EAST AND WEST 135 



fying his urgent needs and slowly emerging out of the darkness, 

 when his instinctive craving for power and for knowledge was be- 

 ginning to appear. Who first thought of kindling a fire? Who in- 

 vented the earliest stone implements? Who domesticated the 

 animals which have shared our lives ever since? How did lan- 

 guage develop? And later, much later, writing? Who conceived 

 the wheel? Just think of these discoveries and of their infinite im- 

 plications. Without articulate language man remained an animal. 

 Without writing, the safe transmission and preservation of knowl- 

 edge were impossible. Progress implies safe keeping of what we 

 already have. Without writing, the accumulation of knowledge 

 was precarious and limited, progress small and uncertain. Can 

 any one of our modern discoveries, however startling, begin to 

 compare with those which made possible all the others? And yet 

 we know nothing about them. We can hardly guess. It is probable 

 that they involved the secular collaboration of thousands of men, 

 each big step forward being finally secured by the exceptional 

 genius of some of them. The evolutions leading to each of these 

 fundamental discoveries were exceedingly slow — almost compar- 

 able to the biologic transitions from one type to another — so slow 

 that the people who took part in them were utterly unaware of 

 them. Genius was then required only from time to time to clinch 

 the results obtained by the unconscious accumulation of infini- 

 tesimal efforts, to secure what was gained and prepare another 

 slow movement in the same general direction. 



The total evolution which prepared the dawn of science must 

 have taken tens of thousands of years. By the beginning of the 

 third millennium before Christ it was already completed in at least 

 two countries: Mesopotamia and Egypt, and possibly in two 

 others, India and China. The people of Mesopotamia and Egypt 

 had then already attained a high stage of culture including the 

 use of writing, and a fair amount of mathematical, astronomical 

 and medical knowledge. Thus it would seem proved that civili- 

 zation began in the East. £x oriente lux, ex occidente lex. From 



