It is a world-old tale, this of the trembling heart, the failing eyes, the desponding mind of the natural man. "And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life: In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see" (Deut. xxviii.).
The condition of Hopeful and Christian put by Giant Despair into "a very dark dungeon, nasty and stinking to their spirits," and beaten with stripes, and made to feel that the bitterness of death was as nothing to the bitterness of life, illustrates in allegory the state of man for countless centuries. In darkness and in the shadow of death he lay helpless, singing like the prisoners vain hymns of hope, and praying vain prayers of patience, yet having all the while in his bosom, like Christian, a key called Promise, capable of unlocking the doors of his dungeon. Groping between what Sir Thomas Browne so finely calls "the night of our forebeing" and the unknown future—the dark before and after, he at last came to himself, and with the help of this key unlocked the mysteries of Nature, and found a way of physical salvation.
Man's redemption of man is the great triumph of Greek thought. The tap-root of modern science sinks deep in Greek soil, the astounding fertility of which is one of the out-standing facts of history. As Sir Henry Maine says: "To one small people ... it was given to create the principle of progress. That people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of Nature nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin." Though not always recognized, the controlling principles of our art, literature and philosophy, as well as those of science, are Hellenic. We still think in certain levels only with the help of Plato, and there is not a lecture room of this university[[1]] in which the trained ear may not catch echoes of the Lyceum. In his introductory chapter of his Rise of the Greek Epic, Professor Murray dwells on the keen desire of the Greeks to make life a better thing than it is, and to help in the service of man, a thought that pervades Greek life like an aroma. From Homer to Lucian there is one refrain—the pride in the body as a whole; and in the strong conviction that "our soul in its rose-mesh" is quite as much helped by flesh as flesh is by soul, the Greek sang his song "For pleasant is this flesh." The beautiful soul harmonizing with a beautiful body is as much the glorious ideal of Plato as it is the end of the education of Aristotle. What a splendid picture in Book III of the Republic, of the day when "our youth will dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason." The glory of this zeal for the enrichment of the present life was revealed to the Greeks as to no other people, but in respect to care for the body of the common man, we have only seen its fulfilment in our own day, but as a direct result of methods of research initiated by them.
Philosophy, as Plato tells us, begins with wonder; and, staring open-eyed at the starry heavens on the plains of Mesopotamia, man took a first step in the careful observation of Nature, which carried him a long way in his career. But he was very slow to learn the second step—how to interrogate Nature, to search out her secrets, as Harvey puts it, by way of experiment. The Chaldeans, who invented gnomons, and predicted eclipses, made a good beginning. The Greeks did not get much beyond trained observation, though Pythagoras made one fundamental experiment when he determined the dependence of the pitch of sound on the length of the vibrating cord. So far did unaided observation and brilliant generalization carry Greek thinkers, that there is scarcely a modern discovery which by anticipation cannot be found in their writings. Indeed one is staggered at their grasp of great principles. Man can do a great deal by observation and thinking, but with them alone he cannot unravel the mysteries of Nature. Had it been possible the Greeks would have done it; and could Plato and Aristotle have grasped the value of experiment in the progress of human knowledge, the course of European history might have been very different.
This organon was absent, and even in the art of medicine Hippocrates with all his genius did not get beyond highly trained observation, and a conception of disease as a process of Nature. The great Pergamite, Galen, did indeed realize that the bare fact was only preliminary to the scientific study of disease by experiment, and to the collecting of data, from which principles and laws could be derived. On the dark horizon of the ancient world shone the brightness of the Grecian dawn so clearly that the emancipated mind had an open way. Then something happened—how, who can tell? The light failed or flickered almost to extinction: Greece died into a mediaevalism that for centuries enthralled man in chains, the weary length of which still hampers his progress. The revival of learning awakened at first a suspicion and then a conviction that salvation lay in a return to the old Greek fathers who had set man's feet in the right path, and so it came about that in the study of chemistry, and in the inventions of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, modern science took its origin. The growth of the experimental method changed the outlook of mankind, and led directly to the development of the physical and biological sciences by which the modern world has been transformed.
A slow, painful progress, through three centuries, science crept on from point to point, with many mistakes and many failures, a progress often marked and flecked with the stains of human effort, but all the same the most revolutionary and far-reaching advance ever made by man's intellect. We are too close to the events to appreciate fully the changes which it has wrought in man's relation to the world; and the marvellous thing is that the most important of these changes have been effected within the memory of those living. Three stand out as of the first importance.
My generation was brought up in the belief that "Man was in his original state a very noble and exalted creature, being placed as the head and lord of this world, having all the creatures in subjection to him. The powers and operations of his mind were extensive, capacious and perfect"—to quote the words of one of my old Sunday-school lessons. It is not too much to say that Charles Darwin has so turned man right-about-face that, no longer looking back with regret upon a Paradise Lost, he feels already within the gates of a Paradise Regained.
Secondly, Chemistry and Physics have at last given him control of the four elements, and he has harnessed the forces of Nature. As usual Kipling touches the very heart of the matter in his poem on "The Four Angels," who in succession offered to Adam fire, air, earth and water. Happy in the garden, watching the apple tree in bud, in leaf, in blossom and in fruit, he had no use for them; but when the apple tree was cut down, and he had to work outside of Eden wall,—then—
out of black disaster
He arose to be the master
Of Earth and Water, Air and Fire.
And this mastery, won in our day, has made the man with the hoe look up.