infinite variety of their sizes a sufficient account of the multiplicity of
phenomena. To these a priori speculations he would add a rude conception
of matter and his own immediate experience of health and disease. His
cosmos would necessarily be imperfect and unequal, being the first attempt
to impress form and order on the primaeval chaos of human knowledge. He
would see all things as in a dream.

The ancient physical philosophers have been charged by Dr. Whewell and
others with wasting their fine intelligences in wrong methods of enquiry;
and their progress in moral and political philosophy has been sometimes
contrasted with their supposed failure in physical investigations. 'They
had plenty of ideas,' says Dr. Whewell, 'and plenty of facts; but their
ideas did not accurately represent the facts with which they were
acquainted.' This is a very crude and misleading way of describing ancient
science. It is the mistake of an uneducated person--uneducated, that is,
in the higher sense of the word--who imagines every one else to be like
himself and explains every other age by his own. No doubt the ancients
often fell into strange and fanciful errors: the time had not yet arrived
for the slower and surer path of the modern inductive philosophy. But it
remains to be shown that they could have done more in their age and
country; or that the contributions which they made to the sciences with
which they were acquainted are not as great upon the whole as those made by
their successors. There is no single step in astronomy as great as that of
the nameless Pythagorean who first conceived the world to be a body moving
round the sun in space: there is no truer or more comprehensive principle
than the application of mathematics alike to the heavenly bodies, and to
the particles of matter. The ancients had not the instruments which would
have enabled them to correct or verify their anticipations, and their
opportunities of observation were limited. Plato probably did more for
physical science by asserting the supremacy of mathematics than Aristotle