Meanwhile, And Despite Our Universities, New Conceptions Are Prevailing,
Aristotle Is Winning The Day.
A fresh kind of thinker has arisen, whose
chief idea of "virtue" is to investigate patiently the facts of
Life;
men of the type of Lister, any one of whom have done more to regenerate
mankind, and to increase the sum of human happiness, than a wilderness
of the amiably-hazy old doctrinaires who professed the same object. I
call to mind those physicians engaged in their malaria-campaign, and
wonder what Plato would have thought of them. Would he have recognized the
significance of their researches which, while allaying pain and misery,
are furthering the prosperity of the country, causing waters to flow in
dry places and villages to spring up in deserts - strengthening its
political resources, improving its very appearance? Not likely. Plato's
opinion of doctors was on a par with the rest of his mentality. Yet
these are the men who are taking up the thread where it was dropped,
perforce, by those veritable Greek sages, whelmed under turbid floods of
Pythagorean irrationalism. And are such things purely utilitarian? Are
they so grossly mundane? Is there really no "philosophy" in the choice
of such a healing career, no romance in its studious self-denial, no
beauty in its results? If so, we must revise that classic adage which
connects vigour with beauty - not to speak of several others.
XXXIX
MIDDAY AT PETELIA
Day after day, I look across the six miles of sea to the Lacinian
promontory and its column.
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