The Greek spirit slept for wellnigh a thousand
years. When it woke again, like Antaeus it had gathered strength
from the earth where it lay; like Apollo it had lost none of its
divinity through its long servitude.
In the history of Roman thought we nowhere find any of those
characteristics of the Greek Illumination which I have pointed out
are the necessary concomitants of the rise of historical criticism.
The conservative respect for tradition which made the Roman people
delight in the ritual and formulas of law, and is as apparent in
their politics as in their religion, was fatal to any rise of that
spirit of revolt against authority the importance of which, as a
factor in intellectual progress, we have already seen.
The whitened tables of the Pontifices preserved carefully the
records of the eclipses and other atmospherical phenomena, and what
we call the art of verifying dates was known to them at an early
time; but there was no spontaneous rise of physical science to
suggest by its analogies of law and order a new method of research,
nor any natural springing up of the questioning spirit of
philosophy with its unification of all phenomena and all knowledge.
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