than the analytic impulse—­especially Democritus—­seem half modern rather than 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 inquiry for inquiry’s sake, and honors it as supreme; even the ethelistic philosophers, Fichte and Schopenhauer, pay their tribute to the prejudice in favor of intellectualism.  The fact that the modern period can show no one philosophic writer of the literary rank of Plato, even though it includes such masters of style as Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Lotze, not to speak of lesser names, is an external proof of how noticeably the aesthetic impulse has given way to one purely intellectual.