LXXII THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



beyond what it was in the thirteenth century. That old knowledge 

 and old literature helped to sweeten life and to cheer and renew the 

 minds of all those weary of the subtleties of the Schools and the 

 dogma of the Middle Ages. Our outlook to-day has been enormously 

 influenced by the great thinkers, poets and philosophers of anti- 

 quity, and we would be failing in our duty, were we not to acknow- 

 ledge this debt. 



The acknowledgment must not, however, be undiscriminating 

 as our classical friends would seem to postulate. The ideals of the 

 past are not wholly those of to-day. When Socrates was crusading 

 for wisdom amongst his fellow Athenians thousands of slaves, chained 

 in the underground mines of Laurium, not thirty miles from Athens, 

 lived a wretched, degraded life from which death was the only release. 

 One must also remember the slaughter of the prisoners at Aegos- 

 Potami, the starvation of the captive Athenians in the marble quarry 

 of Syracuse, the holocaust of non-combatants when a Roman army 

 attacked a hostile town or tribe, the strangling of the prisoners after 

 a Roman Triumph, the Gladiatorial Games, the atrocities of the 

 Servile War, and other incidents and examples, countless in number, 

 of old world inhumanity, to which some German writers have re- 

 ferred in justification of the cult of "frightfulness," 



Man will not for ever go to the past for all the life which does 

 not depend on bread alone. His course is still in the early 

 dawn of civilization. If, then, progress means the realization more 

 and more of the ideals of liberty, justice, kindliness of spirit and 

 truth, which he to-day ardently cherishes, he must resolutely march 

 towards the full morning light and not linger in the twilight, however 

 beautiful a glow it may give to the world. The splendor of this dawn 

 will, nevertheless, always be a memory of wonder even in the old age 

 of the earth, it will always chasten pride and foster the belief that 

 behind the mask of man's fateful and changing history there is an 

 unchanging Chorus teaching him to be wise and to bow to Destiny. 



The ancient learning, the old knowledge, will not be eclipsed. 

 There will be always those, perhaps a very few, who will go back to 

 it to look out on the world through the eyes of the great thinkers, 

 poets and prophets of the past. The old tales, the old legends, there- 

 fore, will never be forgotten, the old setting of the hopes and fears 

 of humanity will then be renewed for each generation, and life will 

 thus be dowered with an interest that will transcend all merely tem- 

 porary values. 



It will, however, be only in sympathy and co-operation with 

 the new knowledge which will be the ever-increasing endowment in the 

 age now dawning. Indeed, whether the ultra-reactionaries on the one 



