350 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



utilized them constructively for compensating plebian 

 betterments. Her intellectualism could not, or did 

 not, test the veracity of its imagery by an experimen- 

 tal appeal to the democracy of nature, and would not 

 submit to the correction of its conduct by humiliating 

 experience with little things and homely. 



When her creative resources were exhausted, there 

 was no sufficient motive for mere repetition. She 

 could not, in self-sustaining labor, pay the price of 

 freedom with the unproductive freedom she de- 

 manded. 



The Greeks, in other words, were unscientific in 

 the constructive usage of their thought and action. 

 Their culture lacked the creative metabolism of a uni- 

 versal give and take, the vital catholicity which gladly 

 receives from all and freely gives to all. It was not 

 impregnated with the regenerative lure of the scien- 

 tific spirit, which ever leads to new exploits and creates 

 new means to new delights; which ever satisfies and 

 never satiates; which ever calls to new adventures in 

 fields unhorizoned and unexplored, where achievement 

 flows through its countless outlets of employment to the 

 ocean of created things and back again to the sunlight 

 and the soil. 



New social systems sprang from the prostrate rem- 

 nants of Greek and Roman culture, not from quickened 

 parent seeds, but from storm-swept foreign spores that 

 like fungous growths on fallen tree-trunks could never 

 blossom into fruit like theirs. 



The remnants of these moribund civilizations grad- 

 ually broke down into their less perishable elements of 

 Tightness. But for centuries their decomposing remains 

 provided an easy living for pale mental parasites and 



