In most of us at all times, and in all of us at most times, these influences and their operations lie deep below the threshold of consciousness, some of them deeper than any plummet of self-analysis can sound.  They are also the unseen foundations of the social and political superstructure in which we live.  Or, to use another figure, they form the fertile soil in which we, with all our activities and institutions, are rooted and from which we draw no small part of our spiritual sustenance.  Hence it is highly pertinent here and now to examine them, for in this identity of foundation is to be found the primary unity of the now diffused life of Europe which has parted into so many and so widely divergent currents of national life.  We all come spiritually from the same ancient home, and it is well and wise to recall its memories.  So we and others shall be the more disposed to re-knit the old bonds and to weave new ones which may one day restore on a grander scale, in more organized fullness and more efficacious potency, the primordial unity which interests and passions have with rude violence, at least in appearance, disrupted and dissolved and so for a time arrested or enfeebled.

I have many predecessors in the task of answering the question, What do we owe to the Greeks?  Any answer which I have to offer, must, in the compass at my disposal, be imperfect; it must also be abstract; and lastly it cannot but be in form dogmatic.  But I think it is not too much to say that it is to the Greeks that we owe the very conception of civilization and through that in large measure its very existence.  The truth of this is more evident if we put the truth in another way, saying that the Greeks first explicitly recognized the contrast between the barbarous and the civilized state of mankind, and delivered themselves and us from the former by defining the latter and attempting, not without success, to establish it in actual reality.  No doubt before them men had felt the pressure of barbarism within and without, and had framed dreams of something better, but it was the Greeks who first defined and conceived the ideal and so made it possible to realize it.  Their distinctive peculiarity lay in their setting themselves not merely to imagine but to think out an ideal of civilized life, and narrowly and abstractly as to the end they conceived this ideal, they discerned the main essential lines of its structure, the permanent laws of its development and well-being.  In doing this they discovered the need and efficacy of knowledge for the conduct of human life, individual and collective; and found in knowledge no mere means to living but a new and heightened form of life itself, lifted above the trammelling conditions, the disillusionments and disappointments of the merely practical life.  Thus they created Science and Philosophy, bequeathing to us the ideals and the results of the one and the other.  We may so far define their contribution as consisting in the thought of Civilization-through-knowledge, a thought which was not a thought only but a potent and effective instrument of action, not a mere ideal but an ideal governing, directing, and realized, in action and life.