Lecture III

Roman civilization is characterized by a mind that made everything abstract. The Romans evolved a dry, abstract way of thinking that did not perceive in images and wanted to live only in the forms of the mind. With the Greeks we still feel that the figures of their gods, that is, the elemental principles in the world of nature, had an inner life. The Roman gods were stiff, abstract concepts. Logic gained the upper hand over the imaginative thinking that had still been widespread in ancient Greece. Anything the Romans still had by way of imagination actually came from Greece. The Romans introduced the prosaic, logical thinking that was later to give the Latin language the logical quality that was to govern civilization for ages to come.