The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of European historyGrant, Madison
History
The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of European history
Grant, Madison
Ethnology -- Europe
“Knowing what we do of the psychological peculiarities of the different
races of mankind, it is perhaps not an illegitimate speculation to
wonder whence the Greeks inherited this sense of proportion in their
whole mental outlook. The feeling of Hellenes for art in general was
surely inherited from their forebears on the Ægean, not the
Indo-European side.[7] The feeling for naturalistic art, for truth of
representation, may have come from the Ægeans, but the equally
characteristic love of the crude and bizarre was not inherited: the
sense of proportion inhibited it. In fact, we may ascribe this sense to
the Aryan element in the Hellenic brain, to which must also be
attributed the Greek political sense, the idea of the rights of the folk
and of the individual in it.[8] The Mediterranean possessed the artistic
sense without the sense of proportion: the Aryan had little artistic
sense but had the sense of proportion and justice, and with it the
political sense. The result of the fusion of the two races we see in the
true canon of taste and beauty in all things that had become the ideal
of the Greeks,[9] and was through them to become the ideal of mankind.”
Footnote 7:
“We have only to look around and seek, vainly, for any self-developed
artistic feeling among the pure Indo-Europeans. The Kassites had none
and blighted that of Babylonia for centuries: the Persians had none
and merely adopted that of Assyria: the Goths and Vandals had none:
the Celts and Teutons have throughout the centuries derived theirs
from the Mediterranean region.”
Footnote 8:
The predominance of the Aryan element in Greek political ideas is
obvious. It is not probable that the old Ægean had any more definite
political ideas than had his relative the Egyptian.
Footnote 9:
“In matters of political and ordinary justice between man and man they
fell short of their ideal often enough, but they had the reasonable
ideal: the barbarians had none. The Egyptians were an imaginative
race, but their imagination was untrammelled by the sense of
proportion: their only thinker with reasonable and logical ideas,
Akhenaten, soon became as mad a fanatic as any unreasonable Nitrian
monk or Arab Mahdi. Ordinarily speaking, Egyptian and Semitic ideals
were purely religious, and so, to the Greek mind, beyond the domain of
reason. The Babylonians, Assyrians, and Phœnicians cannot be said ever
to have possessed any ideals of any kind.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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