institutions,
are rooted and from which we draw no small part of our spiritual
sustenance. Hence it is highly pertinent here and now to examine them,
for in this identity of foundation is to be found the primary unity of
the now diffused life of Europe which has parted into so many and so
widely divergent currents of national life. We all come spiritually from
the same ancient home, and it is well and wise to recall its memories.
So we and others shall be the more disposed to re-knit the old bonds and
to weave new ones which may one day restore on a grander scale, in more
organized fullness and more efficacious potency, the primordial unity
which interests and passions have with rude violence, at least in
appearance, disrupted and dissolved and so for a time arrested or
enfeebled.

I have many predecessors in the task of answering the question, What do
we owe to the Greeks? Any answer which I have to offer, must, in the
compass at my disposal, be imperfect; it must also be abstract; and
lastly it cannot but be in form dogmatic. But I think it is not too much
to say that it is to the Greeks that we owe the very conception of
civilization and through that in large measure its very existence. The
truth of this is more evident if we put the truth in another way, saying
that the Greeks first explicitly recognized the contrast between the
barbarous and the civilized state of mankind, and delivered themselves
and us from the former by defining the latter and attempting, not
without success, to establish it in actual reality. No doubt before them
men had felt the pressure of barbarism within and without, and had
framed dreams of something better, but it was the Greeks who first
defined and conceived the ideal and so made it possible to realize it.
Their distinctive peculiarity lay in their setting themselves not merely
to imagine but to think out an ideal of civilized life, and narrowly
and abstractly as to the end they conceived this ideal, they discerned
the main essential lines of its structure, the permanent laws of its
development and well-being. In doing this they discovered the need and
efficacy of knowledge for the conduct of human life, individual and
collective; and found in knowledge no mere means to living but a new and
heightened form of life itself, lifted above the trammelling conditions,
the disillusionments and disappointments of the merely practical
life. Thus they created Science and Philosophy, bequeathing