nd yet
reverent--identical with that which happily is beginning to prevail in
our own day. They defied those very volcanic and meteoric phenomena of
their land, to which their countrymen were slaying their own children in
the clefts of the rocks, and, like Theophrastus' superstitious man,
pouring their drink-offerings on the smooth stones of the valley; and
declared that, for their part, they would not fear, though the earth was
moved, and though the hills were carried into the midst of the sea;
though the waters raged and swelled, and the mountains shook at the
tempest.

The fact is indisputable. And you must pardon me if I express my belief
that these men, if they had felt it their business to found a school of
inductive physical science, would, owing to that temper of mind, have
achieved a very signal success. I ground that opinion on the remarkable,
but equally indisputable fact, that no nation has ever succeeded in
perpetuating a school of inductive physical science, save those whose
minds have been saturated with this same view of Nature, which they
have--as an historic fact--slowly but thoroughly learnt from the writings
of these Jewish sages.

Such is the fact. The founders of inductive physical science were not
the Jews: but first the Chaldaeans, next the Greeks, next their pupils
the Romans--or rather a few sages among each race. But what success had
they? The Chaldaean astronomers made a few discoveries concerning the
motions of the heavenly bodies, which, rudimentary as they were, still
prove them to have been men of rare intellect. For a great and a patient
genius must he have been, who first distinguished the planets from the
fixed stars, or worked out the earliest astronomical calculation. But
they seem to have been crushed, as it were, by their own discoveries.
They stopped short. They gave way again to the primeval fear of Nature.
They sank into planet-worship. They invented, it would seem, that
fantastic pseudo-science of astrology, which lay for ages after as an
incubus on the human intellect and conscience. They became the magicians
and quacks of the old world; and mankind owed them thenceforth nothing
but evil. Among the Greeks and Romans, again, those sages who dared face
Nature like reasonable men, were accused by the superstitious mob as
irreverent, impious, atheists. The wisest of them all, Socrates, was
actually put to death on that charge; and finally, they failed. School
after