The Greek Philosophers, Vol. 1 (of 2)Benn, Alfred William
Philosophy
The Greek Philosophers, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Benn, Alfred William
Philosophy, Ancient
of attempting half a dozen and leaving most of them incomplete.
This careful restriction of individual effort to a single province
involved no dispersion or incoherence in the results achieved. The
highest workers were all animated by a common spirit. Each represented
some one aspect of the glory and greatness participated in by all. Nor
was the collective consciousness, the uniting sympathy, limited to a
single sphere. It rose, by a graduated series, from the city community,
through the Dorian or Ionian stock with which they claimed more
immediate kinship, to the Panhellenic race, the whole of humanity, and
the divine fatherhood of Zeus, until it rested in that all-embracing
nature which Pindar knew as the one mother of gods and men.[7]
We may, perhaps, find some suggestion of this combined distinctness and
comprehensiveness in the aspect and configuration of Greece itself;
in its manifold varieties of soil, and climate, and scenery, and
productions; in the exquisite clearness with which the features of its
landscape are defined; and the admirable development of coast-line by
which all parts of its territory, while preserving their political
independence, were brought into safe and speedy communication with
one another. The industrial and commercial habits of the people,
necessitating a well-marked division of labour and a regulated
distribution of commodities, gave a further impulse in the same
direction.
But what afforded the most valuable education in this sense was their
system of free government, involving, as it did, the supremacy of an
impersonal law, the subdivision of public authority among a number of
magistrates, and the assignment to each of certain carefully defined
functions which he was forbidden to exceed; together with the living
interest felt by each citizen in the welfare of the whole state, and
that conception of it as a whole composed of various parts, which is
impossible where all the public powers are collected in a single hand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
The Greek Philosophers, Vol. 1 (of 2) — John Shaqi
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