CLASSICS AND THE COLLEGE COURSE 555 
with conditions existing in modern times. He is led to suppose that 
later periods offer nothing to compare with the Iliad and Auneid; with 
the intellect of Aristotle; with the morals of Cicero, Seneca and Marcus 
Aurelius ; with the philosophy or excellence of Socrates and Plato; with 
the daintiness of the Greek lyric poets; with the abandon of Horace ; 
or with the heroism of Marathon and Thermopyle. He is led to sup- 
pose that one must look to Greece and Rome for models of purity and 
devotion ; he is told that only by study of the classical writers can he 
gain sure foundation in morals and true intellectual polish; that the 
fulness of the Greek language was the outcome of God’s desire to have 
a fit vehicle for revelation. And finally he is left to gather that our 
colleges by their teaching of Greek and Latin enable students to come 
in close touch with all this nobility of thought and life. 
Yet no one need feel humiliation because he lives in an inferior age 
or belongs to a deteriorated race. The sentences extolling the distant 
past mean nothing; they are but echoes from voices of the long-buried 
Humanists, which by long reverberation have become polished in form, 
musical in rhythm. No “ literary function ” would be complete unless 
some modern Humanist had repeated them with the fervor of a 
Thibetan priest. 
No one denies that the author of the Iliad had marvelous skill in 
description, but not a few have regretted that a writer of such ability 
had no better subject than the quarrels and combats of lustful savages, 
whose exploits, so vividly pictured, are those of mere brutes. In point 
of morals, the Homeric poems are not superior to the Kalevala, to 
which they are inferior in imagery. Of course, this matter is one of 
taste, but one may be pardoned for supposing that the Kalevala, less 
extravagant in description than the Iliad, would have gained the 
stronger hold on popular fame if it too had been translated by Alex, 
ander Pope. But neither the Iliad nor the Alneid is superior to 
Paradise Lost or to the Inferno, which, produced by greater intellects, 
are free from the grossness which characterizes the Homeric poems. 
Aristotle no more typified Greek intellect than Ajax typified Greek 
physique, or than a building with forty-five stories typifies New York’s 
dwelling houses. He was a giant amid pygmies, a phenomenon in the 
Greek intellectual sky as startling as was Donati’s comet in our physical 
sky, half a century ago. Like Leibnitz, Kant and Spencer, he broke 
away from the trammels which bound his contemporaries and devoted 
himself to the study of actual conditions in search of sure basis for 
philosophy. Like Leibnitz, Kant and Spencer, he received the maledic- 
tions of those who belonged to the prevailing schools. Were he living 
now he would be but one of many, possibly the chief. It is unjust to 
compare him with Spencer, as some have done, for the latter lived in 
an age of greater knowledge and greater advantages. Plato’s reputa- 
