expressing a higher, and therefore a more widely embracing unity, than had been recognised before. The significance of Form, as against mere material substance, now becomes prominent. And it is herein that the most striking characteristic of this highly gifted Greek race becomes most clearly exhibited. For, as we all know, it is the Greeks who are, for all time, the masters—supreme and undisputed--of pure form. But the birth of an idea which introduces a new and potent factor into human life is a moving spectacle. We seem, in contemplating it, to approach holy ground. It is surely so here, where we witness the emergence into human thought of a conception that makes both science and art henceforward possible. Yet how naturally does the evolution proceed! What poor sort of explanation is it, for one who gazes with admiring wonder at some collection of rare and beautiful pottery, to be told that after all, there is in all the exquisite varied outline exhibited-one underlying material common to them all; that they are but one Substance-clay! But Form implies proportion, symmetry, grace; To the delicately restricting limit which applied to the amorphous material subjected to it gives it all its meaning, its utility, its beauty. Moreover, there is exhibited herein a marvel which can never lose its wonderfulness for a reflective mind, and is pregnant with a profound significance, which, later in our inquiry, we must make some effort to develope. see the potter at his wheel, his deft hand imparting its delicate impress upon the revolving plastic mass, is nothing less than to behold, in its simplest but most vivid presentation, the spectacle of mind being there and then infused into matter of matter actually being informed by mind. Can we wonder that, later on in Greek thought, it should come to be that the whole meaning of the word "Aŋ, ' matter,' should be found in this very thing; viz. that it was susceptible of Form? Its one characteristic potency lay in its capacity for being informed by mind. In itself it was nothing. Herein surely lies the genetic spring and source of all Art. But it is on the intellectual side that we are at present concerned in regarding it. And here, in this strange wedding of matter with mind, we find our first and clearest exhibition of that conciliation of logical contradictories, which has already been hinted at, and which comes inevitably to assume ever more of importance as we proceed. For undoubtedly these two, Body and Spirit, Matter and Mind, are of the nature of logical contradictories. Mutually exclusive they are; so that each is used in definition as the negative delimitation of the other. Yet are they here represented through the senses. to the mind in one. Later on we may seek to exhibit the farreaching application of the principle that meets us here. For the present it is but with its first clear emergence in the field of human thought that we are concerned. And especially that in this emphasis on form is found the origin of that governing conception of the world as indeed a Cosmos, which is, as we have already noted, at once the necessary postulate both of science and of art. Till this was recognised and realised, neither was possible. But our indebtedness to these pioneers of speculative thought claims one further word by way of enlargement and illustration. The process of abstraction gives us the line along which at first they sought exclusively to make progress, driven forwards as they were by that instinct for a final unity, and that faith in its existence which gives us the motive power of the philosophic enterprise. This process of abstraction itself receives its severest example and illustration in what seems to us perhaps a thing of extreme simplicity, viz. the act of counting. Familiarity is apt to blind us to the marvel involved even in its most commonplace exercise. : How easily we can say, as we pass in mental review several objects lying before us: This tree, I this leaf, 2: this grain of sand, 3: the Sun, 4 the World, 5. One, two, three, four, five! Yet at every utterance of the numeral we have deliberately dismissed from our regard the most patent and overwhelming differences in the objects before us, and fixed our attention upon one sole quality. Each of them is for us at that moment simply a single unit. Nay, and so wide now is the range of application, that once we have drawn the line between the world material, the object-world, and the world spiritual, the subject-world, we can, with perfect facility, cross the boundary and continue to reckon-This thought, I this feeling, 2 my spirit, 3. Beyond all space limits-the realm of the visible and palpable-we carry with us and apply the conception of unitary existence which we have elsewhere obtained. It was further perceived that form, proportion, symmetry, harmony, all that implied restrictive limit, could be Numerically represented. The two aspects of the Cosmos-the beautiful order became exhibited, not separately or independently, but in their mutual relation; and the world intellectual and the world aesthetic were seen to be intimately connected, and governed by a unity of principle. How natural then it was that these Pythagorean philosophers, as emphasising the intellectual side of the great idea, should have adopted as their philosophical principle that mysterious apieμós, number,' which has generated the whole science of Mathematics, with its wide ranges of abstract reasoning, and of innumerable applications to the concrete sciences, and in this way to the practical utilities and conveniences of life. But it is for us to |