CHAPTER III 



THE BEGINNINGS OF SCIENCE IN GREECE 



Except the blind forces of Nature nothing moves in this world 

 which is not Greek in its origin. Sir Henry Sumner Maine. 



A spirit breathed of old on Greece and gave birth to poets and 

 thinkers. There remains in our classical education I know not what 

 of the old Greek soul something that makes us look ever upward. 

 And this is more precious for the making of a man of science than the 

 reading of many volumes of geometry. Poincare. 



Number, the inducer of philosophies, 

 The synthesis of letters. Mschylus. 



Mathematics, considered as a science, owes its origin to the idealistic 

 needs of the Greek philosophers, and not as fable has it, to the practical 

 demands of Egyptian economics. . . . Adam was no zoologist when 

 he gave names to the beasts of the field, nor were the Egyptian sur- 

 veyors mathematicians. Hankel. 



GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES. From the twilight of civili- 

 zation and the first faint suggestions of science in Chaldea and 

 Egypt, we pass to the more brilliant dawn of science and civili- 

 zation in Greece. Geographically we shall be concerned not 

 merely with Greece itself, but, as time passes, with other Hellenic 

 countries, especially the Ionian shores and islands of western 

 Asia Minor, and the Greek colonies in southern Italy, Sicily, and, 

 after its conquest by Alexander the Great, northern Egypt. Greece 

 and its civilization seem immeasurably closer to us both in time 

 and in spirit than do ancient Babylonia and Egypt. In these 

 more remote civilizations science had been cultivated chiefly as a 

 tool, either for immediate practical applications or as a part of the 

 professional lore of a conservative priesthood. In Greece, on 

 the other hand, for the first time in the history of our race, 



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