of the Western world. In the works, too, of the Greek philosophers,
especially of Plato and Aristotle, it inspired the earliest and some of
the deepest reflections on the nature of social life and government. But
it never acquired the permanence of the political units needed to build
up the European Commonwealth. For this nations were required, and the
Greeks were a race and not a nation. The [Greek: polis] lacked the
size, the variety of elements, and the territorial basis on which a
modern nation rests.

It is rather in their achievements as thinkers and as artists, above all
in their science and philosophy, that we find the most fundamental and
lasting contribution of the Greeks to the unity and progress of mankind.
When these became allied to the tenacity, the organizing and legal
genius of the Romans, a firm centre of civilized life was established,
which has survived the shocks of two thousand years of growth and
conflict and will survive the upheaval of the present. The Greek
unification was in the world of thought and art; the Roman attempted a
corresponding work of organization in the human world which lay nearest
to him in the countries round the Mediterranean Sea. Both efforts were
of priceless value and continuing effect, but both were, from the
conditions of the problem, imperfect solutions, the brilliant but
precocious sketches of adolescent genius. The Greek, working at first on
the material accumulated by generations of Chaldean and Egyptian
priests, discovered from their crude, unorganized, and inexact
observations of geometry and astronomy the elements of unity in
diversity which constitute science. Inquiring for causes, comparing and
correcting individual facts, he arrived at the first equations in
mathematics, the first laws of nature. His work in this sphere and in
that of medicine went on continuously until after the Roman occupation
of the Mediterranean world was complete. It died out gradually in the