of nature. In the period in which their most brilliant minds were
busied with the problems of the universe men might improve the
building of ships, or invent new geometrical demonstrations, but
their science did little or nothing to transform the conditions of
life or to open any vista into the future. They were in the presence
of no facts strong enough to counteract that profound veneration of
antiquity which seems natural to mankind, and the Athenians of the
age of Pericles or of Plato, though they were thoroughly, obviously
"modern" compared with the Homeric Greeks, were never self-
consciously "modern" as we are.

1.

The indications that human civilisation was a gradual growth, and
that man had painfully worked his way forward from a low and savage
state, could not, indeed, escape the sharp vision of the Greeks. For
instance, Aeschylus represents men as originally living at hazard in
sunless caves, and raised from that condition by Prometheus, who
taught them the arts of life. In Euripides we find a similar
recognition of the ascent of mankind to a civilised state, from
primitive barbarism, some god or other playing the part of
Prometheus. In such passages as these we have, it may be said, the
idea that man has progressed; and it may fairly be suggested that
belief in a natural progress lay, for Aeschylus as well as for
Euripides, behind the poetical fiction of supernatural intervention.
But these recognitions of a progress were not incompatible with the
widely-spread belief in an initial degeneration of the human race;
nor did it usually appear as a rival doctrine. The old legend of a
"golden age" of simplicity, from which man had fallen away, was
generally accepted as truth; and leading thinkers combined it with