MODERN SCIENCE 9 



been an evolutionary product of what may be called the 

 v/social consciousness rather than the definite fruit of 

 individual minds. From all the civilizations of the 

 ancient East, save from Greece alone, scarcely the name 

 of a discoverer or an inventor has come down to us. . Jt 

 is characteristic Q.Lthi&. pre-Greek maimaHhatJtJs_a 

 social, not an individual product. 



Into this great anonymous Oriental heritage the 

 philosophers of the Ionian cities were fortunate enough 

 to enter. /They come often under grave suspicion of 

 concealing their debt to antiquity, and it is unfortunate 

 that the more reliable accounts of the origin of Greek 

 Science, such as the History of Mathematics by 

 Eudemus, the pupil of Aristotle, are lost to us. But 

 once the Greeks had inherited this scientific system 

 they impressed it with their own individuality in their 

 own self-centred way. Their self-centred character has 

 often been remarked, and had indeed been observed by 

 the Greeks themselves. Thej^hpjug^ 

 as a people ; and the Science that they inherited from 

 antiquityTJrom being anonymous became, in their hands, 

 eponymous, a character which it has ever since retained. 

 Science from their time to ours has always been the 

 fruit of individual minds and not a product of the 

 social consciousness. 



But there is another point in which the Science of the 

 Greeks divides them from the ancient East and unites 

 them with us. ^lt is their conviction of Order, their faith 

 that Order reigns in Nature. This is their great and 

 most vital contribution to scientific thought. Now it is 

 very interesting to observe that this trust in the reign 

 of law was with them a fcith nr inhiiHnn and in no sense 

 the result of observation. The actual basis of observed 

 fact on which the Ionian philosophy was founded was 



