The Greek View of Life

Greek view of life, it may be as well to endeavour briefly to recapitula

deal"; we have interpreted their customs and institutions, political, social, or religious, by the conceptions and ideals of philosophers and poets, and

irect outcome of the facts. That absolute separation of what ought to be from what is which continues to haunt and vitiate modern life had not yet been made in ancient Greece. Plato, idealist though he be, is yet rooted in the facts of his age; his perfect republic he bases on the institutions of Sparta and Crete; his perfect man he shapes on the lines of the Greek citizen. That dislocation of the spirit which opposed the body to the soul,

confusion, yet, on the other, it is legitimate to say that they had built on the plan of the ideal, and that their life both in public and privat

ally related to the real; and that is why it is poss

their popular religion. Of this religion, as we saw, the essential feature was that belief in anthropomorphic gods, by virtue of which a reconciliation was effected between man and the powers whether of nature or of his own soul. Behind phenomena, physical or psychic, beings were conceived of like nature wit

an goodness was the object of their quest, and they believed that the one implied the other. But since the perfection of the body required the co-operation of external aids, they made these also essential to their ideal. Not merely virtue of the soul, not merely health and beauty of the body, but noble birth, sufficient wealth and a good name among men, were included in their conce

the state; the faculties essential to his excellence had there only their opportunity of development; the qualities defined as virtues had there only their significance; and it was only in so far as he was a citizen that a man was properly a man at all. Thus that opposition between the individual and the state which perplexes our own society had h

ast, the achievement of the Greeks, to create and maintain an essential harmony. The antitheses of which we in our own time are so painfully and increasingly aware, between Man as a moral being and Nature as an indifferent law, between the flesh and the spirit, between the individual and the state, do not app

after all, but a transitory and imperfect attempt to reconcile elements whose antagonism was too strong for the solution thus proposed. The factors of disruption were present from the beginning in the Greek ideal; and it was as much by the development of its own int

al speculation, not only was the existence of the gods unproved, but their mutually conflicting activities, their passions and their caprice, were incompatible with that conception of universal law which the developing reason evolved as the form of truth. The reconciliation of man with nature which had been effected by the medium of ant

and strength, but such a share at least of external goods as would give a man scope for his own self-perfection. And since these conditions were n

ities that could not be ignored; old age and death were imperative certainties; and no care, no art, no organisation of society, could obviate the inherent incompatibility of individual perfection with the course of nature. Harmony between the individ

in the development of consciousness, to be self- contradictory; and the next great system of ethics that succeeded to that of Aristotle, postulated an end of action that should be at once independent of the aids of fortune and op

ransferred, for us, to a future infinitely remote, which nevertheless is conceived as attainable. Dissatisfaction with the world in which we live and determination to realise one that shall be better, are the prevailing characteristics of the modern spirit. The development is one into whose meaning and end this is not the place to enter. It is enough that we feel it to be inevitable; t