_Hylozoists_--the Ionic schools we have reviewed--is the very best introduction to the higher task of framing theories from experiments, and when I have heard read in the schools essays written in ignorance of these theories, I have often wondered at the absence of scientific logic of consistent thinking, of clear imagining which characterises the modern scientist. And when we are faced in our universities by the gigantic demands of modern scientists for laboratories, machinery, upkeep, and what not, by way of promoting what they call very ridiculously _original research_, they should be told openly and constantly that no mere mechanic, no mere tradesman, however splendidly equipped, will ever be worth one straw in original research. Such a high calling, if it is not to be mere name, a mere imposture, requires as its first implement a trained intellect, taught to speculate, and to devise theories which may or may not be verified or illustrated by mechanical tools. The greatest discoverers in modern science were men with bad tools, and small equipment. The old Greeks had none at all, and yet how many of the world’s mysteries did they approach and solve, merely by the force of pure and sound speculation! When we hear little modern men of science wondering how the Greeks could have got so far without modern instruments, we feel rather inclined to tell them we wonder the moderns have done so much with the help of these, for in abstract thinking lies the real basis of every great discovery. So far, the course of Greek philosophy has led us to the side of science, to the constitution of the world, to the immensity of space, to the physical construction of animal and vegetable life, to the problem of the duration of the universe, to the dreams about its origin. Regarding all this as _natural philosophy_ (to use an obsolete but convenient expression), there remains another orb of Greek speculation which took rise with Socrates, passed on through Plato and Aristotle to the Stoic and Epicurean schools, and even illumined with its setting rays the old world passing into the night of the Dark Ages. Two things, says the philosopher Kant, impress me always with their peerless majesty--the starry heaven above, and the Moral Law within. It is this latter aspect of human philosophy, bound up as it is on the one side with profound metaphysic, on the other with ordinary practical life, that I must now speak. But here, where the material is large, and our evidence very complete, it is not expedient that I should detain you at any length. It may be new to some of you that Parmenides or Leucippus have been the fathers of modern systems; but none of you will doubt for a moment the colossal influence of Plato and Aristotle upon modern thought.