of culture; and in Italy with the Umbrians, Oscans, and
Etruscans, who, little as we know of their antecedents, have left
us monuments to testify to their high development. The chief
reason why the racial mingling of a later day did not avail at
once to give new life to Roman thought was that the races which
swept down from the north were barbarians. It was no more
possible that they should spring to the heights of classical
culture than it would, for example, be possible in two or three
generations to produce a racer from a stock of draught horses.
Evolution does not proceed by such vaults as this would imply.
Celt, Goth, Hun, and Slav must undergo progressive development
for many generations before the population of northern Europe can
catch step with the classical Greek and prepare to march forward.
That, perhaps, is one reason why we come to a period of stasis or
retrogression when the time of classical activity is over. But,
at best, it is only one reason of several.

The influence of the barbarian nations will claim further
attention as we proceed. But now, for the moment, we must turn
our eyes in the other direction and give attention to certain
phases of Greek and of Oriental thought which were destined to
play a most important part in the development of the Western
mind--a more important part, indeed, in the early mediaeval
period than that played by those important inductions of science
which have chiefly claimed our attention in recent chapters. The
subject in question is the old familiar one of false inductions
or pseudoscience. In dealing with the early development of
thought and with Oriental science, we had occasion to emphasize
the fact that such false inductions led everywhere to the
prevalence of superstition. In dealing with Greek science, we
have largely ignored this subject, confining attention chiefly to
the progressive phases of thought; but it must not be inferred
from this that Greek science, with all its secure inductions, was
entirely free from superstition. On the contrary, the most casual
acquaintance with Greek literature would suffice to show the
incorrectness of such a supposition. True, the great thinkers of
Greece were probably freer from this thraldom. of false
inductions than any of their predecessors. Even at a very early
day such men as Xenophanes, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Plato
attained to a singularly rationalistic conception of the
universe.

We saw that "the father of medicine," Hippocrates, banished
demonology and conceived disease as due to natural causes. At a
slightly later day the sophists challenged all knowledge, and
Pyrrhonism became a synonym for scepticism in recognition of the
leadership of a master doubter. The entire school of Alexandrians
must have been relatively free from superstition, else they could
not have reasoned with such effective logicality from their
observations of nature. It is almost inconceivable that men like
Euclid and Archimedes, and Aristarchus and Eratosthenes, and
Hipparchus and Hero, could have been the victims of such
illusions regarding occult forces of nature as were constantly
postulated by Oriental science. Herophilus and Erasistratus and
Galen would hardly have pursued their anatomical studies with
equanimity had they believed that ghostly apparitions watched
over living and dead alike, and exercised at will a malign
influence.

Doubtless the Egyptian of the period considered the work, of the
Ptolemaic anatomists an unspeakable profanation, and, indeed, it
was nothing less than revolutionary--so revolutionary that it
could not be sustained in subsequent generations. We have seen
that the great Galen, at Rome, five centuries after the time of
Herophilus, was prohibited from dissecting the human subject. The
fact speaks volumes for the attitude of the Roman mind towards
science. Vast audiences made up of every stratum of society
thronged the amphitheatre, and watched exultingly while man slew
his fellow-man in single or in multiple combat. Shouts of
frenzied joy burst from a hundred thousand throats when the
death-stroke was given to a new victim. The bodies of the slain,
by scores, even by hundreds, were dragged ruthlessly from the
arena and hurled into a ditch as contemptuously as if pity were
yet unborn and human life the merest bauble. Yet the same eyes
that witnessed these scenes with ecstatic approval would have
been averted in pious horror had an anatomist dared to approach
one of the mutilated bodies with the scalpel of science. It was
sport to see the blade of the gladiator enter the quivering,
living flesh of his fellow-gladiator; it was joy to see the warm
blood spurt forth from the writhing victim while he still lived;
but it were sacrilegious to approach that body with the knife of
the anatomist, once it had ceased to pulsate with life. Life
itself was held utterly in contempt, but about the realm of death
hovered the threatening ghosts of superstition. And such, be it
understood, was the attitude of the Roman populace in the early
and the most brilliant epoch of the empire, before the Western
world came under the influence of that Oriental philosophy which
was presently to encompass it.

In this regard the Alexandrian world was, as just intimated, far
more advanced than the Roman, yet even there we must suppose that
the leaders of thought were widely at variance with the popular
conceptions. A few illustrations, drawn from Greek literature at
various ages, will suggest the popular attitude. In the first
instance, consider the poems of Homer and of Hesiod. For these
writers, and doubtless for the vast majority of their readers,
not merely of their own but of many subsequent generations, the
world is peopled with a multitude of invisible apparitions,
which, under title of gods, are held to dominate the affairs of
man. It is sometimes difficult to discriminate as to where the


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