Greek. By the side of the Greek philosophy, in its sacred festal garb,
stands the modern in secular workday dress, in the laborer's blouse, with
the merciless chisel of analysis in its hand. This does not seek beauty,
but only the naked truth, no matter what it be. It holds it impossible to
satisfy at once the understanding and taste; nay, nakedness, ugliness,
and offensiveness seem to it to testify for, rather than against, the
genuineness of truth. In its anxiety not to read human elements into
nature, it goes so far as completely to read spirit out of nature. The
world is not a living whole, but a machine; not a work of art which is to
be viewed in its totality and enjoyed with reverence, but a clock-movement
to be taken apart in order to be understood. Nowhere are there ends in the
world, but everywhere mechanical causes. The character of modern thought
would appear to a Greek returned to earth very sober, unsplendid, undevout,
and intrusive. And, in fact, modern philosophy has a considerable amount
of prose about it, is not easily impressed, accepts no limitations from
feeling, and holds nothing too sacred to be attacked with the weapon of
analytic thought. And yet it combines penetration with intrusiveness;
acuteness, coolness, and logical courage with its soberness. Never before
has the demand for unprejudiced thought and certain knowledge been made
with equal earnestness. This interest in knowledge for its own sake
developed so suddenly and with such strength that, in presumptuous
gladness, men believed that no previous age had rightly understood what
truth and love for truth are. The natural consequence was a general
overestimation of cognition at the expense of all other mental activities.
Even among the Greek thinkers, thought was held by the majority to be the
noblest and most divine function. But their intellectualism was checked
by the aesthetic and eudaemonistic element, and preserved from the
one-sidedness which it manifests in the modern period, because of the
lack of an effective counterpoise. However eloquently Bacon commends the
advantages to be derived from the conquest of nature, he still understands