Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/424

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of the Athenian character, as portrayed in Thucydides, to recognise intelligence as the true basis of action and the true root of courage[1], instead of regarding mental culture as adverse to civic loyalty and warlike spirit[2]. If soothsayers cannot give us prescience, reason well used can enable such a man as Themistocles at least to conjecture the future[3]. In a trial of human forces the chances baffle prediction, but superiority in ideas (διάνοιαι) is a sure ground of confidence[4]. Yet the man of sound judgment will not presume on this confidence, for he will remember that the other element, "fortune," is beyond his control[5]. Justice, rightly understood, is the "common good[6]," and is identical with true self-interest[7]. As the remorseless exaction of an extreme penalty, "justice" may be opposed to "equity[8]"; or as a moral standard, it may be opposed to "self-interest" in the lower sense[9]. And self-interest, when thus opposed to justice, can appeal to "the immemorial usage[10]," believed to obtain among the gods, and so certainly established

  1. ii. 40 § 2; 62 § 5.
  2. As Archidamus does (i. 84), and Cleon (iii. 37).
  3. i. 138, τῶν μελλόντων ἐπὶ πλεῖστον τοῦ γενησομένου ἄριστος εἰκαστής.
  4. i. 84 § 3; vi. 11 § 6.
  5. iv. 64.
  6. τὸ κοινὸν ἀγαθόν, v. 90.
  7. i. 41.
  8. iii. 40; iv. 19.
  9. i. 76, 79; iii. 56; v. 90; iv. 61.
  10. i. 76, τὸ ἀεὶ καθεστός.