expression of the Greek national genius. We must now bring this long and complicated, but it is hoped not uninteresting, study to a close. We have accompanied philosophy to a point where it enters on a new field, and embraces themes sufficiently important to form the subject of a separate chapter. The contributions made by its first cultivators to our positive knowledge have already been summarised. It remains to mention that there was nothing of a truly transcendental character about their speculations. Whatever extension we may give to that terrible bugbear, the Unknowable, they did not trespass on its domain. Heracleitus and his compeers, while penetrating far beyond the horizon of their age and country, kept very nearly within the limits of a possible experience. They confused some conceptions which we have learned to distinguish, and separated others which we have learned to combine; but they were the lineal progenitors of our highest scientific thought; and they first broke ground on a path where we must continue to advance, if the cosmos which they won for us is not to be let lapse into chaos and darkness again. FOOTNOTES: [5] Plato, _Rep._ IV., 435, E; Aristotle, _Pol._ VII., 1327, b., 29. [6] _Nem._ III. 40-42. (Donaldson.) [7] _Nem._ VI. _sub in._ [8] The word differentiation (ἑτεροίωσις) seems to have been first used by Diogenes Apolloniates. Simpl. _Phys._ fol. 326 ff., quoted by Ritter and Preller, _Hist. Phil._, p. 126 (6th ed.) [9] Ritter and Preller, p. 112. [10] Ritter and Preller p. 8. [11] _Die Philosophie der Griechen_, I. p. 401 (3rd ed.) [12] Ritter and Preller, p. 54. [13] Ritter and Preller, p. 54. [14] _Ib._ [15] _Metaph._ I. v. [16] Ritter and Preller, p. 63. [17] _Op. cit._ p. 475. [18] The tendency which it has been attempted to characterise as a fundamental moment of Greek thought can only be called analytical in default of a better word. It is a process by which two related terms are at once parted and joined together by the insertion of one or more intermediary links; as, for instance, when a capital is inserted between column and architrave, or when a proposition is demonstrated by the interposition of a middle term between its subject and predicate. The German words Vermitteln and Vermittelung express what is meant with sufficient exactitude. They play a great part in Hegel’s philosophy, and it will be remembered that Hegel was the most Hellenic of modern thinkers. So understood, there will cease to be any contradiction between the Eleates and Greek thought generally, at least from one point of view, as their object was to fill up the vacant spaces supposed to separate one mode of existence from another. [19] Ritter and Preller, p. 62. [20] For the originals of this and the succeeding quotations from Heracleitus, see Ritter and Preller, pp. 14-23. [21] Τῇ μὲν ἡλικίᾳ πρότερος ὢν, τοῖς δ’ ἔργοις ὕστερος. _Metaph._ I. iii. [22] Ritter and Preller, p. 90.