asserts its kindred with the divine. What
is that soul? Such was the second question propounded by Greek
philosophy.

[Sidenote: Second problem. What is the soul?]

[Sidenote: Its material solution thereof.]

A like course of superficial observation was resorted to in the solution
of this inquiry. To breathe is to live; then the breath is the life. If
we cease to breathe we die. Man only becomes a living soul when the
breath of life enters his nostrils; he is a senseless and impassive form
when the last breath is expired. In this life-giving principle, the air,
must therefore exist all those noble qualities possessed by the soul. It
must be the source from which all intellect arises, the store to which
all intellect again returns. The philosophical school whose fundamental
principle was that the air is the primordial element thus brought back
the Deity into the world, though under a material form. Yet still it was
in antagonism to the national polytheism, unless from that one god, the
air, the many gods of Olympus arose.

[Sidenote: Third problem. What is God?]

But who is that one God? This is the third question put forth by Greek
philosophy. Its answer betrays that in this, its beginning, it is
tending to Pantheism.

In all these investigations the starting-point had been material
conceptions, depending on the impressions or information of the senses.
Whatever the conclusion arrived at, its correctness turned on the
correctness of that information. When we put a little wine into a
measure of water, the eye may no longer see it, but the wine is there.
When a rain-drop falls on the leaves of a distant forest, we cannot hear
it, but the murmur of many drops composing a shower is audible enough.
But what is that murmur except the sum of the sounds of all the
individual drops?

[Sidenote: Fourth problem. Has man a criterion of truth?]

And so it is plain our senses are prone to deceive us. Hence arises the
fourth great question of Greek philosophy: Have we any criterion of
truth?

[Sidenote: Importance of the views of Pythagoras.]

The moment a suspicion that we have not crosses the mind of man, he
realizes what may be truly termed intellectual despair. Is this world an
illusion, a phantasm of the imagination? If things material and
tangible, and therefore the most solid props of knowledge, are thus
abruptly destroyed, in what direction shall we turn? Within a single
century Greek philosophy had come to this