Now that we have examined in some detail the most important phases of the Greek view of life, it may be as well to endeavour briefly to recapitulate and bring to a point the various considerations that have been advanced. But, first, one preliminary remark must be made. Throughout the preceding pages we have made no attempt to distinguish the Greek "view" from the Greek "ideal"; we have interpreted their customs and institutions, political, social, or religious, by the conceptions and ideals of philosophers and poets, and have thus, it may be objected, made the mistake of identifying the blind work of popular instinct with the theories and aspirations of conscious thought. Such a procedure, no doubt, would be illegitimate if it were supposed to imply that Greek institutions were the result of a deliberate intention consciously adopted and approved by the average man. Like other social products they grew and were not made; and it was only the few who realised fully all that they implied. But on the other hand it is a distinguishing characteristic of the Greek age that the ideal formulated by thought was the direct outcome of the facts. That absolute separation of what ought to be from what is which continues to haunt and vitiate modern life had not yet been made in ancient Greece. Plato, idealist though he be, is yet rooted in the facts of his age; his perfect republic he bases on the institutions of Sparta and Crete; his perfect man he shapes on the lines of the Greek citizen. That dislocation of the spirit which opposed the body to the soul, heaven to earth, the church to the state, the man of the world to the priest, was altogether alien to the consciousness of the Greeks. To them the world of fact was also the world of the ideal; the conceptions which inspired their highest aims were already embodied in their institutions and reflected in their life; and the realisation of what ought to be involved not the destruction of what was, but merely its perfecting on its own lines. While then, on the one hand, it would be ridiculous so to idealise the civilisation of the Greeks as to imply that they had eliminated discord and confusion, yet, on the other, it is legitimate to say that they had built on the plan of the ideal, and that their life both in public and private was, by the very law of its existence, an effort to realise explicitly that type of Good which was already implicitly embodied in its structure. The ideal, in a word, in ancient Greece, was organically related to the real; and that is why it is possible to identify the Greek view with the Greek ideal.