like a report to Parliament, so half Thucydides reads like a
speech, or materials for a speech, in the Athenian Assembly. Of later
times it is unnecessary to speak. Every page of Aristotle and Plato
bears ample and indelible trace of the age of discussion in which they
lived; and thought cannot possibly be freer. The deliverance of the
speculative intellect from traditional and customary authority was
altogether complete.

No doubt the 'detachment' from prejudice, and the subjection to reason,
which I ascribe to ancient Athens, only went down a very little way
among the population of it. Two great classes of the people, the slaves
and women, were almost excluded from such qualities; even the free
population doubtless contained a far greater proportion of very
ignorant and very superstitious persons than we are in the habit of
imagining. We fix our attention on the best specimens of Athenian
culture--on the books which have descended to us, and we forget that
the corporate action of the Athenian people at various critical
junctures exhibited the most gross superstition. Still, as far as the
intellectual and cultivated part of society is concerned, the triumph
of reason was complete; the minds of the highest philosophers were then
as ready to obey evidence and reason as they have ever been since;
probably they were more ready. The rule of custom over them at least
had been wholly broken, and the primary conditions of intellectual
progress were in that respect satisfied.

It may be said that I am giving too much weight to the classical idea
of human development; that history contains the record of another
progress as well; that in a certain sense there was progress in Judaea
as well as in Athens. And unquestionably there was progress, but it was
only progress upon a single subject. If we except religion and omit
also all that the Jews had learned from foreigners, it may be doubted
if there be much else new between the time of Samuel and that of
Malachi. In Religion there was progress, but without it there was not
any. This was due to the cause of that progress. All over antiquity,
all over the East, and over other parts of the world which preserve
more or less nearly their ancient condition, there are two classes of
religious teachers--one, the priests, the inheritors of past accredited
inspiration; the other, the prophet, the possessor of a like present
inspiration. Curtius describes the distinction well in relation to