Greeks to look long and steadily at every object, great and small, from the structural features of the landscape, the mountains and the clouds, to man both as an individual and in combination with others of his kind, and from man to the wasp and the frog or the meanest flower that blows; and their sensitiveness made the impression distinct and permanent. (As a result, they learned to see parts as parts, and the relation between them, and wholes as wholes, with the relation between part and whole. This accounts for their discovery of order and organization in the world about them-in what they termed the cosmos; it accounts also (if genius can be explained) for their own constructiveness-for the perfection of their architecture, and for the architectonic qualities of their prose and poetry. What they conceived was distinct and orderly, like the cosmos itself; hence what they executed, whether temple or epic poem, had the finished structure of a living organism: every detail was subordinate to the function of the whole. Thus the deed of horror, the slaying of Aegisthus at the hand of Orestes, was subordinate to the total effect of the tragic story; the frieze of the horsemen was contributory to the general but distinct effect of the Parthenon; and the worth of the individual was measured by his service to the State. But the State itself was a being, so to speak, like an animal of a higher sort, whose function was to live the life of reason, contemplating and realizing justice and truth, which were divine. Wherever they looked, these sensitive men saw life, divine, distinct, and orderly.

Accordingly, the Greeks were religious. Saint Paul, in fact, speaking to the Athenians in their decline, remarked that they were excessively religious. We are not prone to think of them as such. We think of them as a joyous race, loving the sunlight, adorning themselves on every occasion with garlands of flowers, worshipers of human youth and beauty; inquisitive, too, and loquacious: 'For all the Athenians, and strangers which were there, spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing.' But, after all, there is such a thing as a religion of joy; nor does a delight in youth and beauty preclude a serious view of human life. Moreover, the practice of discussion need not interfere with the habit of severe thought about the highest things. The Socratic method of arriving at truth through question and answer is proverbial. Yet we recall the story told of Socrates in the Symposium: 'One morning he was thinking about something which he could not resolve; he would not give it up, but continued thinking from early dawn until noon-there he stood, fixed in thought;

and at noon attention was drawn to him, and the rumor ran through the wondering crowd that Socrates had been standing and thinking about something ever since the break of day. At last, in the evening after supper, some Ionians out of curiosity (I should explain that this occurred not in winter but in summer) brought out their mats and slept in the open air that they might watch him and see whether he would stand all night. There he stood until the following morning; and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the sun, and went his way.' And so the Greeks thought out the nature of Deity. The beauty of their loftiest religious conceptions is obscured by a gross indelicacy in some of their traditional observances; and the monotheism in which their philosophy culminated is often lost to us through the bewildering fecundity of their artistic imagination, which beheld a separate deity, or nymph, or demon, in every manifestation of nature. Our idea of Greek religion has been distorted also by Matthew Arnold's insistence upon the religious genius of the Hebrew as contrasted with the intellectual genius of the Greek.

Because of Arnold and his misleading emphasis, this point may need some reinforcement. I shall reinforce it with a quotation from Mr. Haigh on Aeschylus.

'In his hands the religion of the Greeks has been raised to a higher level of moral dignity than it ever attained either before or since.

(The first point to be noticed, in regard to his religious views, is the sublime conception of Zeus as the supreme ruler of the universe. The other deities are represented as merely the ministers of his will, and though still possessing their usual characteristics, stand in a subordinate rank. The language applied to Zeus is monotheistic in tone, and his praises are chanted in strains of the loftiest exaltation. He is "king of kings, most blessed of the blessed, most mighty of rulers." His power "knows no superior, nor is any one enthroned above him; swifter than speech is the accomplishment of his purpose." He "holds for ever the balance of the scales: nothing comes to mortal man but by the will of Zeus." "Zeus is sky, and earth, and heaven; Zeus is all things, yea, greater than all things." His power, though invisible, is omnipotent and omnipresent. "Dark and shadowy," it is said, “are the pathways of his counsels, and difficult to see. From their hightowering hopes he hurleth down to destruction the race of men. Yet setteth he no forces in array, all his works are effortless.

Seated on holiest throne, from thence, unknown to us, he bringeth his will to pass."

'Such being the scheme of divine government, as conceived by Aeschylus, in which the laws of eternal justice are administered by an all-powerful deity, it follows that injustice can never prosper, and that the punishment of sin is certain and inevitable."5

As for the intellectual faculty of the Greeks, their habit of making fine yet clear and true distinctions, of inserting the edge of the mind at the joint between ideas, this went hand in hand with their clear and sharp discrimination of objects in the world about them, and has led to their superiority in the mental, moral, and political sciences. Their excellence here has so often been emphasized that every one is aware of our debt to the Greeks for the foundations of logic, mathematics, ethics, psychology, and the science of government.

