and Manchu—as fleeting periods of apparent pause and concentration in the universal flow of things.
It was not without some warrant, perhaps, that one of the very earliest Greek philosophers, Anaximander, more than five centuries before the Christian era, reached the startling conclusion that the cosmos which he beheld with penetrating eyes was a limitless flood, ever in motion, throwing up new forms and beings and drawing them again into its devouring immensity according to the law of destiny—whirling worlds, swaying tides, growing crops, wandering herds, puny man, and his little systems erected proudly for a day against eternity being but symbols of an unchanging force, the essence of all reality. Conceived even in terms of modern mathematics, a purely mechanistic philosophy is engaging in its simplicity, but we are warned by one recent historian, Henry Adams, that mere motion cannot account for direction or for the problems of vital energy; and by another, Oswald Spengler, that "there is an organic logic, an instinctive, dream-sure logic of all existence, as opposed to the logic of the inorganic, the logic of understanding and of things understood—a logic of direction as against a logic of extension."
More than two thousand years after Anaximander, in the nineteenth century, the German philosopher, Hegel, seeking the solution to the endless changes of history, came to the conclusion that the evolution of humanity was, in its inmost nature, the progressive revelation of the divine spirit. Assuming, as necessary, God the unconditioned, creator and upholder of all, Hegel saw in the kaleidoscopic time-patterns of civilization, strewn through the ages, mere partial reflections of the grand Idea underlying the universe—"an infinite power realizing its aim in the absolute rational design of the world." Nations rising and declining were to him but pawns in a majestic game, each with its mission to fulfill, with its heroes as servants of their epochs carrying out that aspect of the Idea then fated for realization.
