aking
the ground may have been useful in mental gymnastics.

Mature life brings so many professional or social duties that it leaves
scant time for culture; and those who care for culture most earnestly
and sincerely, are the very persons who will economize time to the
utmost. Now, to read a language that has been very imperfectly mastered
is felt to be a bad economy of time. Suppose the case of a man occupied
in business who has studied Greek rather assiduously in youth and yet
not enough to read it with facility. Suppose that this man wants to get
at the mind of Plato. He can read the original, but he reads it so
slowly that it would cost him more hours than he can spare, and this is
why he has recourse to a translation. In this case there is no
indifference to Greek culture; on the contrary, the reader desires to
assimilate what he can of it, but the very earnestness of his wish to
have free access to ancient thought makes him prefer it in modern
language.

This is the most favorable instance that can be imagined, except, of
course, those exceedingly rare cases where a man has leisure enough, and
enthusiasm enough, to become a Hellenist. The great majority of our
contemporaries do not care for ancient thought at all, it is so remote
from them, it belongs to conditions of civilization so different from
their own, it is encumbered with so many lengthy discussions of
questions which have been settled by the subsequent experience of the
world, that the modern mind prefers to occupy itself with its own
anxieties and its own speculations. It is a great error to suppose that
indifference to ancient thinking is peculiar to the spirit of
Philistinism; for the most cultivated contemporary intellects seek light
from each other rather than from the ancients. One of the most
distinguished of modern thinkers, a scholar of the rarest classical
attainments, said to me in reference to some scheme of mine for renewing
my classical studies, that they would be of no more use to me than
numismatics. It is this feeling, the feeling that Greek speculation is
of less consequence to the modern world than German and French
speculation, which causes so many of us, rightly or wrongly, to regard
it as a palaeontological curiosity, interesting for those who are curious
as to the past of the human mind, but not likely to be influential upon
its future.

This estimate of ancient thinking is not often expressed quite so openly
as I have just exp