RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 75 



are the age of the spread of Greek culture after 

 Alexander, and the early age of Christianity in 

 the Graeco-Roman world. These times are full 

 of modernity. The problems with which they 

 teem are our problems, and nothing is more cer- 

 tain than that factors which then worked will work 

 in the same direction now. Great shifts of popu- 

 lation to new regions, the drift of the dwellers in 

 the country districts towards the towns, the decay 

 of religious belief, vast wealth of a few and gall- 

 ing poverty of many, distaste for military service, 

 increase of divorce, a falling birth-rate, these and 

 many other modern tendencies were familiar two 

 thousand years ago. And men of those times, 

 men quite as wise as any of us, tried to devise 

 cures for these things, introduced some remedies 

 which were palliations for the diseases of society, 

 and some remedies which only increased the evils 

 they were intended to prevent. All these things 

 stand written in the history of the past. Are we 

 so wise or so self-confident as to disdain to learn 

 the lessons which history teaches ? Must we learn 

 only as do plants and animals, from the hard 

 lessons of suffering? 



In this matter Germany has something to 

 teach. A French writer, M. P. Huvelin, writes 

 as follows : 



* It is an enviable privilege of the Germans that 

 they realize without effort and by nature the rela- 

 tions between practical aims and disinterested 

 study. With them, new social and academic 



