oposes to itself. This function is their effective
essence. It insures their eternal fixity, and this property surely
endows them with a very genuine and sublime reality. What is fantastic
is only the dynamic function attributed to them by Aristotle, which
obliges them to inhabit some fabulous extension to the physical world.
Even this physical efficacy, however, is spiritualised as much as
possible, since deity is said to move the cosmos only as an object of
love or an object of knowledge may move the mind. Such efficacy is
imputed to a hypostasised end, but evidently resides in fact in the
functioning and impulsive spirit that conceives and pursues an ideal,
endowing it with whatever attraction it may seem to have. The absolute
intellect described by Aristotle remains, therefore, as pertinent to
the Life of Reason as Plato's idea of the good. Though less
comprehensive (for it abstracts from all animal interests, from all
passion and mortality), it is more adequate and distinct in the region
it dominates. It expresses sublimely the goal of speculative thinking;
which is none other than to live as much as may be in the eternal and to
absorb and be absorbed in the truth.

The rest of ancient philosophy belongs to the decadence and rests in
physics on eclecticism and in morals on despair. That creative breath
which had stirred the founders and legislators of Greece no longer
inspired their descendants. Helpless to control the course of events,
they took refuge in abstention or in conformity, and their ethics became
a matter of private economy and sentiment, no longer aspiring to mould
the state or give any positive aim to existence. The time was
approaching when both speculation and morals were to regard the other
world; reason had abdicated the throne, and religion, after that brief
interregnum, resumed it for long ages.

[Sidenote: Transcendentalism true but inconsequential.]

Such are the threads which tradition puts into the hands of an observer
who at the present time might attempt to knit the Life of Reason ideally
together. The problem is to unite a trustworthy conception of the
conditions under which man lives with an adequate conception of his
interests. Both conceptions, fortunately, lie before us. Heraclitus and
Democritus, in systems easily seen to be complementary, gave long ago a
picture of nature such as all later observation, down to our own day,
has done nothing but fill out and confirm. Psychology and