It is ungrateful to cavil at this moralizing and didactic
temper, which animates a large part of the nation and is responsible for much
of the British achievement. But its place is in the world of action not in that
of letters, and it does not produce the greatest literature or the truest
thought. The Greeks might have gained by a greater infusion of it: we, on the
other hand, can learn something from their intellectual disinterestedness which
in political and social controversies would make opposing views more
intelligible and the path to truth easier and plainer, in literature would free
us from excesses that are followed by reaction to a contrary excess, and in
national life would guard us from the materialism which besets an industrial
and commercial age. It is not confined to the Greeks; but by no people is the
ideal of intellectual truth more clearly and universally exhibited than by
those who first brought it into an indifferent world, and who built upon it
their literature and art no less than their science and philosophy.