Principles of western civilisation
180 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.
fore, as a favour for which he had every cause to be grateful.
A certain detachment of mind from tendencies prevailing in the recent uncritical and unscientific past is, in short, necessary to a perception of the full measure of the difference which separates the modern spirit from that of the epoch of human evolution here represented. Comparisons of outward forms and superficial resemblances, common in past studies of the lifeprinciples of the ancient civilisations, are in the highest degree misleading.’ If we turn to Aristotle’s Ethics, we observe the highest good defined as consisting in ‘virtuous energies,” and happiness defined as “energy directed to the pursuit of virtue.”* Such terms may be, and sometimes are, even by current writers, taken as if they were intended in the sense in which we use them. But when we look closely we see that they imply, in reality, something so substantially different as to be almost beyond the possibility of immediate comprehension. For, when we turn to Aristotle's Politics, we see that the “ virtue” of which he is speaking is merely a form of activity related to ends comprised within the limits of the existing State; and that even in this sense its practice is limited to a small class. To the “barbarians” Aristotle considered the Greeks had no more duties than to wild beasts.
1 The stand-point in Grote’s comparisons is referred to elsewhere. Compare, however, Seeley’s much more recent stand-point in many of the lectures included in his J#troduction to Political Science (e.g. lec. vii.) At times it almost seems as if Seeley conceived the fundamental difference between our modern civilisation and that of the ancient States to be no more than that arising from the larger size of the territory of the modern State, and the
problems of government by representation involved in it. 2 Ethics, i. and x. 3 Ibid.