Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/19

] no other people of whom so many of the features are accurately descriptive. Even our critics would probably concede us everything except the idealistic mood and perhaps (though Edwards would be the refutation) the speculative grasp. What is wanting, however, to the original Saxon stock in these respects is being developed, so observation would seem to show, from the German and other foreign grafts now happily incorporated with it. As the mixing-place of the Same and the Other (to apply the striking terminology of Plato), there is every reason to believe that America will be the scene on which that master-demiurgus, the human spirit, will manifest its next world-phase of philosophical discovery, interpretation, and construction. And this confidence is further justified by Zeller's account of the third and last condition of the origin of Greek Philosophy. This he finds in the condition of Hellenic civilization, more particularly, in the course and actual attainment of the religious, moral, political, and artistic development of the Hellenes. On the one hand, Greek culture was characterized by freedom,—freedom of government for the city-states, freedom of action for the individual, and freedom of thought in religion (which possessed no uniform system of doctrine and no regularly organized priesthood endowed with external power). On the other hand, Greek culture was characterized by respect for custom and law and by subordination of the individual to the whole. These opposite features attained to a full harmony of development about the time of the origin of Greek Philosophy. To them it owes, on the one hand, its originality and independence; on the other, its orderliness, its system, its constructive tendencies. If these favoring aspects of Greek civilization are not to-day reproduced in the American love of independence and the American respect