civilisation of which he likened to the Augustan and Periclean. A
certain stony gaze of anthropological interest with which I regarded
his frontal bone seemed to strike the poor man dumb, and he took a
hurried departure. Could he have been ignorant that ours is, in
general, greater than the Periclean for the very reason that the
Divinity is neither the devil nor a bungler; that three thousand years
of human consciousness is not nothing; that a whole is greater than its
part, and a butterfly than a chrysalis? But it was the assumption that
it was therefore in any way great in the abstract that occasioned my
profound astonishment, and indeed contempt. Civilisation, if it means
anything, can only mean the art by which men live musically
together--to the lutings, as it were, of Panpipes, or say perhaps, to
triumphant organ-bursts of martial, marching dithyrambs. Any formula
defining it as "the art of lying back and getting elaborately tickled,"
should surely at this hour be _too_ primitive--_too_ Opic--to bring
anything but a smile to the lips of grown white-skinned men; and the
very fact that such a definition can still find undoubting acceptance
in all quarters may be an indication that the true [Greek: _idéa_]
which this condition of being must finally assume is far indeed--far,
perhaps, by ages and aeons--from becoming part of the general
conception. Nowhere since the beginning has the gross problem of living
ever so much as approached solution, much less the delicate and
intricate one of living _together: à propos_ of which your body
corporate not only still produces criminals (as the body-natural
fleas), but its very elementary organism cannot so much as catch a
really athletic one as yet. Meanwhile _you_ and _I_ are handicapped.
The individual travaileth in pain. In the struggle for quality, powers,
air, he spends his strength, and yet hardly escapes asphyxiation. He
can no more wriggle himself free of the psychic gravitations that
invest him than the earth can shake herself loose of the sun, or he of