CIVILIZATION AND SCIENCE. 273 



experiment, nor even observe, should now, by their teaching and by 

 their ideas, produce a race in whom these faculties were to go on stead- 

 ily and incessantly developing a race bearing to the authors of its in- 

 tellectual culture the same relation as subsists between a brood of ducks 

 and the hen that has hatched them out? To what cause, then, do 

 modern civilized peoples owe the victorious outburst of the instinct of 

 causality which among the ancients found no adequate or methodical 

 expression, or was satisfied with futile reasons? Must we say that 

 among the Kelts and Germans, who soon vied with the Latin peoples 

 in their ardor to share in this newly-awakened intellectual activity, this 

 instinct was naturally stronger than among the Greeks and Romans ? 

 And was, perhaps, Keltic or Germanic blood mingled with Tuscan in 

 the veins of the youth who, during mass, discovered the isochronism of 

 the pendulum oscillations in Buschetto's cathedral ? 



The greater seclusion and introspection of northern life, the quiet 

 and leisure of the monasteries, the exigencies of a ruder climate, are 

 cited as conditions that would naturally dispose the modern civilized 

 nations toward investigation of Nature and the manufacturing arts. 

 But if we trace backward the course of modern science, we at last find 

 many clews leading into the laboratories of the alchemists and the ob- 

 servatories of the astrologers ; and here, as we know, we meet with 

 Arabian philosophy as a new element of culture. 



While beneath the sign of the Cross the night of barbarism was 

 settled down on the Western world, in the East, under the green stand- 

 ard of the Prophet, an original form of civilization had been developed, 

 which not only preserved what had been won by the classical peoples 

 in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, but even itself made no mean 

 acquisitions in those sciences. Through the crusaders and the Spanish 

 Moors, this civilization had in many ways reacted on Europe, and it is 

 natural for us to seek here for the source of those new ideas which the 

 mind of the Western nations, reawakened by the writings of the an- 

 cients, could not have drawn from those writings. The question arises, 

 " Whence did the Arabs derive their stronger instinct of causality, as 

 compared with the Greeks and Romans ? " Was that intelligent race 

 specially gifted for observation and investigation of facts ? Such a sup- 

 position conflicts with all we know of Semitic habits of thought, which 

 incline more toward the exercise of dialectical subtilty, fanciful imagin- 

 ing, and speculative meditation. 



But for the momentary ascendency of natural science under the 

 influence of Islam, as also for its development in the Christian West 

 so soon as the ban of the scholastic philosophy had been broken, a pro- 

 founder reason can with some probability be assigned, and one which 

 covers both of these cases. This reason, it is true, is ultimately based 

 on an ethno-psychological peculiarity of the Semitic race. That race, 

 not only directly, through the labors of its Arabic branch, had a part in 

 the creation of modern science, but indirectly, too, the Semites were 

 VOL. xiii. 18 



