Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/403

Rh artistic, and physical development of ancient Greece, I could wonder how still more ample it might have been had there existed a master spirit or an imperious motive to weld those statelets into one great nation and check the rarely ceasing internal wars and personal feuds. Looking back—from what some of you may consider a less ethical, but I believe a more scientific standpoint—I now see a direct correlation between the achievements of Greece and the intensity of its intertribal struggles. The pax romana did not provide the Greek spirit with an atmosphere as bracing to either bodily or spiritual development, as the instability and storm which accompanied the earlier conditions.

The struggle of man against man, with its victory to the tougher and more crafty: the struggle of tribe against tribe, with its defeat for the less socially organized: the contest of nation with nation whether in trade or in war, with the mastery for the foreseeing nation, for the nation with the cleaner bill of health, the more united purpose of its classes, and the sounder intellectual equipment of its units: are not these phases of the struggle for existence the factors which have made for human progress, which have developed man from brute into sentient being? We have been told that "the cosmic process is opposed to the ethical" I But from the standpoint of science, is not the ethical the outcome of the cosmic? Are not the physique, the intellectuality, the morality of man, the product of that grim warfare between individual and individual, between society and society, and between humanity and nature, of which we even yet see no end? The ethical as the product of the cosmic process will indeed aid us when we pass outside the field of science. But standing well within the boundaries of that field, are men to cry like little children because the world is not "as it ought to be"?

 Nach ewigen ehrnen Grossen Gesetzen Müssen wir alle Unseres Daseyns Kreise vollenden.

Nay, what has been rather man's method in mastering the physical universe? Has he not studied those brazen eternal laws, and guided the course of his being by that knowledge? Realize that the most valuable part of that knowledge is scarcely two hundred years old. And when we turn to biology—to the biological factors which control man's life and its relations to that of other organisms—are we not yet at the very dawn of discovery—a dawn whose actual storm-drifts foretell the coming flood of light?

Plato, in the Fifth Book of the "Laws," describes what he terms a purification or purgation of the state. Permit me for my weakness, not yours, to cite it from Jowett's translation:

The shepherd or herdsman, or breeder of horses, or the like, when he has received his animals will not begin to train them until he has first purified them