abeunt studia in mores. Accordantly with phases in life, I can trace three forms or stages of study. master-works I first read were identified with b opinions, and seen through the colours of personal pass they were measured (it is a confession due to Truth a Folly) by my own standard, by an omnipresent imman of self and of Désirée. During earlier college life I almost without attempt at judgment; more to gain ception of new realms, than to conquer or submit t indwelling Spirits :-I was sustained in this course by rivalry, criticism, and co-operation of friends, dazzled m while by the glare of newly discovered suns, diverted from bewilderment by heartsome pleasures and b activity. But now, lastly, studying the master-works: and more from their own point of view, they moulded m justly enthroned in an opposite house of the heaven that which these stars held during boyhood, their influ carried me away from the littleness of self. And if the effect was the perturbation of every predetermined opi by the vast array of irreconcileable fact and reaso presented on all opinions, books brought again for general doubt a deeper and consoling ransom in ano lesson, the sense of a great compensation, an even jus pervading all the ages. Nor was study without pers recompense:-Poet and philosopher giving freshness of and new axioms of thought in return for fluctuation dogma, and leading me ultimately forth of themselves the world without, to compare Science with Reality. aspect of study, I may further add, implied the attainn in a certain degree of unconscious mental sympathy the writers' minds, that prepared me for reception of t conclusions. What, however, was it then, if experience firmed these darker lessons, if nature answered in aud hases in my with boyish zzled mean- -works more if the first y. This tainment thy with of their nce conaudible sighs, if mystery and disorder appeared paramount in the Kosmos, if the Preacher's text Vanity of vanities', proved more or less the confession, not of the wise only, but of the whole world his audience? Thankfulness and delight were at least my portion, whilst Désirée was my hope. I loved her now with the larger mind; and the passion, no longer fancifully prefigured in books and in Nature, took a greater depth by contrast- a blessedness above joy; a treasure with which nothing alien could intermeddle. XX Scholars, if any turn these pages, may have wondered why, amongst the great writers of the early world powerful over the soul's development, I placed the name Heracleitus. How should the scanty relics of the noble Ephesian, mysterious and sad like broken words on gravestones, requiring (the ancients said) a Delian diver' to fathom them, and enigmatical even to a mind subtle as Aristotle's, so profoundly affect, and after twenty-two centuries, an English youth-that at the touch of these dark sayings he found himself in an altered world? Was it that any compact results of philosophy, any science of life, any doctrines alluring to Sense or to Pride, lay within the charmed domain of the Ionian Muses'? The stern selfdenial of the philosopher's own career, the fragmentary condition of his work, the immaturity of thought and experience in that early day forbid such conclusions; but, explained as he was by a great Thinker, from Heracleitus I gained what to a youthful mind in importance far surpassed any results-the first conception of the character and limits of human knowledge, an idea of just method in thinking. Hitherto I had believed that certainty, if not completion, had been reached by human wit in all the larger spheres of science and study; that the lines were firm, if the details, from the infinity of Nature, might be in various stages of progressive unfolding-that Righ Wrong, further, to take these words in their largest si cance as inclusive of every moral and religious pro were demonstratively ascertained that the qu 'What is Truth', was one now which, in Bacon's p could be put only by 'jesting Pilate'. Thus (turni their personal bearing on self), in matters intellectua scientific, I supposed due diligence in following accre paths was the single requisite; in political, moral religious, that the struggle lay simply between the and the evil, the sceptic and the believer, Ahrima Ormuzd, wilful blindness and illuminated faith. could be, as men say, but a right and a wrong; and preconceptions were the right alluded to. In referen the latter fields of thought, this calm acceptance obvious) could not be directly touched by Heracleitus, the course of an historical examination into Philos brought his doctrines before the lecture-room. Bu first, as it seems, consciously and clearly asked what wa relation between thought and thing; how far the within answered to the world without; what might b authority for any human conclusions; what, in a was known in Knowledge, to answer it by Mys Everywhere we stand between contradictions-Part 'Whole-Unity and Divisibility-Soul and Body-F and Infinite. Existence is change-all things are an 'not; we may not say they are, but they are becoming. 'world's harmony returns on itself; opposites pass into ' other in an eternal reflux. All the settled conclusio 'man are from one divine source; all are true, and 'together. Much information is not science: there is 'wisdom, to find the law which governs all through al XXI After the lapse of centuries, how strange, si at Right and bus problem, he question con's phrase, ellectual and ig accredited re and are clusions of e, and all ere is one gh all'. e, simply subtle, unearthly almost, such words sound! Yet these first (and this by the simple priority which Heracleitus held over Plato in my historical course) aroused me to individual thought; to ask the ground of my own convictions; to compare at last the teaching of the schools with the facts of life. Profound then was the shock, I do not know if life can furnish any more impressive, with which I now learned that divergence of judgment-that uncertaintyon the fundamental points of human knowledge, were not necessarily identified with wilful wrong; that not only was it hopeless to escape Doubt, but that the problems themselves were in their very nature undecipherable. Everything seemed shaken at once: like Orpheus dissevered from Eurydice, I knew not where to turn, or what world it was in which I found myself. The words quoted in my paraphrase contain, some will have recognized, the germs of almost every later philosophy which, entering successively and successively failing in a contest where the strife is the triumph, not the victory-has truly set itself to face the whole problem of existence; which has bravely confessed that Faith and Sight, Fact and Reason, pass into each other, and are the inseparable poles of a larger unity; that a true science must solve all, or solve nothing. But the purely ontological bearing of the system I pass over here: it is enough to notice that, translated into their modern equivalents, the dark phrases of Heracleitus will be found. the statement of problems not belonging to some 'ideal' sphere, or remote from our daily thoughts. They are questions put in many nurseries; they underlie most lines of practical life. The circle widens as we approach it, and by force of the 'one law', that Unity which at once pervades and is Science, contradictions seemingly metaphysical' reproduce themselves in every province of what Auguste G Comte would fondly isolate as Positive Philo The speciality at once, the obscurity, and the my eternal influence of Plato lie in this, that beyo Grecian Thinker, and immeasurably beyond alm modern Thinker, he grasped the dynamic Unity Universe; that the metaphysical, moral, emotion physical aspects of every problem were always t before him; that all Science, in his treatment, is nent in every portion of Science. But he felt cons what most men feel ignorantly. What is the of the knowledge which seems only consciousness inward thoughts and impressions, towards what not less securely and essentially known, an abs external world: how Space and Time, finite only experience, can yet be portions of the Illimital the Eternal-conceptions which we can only de intervention of the idea, infinite: what subtle gra ever unite and ever separate life and matter, so body; and more mysterious yet, yet more closely ential over life, crying aloud to the simplest hear the subtlest, questions that agitate thrones and cot how Omnipotence can mentally be reconciled with Freedom, the perfect Creator with the imperfect absolute Goodness with mortal Sin-the Above w Abyss-many centuries passed before these migh blems could be felt in Ephesus, yet in the heart sorrowful Heracleitus they were potentially present, Like hints and echoes of the world XXII He who has never thought on these hig ments, has not exercised man's noblest function; w never sighed over them, fails in human sympathy. |