These researches have accomplished much, and they promise to accomplish more. They help us perhaps to take a juster view of the early Greek thinkers, and show how much they still laboured under conditions of thought and speech from which their struggles have partly freed us. But for the present, and with certain explanations to be given later, it may still be said that the birthday of our modern world is the moment when the Greek sages began to construe the facts of the universe. Before their time the world lay, as it were, in a dream-life. Unconsciously in the womb of time the spirit of the world was growing,--its faculties forming in secresy and silence,--until the day of birth when the preparations were completed, and the young spirit drew its first breath in the air of thought. A new and to us all-important epoch in the history of thought begins with the Greeks: and the utterances of Parmenides mark the first hard, and still somewhat material, outlines of the spiritual world in which we live. Other nations of an older day had gathered the materials: in their languages, customs, religions, &c., there was an unconscious deposit of reason. It was reserved for the Greeks to recognise that reason: and thus in them reason became conscious. For us, then, it was the Greek philosophers who distinctly drew the distinction between sense and thought, and who first translated the actual forms of our natural life into their abbreviated equivalents in terms of logic. The struggle to carry through this transition, this elevation into pure thought, is what gives the dramatic interest to the Dialogues of Plato and keeps the sympathy of his readers always fresh. Socrates, we are told, first taught men to seek a general definition: not to be content with having--like Pythagoreans--their meaning wrapped up inseparably in psychical images and quasi-material symbols. He taught them to refer word to fellow word, to elicit the underlying idea by the collision and comparison of instances, to get at the 'content' which was identical in all the multiplicity of forms. He taught them, in--brief, to think: and Plato carried out widely and deeply the lesson. The endeavour to create an ideal world, which, at its very creation, seems often to be transformed into a refined and attenuated copy of the sense-world, meets us in almost every page of his Dialogues. In Aristotle this effort, with its concomitant tendency to give 'sensible' form to the ideal, is so far over and past; and some sort of intellectual world, perhaps narrow and inadequate, is reached,--the logical scheme in which immediate experience was expressed and codified. What these thinkers began, succeeding ages have inherited and promoted.