hey were not a sign of grief and mourning set there by God
Himself.' When Lampon saw in the prodigy of the one-horned ram the omen
of the supreme rule of Pericles, and when Anaxagoras showed that the
abnormal development was the rational resultant of the peculiar formation
of the skull, the dreamer and the man of science were both right; it was
the business of the latter to consider how the prodigy came about, of the
former to show why it was so formed and what it so portended. The
progression of thought is exemplified in all particulars. Herodotus had
a glimmering sense of the impossibility of a violation of nature.
Thucydides ignored the supernatural. Polybius rationalised it. Plutarch
raises it to its mystical heights again, though he bases it on law. In a
word, Plutarch felt that while science brings the supernatural down to
the natural, yet ultimately all that is natural is really supernatural.
To him, as to many of our own day, religion was that transcendental
attitude of the mind which, contemplating a world resting on inviolable
law, is yet comforted and seeks to worship God not in the violation but
in the fulfilment of nature.

It may seem paradoxical to quote in connection with the priest of
Chaeronea such a pure rationalist as Mr. Herbert Spencer; yet when we
read as the last message of modern science that 'when the equation of
life has been reduced to its lowest terms the symbols are symbols still,'
mere signs, that is, of that unknown reality which underlies all matter
and all spirit, we may feel how over the wide strait of centuries thought
calls to thought and how Plutarch has a higher position than is usually
claimed for him in the progress of the Greek intellect.

And, indeed, it seems that not merely the importance of Plutarch himself
but also that of the land of his birth in the evolution of Greek
civilisation has been passed over by modern critics. To us, indeed, the
bare rock to which the Parthenon serves as a crown, and which lies
between Colonus and Attica's violet hills, will always be the holiest
spot in the land of Greece: and Delphi will come next, and then the
meadows of Eurotas where that noble people lived who represented in
Hellenic thought the reaction of the law of duty against the law of
beauty, the opposition of conduct to culture. Yet, as one stands on the
[Greek] of Cithaeron and looks out on the great double plain of Boeotia,
the enormous importance of the division of Hellas