EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 179 



The sages of Miletus were pronounced evolutionists; and, 

 however dark may be some of the sayings of Heracleitus of 

 Ephesus, who was probably a contemporary of Gautama, no 



It would be difficult to find another three centuries which have given birth to four events 

 of equal importance. All the principal existing religions of mankind have grown out of 

 the first three, while the fourth is the little spring, now swollen into the great stream of 

 positive science. So far as physical possibilities go, the prophet Jeremiah and the oldest 

 Ionian philosopher might have met and conversed. If they had done so they would prob- 

 ably have disagreed a good deal; and it is interesting to reflect that their discussions 

 might have embraced questions which at the present day are still hotly controverted. 



The old Ionian philosophy, then, seems to be only one of many results of a stirring of 

 the moral and intellectual life of the Aryan and the Semitic populations of western Asia. 

 The conditions of this general awakening were doubtless manifold : but there is one which 

 modern research has brought into great prominence. This is the existence of extremely 

 ancient and highly advanced societies in the valleys of the Euphrates and of the Nile. 



It is now known that more than a thousand perhaps more than two thousand years 

 before the sixth century B. c., civilization had attained a relatively high pitch among the 

 Babylonians and the Egyptians. Not only had painting, sculpture, architecture, and the 

 industrial arts, reached a remarkable development, but in Chaldea, at any rate, a vast 

 amount of knowledge had been accumulated and methodized hi the departments of gram- 

 mar, mathematics, astronomy, and natural history. Where such tracks of the scientific 

 spirit are visible naturalistic speculation is rarely far off, though, so far as I know, no re- 

 mains of an Accadian or Egyptian philosophy, properly so called, have yet been recovered. 



Geographically, Chaldea occupied a central position among the oldest seats of civiliza- 

 tion. Commerce, largely aided by the intervention of those colossal peddlers, the Phoeni- 

 cians, had brought Chaldea into connection with all of them for a thousand years before 

 the epoch at present under consideration. And in the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries 

 the Assyrian, the depository of Chaldean civilization, as the Macedonian and the Roman, at 

 a later date, were the depositories of Greek culture, had added irresistible force to the other 

 agencies for the wide distribution of Chaldean literature, art, and science. 



I confess that I find it difficult to imagine that the Greek immigrants who stood in 

 somewhat the same relation to the Babylonians and the Egyptians as the later Germanic 

 barbarians to the Romans of the Empire should not have been immensely influenced by 

 the new life with which they became acquainted. But there is abundant direct evidence of 

 the magnitude of this influence in certain spheres. I suppose it is not doubted that the 

 Greek went to school with the Oriental for his primary instruction in reading, writing, and 

 arithmetic, and that Semitic theology supplied him with some of his mythological lore. 

 Nor does there now seem to be any question about the large indebtedness of Greek art to 

 that of Chaldea and that of Egypt. 



But the manner of that indebtedness is very instructive. The obligation is clear, but its 

 limits are no less definite. Nothing better exemplifies the indomitable originality of the 

 Greeks than the relations of their art to that of the Orientals. Far from being subdued 

 into mere imitators by the technical excellence of their teachers, they lost no time in better- 

 ing the instruction they received, using their models as mere stepping stones on the way to 

 those unsurpassed and unsurpassable achievements which are all their own. The shibboleth 

 of Art is the human figure. The ancient Chaldeans and Egyptians, like the modern Japan- 

 ese, did wonders in the representation of birds and quadrupeds ; they even attained to some- 

 thing more than respectability in human portraiture. But their utmost efforts never brought 

 them within range of the best Greek embodiments of the grace of womanhood, or of the 

 severer beauty of manhood. 



It is worth while to consider the probable effect upon the acute and critical Greek mind 

 of the conflict of ideas, social, political, and theological, which arose out of the conditions 



