BEGINNINGS IN GREECE 37 



The Greeks before any other people of antiquity possessed the 

 love of knowledge for its own sake. To see things as they really are, 

 to discern their meaning and adjust their relations, was with them 

 an instinct and a passion. Their method in science and philosophy 

 might be very faulty and their conclusions often absurd, but they 

 had that fearlessness of intellect which is the first condition of seeing 

 truly. . . . Greece, first smitten with the passion for truth, had 

 the courage to put faith in reason and in following its guidance to 

 take no account of consequences. 'Those,' says Aristotle, 'who 

 would rightly judge the truth must be arbitrators and not litigants.' 

 'Let us follow the argument wheresoever it leads' may be taken 

 not only as the motto of the Platonic philosophy but as expressing one 

 side of the Greek genius. . . . 



At the moment when Greece has come into the main current of 

 the world's history, we find a quickened and stirring sense of per- 

 sonality and a free people of intellectual imagination. The oppres- 

 sive silence with which Nature and her unexplained forces had brooded 

 over man is broken. Not that the Greek temper is irreverent or 

 strips the universe of mystery. The mystery is still there and felt . . . 

 but the sense of mystery has not yet become mysticism. . . . Greek 

 thinkers are not afraid lest they should be guilty of prying into hidden 

 things of the gods. They hold frank companionship with thoughts 

 that had paralyzed Eastern nations into dumbness or inactivity, and 

 in their clear gaze there is no ignoble terror. . . . Know thyself, is 

 the answer which the Greek offers to the sphinx's riddle. . . . But 

 to the Greeks, 'know thyself meant not only to know man but the 

 less pleasing task to know foreigners. . . . The people of ancient 

 India did not care to venture beyond their mountain barriers and to 

 know their neighbors. The Egyptians, though in certain branches of 

 science they had made progress, in medicine, in geometry, in as- 

 tronomy, had acquired no scientific distinction for they kept to 

 themselves, but the Greeks were travellers. . . . Aristotle thought 

 it worth his while to analyze and describe the constitutions of 58 

 states, including in his survey not only Greek states but those of the 

 barbarian world. . . . 



It was the privilege of the Greeks to discover the sovereign efficacy 

 of reason. . . . And it was Ionia that gave birth to the idea which 

 was foreign to the East but has become the starting-point of modern 

 science, the idea that Nature works by fixed laws. . . . Again, in 



