For, setting
aside the artistic prejudices which would have led the Greeks to
reject this idea of unlimited improvement, we may note that the
modern conception of progress rests partly on the new enthusiasm
and worship of humanity, partly on the splendid hopes of material
improvements in civilisation which applied science has held out to
us, two influences from which ancient Greek thought seems to have
been strangely free. For the Greeks marred the perfect humanism of
the great men whom they worshipped, by imputing to them divinity
and its supernatural powers; while their science was eminently
speculative and often almost mystic in its character, aiming at
culture and not utility, at higher spirituality and more intense
reverence for law, rather than at the increased facilities of
locomotion and the cheap production of common things about which
our modern scientific school ceases not to boast. And lastly, and
perhaps chiefly, we must remember that the 'plague spot of all
Greek states,' as one of their own writers has called it, was the
terrible insecurity to life and property which resulted from the
factions and revolutions which ceased not to trouble Greece at all
times, raising a spirit of fanaticism such as religion raised in
the middle ages of Europe.
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