THREE:Considered as means for transmitting power, the contrast as to advantages and disadvantages lies especially between belts and gearing instead of between belts and shafts. It is true in extreme cases, such as that cited at Crewe, or in conveying water-power from inaccessible places, through long distances, the comparison lies between belts and shafts; but in ordinary practice, especially for first movers, the problem as to mechanism for conveying power lies between belts and gear wheels. If experience in the use of belts was thorough, as it is in the case of gearing, and if the quality of belts did not form so important a part in the estimates, there would be but little difficulty in determining where belts should be employed and where gearing would be preferable. Belts are continually taking the place of gearing even in cases where, until quite recently, their use has been considered impracticable; one of the largest rolling mills in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, except a single pair of spur wheels as the last movers at each train of rolls, is driven by belts throughout.In the last chapter we considered the philosophy of Plato chiefly under its critical and negative aspects. We saw how it was exclusively from that side that he at first apprehended and enlarged the dialectic of Socrates, how deeply his scepticism was coloured by the religious reaction of the age, and how he attempted, out of his masters mouth, to overturn the positive teaching of the master himself. We saw how, in the Protagoras, he sketched a theory of ethics, which was no sooner completed than it became the starting-point of a still more extended and arduous enquiry. We followed the widening horizon of his speculations until they embraced the whole contemporary life of Hellas, and involved it in a common condemnation as either hopelessly corrupt, or containing within itself the seeds of corruption. We then saw how, by a farther generalisation, he was led to look for the sources of error in the laws of mans sensuous nature and of the phenomenal world with which it holds communion; how, moreover, under the guidance of suggestions coming both from within and from without, he reverted to the earlier schools of Greek thought, and brought their results into parallelism with the main lines of Socratic dialectic. And finally, we watched him planting a firm foothold on the basis of mathematical demonstration; seeking in the very constitution of the soul itself for a derivation of the truths which sensuous experience could not impart, and winning back from215 a more profoundly reasoned religion the hope, the self-confidence, the assurance of perfect knowledge, which had been formerly surrendered in deference to the demands of a merely external and traditional faith. That God alone is wise, and by consequence alone good, might still remain a fixed principle with Plato; but it ceased to operate as a restraint on human aspiration when he had come to recognise an essential unity among all forms of conscious life, which, though it might be clouded and forgotten, could never be entirely effaced. And when Plato tells us, at the close of his career, that God, far more than any individual man, is the measure of all things,133 who can doubt that he had already learned to identify the human and divine essences in the common notion of a universal soul?
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams
