is good. God is good who made the flower, but the flower, as we understand it, has neither consciousness nor volition, without which goodness is impossible. Our ordinary criticisms of works of art, pictures, poems or anything else, as good or bad are not merely wholly beside the point, any such qualities that they may express being additional (accidental in the technical sense), but they are grossly misleading and mischievous, and probably largely explain that fundamental disease of our civilization which produces our social and economic troubles and the general misery of our great cities. PART III HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN Now, if we probe a little deeper we shall find that this stress upon beauty in its relation to character was not an isolated, unrelated phenomenon, but was inseparably connected with the Greek conception of life as a whole. On the ends of the great temple at Delphi, which in some respects may be considered the centre of Greek religion, were two mottoes which may be taken as the mottoes of Greek life. At the one end yvw0i σeavтóv (gnôthi seauton) know thyself; at the other end undev ayav (mêden agân) nothing in excess. Γνώθι σεαυτόν: know thyself—if ever there was a people who made it their aim to understand the nature of man it was the Greeks. They were humanists in the highest sense. Know thyself, find out what it is to be a man, find out all that marks him out and distingushes him from the lower creation, that lifts him above the mere physical nature which he shares with them and then endeavour to the utmost of thine ability to develop all these essentials and to be a man. |