5. The early vellum and wooden telescopes of the Orrery Collection.
6. An original Marshall microscope.
7. Early surveying instruments, including the great quadrate of Schissler.
The story of the free cities of Greece shows how a love of the higher and brighter things in life may thrive in a democracy. Whether such love may develop in a civilization based on a philosophy of force is the present problem of the Western world. To-day there are doubts, even thoughts of despair, but neither man nor nation is to be judged by the behaviour in a paroxysm of delirium. Lavoisier perished in the Revolution, and the Archbishop of Paris was butchered at the altar by the Commune, yet France was not wrecked; and Russia may survive the starvation of such scholars as Danielevski and Smirnov, and the massacre of Botkin. To have intelligent freemen of the Greek type with a stake in the State (not mere chattels from whose daily life the shadow of the workhouse never lifts), to have the men and women who could love the light put in surroundings in which the light may reach them, to encourage in all a sense of brotherhood reaching the standard of the Good Samaritan—surely the realization in a democracy of such reasonable ambitions should be compatible with the control by science of the forces of nature for the common good, and a love of all that is best in religion, in art, and in literature.
Amid the smoke and squalor of a modern industrial city, after the bread-and-butter struggle of the day, "the Discobolus has no gospel." Our puritanized culture has been known to call the Antinous vulgar. Copies of these two statues, you may remember, Samuel Butler found stored away in the lumber-room of the Natural History Museum, Montreal, with skins, plants, snakes, and insects, and in their midst, stuffing an owl, sat "the brother-in-law of the haberdasher of Mr. Spurgeon." Against the old man who thus blasphemed beauty, Butler broke into those memorable verses with the refrain "O God! O Montreal!"
Let us not be discouraged. The direction of our vision is everything, and after weltering four years in chaos poor stricken humanity still nurses the unconquerable hope of an ideal state "whose citizens are happy ... absolutely wise, all of them brave, just, and self-controlled ... all at peace and unity and in the enjoyment of legality, equality, liberty, and all other good things." Lucian's winning picture of this "Universal Happiness" might have been sketched by a Round Table pen or some youthful secretary to the League of Nations. That such hope persists is a witness to the power of ideals to captivate the mind and the reality may be nearer than any of us dare dream. If survived, a terrible infection, such as confluent smallpox, seems to benefit the general health. Perhaps such an attack through which we have passed may benefit the body cosmic. After discussing the various forms of government, Plato concludes that "States are as the men are, they grow out of human characters," [18] and then, as the dream-republic approached completion, he realized that after all the true State is within, of which each one of us is the founder, and patterned on an ideal the existence of which matters not a whit. Is not the need of this individual reconstruction the Greek message to modern democracy? And with it is blended the note of individual service to the community on which Professor Gilbert Murray has so wisely dwelt.
[ [18] Republic, Book VIII.
With the hot blasts of hate still on our cheeks, it may seem a mockery to speak of this as the saving asset in our future; but is it not the very marrow of the teaching in which we have been brought up? At last the gospel of the right to live, and the right to live healthy, happy lives, has sunk deep into the hearts of the people; and before the war, so great was the work of science in preventing untimely death that the day of Isaiah seemed at hand, when a man's life should be "more precious than fine gold, even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir." There is a sentence in the writings of the Father of Medicine upon which all commentators have lingered, "ἢν γὰρ παρῇ φιλανθρωπίη, πάρεστι καὶ φιλοτεχνίη" [19]—the love of humanity associated with the love of his craft!—philanthropia and philotechnia—the joy of working joined in each one to a true love of his brother. Memorable sentence indeed! in which for the first time was coined the magic word "philanthropy," and conveying the subtle suggestion that perhaps in this combination the longings of humanity may find their solution, and Wisdom—Philosophia—at last be justified of her children.
[ [19] Œuvres complètes d' Hippocrates. Par E. Littré, IX, 258.
THE END