, and their record in art and
literature.

What is this spirit? Is it not the confidence in the spirit of man, the
spirit which in intellectual matters bends to no authority, and
recognizes no limit to its enterprise, which probes all things, tests
all things, and follows fearlessly where the argument leads it? This is
what I mean by the spirit of Greece, it is that which Sophocles has
immortalized. Of all this, what we call science is but a part, perhaps
at present the most striking and important part, but still a part only;
to look to it as the key of our civilization and the sole basis of our
education would be to set up a partial and, therefore, a false ideal. An
ideal, moreover, which, if pursued to its logical conclusion, would
become the basis for the most appalling tyranny, by which the free
spirit of investigation, to which we owe all our scientific progress,
would be buried in the structure that itself had reared. For what is the
end to which it must lead? Is it not a society which is held together by
technical skill, a society of organized efficiency, where each
individual holds his place, not as a living spirit, but as a slave of
the great machine, tied throughout his life to the perfect performance
of his limited and specialized task? I can imagine such a society; it is
the ideal which some modern German writers have definitely put before
us. It may be that this will be the Europe of the future, a Europe with
a common government and a universal system of education by which each
child will be trained to take his allotted part in an organized slavery.
I hope I shall not live to see it.

None the less, a unity there is, but it is a deeper unity than this. It
is the unity inherited from the past. Here we may find, not indeed a
superficial uniformity, but a real unity of life and spirit. No
civilization can repudiate its own origin, and whatever the future may
have in store the childhood of Europe was nourished on the Bible and
Christianity, and in the more mature years there was added the impulse
to the boldest use of the human intellect that came from Greece. These
two elements give us that which is the peculiar characteristic of
Western Europe, and as we are told that the growth of each individual
repeats the evolution of the race, so the education of each individual
repeats in childhood and boyhood the education of the nation. It is from
these two elements that the whole of modern culture springs, and it is