The New Gospel

The philosophy of the ancient Greeks attracts us at this moment, because never before or since, anywhere in the world, has anything like their highly advanced and articulated system of knowledge and speculation been established without the fateful division which has hampered us for centuries and has become unendurable in our days …  [Unlike today] there was no limitation as to the subjects on which a learned man would be allowed by other learned men to give his opinion … There was not, as in Babylonia and Egypt, a hereditary privileged priestly caste of the kind that, if they were not themselves rulers, usually side with them in opposing development of new ideas, since they have an instinctive feeling that any change in outlook might eventually turn against them and their privileges … The grand idea that informed these men was that the world around them was something that could be understood, if one only took the trouble to observe it properly; that it was not the playground of gods.