The open-minded Greek sought to picture, to ascertain, to present. He was not dominated by the wish to show how things should be. To know and to understand, to explain by understanding the abiding reason in things, to find out the fundamental principle in things rather than to adjust it to the personal desires――this was the objective attitude of mind of the Greeks. The Greek saw before he reasoned; he visualized his thought in form before he subjected the form to rational analysis. The cosmos was a harmony and an art before which he stood in contemplation rather than in criticism. Human elements were found in it everywhere, but only as parts of that cosmos. “The unity of the spiritual and the natural, which Greek thought demands and presupposes, is the direct unbroken unity of the classic theory of the world.”[20] By whatever names the great theories of the Systematic Period are called, we must remember that they did not depart from this objective Greek point of view. At certain times the moorings of Greek thought seem about to be shifted, as when Plato passes beyond the ancient Greek attitude and anticipates Christian morality by flight from the world of sense, and when Aristotle elaborates his doctrine of a transcendent god. But the tie never breaks, and the Systematic philosophers remain Greek and not modern. They have the Greek objective attitude of mind. The inner consciousness does not stand with its attestations over against all other things. The greatest of these philosophers never thought of himself but as “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh” of the world surrounding him. In art the classic Greek “could obey but not surpass nature”; in religion he worshiped beings that were only superior human beings; in politics he was a member of a social whole. To Æschylus, Pericles, Socrates, Protagoras, Aristophanes, Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle alike, human nature is a part of the world and not _vice versa_. The Greek mind interpreted nature rather than recreated it.