by Will Durant
But the lover of philosophy will only reluctantly yield to science and art the supreme places in our Grecian heritage. Greek science itself was a child of Greek philosophy—of that reckless challenge to legend, that youthful love of inquiry, which for centuries united science and philosophy in one adventurous quest. Never had men examined nature so critically and yet so affectionately: the Greeks did no dishonor to the world in thinking that it was a cosmos of order and therefore amenable to understanding. They invented logic for the same reason that they made perfect statuary: harmony, unity, proportion, form, in their view, provided both the art of logic and the logic of art. Curious of every fact and every theory, they not only established philosophy as a distinct enterprise of the European mind, but they conceived nearly every system and every hypothesis, and left little to be said on any major problem of our life. Realism and nominalism, idealism and materialism, monotheism, pantheism, and atheism, feminism and communism, the Kantian critique and the Schopenhaurian despair, the primitivism of Rousseau and the immoralism of Nietzsche, the synthesis of Spencer and the psychoanalysis of Freud—all the dreams and wisdom of philosophy are here, in the age and land of its birth. And in Greece men not only talked of philosophy, they lived it: the sage, rather than the warrior or the saint, was the pinnacle and ideal of Greek life. Through all the centuries from Thales that exhilarating philosophical bequest has come down to us, inspiring Roman emperors, Christian Fathers, Scholastic theologians, Renaissance heretics, Cambridge Platonists, the rebels of the Enlightenment, and the devotees of philosophy today. At this moment thousands of eager spirits are reading Plato, perhaps in every country on the earth.
Civilization does not die, it migrates; it changes its habitat and its dress, but it lives on. The decay of one civilization, as of one individual, makes room for the growth of another; life sheds the old skin, and surprises death with fresh youth. Greek civilization is alive; it moves in every breath of mind that we breathe; so much of it remains that none of us in one lifetime could absorb it all. We know its defects—its insane and pitiless wars, its stagnant slavery, its subjection of woman, its lack of moral restraint, its corrupt individualism, its tragic failure to unite liberty with order and peace. But those who cherish freedom, reason, and beauty will not linger over these blemishes. They will hear behind the turmoil of political history the voices of Solon and Socrates, of Plato and Euripides, of Pheidias and Praxiteles, of Epicurus and Archimedes; they will be grateful for the existence of such men, and will seek their company across alien centuries. They will think of Greece as the bright morning of that Western civilization which, with all its kindred faults, is our nourishment and our life.
TO THOSE WHO HAVE COME THUS FAR:
THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNSEEN BUT EVER FELT COMPANIONSHIP.
Glossary
Aperçus—instinctive insights.
Bizarreries—strange or extravagant expressions or actions.
Bourgeoisie—the middle classes.
Cujus regio ejus religio—the religion of the region must be that of the ruler.
De nobis fabula narrabitur—about us the story will be told.
Deus ex machina—the god from the machine.
Élan—spirited vitality.
In medias res—into the middle of things, or into the heart of the subject.
La Parisienne—The Parisian Woman.
Mater Dolorosa—The Sorrowful Mother.
Mise en scène—the surrounding situation.
Nouveaux riches—the newly rich.
Oikoumene (sc. ge)—the inhabited world.
Pace—despite, begging the pardon of.
Pinakotheka—picture gallery.
Plein air—open air.
Pornaia—brothels.
Soferim—scholars.
Bibliography
Of Books Referred to in Text or Notes
The starred volumes are recommended for further study.
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