These then were the three ideas or ideals which the Greeks wrought into the very texture and substance of the modern mind, the idea of Art, the idea of Science, the idea of Philosophy; in all three introducing and still more deeply implanting the ideas of Freedom as the motive and end of civilized life and of Knowledge as its guide and ally.  It may be thought that I have dwelt too much on theory, and have not said enough of the specific contribution of Greece as working out in practice a certain type or types of corporate life such as the City State; but the fact is that in Greek civilization theory continually outran practice and that it endowed mankind much more with ideas or ideals than with practical illustrations or models for our imitation.  Yet again we must not exaggerate or imagine these ideas as merely Utopian or such stuff as dreams are made of.  The ferment which they set up burst the fabric of Greek social and political institutions, but it clarified and steadied down, as the enthusiasms of youth may do, into the sober designs of grave and energetic manhood.

The spectacle of the dissolution of the Greek civilization is not a pleasant one.  ‘The glory that was Greece’ fades out of the world and leaves it grey and dull, and there was worse than this; there was also decay and degeneracy and corruption.  To dwell upon it is as the sin of Ham.  Nevertheless what took place was not a mere relapse towards barbarism, but on the contrary the supersession of a form of civilization which had done its work by another form less attractive, but more sound and solid.  The Romans have the airs of grown and grave men beside the perpetual youth of Greece, (the Greeks were ’always children’) but they are well aware of how much they learned and had to learn from their predecessors in the task of civilizing the world.  So much is this so that in many departments of civilized life they look upon themselves as imitating the Greeks and carrying out their ideas.  In this they were less than just to themselves, for even in the world of art they continued to create; and certainly in literature they produced works not unworthy to stand beside their chosen models.  Especially they created a prose style, which without ceasing to be artistic served the sober and serious purposes of political oratory and historic record.  But their peculiar genius showed itself most in the applied arts which pressed Greek science into the ministry of life in architecture and engineering.  Their roads and bridges and aqueducts still stand to bear witness of them.  It would be a great error to deny to them fertile advance in the sciences, because their discoveries are so immediately put to the proof in practice and so little disengage themselves into express theory from their applications.