FORE:Here, then, we find, chiefly among the rustic population, a religion intimately associated with morality, and including the doctrine of retribution after death. But this simple faith, though well adapted to the few wants of its original votaries, could not be raised to the utmost expansion and purity of which it was susceptible without being brought into vivifying contact with that other Olympian religion which, as we have seen, belonged more peculiarly to the ruling aristocracy. The poor may be more moral than the rich, and the country than the town; nevertheless it is from dwellers in cities, and from the higher classes, including as they do a large percentage of educated, open-minded individuals, that the impulses to moral progress always proceed. If the narrowness and hardness of primitive social arrangements were overcome; if justice was disengaged from the ties of blood-relationship, and tempered with consideration for inevitable error; if deadly feuds were terminated by a habitual appeal to arbitration; if the worship of one supreme ideal was substituted for a blind sympathy with the ebb and flow of life on earth; if the numerical strength of states was increased by giving shelter to fugitives; if a Hellenic nation was created and held together by a common literature and a common civilisation, by oracles accessible to all, and by periodical games in which every free-born Greek could take part; and, lastly, if a brighter abode than the slumberous garden of Persephon was assigned after death to the godlike heroes who had come forth from a thrice repeated ordeal with souls unstained by sin;55all this was due to the military rather than to the industrial classes, to the spirit that breathes through Homer69 rather than to the tamer inspiration of Hesiods muse. But if justice was raised to an Olympian throne; if righteous providence, no less than creative power, became an inalienable attribute of Zeus; if lyric poetry, from Archilochus to Simonides and Pindar, is one long hymn of prayer and praise ever turned upward in adoring love to the Divine; we must remember that Themis was a synonyme for Earth, and that Prometheus, the original friend of humanity, for whose benefit he invented every useful art, augury included, was her son. The seeds of immortal hope were first planted in the fructifying bosom of Dmtr, and life, a forsaken Ariadn, took refuge in the mystical embraces of Dionysus from the memory of a promise that had allured her to betray. Thus, we may conjecture that between hall and farm-house, between the Olympian and the Chthonian religions, there was a constant reaction going on, during which ethical ideas were continually expanding, and extricating themselves from the superstitious elements associated with their earliest theological expression.Aristotles work on reproduction is supposed by many to contain a reference to his distinction between the two Reasons, but we are convinced that this is a mistake. What we are told is that at the very first formation of a new being, the vegetative soul, being an exclusively corporeal function, is precontained in the elements furnished by the female; that the sensitive soul is contributed by the male (being, apparently, engendered in the semen by the vital heat of the parent organism); and, finally, that the rational soul, although entirely immaterial, is also carried in with the semen, into which it has first been introduced from without, but where, or when, or how is not more particularly specified.260 But even were the genetic theory in question perfectly cleared up, it would still throw no light on the distinction between active and passive reason, as the latter alone can be understood by the rational soul to which it refers. For we are expressly informedwhat indeed hardly required to be statedthat the embryonic souls exist not in act but in potency.261 It seems, therefore, that Mr. Edwin Wallace is doubly mistaken when he quotes a sentence from this passage in justification of his statement, that Aristotle would seem almost to identify the creative reason with God as the eternal and omnipresent thinker;262 first, because it does not refer to the creative Nous at all; and, secondly, because, if it did, the words would not stand the meaning which he puts upon them.263
THREE:"Don't laugh at me, Gordon," Hetty whispered. "I knew there was something wrong with that dreadful corner house. You have heard of the tragedy?"
