its former habitants.

If we examine the ways of an infant we shall cease to wonder at those
of an infant civilization. Long before we can engage the curiosity of
the child in the History of England--long before we can induce him to
listen with pleasure to our stories even of Poictiers and Cressy--and
(a fortiori) long before he can be taught an interest in Magna Charta
and the Bill of Rights, he will of his own accord question us of the
phenomena of nature--inquire how he himself came into the world--
delight to learn something of the God we tell him to adore--and find
in the rainbow and the thunder, in the meteor and the star, a thousand
subjects of eager curiosity and reverent wonder. The why perpetually
torments him;--every child is born a philosopher!--the child is the
analogy of a people yet in childhood. [186]

XII. It may follow as a corollary from this problem, that the Greeks
of themselves arrived at the stage of philosophical inquiry without
any very important and direct assistance from the lore of Egypt and
the East. That lore, indeed, awakened the desire, but it did not
guide the spirit of speculative research. And the main cause why
philosophy at once assumed with the Greeks a character distinct from
that of the Oriental world, I have already intimated [187], in the
absence of a segregated and privileged religious caste. Philosophy
thus fell into the hands of sages, not of priests. And whatever the
Ionian states (the cradle of Grecian wisdom) received from Egypt or
the East, they received to reproduce in new and luxuriant prodigality.
The Ionian sages took from an elder wisdom not dogmas never to be
questioned, but suggestions carefully to be examined. It thus
fortunately happened that the deeper and maturer philosophy of Greece
proper had a kind of intermedium between the systems of other nations
and its own. The Eastern knowledge was borne to Europe through the
Greek channels of Asiatic colonies, and became Hellenized as it
passed. Thus, what was a certainty in the East, became a proposition
in Ionia, and ultimately a doubt, at Athens. In Greece, indeed, as
everywhere, religion was connected with the first researches of
philosophy. From the fear of the gods, to question of the nature of
the gods, is an easy transition. The abundance and variety of popular
superstitions served but to stimulate curiosity as to their origin;
and since in Egypt the sole philosophers were the priests, a Greek