Destructive as were the effects of the continual wars, and especially of the raids of the Celtic hordes in Asia Minor, nevertheless there pulsates here a fresh, progressive life, to which the future seems to belong. To be sure, there is no lack of counter disturbance; beneath the surface of Hellenism, the native population that is absorbed into the Greek life everywhere preserves its own character, not through active resistance, but through the passivity of its nature. When the orientals become Hellenised, Hellenism itself begins at the same time to take on an oriental impress. But in this there lies no danger as yet. Hellenism everywhere retains the upper hand and seems to come nearer and nearer to the goal of its mission for the world. In all fields of intellectual life the cultured classes have undisputed control and can look down with absolute contempt on the currents that move the masses far beneath them; the exponents of philosophical enlightenment may imagine they have completely dominated them. When the great ideas upon which Hellenism is based have been created by the classical period and new ones can no longer be placed beside them, the new time sets to work to perfect what it has inherited. The third century is the culmination of ancient science. However, this whole civilisation lacks one thing, and that is a state of natural growth. Of all the states that developed out of Alexander’s empire, the kingdom of the Antigonidæ in Macedonia was the only one that had a national basis; and therefore, in spite of the scantiness of its resources, it was also the most capable of resistance of them all. All others, on the contrary, were purely artificial political combinations, lacking that innate necessity vital to the full power of a state. They might have been altogether different, or they might not have been at all. The separation of state and nationality, which is the result of the development of the ancient East, exists in them also; they are not supported by the population, which, by the contingencies of political development, is for the moment included in them, and their subjects, so far as the individual man or community is not bound to them by personal advantage, have no further interest in their existence. To be sure, had they maintained their existence for centuries, the power of custom might have sufficed to give them a firmer constitution, such as many later similar political formations have acquired and such as the Austrian monarchy possesses to-day; and as a matter of fact we find the loyalty of subjects to the reigning dynasty already quite strongly developed in the kingdom of the Seleucidæ. But a national state can never arise on the basis of a universal, denationalised civilisation, and the unity is consequently only political, based only upon the dynasty and its political successes. Therefore, except in Macedonia, none of these states can, even in the struggle for existence, set in motion the full national