The 'liberation of humanity,' as Goethe used to call it--the deliverance of men from the yoke of inherited usage, and of rigid, unquestionable law--was begun in Greece, and had many of its greatest effects, good and evil, on Greece.
Bagehot reflects on the origins of human liberation from traditional constraints, tracing it back to ancient Greece.
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We have thus a whole group of ancient republics of non-Aryan race, and one which, being more ancient than the classical republics, could not have borrowed from or imitated them.
There is no ELASTIC element, everything is rigid, specified, dated.
Savages waste away before modern civilisation; they seem to have held their ground before the ancient.
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
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