In such a manner the Greek mind humanized its world, and in doing so humanized itself, or rather divinized itself, without stretching to the breaking-point the strands which bound itself to its world.  But it did not stop there, and we do it wrong if we dwell too exclusively on its triumphant achievements in literature and art.  For ’speech created thought, which is the measure of the universe’.  The Greeks were not only supreme artists but also the pioneers of thought.  They first took the measure of the Universe in which they lived, asserting the mind of man to be its measure, and it amenable and subject to reason.  The world they lived in was not only beautiful to the imagination, it was also reasonable, penetrable, and governable by the intellect.  The ways of it and everything in it were regular and orderly, predictable, explicable not eccentric, erratic, baffling and inscrutable.  Not only was Nature knowable; it was also through knowledge of it manageable, a realm over which man could extend his sway, making it ever a more and more habitable home.  In it and availing himself of its offered aid he built his households and his cities, dwelling comfortably in his habitations.  But the thought which enabled him to lay a secure basis, economic and social or political, for his life had other issues and promised other fruit.  The Greek mind became interested in knowledge for its own sake and in itself as the knower of its world.

The second and more important creation of the Greek mind was Science or the Sciences.  In no earlier civilization can we trace anything but the faintest germs of this, while in Greek civilization it comes almost at once to flower and fruit.  First and foremost we have to think of Mathematics, of Arithmetic and Geometry and Optics and Acoustics and Astronomy, but we must not forget also their later and perhaps not wholly so successful advances in Physics and Chemistry, in Botany and Zoology, in Anatomy and Physiology.  Doubtless, especially in the case of the Sciences where experiments are required and have proved so fertile in the extension of our knowledge, there were grave defects, and too much trust was placed in mere observation and hasty speculation; but what they accomplished in Science is no less but more marvellous than what they accomplished in Art.  The idea of Science was there, disengaged from the limiting restrictions of practical necessities, the idea of free and therefore all the more potent Science.  The whole physical—­and much more than the physical—­environment of human life was proclaimed permeable to human thought and therefore governable by human will or at any rate already amicable and amenable to human purposes.