CIVILIZATION AND SCIENCE. 261 



not a single peak covered with everlasting snow; it has no great 

 streams, volcanoes, or deserts, and so healthful is its climate that during 

 1.000 years it was visited only by one great epidemic the plague 

 described by Thucydides. Here, says Buckle, man did not feel himself 

 overpowered by Nature. Here it was possible for those myths to have 

 their rise which still delight us with their undying charm, and this 

 because, instead of personifying the destroying forces of Nature, they 

 rather glorify whatever is purely human. True, even Grecian mythol- 

 ogy is haunted by many monstrous shapes, which, though an abomina- 

 tion to the eye of the comparative anatomist, even yet in some measure 

 disfigure the imaginations of our artists. Yet even against the worst 

 of these monsters man could hold his own, as Ulysses against Scylla ; 

 often he triumphs over them, as Bellerophon over the Chimaera, Theseus 

 over the Minotaur ; and, by insensible gradations, ending in the pleas- 

 ing personifications of the spirits of tree, and mountain, and spring, 

 these creatures of the artistic imagination of the Greeks at last become 

 perfectly human figures. 



It is an easy thing to carry still further these ideas of Buckle's 

 which have also been put forward by Lecky and to deduce the mono- 

 theism of the Semites from their inhabiting a desert region, where 

 Nature, in its majestic uniformity, presented itself to them lacking in 

 color and form. It is not to be denied that in this idea of an agree- 

 ment between religious forms and the aspects of Nature there is a cer- 

 tain degree of truth ; still, like many another of Buckle's deductions, 

 this theory bears the impress of a rather superficial rationalism. Buckle 

 overlooks a multitude of complex intermediate facts. He makes the 

 connection between forms of religion and the aspects of Nature far too 

 direct. In particular, in deducing Hindoo mythology from the assumed 

 terrifying aspects of Nature in India, he surely errs. Between the Him- 

 alayas and the Indian Ocean are thousands of square miles of fertile 

 and now very thickly-populated country, where Nature offers nothing 

 at all to excite the imagination in an unwonted degree. And to the 

 originators of the Brahmanic faith what was a mountain-range which 

 they had no occasion to cross, or an ocean which they had no occasion 

 to navigate? Can any one suppose that, had the Jews been trans- 

 planted to the region between the Indus and the Ganges, they would 

 have excogitated the Brahmanic, or the Koraks the Hellenic religion, 

 had they migrated to the Peloponnesus? This brings us to a point on 

 which neither Buckle nor Lecky has bestowed sufficient attention. If 

 we were to maintain that the general psychological character of any 

 given portion of the human race results from (among many other con- 

 ditions) the local impressions under which they have developed, and 

 that, again, from this psychological character, combined with many 

 other circumstances, has come its form of religion, we should be stating 

 with more correctness the causal connection between these two orders 

 of phenomena. 



