Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/33

Rh faiths, inevitably describes, in the terms of his system, the characteristic attitude of his age and people. So, for instance, Plato and Aristotle, taken togetlier, express for us, in their philosophical writings, the essence of the highest Greek faith and life. The Greek love of the beautiful and reverence for the state, the Greek union of intellectual freedom with conventional bondaoe to the forms of politics and of religion, the whole Greek attitude towards the universe, in so far as the Athens of that age could embody it, are made articulate in enduring form in the speculations of these representative men. They consciously interpret this Hellenic life, — they do also more: they criticise it. Plato especially is in some of his work a fairly destructive analyst of his nation’s faith. And yet it is just this faith, incorporated as it was into his own temperament, bred into his every fibre, that he must needs somehow express in his doctrine. And now perhaps you may already see why there is of necessity nothing absolute, notliing final, about much that a Plato himself may have looked upon as absolute and as final in his work. Greek life was not all of human life; Greek life was doomed to pass away; Greek instincts and limitations could not be eternal. The crystal heavens that the Greek saw above him were indeed doomed to be rolled up like a scroll, and the elements of his life were certain to pass away in fervent heat. But then, into all nobler future humanity, Greek life was certain to enter, as a factor, as a part of its civilized instincts, as an ennobling passion in its artistic production, as a moment of its spirituality. And therefore, too, Plato’s philosophy, doomed in one sense not to be absolute or final, has its part, as a fact, in your own reflection to-day, and would have its part in the absolute philosophical estimate of the highest human life if ever we attained that estimate. If philosophy criticises, estimates, and to that end rewords life, if the great philosopher expresses in his system the most