Essays and addresses / by professors and lectures of the Owens College, Manchester.

Date:: 1874

Credit: Essays and addresses / by professors and lectures of the Owens College, Manchester. Source: Wellcome Collection.

31/584 page 10

$10 ON SOME RELATIONS OF CULTURE [i- that, unless due play is given to the special gifts and aspirations, of its members, society cannot reach its highest form, and that, unless individual men remember that they exist for the sake of society at least as much as for themselves, they, too, will fall short of their proper standard, and will leave some of their noblest faculties wholly unused. The history, both of races and of individuals, is full of instances of the ruin that follows when the equi¬ librium between these two moments of all sound civili¬ zation and of all healthy life is violently disturbed. It is easy to see, for instance, how the intense indi¬ viduality of the Greek and especially of the Athenian nature, unchecked by a constraining sense of public duty, contributed to the great disasters of Grecian history, and in the end to the political downfall of the country. We see, also, how the graceful, but too facile, receptivity of their intellect and of their moral nature, unchecked by the controlling influence of deep principles and external bonds, ended in a pliability which made Greeks the scorn of their Roman masters.* Rome still more aptly illustrates the opposite error in the excessive and cruel subordination of the Roman to Rome, and the gradual petrifaction of the national mind and character. The equilibrium is, it is true, difficult to maintain ¡ but some approach to it is the * As in the ' Greeculus esuriens ' of Juvenal. This tendency was not confined to the degenerate Greeks of a later day : see the droll praise of the polypus, as a type of character, in an epic fragment (ap. Athen, vii. 317) quoted by Bergk, Griech. Literaturgeschichte, i. 31 -J- nox)A.iÍ7roSós /xot iÍkvov '¿x^v vÓov, 'А1л.ф[\ох Toìaiv €</)a/j/xó^€u тшу Kev ката Srj/хоу iKijat.$

Essays and addresses / by professors and lectures of the Owens College, Manchester.

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