o not appear in them. The pagan world,
because its maturity was simpler than our crudeness, seems childish to
us. We do not find there our sins and holiness, our love, charity, and
honour.

The Greek too would not find in our world the things he valued most,
things to which he surrendered himself, perhaps, with a more constant
self-sacrifice--piety, country, friendship, and beauty; and he might add
that his ideals were rational and he could attain them, while ours are
extravagant and have been missed. Yet even if we acknowledged his
greater good fortune, it would be impossible for us to go back and
become like him. To make the attempt would show no sense of reality and
little sense of humour. We must dress in our own clothes, if we do not
wish to substitute a masquerade for practical existence. What we can
adopt from Greek morals is only the abstract principle of their
development; their foundation in all the extant forces of human nature
and their effort toward establishing a perfect harmony among them. These
forces themselves have perceptibly changed, at least in their relative
power. Thus we are more conscious of wounds to stanch and wrongs to
fight against, and less of goods to attain. The movement of conscience
has veered; the centre of gravity lies in another part of the character.

Another circumstance that invites a restatement of rational ethics is
the impressive illustration of their principle which subsequent history
has afforded. Mankind has been making extraordinary experiments of which
Aristotle could not dream; and their result is calculated to clarify
even his philosophy. For in some respects it needed experiments and
clarification. He had been led into a systematic fusion of dialectic
with physics, and of this fusion all pretentious modern philosophy is
the aggravated extension. Socrates' pupils could not abandon his ideal
principles, yet they could not bear to abstain from physics altogether;
they therefore made a mock physics in moral terms, out of which theology
was afterward developed. Plato, standing nearer to Socrates and being no
naturalist by disposition, never carried the fatal experiment beyond the
mythical stage. He accordingly remained the purer moralist, much as
Aristotle's judgment may be preferred in many particulars. Their
relative position may be roughly indicated by saying that Plato had no
physics and that Aristotle's physics was false; so that ideal science in
the one suffered from