, contributed
powerfully to give stability to the societies in which they arose. The
younger Pliny points out later the calming effect of Greek astronomy on
the minds of the Eastern peoples, and we are bound to carry back the
same idea into the ancient settled communities where astronomy began and
where so remarkable an order prevailed for so long during its
preparation.

But however great the value we allow to the observations of the priests,
it is to the Ionian Greeks that we owe the definite foundation of
science in the proper sense; it was they who gave the raw material the
needed accuracy and generality of application, A comparison of the
societies in the nearer East to which we have referred, with the history
of China affords the strongest presumption of this. In the later
millenniums B.C. the Chinese were in many points ahead of the
Babylonians and Egyptians. They had made earlier predictions of eclipses
and more accurate observations of the distance of the sun from the
zenith at various places. They had, too, seen the advantages of a
decimal system both in weights and measures and in the calculations of
time. But no Greek genius came to build the house with the bricks that
they had fashioned, and in spite of the achievements of the Chinese they
remained until our own day the type in the world of a settled and
contented, although unprogressive, conservatism.

Science then among its other qualities contains a force of social
movement, and our age of rapid transformation has begun to do fuller
justice to the work of the Greeks, the greatest source of intellectual
life and change in the world. We are now fully conscious of the defects
in their methods, the guesses which pass for observations, the
metaphysical notions which often take the place of experimental
results.[80] But having witnessed the latest strides in the unification
of science on mathematical lines, we are more and more inclined to prize
the geometry and astronomy of the Greeks, who gave us the first
constructions on which the modern mechanical theories of the universe
are based. We shall quote from them here only sufficient illustrations
to explain and justify this statement.

The first shall be what is called Euclidean geometry, but which is in
the main the work of the Pythagorean school of thinkers and social
reformers who flourished from the seventh to the fifth centuries B.C.
This formed the greater part of the geometrical truth known to mankin