SHORT PAPERS 



PROFESSOR WILLIAM ARTHUR HEIDEL, of Iowa College, presented a paper on 

 "The Significance of the fyeotoi/ in the Eleatic Philosophy." The speaker's argu- 

 ments and conclusions were based upon the statement that that which distin- 

 guishes the Eleatics alike from their predecessors and their successors is the fact 

 that they identified unity and homogeneity, the lv and the ipeotoif, and deduced 

 from their identity, interpreted with all strictness, the ultimate logical conclu- 

 sions to which the assumption must lead. 



PROFESSOR MAURICE HUTTON, of the University of Toronto, presented a short 

 paper to the Section on "Hellenism," in which he said in part: 



" It has been a familiar experience in my own life that my virtues or what 

 I have been pleased to call my virtues have been due to ignorance. 



" All the more interest I find in the Socratic paradox that virtue is knowledge. 

 Paradox though it be, that maxim I think expresses the inner idea of Hellenism, 

 the inner idea of the Greek mind; and to it I add the kindred paradox that virtue 

 is an art, the paradox of the first book of the Republic. These paradoxes I find 

 in the life, the literature, and the language of the Greeks. 



" In their life they are expressed in the worship of intellect, to whatever ends 

 addressed. The unscrupulous Antiphon is ' second to no one in virtue,' that is, in 

 intellectual force and astuteness. The typical heroes of Hellas are Odysseus and 

 Themistocles; conspicuous each for his adroitness, 'slimness,' and finesse. 

 Another political hero selected by Aristotle as one of three great statesmen 

 of Athens is Theramenes; the academic statesman or 'mugwump'; the fas- 

 tidious 'independent' who tried all parties and was satisfied with none, for none 

 realized his ideal of a ' scientific republic.' He also was generally considered 

 merely an adroit schemer; but his quest of perfection in politics was probably 

 disinterested enough; he was the doctrinaire hi politics. These ' intellectuals,' as 

 the French call them, appear at their best in the great days of Athens; at their 

 worst in the days of Roman domination when the Greek became the facile, 

 astute, domestic chaplain of his brutal, strong-willed Roman employer; when he 

 presented that most melancholy of spectacles, the spectacle of a man of genius 

 without character and self-respect; evil days are not good for men merely intel- 

 lectual; such men are birds of paradise, or butterflies needing the sunshine of 

 prosperity, if they are to discharge well their ornamental functions in the economy 

 of nature. 



Hellenism' in literature conveys the same suggestion of the cult of know- 

 ledge. Their literature is over-intellectual; there is the attempt to base every- 

 thing, even the deepest and therefore least known instincts of human nature, upon 

 knowledge. Patriotism is laboriously justified alike by poets and historians as 

 enlightened self-interest; the citizen must be a patriot, since his life and his suc- 

 cess depend upon the life and success of his state; so too he must be pious, since 

 by piety he will earn the support of his god, who can be trusted, if fairly treated, 

 to support him, since he has no other natural votaries; there is a solidarity of 

 interest between god and worshiper; honesty again is recommended as the best 

 policy; a man does not serve either god or fellow men for naught; whence we 

 find without surprise, since no one was ever honest on these grounds (and if he 

 was he was not), that Greek honesty was less robust than Roman, in proportion 

 as it was more intellectual and less instinctive. 



" The second paradox of Greece, that virtue is an art, cannot obviously be disen- 



