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components of the monarchy itself must ultimately seek salvation. That is true service to the Crown. Pause before throwing in your lot with a civilization admittedly upon the lower plane: salvation never yet lay in descent. Above all, come before the world with clean hands; blood is hopelessly out of fashion, at best a vulgar argument."

Which advice will be palatable to neither Magyar nor Slav, but will make its modest appeal to the strong and incomparable good sense of the race beyond the seas whose heritage is, in part, a political instinct always alert, never liable, in extraneous cases, to err on the side of undue partiality for the morale of a faith which imagines that kingdoms are to be founded by the knifing of a viceroy and that the best argument for the holding together of Society is the argument of the Thug.

THE INTELLECTUAL AWAKENING IN ATHENS

D

AND ITS MODERN ANALOGY

ALBERT AUGUSTUS TREVER

URING the latter half of the fifth century B.C., a great

intellectual awakening swept over all Greece. Philosophic speculation had ceased to make progress. From whatever direction it was pursued, it had led to scepticism. The old religion of Homer and Hesiod was losing its hold on the cultured classes, and called for a critical examination from its very foundations. The spread of education and culture in the Periclean age, the rise of the drama, the great commercial expansion, the imperialistic policy of Athens, which brought her into direct contact with every part of the Mediterranean world, the Peloponnesian war, which undermined the very foundations of government and patriotism,—all these facts immensely broadened the mental horizon of the Greeks, robbed life and thought of its old simplicity, and tended to create restlessness and a spirit of criticism. The Greek race came to its majority with a thrill of pride in its new found freedom and wisdom. Careless of danger, curious of life, enamored of the new and the extreme, it exhibited the spirit of the modern boy, who tears to pieces his new machine to see how it is made.

It is our purpose to paint certain dominant tendencies in this age of Greece and to point the analogy with the intellectual conditions of to-day. The fact is recognized, of course, that general tendencies do not exactly represent the actual thought and life of any time. Just as great men like Plato, Sophocles, and Aristophanes withstood their time spirit, so there are by no means wanting men to-day to oppose the trend of modern thought and life. Certain qualities, however, stand out as markedly characteristic of both periods.

1. The latter half of fifth century Greece was an age of fierce and free criticism of everything traditional. There was a seething mental restlessness. The product of the past was no longer accepted on hearsay merely. It must be tested in the white light of criticism, and all that failed to resist the fire

must be rejected. Custom broke down. Authority was denied. The age wrote a great question-mark over everything. The uncritical superstition of Herodotus and the simple piety of Eschylus gave way to the critical doubts of Thucydides and the sceptical sneers of Euripides. Tradition, philosophical, literary, religious, moral, political, was tried before the bar of criticism with a frankness that shocked the conservative element. Nothing was so sacred as to escape. The very foundations of society were being overhauled, and the trademark of the past upon an idea or institution tended to prejudge it. It was indeed the gala-day for the new, and the chief anxiety of the cultured young Athenian of the time was to be in accord with the "consensus of modern scholarship," as represented by the Sophists, the professors of the new learning.

2. Naturally such a spirit led to scepticism and denial in religion and philosophy. The crude polytheism had done very well for a simple age, which did not examine critically into the implications of its faith. Its anomalies, rational and moral, were then, for the most part, unnoticed, and thus the old religion had served to develop the sturdy Marathonian men. But now the age of enlightenment had come, and the hoary pantheons of the Homeric Bible must go. The majority of the prominent teachers of the day were unbelievers. Protagoras was a frank agnostic; Gorgias was an absolute sceptic; Prodicus reasoned God out of the universe, while Euripides, with an ill-concealed scoff, dragged the gods from their lofty Olympus into the light of his realism, and set them up before a jury of their peers to prove their right to further toleration even as moral citizens. These are only a few reflecters of the time-spirit, which not only rationalized away the old mythologies and rejected the absurdities of the traditional faith, but even gravely questioned the reality and practical worth of religion and the supernatural altogether.

