What we sometimes mistake for tolerance was merely indifference caused by ignorance.
But we can find no trace of any willingness (however vague) on the part of either kings or priests to allow others to exercise that “freedom of action or judgment” or of that “patient and unprejudiced endurance of dissent from the generally received cause or view” which has become the ideal of our modern age.
Therefore, except in a very negative way, this book is not interested in prehistoric history or what is commonly called “ancient history.”
The struggle for tolerance did not begin until after the discovery of the individual.
And the credit for this, the greatest of all modern revelations, belongs to the Greeks.
CHAPTER II
THE GREEKS
How it happened that a little rocky peninsula in a remote corner of the Mediterranean was able to provide our world in less than two centuries with the complete framework for all our present day experiments in politics, literature, drama, sculpture, chemistry, physics and Heaven knows what else, is a question which has puzzled a great many people for a great many centuries and to which every philosopher, at one time or another during his career, has tried to give an answer.