Something, too, is generally known of the attention they paid to the human body, their study of which was interfered with only by their reverence for it. There are those who think that in many respects Greek civilization attained a stage of development much higher than that which any other Aryan stock has reached; that in the general progress of the Indo-Germanic races the Greeks in some respects anticipated our own future; and that herein lies much of the value their example has for us. Since our infancy came later, they, like an elder brother, point out the course that we must run. However this may be, it cannot be gainsaid that in the one article of disciplining the human body, and perfecting the human form, they set a standard which no nation since, nor any part of it, has equaled, or is likely soon to equal. The indubitable sign of this excellence is their sculpture. We may think if we like that Shakespeare is not inferior to Sophocles in moving the heart through the tragic drama, though I for one would hesitate to say so; and we may agree that the southwest tower of Chartres Cathedral shows the art of man engaged in the service of God as no structural feature of the Parthenon can show it, to which I would readily assent; but where is the English or Italian sculptor who can rival the Hermes of Praxiteles at Olympia? Encomiums of Greek sculpture are superfluous. On the other hand, it may occasion some astonishment when we learn, upon the authority of Dr. Osler, that the establishments of the ancients for the care of bodily 5 A. E. Haigh, The Tragic Drama of the Greeks, pp. 87, 88, 91.

health far surpassed in extent and magnificence our twentiethcentury institutions of a comparable sort. One thinks of the group of buildings sacred to Asclepius at Epidaurus, which included a theatre that would seat twelve thousand persons. Or one thinks of the extravagant Baths of Caracalla at Rome. Here, perhaps, we might learn from the mistakes of the ancients, since we seem in this country to be on the point of letting the care of the body run away with our institutions of learning. At their best, however, the Greeks preserved a just balance in the training of their youth between gymnastic for the body and a thorough literary and artistic, or, as they would call it, 'musical,' education for the soul. They wished the motions of both mind and body to be harmonious and direct. They were saved from excess by their sense of proportion, which arose from their clearness of vision.

But their powers of observation were directed also to the world around them. Thus 'Phidias, like most of the other great artists of Greece, was as much distinguished for accuracy in the minutest details as for the majesty of his colossal figures; and, like Lysippus, he amused himself, and gave proofs of his skill, by making images of minute objects, such as cicadas, bees, and flies." And thus the modern ornithologist has something to learn even from the poet Aristophanes in his comedy of the Birds, as the entomologist has something to learn from the Wasps, and the Weather Bureau from the Clouds. Much more has the natural scientist to learn from the actual researches of the Greeks in several branches, above all in zoology; mainly in respect to method, of course, though the results which we find in Aristotle's work on animals, for instance, are not negligible. Yet it is to be feared that most of our zoölogists are ignorant of the very existence of his Animalia. The experimental psychologists, however, the newest of the new in modern science, have not been slow to recognize the importance of his work on the soul. One could wish that those who nowadays are prating in such wretched taste about 'eugenics,' which they think has just been discovered, were equally well acquainted with the Republic of Plato. It may be accidental, but I have heard very few American botanists mention the fifteen surviving books of Theophrastus on the Natural History and Physiology of Plants.

In general, what the modern scientist may learn from Aristotle, taking him as the representative of scientific investigation among the ancients, is, first of all, the habit of exact personal observation, which, as Agassiz knew, is the corner-stone of science. Secondly, it

• Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology 3.254.

is the method of research: to collect as many examples of a given form as possible—that is, without expending all one's time in mere collection; and to select from these the typical cases, for the purpose of comparison and inference. Finally, it is a sense of the relation of every part of science to the whole, and a recognition of the fact that, while any science may at any time be subservient to any other, even the higher to the lower, still some sciences in the long run are subordinate. A knowledge of the habits of birds and fishes, for example, is less important than a knowledge of the characteristic actions of men.

This brings us to the last trait of the Greeks that needs remark, their scientific interest in human conduct, which, with their profound belief in a First Cause, determined their attitude to human life. To begin with, we must not forget that they found no such opposition as we seem to make between theory and practice, or between knowledge and its application. The distinction between theory and practice we owe, indeed, like many another distinction, to the Greeks, but the divorce is our own contrivance. Accordingly, a theoretical knowledge of human, as of animal, behavior would mean to them the sort of knowledge that corresponds to the facts, arising from exact observation and comparison of the facts, and enabling one to deal with the facts in a practical way. They would not, for example, condemn a candidate for the presidency of the United States on the ground that he was 'too theoretical'; but if his knowledge was one-sided and unfit for use, they would say he was not theoretical enough, and hence was ill-prepared to govern. If he knew books, that is, history in some narrow sense, but not the motives of men, or if he knew Tom, Dick, and Harry, but not the vital truths of history, he could have no true theory of government, and so he would be likely to fail as a leader. With their habitual thoroughness, then, the Greeks observed and classified the various types of men, and the ways in which men act, individually as well as in combination, and in the different periods of life. The powers of men, resulting in right action and happiness, they called virtues, and the characteristic lapses from the normal, resulting in imperfect action and absurdity or ruin, they called vices. They thus built up, as we find in the Ethics, Rhetoric, and Politics of Aristotle, and in the Characters of Theophrastus, a thoroughgoing science of the types and ages of men, of their virtues and vices, and of the several species of organization that arise when families combine to form states. They described youth, or the magnanimous man, or the coward, or a democracy, with the