There comes the old idle dream:  balance of mind and body, perfect physical health combined with the fulness of intellectual vigour.  Why should I not be there in the harvest field, if so it pleased me, yet none the less live for thought?  Many a theorist holds the thing possible, and looks to its coming in a better time.  If so, two changes must needs come before it; there will no longer exist a profession of literature, and all but the whole of every library will be destroyed, leaving only the few books which are universally recognized as national treasures.  Thus, and thus only, can mental and physical equilibrium ever be brought about.

It is idle to talk to us of “the Greeks.”  The people we mean when so naming them were a few little communities, living under very peculiar conditions, and endowed by Nature with most exceptional characteristics.  The sporadic civilization which we are too much in the habit of regarding as if it had been no less stable than brilliant, was a succession of the briefest splendours, gleaming here and there from the coasts of the Aegean to those of the western Mediterranean.  Our heritage of Greek literature and art is priceless; the example of Greek life possesses for us not the slightest value.  The Greeks had nothing alien to study—­not even a foreign or a dead language.  They read hardly at all, preferring to listen.  They were a slave-holding people, much given to social amusement, and hardly knowing what we call industry.  Their ignorance was vast, their wisdom a grace of the gods.  Together with their fair intelligence, they had grave moral weaknesses.  If we could see and speak with an average Athenian of the Periclean age, he would cause no little disappointment—­there would be so much more of the barbarian in him, and at the same time of the decadent, than we had anticipated.  More than possibly, even his physique would be a disillusion.  Leave him in that old world, which is precious to the imagination of a few, but to the business and bosoms of the modern multitude irrelevant as Memphis or Babylon.

The man of thought, as we understand him, is all but necessarily the man of impaired health.  The rare exception will be found to come of a stock which may, indeed, have been distinguished by intelligence, but represented in all its members the active rather than the studious or contemplative life; whilst the children of such fortunate thinkers are sure either to revert to the active type or to exhibit the familiar sacrifice of body to mind.  I am not denying the possibility of mens sana in corpore sano; that is another thing.  Nor do I speak of the healthy people (happily still numerous) who are at the same time bright-witted and fond of books.  The man I have in view is he who pursues the things of the mind with passion, who turns impatiently from all common interests or cares which encroach upon his sacred time, who is haunted by a sense of the infinity of thought