It is of course idle to say that these practitioners were not encumbered and shackled by many false guesses, many pretended discoveries, many groundless speculations of their predecessors. But as the famous oath, which every practitioner in the school of Kos took, expresses clearly the high moral aim with which even now the physician enters on his noble work, the solemn declaration that he will not abuse his influence or intimacy in any house for selfish or immoral purposes, so in their scientific aims these Greeks sought to advance human knowledge by recording honestly their observations, even by telling of their failures, and by seeking to leave behind them such clinical work as might enlighten not only successors but opponents. If we compare this truly modest and scientific attitude with that of the doctors whom Molière scourged, and whose practice is but too well known to us from the minute account of their treatment of princely or even royal patients, we shall again come to the conclusion that where the Greeks failed to teach modern Europe it was not for want of rich suggestion and splendid anticipations of modern science. I need hardly tell you (in conclusion) that I have not only confined myself to touching the fringes of these vast subjects; I have deliberately omitted large topics such as _optics_, and the correction of optical delusions, which the Greeks attained by a subtle use of curves, not merely sections of a large circle, but particularly by the use of the conic section still known by its Greek name of hyperbola. I have said nothing about their astronomy, with its prediction of eclipses, its application to the calendar, and its use as the basis of scientific geography. Had I attempted to weave all these matters into the present lecture, I must have given you a kaleidoscope and not a picture. The main fact to be impressed upon you is that the great triumphs of the Greeks in art and in literature were not attained without a strict education in hard thinking and close reasoning. Plato is said to have made it the first condition of entering on a course of philosophy that the pupil should have studied geometry. It was in accordance with that principle that in our older universities every student, though he were a specialist in classics, must show an adequate knowledge of mathematics. No man in Trinity College, Dublin, can take the degree in languages without having been taught, and having qualified in, pure mathematics, physics, and astronomy. That was the kind of education given by the Greeks. So far as we have departed from it in our education; so far as we have substituted hurry for deliberation, quantity of facts for quality of knowledge, miscellaneous information for systematic thinking, so far we have rendered modern culture impotent to rival their excellence. VII POLITICS--SOCIOLOGY--LAW