Euphrates. Thus in the
intellectual world there is a continuity stretching back six thousand
years or more to the beginnings of recorded civilization. More than once
the continuity is nearly broken, but some strand is always preserved,
and it is in this continuity in the world of ideas that we get the main
evidence of such progress as human history reveals.

The foundations of material civilization were laid in Egypt and in
Babylonia, where the progress made in agriculture and the industrial
arts implies a considerable body of empirical knowledge of physics and
chemistry at an early date. We have Egyptian textbooks of arithmetic
dating from the eighteenth and perhaps from the twelfth dynasty. We have
texts dealing with the rudiments of geometry. Empirical chemistry
appears to be of Egyptian origin, the word itself is referred to the
Egyptian term for black earth--and to have passed to the Arabs, who made
it into a quantitative science, without greatly interesting the
scientific mind of Greece. Careful astronomical records extending over
thousands of years were kept both in Egypt and Babylonia, and upon them
a considerable body of astronomical knowledge was built up. But there
is no evidence of a scientific interest detached at once from theology
and industry. In theology itself Egyptian learning early became
dissatisfied with the popular deities, and sought for a unity of the
godhead either in some one supreme deity such as the sun or, more often,
in a mystical identification of all the gods as so many incarnations or
impersonations of a single principle. But though these and kindred
speculations were not without influence on Greek thought, the entire
achievement of Egypt in this direction, so far as known to us, was of
little importance as compared with that of other oriental civilizations.

Thus without underestimating a debt which the Greeks themselves
acknowledged, it remains true to regard science and philosophy alike as
in essence an original creation of the Greek genius. What grew up in
Greece during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. was the spirit of
disinterested inquiry proceeding on rational methods. By the term
disinterested I mean detached from ulterior objects. Geometry for the
Greek was something more than the art of land measurement, astronomy
something more than a means of regulating the calendar or foretelling an
eclipse. It was a study of the nature of the heavens, an attempt to
penetrate the constr