52 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 



compromised in its execution by the fact that later 

 philosophers submerged man in the world to which 

 philosophy was brought: a world which was the 

 heavy and sunken center of hierarchic heavens lo 

 cated in their purity and refinement as remotely as 

 possible from the gross and muddy vesture of 

 earth. 



The various limitations of Greek custom, its 

 hostile indifference to all outside the narrow city- 

 state, its assumption of fixed divisions of wise and 

 blind among men, its inability socially to utilize 

 science, its subordination of human intention to 

 cosmic aim all of these things were worked into 

 moral theory. Philosophy had no active hand in 

 producing the condition of barbarism in Europe 

 from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. By an 

 unwitting irony which would have shocked none 

 so much as the lucid moralists of Athens, their 

 philosophic idealization, under captions of Nature 

 and Reason, of the inherent limitations of Athenian 

 society and Greek science, furnished the intellectual 

 tools for defining, standardizing, and justifying all 

 the fundamental clefts and antagonisms of feudal 

 ism. When practical conditions are not frozen in 

 men s imagination into crystalline truths, they are 

 naturally fluid. They come and go. But when 

 intelligence fixes fluctuating circumstances into 

 final ideals, petrifaction is likely to occur; and 

 philosophy gratuitously took upon itself the re- 



