_W. E. Gladstone, Juventus Mundi, chapter 4._ HELLENIC GENIUS AND INFLUENCE. HELLENIC AND HELLENISTIC CULTURE. HELLENISM. "It was the privilege of the Greeks to discover the sovereign efficacy of reason. They entered on the pursuit of knowledge with a sure and joyous instinct. Baffled and puzzled they might be, but they never grew weary of the quest. The speculative faculty which reached its height in Plato and Aristotle, was, when we make due allowance for time and circumstance, scarcely less eminent in the Ionian philosophers; and it was Ionia that gave birth to an idea, which was foreign to the East, but has become the starting-point of modern science,—the idea that Nature works by fixed laws. A fragment of Euripides speaks of him as 'happy who has learned to search into causes,' who 'discerns the deathless and ageless order of nature, whence it arose, the how and the why.' The early poet-philosophers of Ionia gave the impulse which has carried the human intellect forward across the line which separates empirical from scientific knowledge; and the Greek precocity of mind in this direction, unlike that of the Orientals, had in it the promise of uninterrupted advance in the future,—of great discoveries in mathematics, geometry, experimental physics, in medicine also and physiology. … By the middle of the fifth century B. C. the general conception of law in the physical world was firmly established in the mind of Greek thinkers. Even the more obscure phenomena of disease were brought within the rule. Hippocrates writing about a malady which was common among the Scythians and was thought to be preternatural says: 'As for me I think that these maladies are divine like all others, but that none is more divine or more human than another. Each has its natural principle and none exists without its natural cause.' Again, the Greeks set themselves to discover a rational basis for conduct. Rigorously they brought their actions to the test of reason, and that not only by the mouth of philosophers, but through their poets, historians, and orators. Thinking and doing—clear thought and noble action—did not stand opposed to the Greek mind. The antithesis rather marks a period when the Hellenic spirit was past its prime, and had taken a one-sided bent. The Athenians of the Periclean age—in whom we must recognise the purest embodiment of Hellenism—had in truth the peculiar power, which Thucydides claims for them, of thinking before they acted and of acting also. … To Greece … we owe the love of Science, the love of Art, the love of Freedom: not Science alone, Art alone, or Freedom alone, but these vitally correlated with one another and brought into organic union. And in this union we recognise the distinctive features of the West. The Greek genius is the European genius in its first and