never sustained except in brief interludes her basic racial and national career, as against the wolves of the world. She finally perished through political hagglings and brawls, even as did peoples by no means given to inquiries into mental abstractions. * The ideal of Greek statuary was to present The voluptuous roundness and smoothness of Greek culture tends to blind us to the raw world of average human life. Whether or not Greek sculpture reveals "poise" we cannot escape the conclusion that there is a world of contrasted meaning in Greek vs. Roman character, as set forth in the art-instincts of the two great races of Antiquity. The Greek, according to reports come down to us through statuary, was a veritable physical god; his face is without wrinkles; the smooth youthful expression shows no troubles such as belong to the world of living men. On the contrary, Roman statues were modeled from average human ugliness, as evidenced by grotesque terra-cotta images found in very early Etruscan tombs. Cicero and Varro tell of family busts adorned with hair and beards. Even Roman death-masks, ugly enough at that, and creating crude caricature of the dead, were not held to be complete unless hair, eyes and complexion were indicated with colored pigments. On the contrary, Roman desire for idealism is absent in the idyllic smoothness and roundness of Greek conceptions of every-day men and women. We draw from these facts: Romans aimed at human fidelity in making images of the race; Greeks at an exaggerated idealism that existed only in the mind. BaringGould (Tragedy of the Caesars) believes that sculptors of Rome were principally concerned in studying human likenesses; the artist intent on portraying wrinkles, squints, scowls, grimaces, necessary to convey the essence of the man's character. It should not be inferred how ever that slaves were customary subjects for portraiture, either in Greece or in Rome. We are merely regarding the relative psychological urge in the two contrasted countries, as applied to Civilization. Rome is practical, Greece is academic. The Greek mind was disposed to reflect on beauty, order and goodness; and these three qualities were held to be one and the same great fact, presented under three phases. The Greek word for the world is "kosmos" (order), but the best known Roman expression of order is on the contrary "the common good" (res publica). For the frank Roman conception of beauty and order was "the useful." On the physical side, Roman energy impressed the national will by means of an elaborate, compactly built system of roads, and on the intellectual side Roman practicability gave to mankind a body of laws whose influence remains to this very hour. Thus, in the higher conceptions of Civilization, the world has always sought a combination of Greek intellectual idealisms combined with Roman practical realism; and let us add has never succeeded in that great politico-social quest. However, in any impartial and logical presentation of social evolution, affecting the rise of the masses, the influence of the two ideals must be acknowledged. And while in this place we point out glaring contrasts, we aim to bestow legitimate criticism and legitimate approval, on both sides. * "Plato needs a curb rather than a spur"; It is our duty as well as our pleasure to testify to the high importance of Greek abstract ideas of justice, touching social evolution. But it must not be forgotten that every national expression of justice is necessarily bound up in a political summary, representing working ideals of the people in question. When we say that Greek scholasticism was not great enough to sustain Greek national life we are organizing centuries of transition in a few words. There is, too, herein a pathetic comment on human institutions, whatsoever; for human institutions in the end fall before the selfishness of average human nature. Empires wax and wane not necessarily because the individual experiment in itself possessed no inherent legitimacy or lasting worth, but because on the contrary the unwritten law (condition) of progress presupposes inevitable transitions, like stages in the growth of a tree. Tentative social forms are forever ebbing and flowing against the concrete fact of human nature's varying moods, expressed in man's growth in knowledge. There was no one overshadowing reason why Egypt should pass, or Babylon, or Greece, or Rome, except that in round terms all new social forms are merely restatements of our inheritance from the past. Birth and death, seedtime and harvest, night and morning, childhood and old age, each flows out of the other; and let us not forget that when the year is ended and winter is at hand, about all that even Mother Nature herself is able to do is to. start Springtime once more—and run on through another year. Under this conception of the inevitable ebb and flow of social forms, we discern that those profound agitations on life, death, first cause, justice, over which Greek philosophers perplexed themselves in their brief journey here on earth, must be regarded as noble, self-confessions of the infinite struggle to shape life's chaos into outward forms of harmony and order. It went about so far, then broke down; and the day came when Roman military masters dragging home Greek statuary as prizes of war (Sulla) regarded these marvelous works of the creative mind not as objects of art but-mark well-sent them to the pits and burned the classic marbles to extract the lime. Were we to seek for days we doubt whether we could find a better illustration of social evolution, as a brutal fact, than is here summed up in the episode of the fate of the Greek marbles. Yet, too, with all their light and learning the Greeks on their side were as inconsistent and as dissatisfied as any other race, and while we acknowledge the importance of Greek cultural stimulus as affecting the march of the masses, we must not forget that 2000 years after Plato, and in spite of the accumulated intellectual riches of intervening centuries, mankind still loves, hates, curses and reviles-just as mankind always has at every period of recorded history. In this connection we read these words of ancient days, ascribed to Protagoras, the Sophist (400's B. C.): "Man is the measure of all things.' This means the individual man, and the words infer that the individual man's opinions are necessarily conclusive, for him. Here we find the inevitable difficulty under which all social forms labor: to retain on one side the largest elements of freedom of thought for the individual, while at the same time insisting that the free individual think in terms of community interest. And this is precisely what Aristotle meant (at least in one phase) when he made a practical criticism of Plato, "Plato needs a curb rather than a spur." CHAPTER XIV THE INTELLECTUAL PIONEER How Aristotle, dead and forgotten for many Greek scholasticism finally split hairs to such an extent that the place was reached where groups of itinerant scholars, called Sophists, carried mental individuality to the nth degree. The Sophists collected in groves, on street corners, in rooms, and brought the young men around them. "Which side do you wish to prove? As you like it, which side? Then follow us, and we will provide the necessary arguments." The plain inference here is that validity of knowledge is based on "cleverness' of argument. Plato, Socrates and others tried to refute irrational elements in this incessant, this ear-splitting babble and cackle. Their inquiries into the nature of ideas, the nature of justice, mercy, ingratitude, have scarcely been improved on by our race; we refer here to abstract ideas. Socrates tried to show that specific knowledge is fruitless unless it led men to principles of "universal" application; and while he could to an extent reach this goal (in a world of ethical idealism), his methods of seeking "physical" truths through logical fence fell far short of Aristotle's plan of utilizing concrete information, derived from research outside the thought-world. Consequently, Aristotle has had the wider general influence on man's practical development. Aristotle as world-pioneer may justly be held, if not the father of modern science, then at least, its ancestral guardian. To Sir Francis Bacon (d. 1629) the honor is reserved for formulating as well as applying the inductive method, in relation to scientific research, and while he was not a research man in the modern technical sense, his writings on method are as important in their way as is Shakespeare's analysis |