GREEK AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE GREEKS 137 



the surrender of that individual liberty in and through which Hel- 

 lenic nationality found its completest expression. 



To us the Hellene is a unique combination of psychic forces; gifted 

 with the rare endowment of a high spirit united with an intellect 

 agile yet profound; gifted with the power to see things as they 

 are and in the light of their essential characteristics, with a sense of 

 proportion and of hostility to extravagance; inimical to all formulas; 1 

 animated by joyous self-confidence, a proud reliance upon his own 

 powers, and a consciousness of his own superiority that divided the 

 world into Greek and barbarian; possessed of an unerring taste 

 and sensitiveness to form (which plays in the refinements of expres- 

 sion a larger role than does the intellect) ; progressive and a creator 

 wherever he worked, yet conservative and bound to the past not 

 only through the sanctities of his faith (which found fixed form in 

 the earliest and the best of his books), but also by a realization of 

 the continuity of the development of the arts; a lover of knowledge, 

 not a lover of wealth; shaping his large curiosity to the purposes 

 of the scientific spirit, and thus impelled to discover the causes of 

 things and to fathom the mysteries of the world in which he lived ; 

 an apostle of intellectual freedom, not of mere utilitarianism; en- 

 dowed with a genius for clear thinking in forms of beauty; a lover 

 of truth in the veil of beauty; his ideal of human nature the harmoni- 

 ous development of man's faculties, a combination of the beautiful 

 in outward form with inner worth. 



Equally mobile with his intellect was his emotion. His emotional 

 qualities were not repressed by insistence on the virtues of impass- 

 iveness. To lament was not unworthy of a manly nature, and 

 sympathy was not unattended by tears. Susceptibility to feeling 

 vitiated the course of justice, as it damned Phrynichus' play. When 

 art depicted the agony of the body, it did not fail to hold the mirror 

 up to nature: Philoctetes' screams filled the theatre. But at his 

 highest, in literature as in life, the Greek submits his emotion to 

 the control of his intellect; he argues while he feels; his dialectic is 

 discerned through the veil of his emotion. As no other people, the 

 Hellenes enjoy that rare possession the union of keenness of feel- 

 ing with the sacred passion for science. By temperament (which is 

 constituted by emotion and will in their mutual relations) the 

 Greeks were excitable and impulsive, and thus stand nearer to those 

 peoples which live in and for the world about them than to those 

 which withdraw into themselves; yet in a higher degree than other 

 nations they combined the qualities resulting from the surrender 

 to the world and the abnegation of the world. 



The intellect of the Hellene is stronger than his moral energy. 



1 But in the later development of philosophy disloyalty to th letter of Epi- 

 curean tenets was the equivalent of impiousness in the opinion of the faithful. 



