The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Philosophy
The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Greece -- Civilization
These ideas, the pursuit of Truth, Freedom, Beauty, Excellence are not
everything. They have been a leaven of unrest in the world; they have
held up a light which was not always comforting to the eyes to see.
There is another ideal which is generally stronger and may, for all we
know, in the end stamp them out as evil things. There is Submission
instead of Freedom, the deadening or brutalizing of the senses instead
of Beauty, the acceptance of tradition instead of the pursuit of Truth,
the belief in hallucination or passion instead of Reason and Temperate
Thought, the obscuring of distinctions between good and bad and the
acceptance of all human beings and all states of mind as equal in value.
If something of this kind should prove in the end to be right for man,
then Greece will have played the part of the great wrecker in human
history. She will have held up false lights which have lured our ship to
dangerous places. But at any rate, through calm and storm, she does hold
her lights; she lit them first of the nations and held them during her
short reign the clearest; and whether we believe in an individual life
founded on Freedom, Reason, Beauty, Excellence and the pursuit of Truth,
and an international life aiming at the fellowship between man and man,
or whether we think these ideals the great snares of human politics,
there is good cause for some of us in each generation at the cost of
some time and trouble to study such important forces where they first
appear consciously in the minds of our spiritual ancestors. In the
thought and art of ancient Greece, more than any other, we shall find
these forces, and also to some extent their great opposites, fresh,
clean and comparatively uncomplicated, with every vast issue wrought out
on a small material scale and every problem stated in its lowest terms.
GILBERT MURRAY.
RELIGION
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