152 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



ing at the head of mankind. Thanks to them Arabic became 

 not only the sacred language of the Qur'an, the vehicle of God's 

 own thoughts, but the international language of science, the 

 vehicle of human progress. Just as to-day the shortest way to 

 knowledge for any Oriental is the mastery of one of the main 

 occidental languages, even so during these four centuries Arabic 

 was the key, and almost the only key, to the new expanding 

 culture. 



Indeed the superiority of Muslim culture, say in the eleventh 

 century, was so great that we can understand their intellectual 

 pride. It is easy to imagine their doctors speaking of the western 

 barbarians almost in the same spirit as ours do of the cc Orientals." 

 If there had been some ferocious eugenists among the Muslims 

 they might have suggested some means of breeding out all the 

 western Christians and the Greeks because of their hopeless back- 

 wardness. At that time Muslim pride would have been the more 

 conceivable because they had almost reached their climax, and 

 pride is never so great as when the fall is near. On the contrary, 

 only a few Christians were then aware of their inferiority; that 

 awareness did not come upon them until much later — by the 

 middle of the thirteenth century — when Islam was already on the 

 downward path and Latin Christendom was climbing higher and 

 higher. This is very interesting, but the rule rather than the excep- 

 tion; when people boast too much of their culture it means either 

 that it is so new that they have not yet grown accustomed to it 

 or else that it is already decadent and that they try to hide their 

 incompetence (even from themselves) under the cloak of past 

 achievements. In the thirteenth century Islam was in the decadent 

 and boasting stage, while Christendom had finally realized the 

 richness of the Greco-Arabic knowledge and made gigantic efforts 

 to be allowed to share it, and hence was relatively in a chastened 

 mood. 



For the sake of illustration let us consider the levels of mathe- 

 matical knowledge among Muslims and among Christians in the 

 first half of the eleventh century. There was then a splendid 



