8 SCIENTIST 



reasonable, and in some sense immortal. There has always 

 been a strong tendency to identify the spirit of man with 

 the real nature of the universe. The material part both of 

 man and of the universe is then given a secondary, acci- 

 dental kind of role. The Greeks were a good deal less 

 embarrassed by their bodies than most people, but never- 

 theless their philosophers were much more interested in 

 ideas and reason than in material things. Plato, the greatest 

 of them all, built his whole philosophy on the notion that 

 ideas in the mind of God constitute the essential structure 

 of the universe. To him and to many others who came 

 after him, the material things we see and feel were but 

 pale and imperfect shadows of this eternal order. This 

 tendency to minimize the status of the material world 

 tended in turn to keep intelHgent men from looking at it 

 very carefully. Most people thought it unlikely that one 

 could get at the essential ideal structure or plan by study- 

 ing its admittedly imperfect results. Instead they relied on 

 the use of their reason, which was felt to be the most 

 godlike of human qualities, to figure out what went on 

 in the divine order. 



A quite different group of people who also grew up in 

 the Eastern Mediterranean, the Jews and their Christian 

 descendants, were equally impressed by the dijQBculty of 

 understanding the world by studying it directly. Inciden- 

 tally, they had less reason to study the world from the 

 practical point of view than the Egyptians and Babylo- 

 nians did, since the Jews during their great period were 

 primarily nomads and shepherds and depended relatively 

 Httle on organized agriculture and industry. Like the 

 Greeks they were primarily interested in getting a clear 

 idea of the spiritual nature of man and his relationship 

 to certain universal truths. They placed less rehance on 

 reason than the Greeks but relied on God to reveal di- 



