The Moral Ideal; A Historic Study

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 2007-01-30. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV. ROME AND THE REIGN OF LA W. Greece contains so much more than the ideal common to it with Rome, that, in confining our gaze to the life of Greece, we do not see clearly the contrast between Ancient and Modern thought. The race that is dowered with genius can hardly exhibit limitations, even when subject to them; amid the rich blossoming of distinct and striking individualities, we discern with difficulty that a person was hardly regarded as what we mean by an individual. But the ideal of antique life is illustrated as much by Athenian thought as by Roman life, or is only less illustrated there because Greek thought is various in its abounding wealth and Roman life is meagre in its simplicity. All the grandeur of the classical world, Greek or Roman, depends on a sense of corporate unity, which appears to the modern intellect rather the goal of eminent goodness than the possible assumption of average practical life. We hardly reach with much effort that sense of the value of organic corporate life which the citizen of antiquity could not lose. Among us, it would require exalted virtue to make the tribe or the nation the starting-point of thought, as it must have been the starting-point of thought to an average Athenian or Roman. The object of conservation to him was a set of groups; the individual was a fraction of one or more of these groups, not an entity that could be considered in himself. The mere perception that a certain regulation tended to preserve these groups gave motive-power; there was no need of adding to it (what unquestionably would be needed in modern life) some argument to show that the thing thus preserved was valuable. At the very moment at which these lines are written (1887) it is less necessary than it was a short time ago...