x THE WILL IN DEVELOPMENT 193 



But in the second place, as Greek ethics advanced 

 thinkers became more aware of the relativity of their 

 entire standpoint. It became increasingly clear that the 

 city-state was not the only form of human association nor 

 the last word of development. The necessity of a more 

 absolute standard appeared, such as would appeal to the 

 individual in the absence, or perhaps in defiance, of positive 

 state law or generally accepted custom. The Greeks 

 formulated the conception of such a standard in the con- 

 ception of Nature as that which is valid everywhere and is 

 unalterable by human agreement, and in the law of Nature 

 they arrived on the side of ethics and jurisprudence at 

 fundamental truths parallel to those of the religious con- 

 sciousness, and asserted Universalism on a different and 

 more logical ground. But though it formulated the con- 

 ception of an absolute standard from which the actual 

 constitution of society has departed, the idea of Nature 

 contained ambiguities which, as became apparent when it 

 was revived in modern thought, rendered it a dangerous 

 instrument in the reconstruction of social ethics. What 

 was needed was a systematic exposition of the nature of 

 the judgment of value which, if it was to reorganise society, 

 must lead up to and culminate in a comprehensive concep- 

 tion of the meaning and purpose of human life. 



() The Reconstruction of Idealism. 



But in the interval between Greek and modern civilisa- 

 tion Christianity had absorbed the energies of Europe, and 

 had saturated the social and ethical domains of thought. 

 The stream of Christian development represented a union 

 of Greek rationalism with Oriental mysticism, but in all 

 but its highest expressions it tended to maintain the 

 separateness of the spiritual and material order, nor at best 

 is it free to criticise its own presuppositions and to revise 

 them in the light of the actual needs of human life. Its 

 function is not to discover how life can best be organised 

 so that humanity can make the most of itself, but assuming 

 that it has possession of that which is best, to see how 

 humanity can be made to conform to its rule. Now the 

 concern of modern rationalism in this linked closely with 



