Polybius is the last scientific historian of Greece. The writer
who seems fittingly to complete the progress of thought is a writer
of biographies only. I will not here touch on Plutarch's
employment of the inductive method as shown in his constant use of
inscription and statue, of public document and building and the
like, because it involves no new method. It is his attitude
towards miracles of which I desire to treat.
Plutarch is philosophic enough to see that in the sense of a
violation of the laws of nature a miracle is impossible. It is
absurd, he says, to imagine that the statue of a saint can speak,
and that an inanimate object not possessing the vocal organs should
be able to utter an articulate sound. Upon the other hand, he
protests against science imagining that, by explaining the natural
causes of things, it has explained away their transcendental
meaning. 'When the tears on the cheek of some holy statue have
been analysed into the moisture which certain temperatures produce
on wood and marble, it yet by no means follows that they were not a
sign of grief and mourning set there by God Himself.' When Lampon
saw in the prodigy of the one-horned ram the omen of the supreme
rule of Pericles, and when Anaxagoras showed that the abnormal
development was the rational resultant of the peculiar formation of
the skull, the dreamer and the man of science were both right; it
was the business of the latter to consider how the prodigy came
about, of the former to show why it was so formed and what it so
portended.
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