merely in the narrow light in which he is estimated by most modern
critics, as the explicit champion of rationalism and nothing more.
For he is connected with another idea, the course of which is as
the course of that great river of his native Arcadia which,
springing from some arid and sun-bleached rock, gathers strength
and beauty as it flows till it reaches the asphodel meadows of
Olympia and the light and laughter of Ionian waters.

For in him we can discern the first notes of that great cult of the
seven-hilled city which made Virgil write his epic and Livy his
history, which found in Dante its highest exponent, which dreamed
of an Empire where the Emperor would care for the bodies and the
Pope for the souls of men, and so has passed into the conception of
God's spiritual empire and the universal brotherhood of man and
widened into the huge ocean of universal thought as the Peneus
loses itself in the sea.

Polybius is the last scientific historian of Greece. The writer
who seems fittingly to complete the progress of thought is a writer
of biographies only. I will not here touch on Plutarch's
employment of the inductive method as shown in his constant use of
inscription and statue, of public document and building and the
like, because it involves no new method. It is his attitude
towards miracles of which I desire to treat.

Plutarch is philosophic enough to see that in the sense of a
violation of the laws of nature a miracle is impossible. It is
absurd, he says, to imagine that the statue of a saint can speak,
and that an inanimate object not possessing the vocal organs should
be able to utter an articulate sound. Upon the other hand, he