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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: alternately true and false, and among the Megaric school, for
undermining the ground of all science, and paving the way for
scepticism, by denying the natural world to be the object of certain
knowledge. The only element of Plato's thought to which they clung was,
as we shall find from the Neoplatonists, his physical speculations; in
which, deserting his inductive method, he has fallen below himself into
the popular cacoethes, and Pythagorean deductive dreams about the
mysterious powers of numbers, and of the regular solids.
Such a people, when they took to studying physical science, would be,
and in fact were, incapable of Chemistry, Geognosy, Comparative Anatomy,
or any of that noble choir of sister sciences, which are now building up
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