30 Introduction 



spring, Islam. St. Paul, however, brought it to the West, and it de- 

 veloped mainly as a Western religion. On the contrary. Buddhism, 

 born in India, travelled Eastward. The history of Buddhism is as essen- 

 tial for the understanding of the growth of Far Eastern culture as the 

 history of Christianity for the development of our own culture. In both 

 cases science was carried around the earth upon the wings of religion. 

 The Islamic evangel was a revival of Jewish unitarianism-^ which had 

 been temporarily pushed back by Trinitarian ideals; it was enormously 

 successful and penetrated deeply into the territories of the Christian 

 West and the Buddhist East. 



In spite of occasional contacts Hindu culture, and even more so 

 Chinese culture, remained exotic, while the Arabic culture was inextri- 

 cably mixed up with the Latin one. When we try to explain our own 

 culture we may leave out almost completely Hindu and Chinese develop- 

 ments, but we cannot leave out the Arabic ones without spoiling the 

 whole story and making it unintelligible. Does this mean that we 

 should neglect the study of Hindu and Chinese history? Certainly not, 

 but that is another kind of study, call it exotic or outlandish if you 

 please. The Arabic story helps us to understand our own because it is 

 an intrinsic part of it; the Chinese and Hindu stories help us to under- 

 stand our own also but in a very different way. They help us to con- 

 ceive the possibility and reality of different developments, of different 

 patterns. The same fundamental problems (mathematical, astronomi- 

 cal, physical, chemical, biological, medical) had to be solved by them 

 as had been solved by our own ancestors; the Hindus and Chinese are 

 essentially the same kind of beings as we are, having the same needs and 

 similar aspirations, but as their conditions of life were very different 

 from ours, their solutions of those problems were also different ( in some 

 respects, not in all respects ) . It is extremely interesting for the philoso- 

 pher or the anthropologist to compare those different solutions attained 

 by similar beings under different circumstances. Chinese culture is a 

 "control" for our own; that is very important.^*^ 



The practical conclusion of all this is that the investigator of medi- 



^The Muslim unitarianism might be considered a Jewish heresy or a Christian 

 one, and this was done by mediaeval writers. Its success was partly caused by 

 Christian disintegration, and especially by the lack of unity on fundamental doc- 

 trines, e.g., on Christology. The Monophysites on the one hand and the Nestorians 

 on the other had been thrown out of the central Orthodox church to the right and 

 left. In the West (when we speak of Islam, we must always deal with the West 

 as well as with the East), the conquest of Spain was facilitated by the fact that the 

 Visigoths (like all the Goths) had remained Arians; it is true the Visigothic hierarchy 

 was converted to Catholicism in 589 but did the rank and file follow suit? Centuries 

 of Arian tradition could not be blotted out easily. That tradition was to some ex- 

 tent unitarian; it was thus possible for the Muslim invaders to take advantage of 

 anti-Trinitarian prejudices and they did so. 



^ Our remarks concerning the Chinese and Hindu cultures would apply with 

 greater strength to the aboriginal American culture which before 1492 was as 

 separate from our own as if it had developed on another planet; unfortunately, our 

 knowledge of American science is very imperfect because of the scarcity or lack of 

 autochthonous writings. 



