Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/18

2 in their efforts at philosophical inquiry? In the first place, as Zeller assures us, they were favored by the character of their abode, which afforded stimulus and resources of the most diverse kinds along with rewards for those who earned them, and by its situation between Europe and Asia whereby the inhabitants were marked out for the liveliest intercourse with each other and with their neighbors. When we remember that the distance between America and Europe has now been reduced to a fraction over five days, and the distance between America and Asia to less than twice that time, we shall see that Zeller's conception of the Hellenic world as a "bridge connecting Europe and Asia" is especially applicable to America, though Americans scarcely need to leave their own country for the boon of intercourse with foreign races, European or Asiatic. The other topographical features of the home of the Hellenes are also characteristic of America if only they be raised to a higher power; that is, if only we imagine the area of their country indefinitely expanded, its resources indefinitely multiplied, and its facilities for intercommunication and intercourse indefinitely increased. In the second place, Zeller finds the originating ground of Greek Philosophy in the numerous and happily combined endowments of the people: in their practical address and active power, in their æsthetic feeling and thirst for knowledge, in the equipoise of their realism and idealism, in their acute perception of individuality and their harmonious conception of a totality, and in their openness to foreign influences along with the self-poised independence that enabled them to assimilate what they received. If this picture of natural endowment, to which might be added a unique vein of humor, be not the counterfeit presentment of the American temperament, there is