662 STUDY AND RESEARCH. 



If tlie classical languages are no longer able to furnisli tlie bond that 

 nnites all the provinces of culture, a substitute can be found only in the 

 lustrous triad — mathematics, philosophy, and the sciences — upon whose 

 development occidental culture in all its ramifications depends. 



For our present purpose it is of secondary importance to determiue 

 that this culture has its roots in the Orient — in Egypt or Babylonia. So 

 far as we are concerned occidental culture began on the western shore 

 of Asia Minor, among the Ionian Greeks, the first to base their specu- 

 lations about the universe on the mathematical computation of celestial 

 phenomena, and the first to create a natural philosophy which summed 

 ui) in a harmonious review all knowledge and conceptions of nature 

 and her forces. In this jihilosophy is contained the begiuning of those 

 general speculations upon the world characteristically called "world- 

 wisdom" (Weltweisheit) by the Germans, which have gradually led to a 

 complete transformation of the old ideas of heaven and earth and man 

 himself; an achievement that forms the imperishable glory of Greek 

 philosophy. 



The occidental nations, it must be admitted, were very late in attain- 

 ing to an understanding thereof After the fall of Constantinople, 

 when the Greek scholars fled to Italy and knowledge of Greek litera- 

 ture spread rapidly, and when in Germany the humanists arose and 

 one university after another was founded, only then the independent 

 spirit of research awakened in all the nations. Mathematicians and 

 scientific men of marked originality appeared, aud soon philosophers 

 were at work accommodating the conceptions about man to the new 

 views and sounding the very depths of intellectual life. 



A little after the beginning of this momentous i^eriod he arose whose 

 gigantic achievement civilized men are at present celebrating. Day 

 before yesterday it was four hundred years since Christopher Columbus 

 first gained sight of a strip of land belonging to that New World where 

 thousands are now exulting in his memory. For him was reserved the 

 enviable fortune to demonstrate at a stroke, by means of a hazardous 

 experiment, the sphericity of the earth, and at the same time to open 

 up the vastest playground ever granted to human enterprise. Let us 

 offer due homage to his genius and energy on this spot, too. Let us not 

 forget that, despite his errors, which at the present moment we are 

 inclined to emphasize too strenuously perhaps, he is the creator of a 

 new time, the time of new thoughts and new actions ! 



After him there was activity everywhere in the world of the intellect. 

 Next to great mathematicians and astronomers arose physicists of the 

 first rank; the reform movement developed in the church, and the 

 corner stone of the modern structure of medicine was laid. Even now 

 we are in the midst of the upheaval, but victory is everywhere on the 

 side of the new. Our age has already earned the title of the age of 

 the natural sciences. No branch of intellectual endeavor has been 

 able to escape the modern influence. The Eoman Church itself, the 



