TWO:In studying the growth of philosophy as an historical evolution, repetitions and anticipations must necessarily be of frequent occurrence. Ideas meet us at every step which can only be appreciated when we trace out their later developments, or only understood when we refer them back to earlier and half-forgotten modes of thought. The speculative tissue is woven out of filaments so delicate and so complicated that it is almost impossible to say where one begins and the other ends. Even conceptions which seem to have been transmitted without alteration are constantly acquiring a new value according to the connexions into which they enter or the circumstances to which they are applied. But if the method of evolution, with its two great principles of continuity and relativity, substitutes a maze of intricate lines, often returning on themselves, for the straight path along which progress was once supposed to move, we are more than compensated by the new sense of coherence and rationality where illusion and extravagance once seemed to reign supreme. It teaches us that the dreams of a great intellect may be better worth our attention than the waking perceptions of ordinary men. Combining fragments of the old order with rudimentary outlines of the new, they lay open the secret laboratory of spiritual chemistry, and help to bridge over the interval separating the most widely contrasted phases of life and thought. Moreover, when we have once accustomed ourselves to break up past systems of philosophy172 into their component elements, when we see how heterogeneous and ill-cemented were the parts of this and that proud edifice once offered as the only possible shelter against dangers threatening the very existence of civilisationwe shall be prepared for the application of a similar method to contemporary systems of equally ambitious pretensions; distinguishing that which is vital, fruitful, original, and progressive in their ideal synthesis from that which is of merely provisional and temporary value, when it is not the literary resuscitation of a dead past, visionary, retrograde, and mischievously wrong. And we shall also be reminded that the most precious ideas have only been shaped, preserved, and transmitted through association with earthy and perishable ingredients. The function of true criticism is, like Robert Brownings Roman jeweller, to turn on them the proper fiery acid of purifying analysis which dissolves away the inferior metal and leaves behind the gold ring whereby thought and action are inseparably and fruitfully united.Such a thinker was Xenophanes, of Colophon. Driven, like Pythagoras, from his native city by civil discords, he spent the greater part of an unusually protracted life wandering through the Greek colonies of Sicily and Southern Italy, and reciting his own verses, not always, as it would appear, to a very attentive audience. Elea, an Italiote city, seems to have been his favourite resort, and the school of philosophy which he founded there has immortalised the name of this otherwise obscure Phocaean settlement. Enough remains of his verses to show with what terrible strength of sarcasm he assailed the popular religion of Hellas. Homer and Hesiod, he exclaims, have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and reproach among mentheft, adultery, and mutual deception.12 Nor is Xenophanes content with attacking15 these unedifying stories, he strikes at the anthropomorphic conceptions which lay at their root. Mortals think that the gods have senses, and a voice and a body like their own. The negroes fancy that their deities are black-skinned and snub-nosed, the Thracians give theirs fair hair and blue eyes; if horses or lions had hands and could paint, they too would make gods in their own image.13 It was, he declared, as impious to believe in the birth of a god as to believe in the possibility of his death. The current polytheism was equally false. There is one Supreme God among gods and men, unlike mortals both in mind and body.14 There can be only one God, for God is Omnipotent, so that there must be none to dispute his will. He must also be perfectly homogeneous, shaped like a sphere, seeing, hearing, and thinking with every part alike, never moving from place to place, but governing all things by an effortless exercise of thought. Had such daring heresies been promulgated in democratic Athens, their author would probably have soon found himself and his works handed over to the tender mercies of the Eleven. Happily at Elea, and in most other Greek states, the gods were left to take care of themselves.
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ONE:"You have some trouble," Hetty said anxiously.
ONE:In casting and forging operations the material is treated while in a heated and expanded condition; the nature of these operations is such that accurate dimensions cannot be attained, so that both forgings and castings require to be made enough larger than their finished dimensions to allow for shrinkage and irregularities. Finishing as a process consists in cutting away this surplus material, and giving accurate dimensions to the parts of machinery when the material is at its natural temperature. Finishing operations being performed as said upon material at its normal temperature permits handling, gauging and fitting together of the parts of machinery, and as nearly all other processes involve heating, finishing may be called the cold processes of metal work. The operations of a fitting shop consist almost entirely of cutting, and grinding or abrading; a proposition that may seem novel, yet these operations comprehend nearly all that is performed in what is called fitting.
ONE:"Freedom and revenge," she murmured. "What good words they are. Tomorrow! Well, tomorrow shall be my destruction or my Waterloo!""Lend me 500, Lady Longmere," the Countess asked gaily.
