The vitiating concept of racial genius appears incidentally, but definitely, in Dr. Cunningham's contrast of Phoenicians and Greeks as relatively wealth-seekers and culture-seekers, ingrained barbarians and ingrained humanists (_Western Civilisation_, pp. 72, 73, 98, 99, etc.), and in his phrase as to the persistent "principles which the Greek and the Phoenician respectively represented." The antithesis, it is here maintained, is spurious. Many Greeks were in full sympathy with the Phoenician norm; many Phoenicians must have been capable of delighting in the Greek norm had they been reared to it. At a given period the Phoenicians had a higher life than the Greeks; and had the Phoenicians evolved for ages in the Greek environment, with an equivalent blending of stocks and cross-fertilisation of cultures, they could have become all that the Greeks ever were. The assertion that when we see "the destruction and degradation of human life in the march of material progress, we see what is alien to the Greek spirit" (_id._ p. 99) will not bear examination. Greek slavery, like every other, was just such a degradation of human life. And to speak of a "consciousness of her mission" on the part of "Athens" (_id._ pp. 72, 73) is to set up a pseudo-entity and a moral illusion. It is remarkable that even among students well abreast of evolutionary thought there is still a strong tendency to think of Greek civilisation in terms of some occult virtue of "Hellenic spirit," something unique in social phenomena, something not to be accounted for like the process of evolution in other races. Thus so accomplished and critical a thinker as Prof. Gilbert Murray seems to account for every Greek advance beyond savagery as a result of "Hellenism." _E.g._, "Human sacrifice, then, is one of the barbarities which Hellenism successfully overcame" (_The Rise of the Greek Epic_, 1907, p. 16); "Solved by the progressive, or, I may say, by the Hellenic spirit" (_Id._ p. 25). In this way the discrediting and abandonment of the use of poisoned arrows in the "Homeric" period (_Id._ pp. 120-21) seems to be ascribed either to the Homeric or to the Hellenic "spirit."