Poor Diodorus went
home, took pen and ink, wrote a treatise on the awful nothing, and died
in despair, leaving five "dialectical daughters" behind him, to be
thorns in the sides of some five hapless men of Macedonia, as
"emancipated women;" a class but too common in the later days of Greece,
as they will always be, perhaps, in civilisations which are decaying and
crumbling to pieces, leaving their members to seek in bewilderment what
they are, and what bonds connect them with their fellow-beings. But to
return: funds shall be provided for the Museum from the treasury; a
priest of rank, appointed by royalty, shall be curator; botanical and
zoological gardens shall be attached; collections of wonders made. In
all things the presiding genius of Aristotle shall be worshipped; for
these, like Alexander, were his pupils. Had he not mapped out all
heaven and earth, things seen and unseen, with his entelechies, and
energies, and dunameis, and put every created and uncreated thing
henceforth into its proper place, from the ascidians and polypes of the
sea to the virtues and the vices--yea, to that Great Deity and Prime
Cause (which indeed was all things), Noesis Noeseon, "the Thought of
Thoughts," whom he discovered by irrefragable processes of logic, and in
whom the philosophers believe privately, leaving Serapis to the women
and the sailors? All they had to do was to follow in his steps; to take
each of them a branch, of science or literature, or as many branches as
one man conveniently can; and working them out on the approved methods,
end in a few years, as Alexander did, by weeping on the utmost shore of
creation that there are no more worlds left to conquer.
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