IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 349 



comprehensive religious philosophy, cosmic in its cre- 

 ative concepts, rather than theistic. But they ulti- 

 mately lost contact with the constructive material 

 world and grew into empty mysticism and inaction. 



Christianity needed the infusion of the scientific 

 spirit, which it is now receiving, in order to increase 

 its sympathy with nature-action, and to broaden its cos- 

 mic concepts. Buddhism and Hinduism need it to 

 draw their thought to present terrestrial realities, and 

 to arm their self-constructive purposes with material 

 instruments. 



, 



3. The Cultural Inequalities of the Greeks. 

 Greek culture, rooted in a primitive social soil, nar- 

 rowly circumscribed geographically and minutely sub- 

 divided by political barriers of mutual distrust and 

 rivalry, nevertheless blossomed into social life with a 

 splendor unsurpassed. But her towering art and in- 

 tellectualism were ultimately sterilized by the limited 

 scope of her social instincts. Greek art lost its regen- 

 erative motive with the decline of her religion, which 

 her growing intellectualism devitalized and destroyed, 

 but could not replace. Her intellectualism was self- 

 centred and top-heavy; its inlets and outlets unduly 

 constricted. It lacked catholicity of receipts and the 

 altruistic spirit of out-going social services. Cut off 

 at the roots from the lower strata of society, and from 

 real communion with the great world of nature-life, 

 it became over-humanistic, aristocratic, acrobatic, and 

 ornamental. Her semi-parasitic philosophers, not 

 more familiar with the intimate life of plants and ani- 

 mals than an Australian black-fellow, rarely sharp- 

 ened their wits on the whetstone of hard realities, or 



