Philosophy,
when we are face to face with real men, is as powerless as over the Iliad
or King Lear. The overmastering human interest transcends explanation. We
do not sit in judgment on the right or the wrong; we do not seek out
causes to account for what takes place, feeling too conscious of the
inadequacy of our analysis. We see human beings possessed by different
impulses, and working out a pre-ordained result, as the subtle forces
drive each along the path marked out for him; and history becomes the more
impressive to us where it least immediately instructs.
With such vividness, with such transparent clearness, the age stands
before us of Cato and Pompey, of Cicero and Julius Caesar; the more
distinctly because it was an age in so many ways the counterpart of our
own, the blossoming period of the old civilization, when the intellect was
trained to the highest point which it could reach, and on the great
subjects of human interest, on morals and politics, on poetry and art,
even on religion itself and the speculative problems of life, men thought
as we think, doubted where we doubt, argued as we argue, aspired and
struggled after the same objects. It was an age of material progress and
material civilization; an age of civil liberty and intellectual culture;
an age of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons and of dinner-parties, of
senatorial majorities and electoral corruption.
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