Excerpt from Testimonium an or Greek and Roman Before Jesus Christ: A Series of Essays and Sketches Dealing, With the Spiritual Elements in Classical Civilization
The autumnal frosts of life are apt to bare many a bough which in our own springtime had delighted our souls with the beauty and the promise of vernal blossoms. And so too in the case of classical scholarship, so long and so strongly attached to the culture and educational traditions of modern times, the writer cannot but feel that it has come to be in evil case. Well nigh there has passed from the minds of men the conviction that the Greeks (an abstraction glibly made) were exemplars and exponents of fair and perfect humanity: that, being without the shackles of a religion or creed brought to them from abroad, they had achieved the ideals of our human kind.
Of late indeed and particularly in the zoological philosophy of modern times, they have not figured so highly, but have been reduced to furnish convenient social data for Herbert Spencer, as do the Ashantee negroes of Africa or the Papuas. Of all the didactic and doctrinal fictions moulded into a dogma, not one is so apt to take the very heart out of history as, e.g., Spencer's thesis that individual man is but a cell in the social organism - whereas he is really a small universe in himself and passes through this world of sense and seeming absolutely alone, guided and determined by himself alone. The noisy diversion of gregarious joys, the prattle of quasi-common concerns may for a while deceive the soul of man as to his essential solitude and as to his personal responsibility, but not for always.
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