immense influence which it exerted on after generations. It seems to
me, speaking under correction, that it exerted this, because it was so
complete a type of the general tendency of the Greek mind, deductive,
rather than inductive; of unrivalled subtlety in obtaining results from
principles, and results again from them ad infinitum: deficient in that
sturdy moral patience which is required for the examination of facts,
and which has made Britain at once a land of practical craftsmen, and of
earnest scientific discoverers.

Volatile, restless, "always children longing for something new," as the
Egyptian priest said of them, they were too ready to believe that they
had attained laws, and then, tired with their toy, throw away those
hastily assumed laws, and wander off in search of others. Gifted,
beyond all the sons of men, with the most exquisite perception of form,
both physical and metaphysical, they could become geometers and
logicians as they became sculptors and artists; beyond that they could
hardly rise. The were conscious of their power to build; and it made
them ashamed to dig.

Four men only among them seem, as far as I can judge, to have had a
great inductive power: Socrates and Plato in Metaphysics; Archimedes
and Hipparchus in Physics. 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,