themselves out.

Mobility! We do not think that a necessarily undesirable condition of
life, of mind, of the physical world about us. 'Tis the dead things,
we may remind ourselves, that after all are most entirely at rest, and
might reasonably hold that motion (vicious, fallacious, infectious
motion, as Plato inclines to think) covers all that is best worth
being. And as for philosophy--mobility, versatility, the habit of
thought that can most adequately follow the subtle movement of things,
that, surely, were the secret of wisdom, of the true knowledge of them.
It means susceptibility, sympathetic intelligence, capacity, in short.
It was the spirit of God that moved, moves still, in every form of real
power, everywhere. Yet to Plato motion becomes the token of unreality
in things, of falsity in our thoughts about them. It is just this
principle of mobility, in itself so welcome to all of us, that, with
all his contriving care for the future, he desires to withstand.
Everywhere he displays himself as an advocate of the immutable. The
Republic is a proposal to establish it indefectibly in a very precisely
regulated, a very exclusive community, which shall be a refuge for
elect souls from an ill-made world.

That four powerful influences made for the political unity of Greece
was pointed out by [23] Grote: common blood, common language, a common
religious centre, the great games in which all alike communicated. He
adds that they failed to make the Greeks one people. Panhellenism was
realised for the first time, and then but imperfectly, by Alexander the
Great. The centrifugal tendency had ever been too much for the
centripetal tendency in them, the progressive elements for the element
of order. Their boundless impatience, that passion for novelty noted
in them by Saint Paul, had been a matter of radical character. Their