192 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



realist to his task of holding up life as it is against life as it 

 is decked out with convention and smothered in tradition. 



(a) The Social Principle in Ethics. 



The realism of art may thus be said to state the problem 

 of which it is the business of philosophy to find the general 

 solution. To this problem the work of ancient philosophy 

 made two great contributions. In the first place, it found 

 a general solution of the problem of the relation of the 

 individual and society. It arrived (with some qualifica- 

 tions, it is true) at the conception that the antithesis between 

 the social and the personal is fundamentally false, and that 

 the true antithesis is between the higher and fuller self 

 which is social, which needs social relations for its content, 

 its filling, and the lower self, which seeks individual satis- 

 faction. This solution has been in substance taken up into 

 modern thought and compared with the idea of selfhood, 

 which the religions suggest has the great merit of placing 

 the conception of personal development in the foreground 

 and putting self-surrender and negation in its right place as 

 a means to the fuller development of self or others. For 

 the same reasons it has the further merit of bringing out the 

 social side of virtue, and insisting on justice as the pivot of 

 the practical life. 



In estimating the value of this contribution we must 

 keep in mind a point which tells both on the credit and the 

 debit side. The Greek thinkers were not working with 

 the developed thought of a spiritual religion before them. 

 Greek philosophy was not an endeavour to take rational 

 account of such a religion and work it into the sum of 

 human experience. On the contrary, for the Greeks such 

 a religion lay not in the past but in the future, and their 

 method of approach to it was mainly through philosophic 

 enquiry. They were working up to the fundamental 

 truths, not working on them as conceptions already 

 familiar. Hence the comparative simplicity of their 

 problem and the relative success and completeness as com- 

 pared with modern systems of their handling. They 

 grasped a smaller range of experience, and held it therefore 

 with a firmer grip. 



