ONE:After a bed had been promised me, my first request was for something to eat, for I had not enjoyed anything as yet. But there was nothing left, absolutely nothing. I scratched my head, and rubbed my empty stomach, when suddenly I heard a fowl cackling outside. Negotiations about it were soon finished; my companion was to kill the fowl, whereas I was to call on Major Krittel and tell him that I liked my enforced stay in Bilsen very much, but that he ought to see now that I got something to eat.
FORE:Physical strength, bone and muscle, must be elements in successful engineering experience; and if these things are not acquired at the same time with a mechanical education, it will be found, when ready to enter upon a course of practice, that an important element, the "propelling power," has been omitted.If the Roman conquest did not altogether put an end to these sentiments, it considerably mitigated their intensity. The imperial city was too strong to feel endangered by the introduction of alien deities within its precincts. The subject states were relieved from anxiety with regard to a political independence which they had irrecoverably lost. Moreover, since the conquests of Alexander, vast aggregations of human beings had come into existence, to which the ancient exclusiveness was unknown, because they never had been cities at all in the ancient sense of the word. Such were Alexandria and Antioch, and these speedily became centres of religious syncretism. Rome herself, in becoming the capital of an immense empire, acquired the same cosmopolitan character. Her population consisted for the most part of emancipated slaves, and of adventurers from all parts of the world, many of whom had brought their national faiths with them, while all were ready to embrace any new faith which had superior attractions to offer. Another important agent in the diffusion and propagation of new religions was the army. The legions constituted a sort of migratory city, recruited from all parts of the empire, and moving over its whole extent. The dangers of a military life combined with its authoritative ideas are highly favourable to devotion; and the soldiers could readily adopt new modes for the expression of this feeling both from each other and from the inhabitants of the countries where they were stationed, and would in turn204 become missionaries for their dissemination over the most distant regions. That such was actually the case is proved by numerous religious inscriptions found in the neighbourhood of Roman camps.313
FORE:You wont make me believe Dick flew that-there crate, he declared.Yet if teleology was, in some respects, a falling-off from the rigid mechanicism first taught by the pre-Socratic schools and then again by the Cartesian school, in at least one respect it marked a comparative progress. For the first attempts made both by ancient and modern philosophy to explain vital phenomena on purely mechanical principles were altogether premature; and the immense extension of biological knowledge which took place subsequently to both, could not but bring about an irresistible movement in the opposite direction. The first to revive teleology was Leibniz, who furnished a transition from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century by his monadology. In this, Atomism is combined with Aristotelian ideas, just as it had previously been combined with Platonic ideas by Descartes. The movement of the atoms is explained by their aspiration after a more perfect state instead of by mechanical pressure. But while Leibniz still relies on423 the ontological argument of Descartes to prove the existence of God, this was soon abandoned, along with the cosmological argument, for the argument from design, which was also that used by the Stoics; while in ethics the fitness of things was substituted for the more mechanical law of self-preservation, as the rule of conduct; and the subjection of all impulse to reason was replaced by the milder principle of a control exercised by the benevolent over the malevolent instincts. This was a very distinct departure from the Stoic method, yet those who made it were more faithful to teleology than Stoicism had been; for to condemn human feeling altogether was implicitly to condemn the work of Nature or of God.
