But these men ran so far counter to the
national genius, that their examples were not followed. As you will
hear presently, the discoveries of Archimedes and Hipparchus were
allowed to remain where they were for centuries. The Dialectic of Plato
and Socrates was degraded into a mere art for making anything appear
alternately true and false, and among the Megaric school, for
undermining the ground of all science, and paving the way for
scepticism, by denying the natural world to be the object of certain
knowledge. The only element of Plato's thought to which they clung was,
as we shall find from the Neoplatonists, his physical speculations; in
which, deserting his inductive method, he has fallen below himself into
the popular cacoethes, and Pythagorean deductive dreams about the
mysterious powers of numbers, and of the regular solids.
Such a people, when they took to studying physical science, would be,
and in fact were, incapable of Chemistry, Geognosy, Comparative Anatomy,
or any of that noble choir of sister sciences, which are now building up
the material as well as the intellectual glory of Britain.
To Astronomy, on the other hand, the pupils of Euclid turned naturally,
as to the science which required the greatest amount of their favourite
geometry: but even that they were content to let pass from its
inductive to its deductive stage--not as we have done now, after two
centuries of inductive search for the true laws, and their final
discovery by Kepler and Newton: but as soon as Hipparchus had
propounded any theory which would do instead of the true laws, content
there to stop their experiments, and return to their favourite work of
commenting, deducing, spinning notion out of notion, ad infinitum.
Pages:
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51