The Legacy of Greece | Page 2

Greek literature was the basis
of education throughout all later antiquity; why its re-discovery,
however fragmentary and however imperfectly understood, was able to
intoxicate the keenest minds of Europe and constitute a kind of spiritual
'Re-birth', and how its further and further exploration may be still a task
worth men's spending their lives upon and capable of giving mankind
guidance as well as inspiration.

But is such a standard legitimate and reasonable? We shall gain nothing
by unanalysed phrases. But I think surely it is merely the natural
standard of any philosophical historian. Suppose it is argued that an
average optician at the present day knows more optics than Roger
Bacon, the inventor of spectacles; suppose it is argued that therefore he
is, as far as optics go, a greater man, and that Roger Bacon has nothing
to teach us; what is the answer? It is, I suppose, that Roger Bacon,
receiving a certain amount of knowledge from his teachers, had that in
him which turned it to unsuspected directions and made it immensely
greater and more fruitful. The average optician has probably added a
little to what he was taught, but not much, and has doubtless forgotten
or confused a good deal. So that, if by studying Roger Bacon's life or
his books we could get into touch with his mind and acquire some of
that special moving and inspiring quality of his, it would help us far
more than would the mere knowledge of the optician.
This truth is no doubt hard to see in the case of purely technical science;
in books of wider range, such as Darwin's for instance, it is easy for any
reader to feel the presence of a really great mind, producing inspiration
of a different sort from that of the most excellent up-to-date
examination text-book. In philosophy, religion, poetry, and the highest
kinds of art, the greatness of the author's mind seems as a rule to be all
that matters; one almost ignores the date at which he worked. This is
because in technical sciences the element of mere fact, or mere
knowledge, is so enormous, the elements of imagination, character, and
the like so very small. Hence, books on science, in a progressive age,
very quickly become 'out of date', and each new edition usually
supersedes the last. It is the rarest thing for a work of science to survive
as a text-book more than ten years or so. Newton's Principia is almost
an isolated instance among modern writings.
Yet there are some few such books. Up till about the year 1900 the
elements of geometry were regularly taught, throughout Europe, in a
text-book written by a Greek called Eucleides in the fourth or third
century B. C.[1] That text-book lasted over two thousand years. Now,
of course, people have discovered a number of faults in Euclid, but it
has taken them all that time to do it.

[1] Since this paper was first written Euclid, Book I, in the Greek, has
been edited with a commentary by Sir Thomas Heath (Cambridge Press,
1920). It is full of interest and instruction.
Again, I knew an old gentleman who told me that, at a good English
school in the early nineteenth century, he had been taught the principles
of grammar out of a writer called Dionysius Thrax, or Denis of Thrace.
Denis was a Greek of the first century B. C., who made or carried out
the remarkable discovery that there was such a thing as a science of
grammar, i. e. that men in their daily speech were unconsciously
obeying an extraordinarily subtle and intricate body of laws, which
were capable of being studied and reduced to order. Denis did not make
the whole discovery himself; he was led to it by his master Aristarchus
and others. And his book had been re-edited several times in the
nineteen-hundred odd years before this old gentleman was taught it.
To take a third case: all through later antiquity and the middle ages the
science of medicine was based on the writings of two ancient doctors,
Hippocrates and Galen. Galen was a Greek who lived at Rome in the
early Empire, Hippocrates a Greek who lived at the island of Cos in the
fifth century B. C. A great part of the history of modern medicine is a
story of emancipation from the dead hand of these great ancients. But
one little treatise attributed to Hippocrates was in active use in the
training of medical students in my own day in Scotland and is still in
use in some American Universities. It was the Oath taken by medical
students in the classic age of Greece when they solemnly faced the
duties of their profession. The disciple swore to honour and obey his
teacher and care for