I
shall then in both cases take the succession of writers in their
chronological order as representing the rational order - not that
the succession of time is always the succession of ideas, or that
dialectics moves ever in the straight line in which Hegel conceives
its advance. In Greek thought, as elsewhere, there are periods of
stagnation and apparent retrogression, yet their intellectual
development, not merely in the question of historical criticism,
but in their art, their poetry and their philosophy, seems so
essentially normal, so free from all disturbing external
influences, so peculiarly rational, that in following in the
footsteps of time we shall really be progressing in the order
sanctioned by reason.
CHAPTER II
AT an early period in their intellectual development the Greeks
reached that critical point in the history of every civilised
nation, when speculative invades the domain of revealed truth, when
the spiritual ideas of the people can no longer be satisfied by the
lower, material conceptions of their inspired writers, and when men
find it impossible to pour the new wine of free thought into the
old bottles of a narrow and a trammelling creed.
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