Footnotes
[1]. See, for instance, Turner’s Samoa, chap. 1. Usually, however, in the Pacific, creation was accomplished, in a more genuinely evolutionary manner, by a long series of progressive generations.
[2]. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, vol. I, book III, chap. VI.
[3]. I have here mainly followed Gomperz (Greek Thinkers, vol. I, pp. 430-34); there is not now, however, much controversy over the position of Hippias, which there is now, indeed, rather a tendency to exaggerate, considering how small is the basis of knowledge we possess. Thus Dupréel (La Légende Socratique, p. 432), regarding him as the most misunderstood of the great Sophists, declares that Hippias is “the thinker who conceived the universality of science, just as Prodicus caught glimpses of the synthesis of the social sciences. Hippias is the philosopher of science, the Great Logician, just as Prodicus is the Great Moralist.” He compares him to Pico della Mirandola as a Humanist and to Leibnitz in power of wide synthesis.
[4]. Strictly speaking, in the technical sense of that much-abused word, this is “decadence.” (I refer to the sense in which I defined “decadence” many years ago in Affirmations, pp. 175-87.) So that while the minor arts have sometimes been classic and sometimes decadent, the major art of living during the last two thousand years, although one can think of great men who have maintained the larger classic ideal, has mainly been decadent.
[5]. Emma Hadfield, Among the Natives of the Loyalty Group. 1920. It would no doubt have been more satisfactory to select a people like the Fijians rather than the Lifuans, for they represented a more robust and accomplished form of a rather similar culture, but their culture has receded into the past,—and the same may be said of the Marquesans of whom Melville left, in Typee, a famous and delightful picture which other records confirm,—while that of the Lifuans is still recent.
[6]. G. Lowes Dickinson, An Essay on the Civilisations of India, China, and Japan (1914), p. 47. No doubt there are shades to be added to this picture. They may be found in a book, published two years earlier, China as it Really Is, by “a Resident in Peking” who claims to have been born in China. Chinese culture has receded, in part swamped by over-population, and concerning a land where to-day, it has lately been said, “magnificence, crudity, delicacy, fetidity, and fragrance are blended,” it is easy for Westerners to show violent difference of opinion.
[7]. See, for instance, the chapter on games in Professor E. H. Parker’s China: Past and Present. Reference may be made to the same author’s important and impartial larger work, China: Its History, with a discriminating chapter on Chinese personal characteristics. Perhaps, the most penetrating study of Chinese psychology is, however, Arthur H. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics.
[8]. His ideas have been studied by Madame Alexandra David, Le Philosophe Meh-ti et l’Idée de Solidarité. London, 1907.
[9]. Eugène Simon, La Cité Chinoise.