CHAPTER VII.
The Romans.
The Romans had no philosophy but that which they borrowed from the Greeks; and what they thus received, they hardly made entirely their own. The vast and profound question of which we have been speaking, the relation between Existence and our Knowledge of what exists, they never appear to have fathomed, even so far as to discern how wide and deep it is. In the development of the ideas by which nature is to be understood, they went no further than their Greek masters had gone, nor indeed was more to be looked for. And in the practical habit of accumulating observed facts as materials for knowledge, they were much less discriminating and more credulous than their Greek predecessors. The descent from Aristotle to Pliny, in the judiciousness of the authors and the value of their collections of facts, is immense.
Since the Romans were thus servile followers of their Greek teachers, and little acquainted with any example of new truths collected from the world around them, it was not to be expected that they could have any just conception of that long and magnificent ascent from one set of truths to others of higher order and wider compass, which the history of science began to exhibit when the human mind recovered its progressive habits. Yet some dim presentiment of the splendid career thus destined for the intellect of man appears from time to time to have arisen in their minds. Perhaps the circumstance which most powerfully contributed to suggest this vision, was the vast intellectual progress which they were themselves conscious of having made, through the introduction of the Greek philosophy; and to this may be added, perhaps, some other features of national character. Their temper was too stubborn to acquiesce in the absolute authority of the Greek philosophy, although their minds were not inventive enough to establish a rival by its side. And the wonderful progress of their political power had given them a hope in the progress of man which the Greeks never possessed. The Roman, as he believed the fortune of his State to be destined for eternity, believed also in the immortal destiny and endless advance of that Intellectual Republic of which he had been admitted a denizen.
It is easy to find examples of such feelings as I have endeavoured to describe. The enthusiasm with which Lucretius and Virgil speak of physical knowledge, manifestly arises in a great measure from the delight which they had felt in becoming acquainted with the Greek theories.
Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musæ
Quarum sacra fero ingenti perculsus amore
Accipiant, cœlique vias et sidera monstrent,
Defectus Solis varios, Lunæque labores!...
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas!