is the standard? And if we cannot
indicate a standard, what right have we to say that one life is any
better than another? The life of the scientific man any better than the
life of the South Sea Islander--content if only he has enough bananas to
eat? Or than the life of a triumphant conqueror, a Zenghis Khan or a
Tamberlaine--exultant if he has enough human heads before him? Or,
indeed, any of these rather than the blank of Nirvana or the life of a
vegetable?

Our first need, then, is the need of a standard for good over and above
the conflicting opinions of men, and some idea as to what that standard
implies.

And the next question is, why we should hold that any of this good is
going to be realized in human life at all? If it is, there must be some
connexion of cause and effect between goodness and human existence. What
is the nature of that connexion? Finally, why should we hope that this
goodness is realized more and more fully as time goes on?

The Greeks faced these questions, as they faced so many, with
extraordinary daring and penetration and with an intimate mixture of
sadness and hope.

They themselves, of all nations known to us in history, had made the
greatest progress in the shortest space of time. A long course of
preparation, it is true, underlay that marvellous growth. The classical
Greeks,--and when I speak of Hellenism I mean the flower of classical
Greek culture,--the classical Greeks entered into the labours of the
island peoples, who, whether kindred to them or not, had built up from
neolithic times a great civilization, the major part of which they
could, and did, assimilate. They found the soil already worked. None the
less it is to their own original genius that we owe those great
discoveries of the spirit which, to quote a recent writer, 'created a
new world of science and art, established an ideal of the sane mind in
the sane body and the perfect man in the perfect society, cut out a new
line of progress between anarchy and despotism, and made moral ends
supreme over national in the State.'[6]

But these practical achievements of theirs have been already summed up
by Professor J. A. Smith in his lecture[7] at this school last year, and
it is to that lecture that I would refer you. I will take it as a basis
and proceed for my own purposes to discuss the Greek conceptions about
progress. Those conceptions were complex, and, speaking roughly, we may
say this: if belief in real progress imp