50 NOTES 



principal existing religions of mankind have grown out of the 

 first three : while the fourth is the little spring, now swollen into 

 the great stream of positive science. So far as physical possibilities 

 go, the prophet Jeremiah and the oldest Ionian philosopher might 

 have met and conversed. If they had done so, they would 

 probably have disagreed a good deal ; and it is interesting to 

 reflect that their discussions might have embraced questions 

 which, at the present day, are still hotly controverted. 



The old Ionian philosophy then, seems to be only one of many 

 results of a stirring of the moral and intellectual life of the 

 Aryan and the Semitic populations of Western Asia. The 

 conditions of this general awakening were doubtless manifold : 

 but there is one which modern research has brought into great 

 prominence. This is the existence of extremely ancient and 

 highly advanced societies in the valleys of the Euphrates and of 



the Nile. 



It is now known that, more than a thousand perhaps 

 more than two thousand years before the sixth century B.C., 

 civilization had attained a relatively high pitch among the 

 Babylonians and the Egyptians. Not only had painting, sculp- 

 ture, architecture, and the industrial arts, reached a remarkable 

 development ; but in Chaldsea, at any rate, a vast amount of 

 knowledge had been accumulated and methodised, in the 

 departments of grammar, mathematics, astronomy and natural 

 history. Where such tracts of the scientific spirit are visible, 

 naturalistic speculation is rarely far off, though, so far as I know, 

 no remains of an Accadiau. or Egyptian, philosophy, properly so 

 called, have yet been recovered. 



Geographically, Chaldeea occupied a central position among 

 the oldest seats of civilization. Commerce, largely aided by 

 the intervention of those colossal pedlars, the Phoenicians, had 

 brought Chaldsea into connexion with all of them, for a thousand 

 years before the epoch at present under consideration. And in 

 the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries, the Assyrian, the 

 depositary of Chaldsean civilization, as the Macedonian and 

 the Roman, at a later date, were the depositaries of Greek cul- 

 ture, had added irresistible force to the other agencies for 

 the wide distribution of Chaldeean literature, art and science. 



I confess that I find it difficult to imagine that the Greek 

 immigrants who stood in somewhat the same relation to the 



