reasonings of the philosopher. But the Hebrew verb has few modal or temporal inflections, has, indeed, no proper tense, only forms that express an action as finished or unfinished, perfect or imperfect. Then, too, the Indo-European languages are rich in qualifying and copulative words, particles that can modify word or clause or sentence, and invest it with a meaning the practised eye alone can discover. But the Semitic tongues are, perhaps, poorer in modal, relational, and copulative particles than in anything else. And hence their capabilities are necessarily limited. Their style must be simple, can never become complex. They are lyrical rather than epic or dramatic, descriptive rather than metaphysical or oratorical.* They are so sensuous as to be eminently picturesque, but as eminently unscientific. As M. Renant has said, "To imagine an Aristotle or a Kant with such an instrument is as impossible as to conceive an Iliad or a poem like that of Job written in our metaphysical and complicated languages." And as is the speech, so is the mind it expresses. The qualities of the tongue are the qualities of the spirits that speak it.

And as the languages are, so have the literatures been. The Indo-European, whether his home has been India or

* Ewald, "Ausführliches Lehrbuch der Heb. Spr.," p. 30, 6th ed. +“Hist. des Langues Sémit.," 18. The views of M. Renan are admirably epitomized and illustrated by Mr. Farrar, "Families of Speech," pp. 118-128. I have also to confess my obligations here to Professor Steinthal's "Charakteristik der Hauptsächlichen Typen des Sprachbaues," pp.

241 ff.

Greece, Italy or Persia, England or Germany, has been able to shape his elastic and mobile speech into every variety of poetry. He has been lyrical, now in songs glowing with the warmth or moving to the rhythm of man's strong love, and again in hymns, here gushing from the soul like the spring bursting from the dark earth into the glad sunlight, there gliding like the hidden brook under leafy shades. He has been epical, too, now in an Iliad, where gods that are but magnified men and men that are hardly diminished gods gloriously mingle in battle and victory and defeat; now in a Ramayana or a Maha-Bharata, where are reflected the struggles through many centuries of priests and princes, peoples and faiths now in a Nibelungenlied, with its old yet ever fresh story of valour and love, jealousy and revenge. He has been dramatic, too, has made the tragedy the mirror of a moral order that could not allow its majesty to be insulted, and the comedy express his hatred of the new evil that was corroding the ancient good. But the Semite, intense and narrow, unequal to the sustained and lofty march of the epic,* to the subtle analysis and complex action of the drama, has been great in the lyric, the song the impassioned son of the desert sings to the maiden he waits to

s;

The Assyrian discoveries have, indeed, revealed the existence of Babylonian legends of an epic character, but they can hardly be regarded as Semitic pur et simple. See Schrader, "Die Höllenfahrt der Istar," p. 58. On the other hand, Steinthal, "Der Semitismus," "Zeitschr. d. Völkerpsychol.," vol. viii. pp. 339 ff.

bear away on his swift steed, in the psalm in which the penitent weeps his sorrow for sin, or the worshipper praises Him who is from everlasting to everlasting, or the victorious warrior extols the Lord who hath triumphed gloriously. The Indo-European has been philosophical and scientific, questioning nature, inquiring at man; but the Semite has been incurious, intuitive, so satisfied with his theistic conception as seldom to feel the need of travelling beyond it. The languages of the first are rich, but the second poor in oratory. The man who guides the Indo-European state is the orator, wise and persuasive in speech, able to save or serve the state as he can, by brave words give courage to her warriors, by prudent counsels guide her fathers, or by reason and passion weld into unity of action and purpose the incoherent demos. But the man who claims to guide the Semitic state is the seer, the prophet, the speaker for God, who in vision or ecstasy has received the word which he must speak to king and people and which they ought to obey. These are real, not imaginary, differences, patent in the respective languages and literatures, latent in the minds that made them. The races approach man and his problems from different standpoints, conceive and solve them differently, and the differences. which have thus arisen explain the work they have respectively done in the world of thought.

The purpose of this paper

III.

is to exhibit these differences

in their reciprocal and complementary action; in other words, to show how the mind of the one race has at once stimulated and supplemented the mind of the other. But before attempting to deal historically and critically with the differences, we must attempt to indicate their source.

The Indo-European and Semitic minds seem to differ in the general notion of nature and man, which is, as it were, the unconscious or implicit basis of all their conscious or explicit thought. The Indo-European appears to have had as its common first principle or starting-point a monistic, or natural, or cosmic conception; but the Semitic a conception dualistic, supernatural, theistic. To the one nature was living, selfexistent, creative; but to the other dead, caused, created. The Indo-European deities were natural, stood within, not above, nature, elements of the abiding yet transitory universe; but the Semitic were supernatural, stood above, not within, nature, its causes, not its creatures. Hence, as we have seen, the gods of the one family differed in names and nature, attributes and powers, from those of the other. To the one the idea of a divine creator was native, to the other alien. The Indo-European religions were all transfigured naturalisms. The one that became most ethical and spiritual-Zoroastrism-bore in its most distinctive features the evidences of its descent. Light and darkness, transformed into ethical entities, became

Ahriman and Ormuzd, the good and the evil spirit; and personalized Time, the infinite, creating, governing, yet devouring all things and beings. But the Semitic religions were in general supernaturalisms. Their gods were creators and lords, sources of life, causes of death, unwithered by time, untouched by decay.

Now, this difference in what may be termed the implicit premiss of every mental process, may be traced to a double cause, an ideal and a real, or a material and formal. The ideal or material cause was psychical, mental; the real or formal was physical, natural. There was a creative faculty which gave the matter, and a stimulating nature which supplied the form of the primal idea. The Indo-European, familiar with a varied and fruitful nature, conceived it as living; the Semite, with one monotonous and desert, conceived it as dead. Το the one the physical, to the other the personal, was the great creative force. The Indo-European, pre-eminently imaginative, conceived the whole as alive and the source of life; the Semite, pre-eminently ethical, conceived the individual as the source of being and authority. The one was objective, the other subjective; and so their standpoints were respectively natural and impersonal, and supernatural and personal.

These differences of standpoint and idea distinctly emerge in the respective mythologies. The IndoEuropean were cosmological, but the Semitic theological