PSYCHOLOGICAL EVOLUTION 201 



sions intuitively, and could offer no proofs, thinking, 

 indeed, that their beliefs must be self-evident to all. 

 So, at a later date, we find an atheistic philosophy, 

 or Materialism, also in existence, due, probably, to 

 a re-action against the excesses of the Greek Mytho- 

 logists. That the truth of none of these philoso- 

 phies was self-evident is shown by the fact that, 

 in the classical world, all of them flourished to- 

 gether, and highly cultivated men could be found 

 among the Poly theists , the Pantheists, the Theists, 

 and the Atheists. 



At last science awoke from its long sleep and 

 began to study with care the material phenomena of 

 the Universe. Scientific observations commenced 

 with the Chaldeans and early Greeks, but it was a 

 dreamy kind of science, confined to a few. The 

 spirit of inquiry was not thoroughly aroused until the 

 bold navigators of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 

 turies sailed round the world, and demolished the old 

 dogma that the earth was a flat disc, with Jeru- 

 salem in its centre. Then the invention of the 

 printing-press spread the news far and wide, and 

 from that time forward science took an important 

 position in the world. 



Long before this, however, the idea of law and 

 order in Nature had been gradually growing. The 

 wonders of the thunderstorm, of eclipses, even of 

 the rainbow, had been explained as the result of 

 physical laws ; and the consequence was that the 

 belief in the crude polytheism of the ancients had 

 been destroyed. 



The advance of scientific knowledge was at first 