Philosophic scepticism also advanced parallel with religious denial. Scepticism had existed before in the systems of Heracleitus, Zeno, and Democritus. But here it was hardly selfconscious. It did not grasp the import of its tendencies. The new thinkers, however, were alive to this, and stated it with a

characteristic fearlessness. The famous assertion of Gorgias was, "Nothing exists. If it did exist it could not be known. If it were known, it could not be communicated." Knowledge was frankly declared to be sensation, and thus all knowledge vanished, and truth was rendered meaningless. It was, however, by a somewhat different path that the thought of the period arrived at its utter scepticism of all truth, as will be seen in the following point.

3. This critical and sceptical spirit was accompanied by an extreme individualism. Protagoras, with his "Man is the measure of all things," merely gave expression to the most characteristic mood of his time. Society existed only for the individual. The passing opinion of each man was set up as a criterion of truth, and knowledge vanished. To be sure there was some truth in this new attitude, that reality is not external to thought, and that all knowledge has a certain relativity. It involved also the important truth that, in the last analysis, the human mind, illuminated by whatever light there is, but untrammelled by tradition or external authority, must be the judge of its own truth. Moreover, it turned philosophy from a naïve consideration of abstract being to a study of thought and perception, and prepared the way for the new sciences of Psychology, Logic, and Ethics. Its basal philosophical error was the exaggeration of the differences in individual minds, and of the illusory nature of sensation, thus making both rational truth and moral distinctions meaningless.

This extreme individualism characterized the practical, as well as the thought life of the time. Denying the reality of truth, it encouraged a lack of deep conviction and sincerity. Law, divine and human, tended to lose its authority. Justice became merely a convention, Might made right, and each man could do what was right in his own eyes. The individual selfinterest of the moment was upheld as supreme, and the concept of a united, mutually helpful society was lost in that of a "mutually destructive congeries of warring units." The popular slogan was return to nature," and this in the narrow interpretation of nature as "red in tooth and claw." Thus all law was only artificial agreement, which the weak were obliged to

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observe, while the true freeman followed the higher principle of the advantage of the stronger.

To be sure, this evil result was by no means universal in the practical life of the Athenian citizen, but the doctrine of extreme individualism was widespread and its effect can be easily traced in the political and social life of the time. Plato felt the necessity of spending his best energies refuting it, and he put into the mouth of one of his characters the assertion, "I have heard the same story on every side from Thrasymachus and innumerable others, and my ears are ringing with it." The assertion of Grote that the Athenian democracy had suffered no degeneration since the Marathon days is a strange exaggeration, in the face of the selfish and unjust attitude of Athens toward her allies, the cruel disregard of all fraternal feeling between states, the decay of patriotism, the growing spirit of irreverence for law and life's sanctities, and the general confusion and anarchy that characterized the last years of the fifth century. In the language of Holm, "The new culture was a dissolvent force. It inspired each with a desire to remodel institutions in accord with his own ideas. Disintegrating criticism. was applied to all conventions; and clever people who had learned too much of Gorgias and not enough of Socrates, were just as much the cause of the fall of Athens as were men like Nicias, whose defect was excessive piety."

4. In accord with this selfish individualism in thought and practical life, the time was characterized by a tendency to discard philosophy and the ideal in education for Rhetoric and the narrow practical, defined as the advantage of the moment. Rhetoric, the practical science of persuasion, became the popular study in the Greek curriculum, as a short cut to wealth, power, and political preferment. The demand of citizens, educators, and Athenian youth alike was "give us the practical," thereby meaning "give us the short cut to vulgar success." This was what the brilliant but superficial Sophists claimed to offer. The watchword was out to win, in spite of the commandments." Patient, sincere research was at a discount. Persuasion was more important than truth. The standard of value was a narrow and selfish utility. Effect was the summum bonum.

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