trains loaded with Birmingham artisans. If he went indoors and tried to read Greek tragedy, and conjure up its scenery and surroundings, the incongruity was too painful. The roar of a train and the puffing of an engine sounded in his ears like the mocking laugh of a horrible demon. The neighbourhood which I used jocularly to call Græcia Minor was completely changed: in the words of Byron

'Twas Greece, but living Greece no more.

He bore the anguish of the change for a short time, then he resigned his living and fled in disgust. He is now ending his days in Southern Greece; but even there, in the native home of his intellectual idôla, he fails, as he has told me, to realise his favourite classical associations so vividly as he used to in his old English parish.

HARRINGTON. I can imagine few products of modern civilisation more painfully out of harmony with a dreamy, classical idealism than a locomotive. Its resistless, headlong progress is the very incarnation of brute force. Its swiftness is a type of the eager, rushing disquietude of modern existence, and a complete contrast to the normally quiet, slow processes of Nature, as well as to the ease, calm dignity, and refinement of Hellenic life and thought.

ARUNDEL. Nevertheless, as a votary of modern civilisation, and, I fear I must add, material progress, I should like to experience the change which passing trains would entail on my parish and neighbourhood. Hilderton is, I am afraid, not likely to be transformed in that way. . . . Meanwhile we are diverging from our subject. . . . Where do you intend us to meet the stream of Greek philosophy? I presume you do not mean to take us to the fountain-head of Homer or Thales?

TREVOR. I might easily find a precedent for making Homer my starting point; for the Greek Skeptics actually attempted to discover their principles in the Volks Evangelium,' as they have been termed, of the Homeric poems-on the same principle, no doubt, which impels all Mahometan sects to discover a locus standi in the Koran, and the many varieties of Christians to hinge each its own faith on the

Bible. Homer is, I need hardly say, the most unconsciously dogmatic author in existence, and all the quotations adduced to prove his Skepticism are mere general remarks on the mutability of men and human affairs. . . . Our present brief sketch of Hellenic free-thought begins about 500 B.C., and ends about 200 A.D., thus comprehending a period of seven hundred years.

MISS LEYCESTER. I have lately been refreshing my memory on the history of Greek philosophy. Its most marvellous feature seems to be the rapid growth which it manifested between 700 and 400 B.C. In the comparatively short space of three centuries, those old Greeks appear to have originated, developed, and almost exhausted systems of speculation closely akin at least to those that occupy our attention now. I presume that such a fact has no parallel in the history of any other nation, ancient or modern.

TREVOR. Undoubtedly not, Miss Leycester. It is the most marvellous phenomenon to my thinking in the whole history of human thought, and the due and orderly sequence which characterises these early speculations is not their least wonderful feature. I have sometimes thought that a man accustomed to the questions of children, and to the study of the growth of the human intellect, might almost map out the early stages of Hellenic thought without reading a page of Greek philosophy. There you have, in easy and natural sequence, the physical, concrete perceptions of the child succeeded in imperceptible gradations by the logical forms and verbal convictions, abstract terms, and metaphysical ideas, nascent doubt, and deliberate Skepticism of the grown man.

HARRINGTON. With a little abatement of Skepticism being considered as the only goal of Greek thought, the advance you have sketched is substantially correct; but we must take heed of a misconception on this point. Students of Greek philosophy, insufficiently versed in its relation to early Greek history, are inclined to exaggerate the specific range and importance of each particular thinker or school of thought. They look over the pages of Zeller, Ritter, or Tennemann, and finding a number of names duly marshalled in order, every one under his own proper school, like natural

history species each under its own genus, they rush to the conclusion that such names or schools represent successive waves of thought or definite philosophical systems which swept over the whole mental surface of ancient Greece. They forget that Greece at this time consisted of half-civilised tribes, differing from each other in political constitution, social habits, religious beliefs, and to some extent in language as well; that, moreover, the dissemination of physical ideas or philosophical theories by oral teaching must have been, under the circumstances, partial and imperfect; and that it was quite possible for Thales to have taught at Miletus or Xenophanes at Elea, without the names of either thinker reaching Sparta or Athens during their lifetime.

ARUNDEL. Your warning is not unneeded. I remember having myself just those ideas of the regular succession of Greek thinkers whom I afterwards found to have been in many cases contemporaries; I used to think of them as related to each other as the kings of England or of some other country. When one ceased reigning, the next began to reign. . . . Not a few students of Greek philosophy would, I think, be greatly benefited if they would study it so far as possible in connection with chronology and historywith Clinton's 'Fasti,' for instance, at their elbows.

