n 4 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



further examined. Nor are old methods superseded, but 

 at best enlarged and supplemented. 



As there are two phases in this development, so there 

 are two great impelling motives persisting throughout and 

 leading to very different forms of reconstruction. We saw 

 that the common-sense order not only failed on the side of 

 knowledge, but even more conspicuously in the matter of 

 the spiritual necessities of man. The craving for spiritual 

 satisfaction is as potent an influence, at least in the earlier 

 stage of reconstruction, as the desire for consistency, com- 

 pleteness or, to put it generally, for truth for its own sake, 

 and we may broadly distinguish attempts at reconstruction 

 in accordance with the dominant motive as primarily re- 

 ligious or primarily scientific and philosophical. But we 

 must not hastily assume any simple order of succession as 

 between the two. On the contrary, the religious and the 

 philosophical movements influence, and even interpenetrate 

 one another. Nor can we here endeavour to trace the 

 filiation of thought, for which indeed many links are 

 wanting. Just this much may be said. In the oldest 

 civilisations of Babylonia and Egypt, the early invention 

 of writing first made possible a connected development of 

 thought from generation to generation. The formative 

 sciences began to appear towards the close of the third 

 millennium B.C. We have an Egyptian text-book on 

 arithmetic with some matter of algebraical character, and 

 some geometry not pure land-measurement from the 

 1 8th dynasty, pointing back to sources as old as the I2th 

 dynasty. We have early Babylonian tables of squares and 

 cubes, and we have the early observational astronomy. 

 That is to say, we have the beginnings of an orderly and 

 systematic treatment of certain subjects. Further, through 

 the second millennium we have clearly in Egypt a growing 

 dissatisfaction with the traditional popular polytheism, and 

 an effort towards a more coherent and spiritual conception, 

 whether monotheistic or pantheistic in tendency. But it 

 is not till the first millennium, perhaps from about 800 B.C., 

 that we get a decided movement, and then during the next 

 three or four centuries we find something that looks like 

 a wave of higher impulse spreading over the centres of 



