Introduction 23 



impressed by the forces of nature, and given to a less 

 eventful life and consequently more contemplative 

 habits, can be explained only on the supposition of a 

 gradual emancipation of the western mind, and an 

 increased capacity for abstract generalization. The 

 acceptance of monotheism involves such capacity. 



(3) The renaissance shows a greater emancipation, 

 and a higher capacity of the mind to deal in abstrac- 

 tions ; otherwise Greek and Roman culture could have 

 appealed to the European mind no more strongly than 

 to the minds of other peoples similarly exposed. 



(4) Finally, the return to nature was not a sudden 

 revolution, though it culminated in the French Revo- 

 lution, but a growth of years and decades. 



These steps may, doubtless, be natural steps in 

 mental evolution. It is only after these phases had 

 been passed through, when the peoples of western 

 Europe had become aware of the knowledge and 

 arts of the human race as a whole, that development 

 of science in the modern sense was possible. This 

 may also be true, to a certain extent, of the individual. 

 It is doubtless true that to pass from childhood into 

 the purely scientific stage would be to abridge the 

 natural course of development. Had Europe re- 

 mained in the earliest phase of development, we could 

 have had no greater control over nature to-day than 

 have the savages of central Africa or the American 

 Indian. Had Europe remained in the humanistic 

 stage of the seventeenth century, modern science 

 would have been as little developed among us as it 

 is among the Hindoos. Hindooism is a clear case 

 of arrested development; and there are many among 

 Europeans even now who are at the point of that 

 stagnation when the mind seeks its activities in sense- 

 less occultism. The caste system of India shows 

 what the human mind is capable of when divorced 

 from nature. It is the desire and aim of the Hindoo 



