This was the effect. The causes must be sought in their discipline and studies. I have observed that among them a principal subject of investigation was the science of politics, that is the science according to the principles of which states are framed and preserved. Nor did they, as some do, conduct their studies in that cold manner in which men investigate matters of mere curiosity, or things they are never to do more than converse or write about. They studied it as a profession, as a means of rising to power, and through power to fame, that is with all the ardour and earnestness of which enthusiastic youth is capable. Education by this means exerted an influence unknown under other forms of government. A consciousness that they were engaged in a sort of sacred contest, of which all Greece was spectator, pervaded the youth of every rank, and impelled them irresistibly into that course of studies which promised the greatest probability of success. Hence, no doubt much of the enthusiasm with which philosophy was cultivated. It was often not so much the abstract love of wisdom as a conviction of the political value of that wisdom which filled the schools of the great men who taught at Athens, whether they were physiologists, mathematicians, masters of music, of strategy, or of eloquence. The example of Pericles applying himself to natural philosophy under Anaxagoras, and deriving thence those streams of pure and masculine eloquence which overflowed the Pnyx, operated forcibly on public opinion. By the same arts and studies men hoped to mount to equal elevation, forgetting that Anaxagoras only watered the plant spontaneously produced by nature.