Read the passage and answer the following questions:
Students of the history of society and literature have grown fond of distinguishing between two powerful influences upon our ways of thinking and of looking at life. They find two chief attitudes of mind, two chief animating spirits, so different from each other in the main that they deserve and have received special and practically antithetical names. Our manner of regarding life and society, morals and sentiment, nature and art, is determined by whichever of these two spirits predominates in us, Sometimes one whole nation has its view in almost all things pervaded by the one set of principles; another nation is no less manifestly informed by the other set At other times it is an individual who stands out in broad spiritual and intellectual contrast with another of the same people and the same age. These two spirits have been called by Matthew Arnold the "Hebraic" and the "Hellenic"; the one Hebraic, because its clearest and most consistent manifestation has been among the Hebrews; the other Hellenic, because its clearest and most consistent manifestation has been among the Hellenes or ancient Greeks. And not only have these two spirits been especially manifested there, but it is directly from those peoples that two corresponding influences have spread to all the more highly civilized portions of the world. From the Hebrews there has spread one great force, and from the Hellenes another great force and these two forces have in a larger or smaller measure determined the characters and views of those peoples, who, being neither Hebrews nor Hellenes, had not of themselves developed so intense a spirituality or so active an intellectuality as one or other of these two possessed.
It is rather in their historical aspect that I propose to make some observations upon these two forces.
I feel a natural diffidence and some little constraint in treating such a subject, especially before a Hebrew gathering. But the Hebrews of whom I have to speak are not yourselves, but your ancestors and they are ancestors with a history so remarkable and a spirit so potent that, though I have no share in your pride, I can in a large measure cordially share in your admiration of them. In a large measure, I say, for I propose to show how the mental view and temperament of Israel when Israel was his truest self, needed to be qualified and corrected by another mental view and temperament - that of the Greeks when the Greeks were their truest selves. And if there was here any descendant of Pericles or Sophocles or Phidias, I should similarly say to him that, though I feel the keenest zest of admiration for the many sublime things which his Athenian ancestors did and wrote and wrought, yet the full perfection of human character and life was not reached by them, and could not be reached by them, until their own spirit was corrected by another, the spirit exemplified in the Hebrews. You will, I am sure, allow me to say whatever I feel to be just And that there may be no misconception, let me add that; whenever I speak of the Hebraic spirit, I shall mean, not the spirit which an individual contemporary Hebrew may happen to display, but the spirit which was characteristic of Israel as a nation before the dispersion. In the same way, the Hellenic spirit will mean the spirit which was characteristic of the pure Hellene before he was demoralized and adulterated by Roman, Slav, and Turk.
Man, chameleon-like, is apt to take the colour of the land on which he happens to be, and a Jew who lives in modem times, amid social and religious conditions, education, and material circumstances so different from those of ancient Palestine, may differ very widely from the type of the race as we gather it from history and literature. Nor is racing everything. Even if the Jews once more gathered together into one nation from all quarters of the earth, we should by no means necessarily behold a people of the same spiritual attributes and ideals as the Hebrews who built the Temple under Ezra, or who fought like lions under the Maccabees. As with the early Saracens, it is often someone great idea or principle which - for the time at least - determines the whole current of a nation's mental and spiritual being. But that idea may gradually lose its intensity and its energizing power, and the Saracen sinks into the voluptuous Mussulman. Hebraism and Hellenism, therefore, mean the diverse spirits of two peoples as they once were, not as they may be now or will necessarily he again.