126 SHEMITIC CIVILIZATION. 



poetic is the destiny of man; his melan- 

 choly vicissitudes, his uneasy search into 

 causes, his just complaint against Heaven. 

 We have no need to learn this from any 

 one. The eternal school for this is the soul 

 of each individual. 



In Science and Philosophy we are ex- 

 clusively Greek The search into causes, 

 knowledge for the sake of knowledge, is 

 a thing of which there is no trace pre- 

 vious to Greece ; a process we have learnt 

 from her alone. Babylon had Science, but 

 not the real element of science, an absolute 

 fixidity of the laws of Nature. Egypt had 

 knowledge of geometry, but she did not 

 produce the Elements of Euclid. As to the 

 old Shemitic mind, it was in its nature anti- 

 philosophical and anti-scientific/ In Job, 

 the search into causes is almost represented 

 as impiety. In Ecclesiastes, science is de- 

 clared a vanity. The author, prematurely 

 disgusted, vaunts his having learnt all that 

 is under the sun, and of having found no- 

 thing but weariness. Aristotle, nearly his 



