Bearing this in mind we may now proceed to recapitulate our conclusions as to what that view was. And, first, let us take the side of speculation. Here we are concerned not with the formal systems of Greek thought, but with that half-unconscious working of imagination as much as of mind whose expression was their popular religion. Of this religion, as we saw, the essential feature was that belief in anthropomorphic gods, by virtue of which a reconciliation was effected between man and the powers whether of nature or of his own soul. Behind phenomena, physical or psychic, beings were conceived of like nature with man, beings, therefore, whose actions he could interpret and whose motives he could comprehend. For his imagination, if not for his intellect, a harmony was thus induced between himself and the world that was not he. A harmony! and in this word we have the key to the dominant idea of the Greek civilisation. For, turning now to the practical side, we find the same impulse to reconcile divergent elements. That antithesis of soul and body which was emphasised in the mediaeval view of life and dominates still our current ethical conceptions, does not appear in the normal consciousness of the Greeks. Their ideal for the individual life included the perfection of the body; beauty no less than goodness was the object of their quest, and they believed that the one implied the other. But since the perfection of the body required the co-operation of external aids, they made these also essential to their ideal. Not merely virtue of the soul, not merely health and beauty of the body, but noble birth, sufficient wealth and a good name among men, were included in their conception of the desirable life. Harmony, in a word, was the end they pursued, harmony of the soul with the body and of the body with its environment; and it is this that distinguishes their ethical ideal from that which in later times has insisted on the fundamental antagonism of the inner to the outer life, and made the perfection of the spirit depend on the mortification of the flesh.