MISS LEYCESTER. But what causes can be assigned for this rapid development of early Hellenic speculation? It seems admitted that we cannot bring in extraneous sources or incitements, such as, e.g. an acquaintance with Egyptian or Indian civilisation. Is there anything known of the early inhabitants of Greece that would throw light on the subject?

TREVOR. Unhappily, not much. The origin and early history of Greek thought are enveloped in dense mythological darkness. We only know, or rather suppose, that different branches of the Aryan race, emigrating from Asia, settled in different parts of Greece at a very remote period. But these

On the limitations imposed by these local characteristics in the progress alike of Greek Literature and Philosophy, compare Ritter, Gesch. der Phil. i. p. 177; and Bergk's exhaustive article on Greek Literature. Ersch and Grüber, Encycl., vol. lxxxi., series i.

different tribes-Pelasgi, Hellenes, Leleges, and minor peoples -stand in the same relation to the Greeks of the fourth century B.C. as the Celts, Saxons, Danes, and Normans stand to the ordinary English or Welsh men of our own day. It seems clear, however, that the earliest manifestations of Greek thought are discovered in the Ionian colonies,' whence we may draw the twofold inference which is, moreover, confirmed by history: (1) That Greek speculation in its earlier stages was closely allied with Greek commerce. (2) That the mixture of races, the ordinary effect of expatriation, must be considered favourable to the growth of Hellenic thought and civilisation. I may add that most historians attempt to discriminate between the thought tendencies of Ionians and Dorians, making the speculations of the former incline towards physical, those of the latter (represented by Pythagoras) to ethical, research.

MRS. HARRINGTON. You say that colonisation and commerce exercised a favourable effect on Greek speculation. Would not the same causes facilitate and render likely the influence of foreign thinkers?

HARRINGTON. For my part, I am so fully convinced of the native self-sufficiency of the Hellenic tribes, that I view with jealousy every attempt to make even the rudimentary commencement of their intellectual and artistic achievements the borrowed wealth of their neighbours.2 The slight admixture of foreign elements perceptible in the speculations of a few Greek thinkers, e.g. Pythagoras, seems to me fully accounted for by the fact that the chief Greek philosophers were themselves great travellers. Unlike modern thinkers, who, for the most part, pass their life in their studies and promulgate their opinions by the aid of the press, their Greek

This is as true of its literature as of its philosophy. Speaking of the enormous influence exercised by these colonies in the development of Greek literature, Bergk says, 'Es ist fast keine Stadt, oder Insel, mag sie auch noch so klein sein, die nicht irgendwie thätigen Antheil an der Pflege der Literatur genommen hätte.' Art. on 'Greek Literature.' Ersch und Grüber, vol. lxxxi., series i.

Compare Zeller's emphatic words. Wenn es je ein Volk gegeben hat, das seine Wissenschaft selbst zu erzeugen geeignet war, so sind dies die Griechen. Phil. d. Griechen, i. 40; so also Professor Prantl, Geschichte der Logik, i. p. 6.

prototypes shifted their abode from one town or country to the other, and wherever they went they opened what Aristophanes calls their thought-shop,' and were prepared to discuss and give their opinion on any question brought before them, whether of speculation or practice, with as much insouciance as a grocer in our day serves tea and sugar to his customers. They were equally willing to argue with, instruct, and exhort any chance passer-by, or even to learn of him if he proved himself competent to teach. In this particular, the modern parallels of the old Greek philosophers must not be sought in such men as Kant, Hegel, or John Stuart Mill, but rather in missionaries or travelling preachers like Whitfield or Wesley; and nothing proves, I think, the rare susceptibility of the Greek mind for speculation, as well as, at this time, their intellectual freedom, than that the careers of such animated circulating libraries (for in those days men were books) as Xenophanes and Pythagoras should have been possible. Of course, we are not surprised to find that the personal contact with men of different races, customs, and beliefs, which such peregrinations entailed occasionally, induced, as in the case of Herodotus,' a certain amount of disbelief in travellers' wonders. For that matter, geography has always been a favourite armoury for Skeptical weapons.

TREVOR. I must now begin my paper; but, before I do so, there is one observation I should like to make by way of general admonition as to the manner in which our researches should be pursued. In treating of any particular Skeptic, we must take his Skepticism, whenever possible, for what he himself professes it to be; avoiding, in all doubtful cases, the constructive or inferential Skepticism which is so common with dogmatic writers on the subject. Nor must we attempt to make any particular phase of unbelief fit in with a man's whole system of thought, congruity being a far rarer attribute of the human intellect than is commonly thought. Nor, again, must we undertake or sanction that easy conversion of Skeptics into dogmatists which consists in the transformation of their negations into the direct affirmations of their opposites-changing their minuses into pluses, to use an 1 Comp. Grote, Greece, vol. i. p. 357.