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Untitled - 24grammata.com

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"SCIENCES IN CONNEXION WITH THE STATE. 193But when the mass of scientific knowledge had accumulated ;when it was felt how valuable that knowledge was tothe state ;when the monarchical constitutions were introduced after the age of Alexander ; provision was made forsuch institutions ;the museum of Alexandria and that ofPergamus were established and it still remains for a more;thorough investigation to decide, whether the state remainedwholly inactive, while the schools of philosophy and of rhetoric were forming. Shall the Grecian republics, then, stillcontinue to be cited, as has been done by the celebratedfounder of a new school of political economy, in proof thatthe state should leave the sciences to provide for themselves?Should it not rather encourage and provide for them incountries, where the culture of most of them is in severalrelations necessary for its welfare ? where the teacher ofreligion as well as the judge, where the physician as well asthe statesman, stands in need of various kinds of knowledge ?But when that assertion is understood as implying thatthe stateamong the Greeks was wholly unconcerned aboutintellectual culture and improvement, but left these subjectsto themselves, a monstrous error lies at the bottom of it.No states in the whole course of history have proportionallydone more for them than the Grecian ;but they did it in adifferent manner from the moderns. We measure intellectual culture by the state of science for which our;modernstates, as is well known, have at times done so much and solittle ;the Greeks, on the contrary, were accustomed to findtheir standard in the arts. The stateamongthe Greeks didlittle for the sciences, because it did every thing for the arts.The latter,as we shall more fully explain hereafter, were ofmore immediate importance to it than the former; whilethe reverse is true amongthe moderns. How then can webe astonished that the arts were the chief object of interestto the Grecian states ?The answer to the other question embraces a wider field :Among the Greeks, what consequences had the sciences forthe state ? And here we would in the first place treat ofphilosophy, and then annex to the inquiry on that subject,some remarks respecting history.After so many acute and copious explanations of the Grecian philosophy, no one will here expect a new analysis of

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