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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: over. There is now more leisure to consider all things and contemplate man. But the manner of this contemplation is still shaped by Roman traits. There is no disinterested quest of knowledge, no full philosophy. Since Aristotle, that had hardly thriven even with the Greeks. Philosophy had tended to narrow to a guide of life. The Roman had never any com- pleter thought of it. He had asked always from his Greek tutors for its practical teachings, by which to conduct his life more satisfactorily. He desired to know for that purpose. Yet in these great imperial times, he wished to know life's full enlightenment in order to conduct it well, if, indeed, not beautifully. He would have the ayaQov, though he never quite felt or knew the icaXov. Life still presented itself to the Roman in modes of doing rather than in modes of being. The Greek-enlightened Roman was still self-reliant and self-controlled. But now these qualities were as much the result of philosophic consideration as of native strength of character. He was now self-reliant because his philosophy taught him that the human soul must rely on its own strength. He had not yet conceived that there might be an inner spiritual aid which was not the man himself. He was now self- controlled because philosophy taught him the misery entailed by any other state. He was rational and still relied on reason. Yet incidentally he was superstitious, and reverent still with great force of conservatism. To the close of the Republic the Romans were provincials. In Cicero's time their stiff provincial dignity turned to dignified urbanity, as was naturalwith those who dwelt in a city which was becoming the world's centre of artistic and literary life, besides being the fountain-head of political power. Kome set the fashion for at least the La...

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