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
classification laid down by the standard Congress library at Washington,
would, when his attention was drawn to it, admit so offending a writer
on to his history shelves at all. His place, he would probably say, is
with the prose-poets, or with the writers of historical fiction next
door to them.
Yet turn to the opening chapters of Thucydides' book. You will find most
of the sciences on which long modern treatises are written: but you will
find something more: you will find them blended into a unity. Let those
who deny that Thucydides was a sociologist, who continue to claim that
Herbert Spencer, inventor of the horrid word, invented also the science,
re-read Thucydides' account of the evolution (for it was as an evolution
that he saw and depicted it) of Greek society from the earliest times to
his own day. Let those who cry up anthropology examine into his
treatment of legend and custom and his power, untrained in Seminar or
institute, to use it as sociological evidence. Let the geographers, too
forgetful sometimes that man is not the creature of environment alone,
refresh their minds by recalling those brilliant sallies in geographical
thinking in which he explains some of the features of early Greek
settlement and city-building. It is not only orthodox history, of the
school of Ranke, of which Thucydides is the father and inspirer: there
is not one of the many movements which have sought to broaden out
historical study in recent years, from Buckle and Leplay and Vidal de la
Blache down to the psycho-analysts of our own day and of to-morrow who
will not find in Thucydides some gleaming anticipation along the path of
their own thought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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