On The Art of Reading

terms of my first lecture-Wh

able to consider Hegel a greater philosopher than Plato. Abbreviating it I repeat it, because I believe in it yet

day, lying there, he returned to life, and he told them what he had seen in the other world. Many wonders he related concerning the dead, for example, with their rewards and punishments: but what had impressed him as most wonderful of all was the great spindle of Necessity, reaching up to Heaven, with the planets revolving

aw and the prophets, so all religions, all philosophies, hang upon two steadfast

?' Natural Science, allowing that for the present these questions are probably unanswerable, contents itself with mapping and measuring what it can of the various forces. But all agree about the harmony; and when a Galileo or a Newton discovers a single rule of it for us, he but makes our assurance surer.

Holy One they will

not faint in

in their human experience, supposed an actual Music of the Spheres inaudible to mortals: Plato as we see (who learned

e Parlement of Fowls") makes the

lis

estial Sir

the nine inf

se that hold th

Adamantine

ate of gods an

mpulsion doth

daughters

teady Nature

orld in measu

heavenly

tion and postulating a governing intelligence with a governing w

t the

in of heaven, he

ent track march

of unalte

be predicted. Anyhow the Universe is not Chaos (if it were, by the way, we should be unable to reason about it at all). It stands and is renewed upon a harmony: and what Plato ca

serve the sta

t heavens, through

ro