do not hesitate to think of the English
character, English institutions, the English type as distinct from the
rest of the world, and we are right in so doing because there is a real
unity pervading all the differences. Just in the same way at a higher
remove there is a certain unity of character pervading the deeper and
wider differences that appear in the various centres of Western
civilization.

* * * * *

SECTION II.--UNITY OF ORIGIN

This unity of character is very largely due to continuous descent from a
common cultural ancestor. The civilization of the West is fundamentally
one not because the peoples of the West are one racially. They are not
so. They comprise every branch of the Aryan family and a considerable
admixture of quite other stocks. Their civilization owes its common
characteristics mainly to a common origin and continued interaction.
That is why it is in the mass a community of ideas, for ideas pass from
man to man and from nation to nation more readily than institutions,
more readily far than character, more readily perhaps than anything
except material goods. In the realm of ideas Western civilization forms
a single commonwealth of informal but of exceeding democratic
constitution. This freedom, indeed, it owes in large measure to its
international character, for there are constantly arising local and
temporary dictators, arbiters of fashion in the ideas of politics,
philosophy, and even of science. Within a narrow circle such a dictator
often has it all his own way, but it is seldom that he can maintain a
prolonged ascendancy throughout the international commonwealth unless
there is some pretty solid foundation for his doctrine.

This commonwealth has its foundations in the past. It derives in the
first instance from the unity of mediaeval Christendom, where it enjoyed
the advantage of a common language of learning, the gradual loss of
which is imperfectly compensated by the possession of two or three
modern languages alone by the educated man of the present day. Through
mediaeval Christendom and through the Arabic schools, which can hardly
be regarded as a part of Western civilization but in the Middle Ages
were rather its teachers, it derives from the Greco-Roman world, and
through the Greco-Roman world from the Greeks themselves. The Greeks in
their turn were aware that they owed the rudiments of their science to
the ancient civilizations of the Nile and the