In the first place, Greek civilization was founded on slavery and a fixed condition of the industrial arts. The philosopher and scholar was estopped from fumbling with those everyday processes that were associated with the mean life of the slave and servant. Consequently there was no one to devise the practical apparatus by which alone profound and ever-increasing knowledge of natural operations is possible. The mechanical inventiveness of the Greeks was slight, and hence they never came upon the lens; they had no microscope to reveal the minute, no telescope to attract the remote; they never devised a mechanical timepiece, a thermometer, nor a barometer, to say nothing of cameras and spectroscopes. Archimedes, it is reported, disdained to make any record of his ingenious devices, for they were unworthy the noble profession of a philosopher. Such inventions as were made were usually either toys or of a heavy practical character. So the next great step forward in the extension of the human mind awaited the disappearance of slavery and the slowly dawning suspicion, and final repudiation, of the older metaphysics, which first became marked some three hundred years ago. NOTES. [18] When in the time of Cicero the long-hidden works of Aristotle were recovered and put into the hands of Andronicus of Rhodes to edit, he found certain fragments of highly abstruse speculation which he did not know what to do with. So he called them "addenda to the Physics"--_Ta meta ta physica_. These fragments, under the caption "Metaphysica", became the most revered of Aristotle's productions, his "First Philosophy", as the Scholastics were wont to call it. [19] John Dewey deduces metaphysics from man's original reverie and then shows how in time it became a solemn form of rationalizing current habits and standards. _Reconstruction in Philosophy_, lectures i-ii. It is certainly surprising how few philosophical writers have ever reached other than perfectly commonplace conclusions in regard to practical "morality". * * * * * V And God made the two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the earth. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its kind: and it was so. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.--Gen. i. Ibi vacabimus et videbimus, videbimus et amabimus, amabimus et laudabimus. Ecce quod erit in fine sine fine. Nam quis alius noster est finis nisi pervenire ad regnum, cuius nullus est finis?--AUGUSTINE.