What is this spirit?  Is it not the confidence in the spirit of man, the spirit which in intellectual matters bends to no authority, and recognizes no limit to its enterprise, which probes all things, tests all things, and follows fearlessly where the argument leads it?  This is what I mean by the spirit of Greece, it is that which Sophocles has immortalized.  Of all this, what we call science is but a part, perhaps at present the most striking and important part, but still a part only; to look to it as the key of our civilization and the sole basis of our education would be to set up a partial and, therefore, a false ideal.  An ideal, moreover, which, if pursued to its logical conclusion, would become the basis for the most appalling tyranny, by which the free spirit of investigation, to which we owe all our scientific progress, would be buried in the structure that itself had reared.  For what is the end to which it must lead?  Is it not a society which is held together by technical skill, a society of organized efficiency, where each individual holds his place, not as a living spirit, but as a slave of the great machine, tied throughout his life to the perfect performance of his limited and specialized task?  I can imagine such a society; it is the ideal which some modern German writers have definitely put before us.  It may be that this will be the Europe of the future, a Europe with a common government and a universal system of education by which each child will be trained to take his allotted part in an organized slavery.  I hope I shall not live to see it.

None the less, a unity there is, but it is a deeper unity than this.  It is the unity inherited from the past.  Here we may find, not indeed a superficial uniformity, but a real unity of life and spirit.  No civilization can repudiate its own origin, and whatever the future may have in store the childhood of Europe was nourished on the Bible and Christianity, and in the more mature years there was added the impulse to the boldest use of the human intellect that came from Greece.  These two elements give us that which is the peculiar characteristic of Western Europe, and as we are told that the growth of each individual repeats the evolution of the race, so the education of each individual repeats in childhood and boyhood the education of the nation.  It is from these two elements that the whole of modern culture springs, and it is from them that again and again they regain their strength.

And if we recollect this we need not be much disturbed by our apparent differences and misunderstandings.  After all, they are the necessary result of freedom, and what do the Bible and Greece mean but moral and intellectual freedom?  We want no formal and artificial unity:  to us change, progress, conflict and division are the breath of our life.  Just as the cluster of little towns in the Aegean islands and valleys prized before all things their political and intellectual independence, so is it with these small countries