Men may keep busy in a variety of ways,
making money, acquiring facility in laboratory manipulation, or
in amassing a store of facts about linguistic matters, or the
chronology of literary productions. Unless such activity reacts
to enlarge the imaginative vision of life, it is on a level with
the busy work of children. It has the letter without the spirit
of activity. It readily degenerates itself into a miser's
accumulation, and a man prides himself on what he has, and not on
the meaning he finds in the affairs of life. Any study so
pursued that it increases concern for the values of life, any
study producing greater sensitiveness to social well-being and
greater ability to promote that well-being is humane study. The
humanistic spirit of the Greeks was native and intense but it was
narrow in scope. Everybody outside the Hellenic circle was a
barbarian, and negligible save as a possible enemy. Acute as
were the social observations and speculations of Greek thinkers,
there is not a word in their writings to indicate that Greek
civilization was not self-inclosed and self-sufficient. There
was, apparently, no suspicion that its future was at the mercy of
the despised outsider. Within the Greek community, the intense
social spirit was limited by the fact that higher culture was
based on a substratum of slavery and economic serfdom--classes
necessary to the existence of the state, as Aristotle declared,
and yet not genuine parts of it.
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