Principles of western civilisation

184 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

therein almost the highest limits of perfection. The counterpart of the problem, equally striking, has been that the Roman people, sprung from a stock nearly related ethnologically, developing the same kind of polity, and attaining to the greatest example in history of military rule and ordered administration, should yet have displayed no corresponding excellence in those respects in which the Greek genius reached the very highest level of perfection.

What we begin to see now, however, is that the explanation of this problem must be considered to lie in the fact of the conditions under which the principle of the ascendency of the present reached its culminating phase in Greece. The clue to the problem is, moreover, evidently related to the same cause in the case of both the Roman and Greek peoples. In Greece, although the military ideals were exactly the same as amongst the Roman peoples, a number of small independent States long contended for a mastery, which none was able so definitely to acquire as to enable it to absorb the others. To anticipate the military history of the Roman universal empire was, therefore, impossible in Greece. But the genius of the people, as expressing the culminating phase of the principle of the ascendant present, came to utter itself in a different though no less characteristic form, the significance of which is beginning to be understood by the modern evolutionist.

In the Greek world, where self-consciousness was always related to present ends, and where, therefore, as under the military ideals of the Roman world, it sought an outlook in every available direc-