The English Novel and the Principle of its DevelopmentLanier, Sidney
History
The English Novel and the Principle of its Development
Lanier, Sidney
English fiction -- History and criticism
Various attempts have been made to account for the complete failure of
Greek physical science by assigning this and that specific tendency to
the Greek mind: but it seems a perfect confirmation of the view I have
here presented--to wit that the organic error was not Greek but simply
a part of the general human lack of personality--to reflect that 1,500
years after Aristotle, things are little better, and that when we do
come to a time when physical science begins to be pursued upon
progressive principles, we find it to be also a time when all other
departments of activity begin to be similarly pursued, so that we are
obliged to recognize not the correction of any specific error in Greek
ratiocination, but a general advance of the spirit of man along the
whole line.
And perhaps we have now sufficiently prepared ourselves, as was
proposed at the outset of this sketch of Greek science, to measure
precisely the height of the new plane which begins with Copernicus,
Kepler and Galileo in the 16th century, over the old plane which ended
with Aristotle and his commentators. Perhaps the true point up to
which we should lay our line in making this measurement is not to be
found until we pass nearly through the 17th century and arrive fairly
at Sir Isaac Newton. For while each one of the great men who preceded
him had made his contribution weighty enough, as such, yet each brings
with him some old darkness out of the antique period.
When we come to examine Copernicus, we find that though the root of
the matter is there, a palpable environment of the old cycle and
epicycle still hampers it; Galileo disappoints us at various
emergencies. Kepler puts forth his sublime laws amid a cluster of
startling absurdities; Francis Bacon is on the whole unfaithful;
Descartes will have his vortices or eddies as the true principles of
motion of the heavenly bodies; and so it is not until we reach Sir
Isaac Newton at the end of the 17th century that we find a large,
quiet, wholesome thinker, de-Aristotleized, de-Ptolemized,
de-Cartesianized, pacing forth upon the domain of reason as if it were
his own orchard, and seating himself in the centre of the universe as
if it were his own easy chair, observing the fact and inferring the
law as if with a personal passion for truth and a personal religion
towards order. In short, and in terms of our present theory, with Sir
Isaac Newton the growth of man's personality has reached a point when
it has developed a true personal relation between man and nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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