the object of faith is known, trusted, loved like an object of sight. The Semite believes as he perceives, his faith is, in a sense, sensuous. And hence its peculiar force, its power to inspire him, to utter itself in words that can inspire us. The Hebrew Psalms stand alone in poetry, mightiest and most moving utterances of faith in an invisible but realized God. What made the Semitic spirit so potent here made it impotent elsewhere. It has, indeed, in one of its most beautiful and perfect creations striven to become dramatic, to use the drama, too, as a theodicy. The Hebrew seldom felt that his sublime Monotheism needed defence. The ways of God justified, or would justify God. If they were dark and perplexing to the present, they would be bright and serene enough to the future. But there was one thing that puzzled even the Hebrewthe prosperity of the wicked, the misfortunes of the righteous. Once he had thought that a happy and prosperous life was the reward of God, certain to the obedient, impossible to the disobedient. But facts were too strong for his simple faith. The bad were often seen great in power, the good desolate and oppressed. Why these inequalities of lot? Why should a man serve God? For wealth or health, or something better, though less perceptible, than either? Out of these questions came the Book of Job, the nearest approach to a dramatic composition the Semitic spirit ever

made. It has, indeed, a significance far higher than the poetical; yet as a poem it has helped us to see in the Semite capabilities other than lyrical, real, though unrealized.

IV.

The reciprocal and complementary action of the Indo-European and Semitic minds in the field of philosophy is a great subject, worthy of patient and penetrative study. Here we can present it only in the baldest outline.

1.

The older Semitic peoples were non-philosophical. The later Greeks, indeed, seemed to regard the East as the wonderland whence all knowledge had come. The men of the Neo-Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic schools loved to send the fathers of Greek philosophy wandering through the Orient, gathering by intercourse and initiation and curious inquiry the secret lore of the ancients, and then to make them return to teach at home what they had learned abroad. But these pictures are for the most part fanciful and fictitious.* The older

* I regret that it is impossible to discuss here the many interesting and important questions connected with the relation of Greek philosophy to older and foreign thought. I hold Greek philosophy to have been, down to Aristotle and in a less degree after him, in everything essential native to Greece. The contrary was long the dominant opinion, but it

Greeks knew nothing of an imported philosophy. There was no philosophy for them to import. The East stimulated the West to philosophic thought, but not by giving it philosophies. It sent knowledge of men and nations, of the means of intercourse, of arts and industries, of individual doctrines or sciences, but not of any constructive or interpretative science of nature and spirit. The Semites were without the intellectual needs that create philosophy. They were related to nature was mostly based on authorities too recent to be trustworthy. The men of the Alexandrian schools were the great believers in the oriental origin of the Greek systems. Obligations acknowledged by the older Greeks relate chiefly to single doctrines in science. Herodotos (ii. 81, 123) believed that the Pythagoreans borrowed certain of their rites and their doctrine of transmigration from Egypt; but he does not go the length of deriving Pythagorean philosophy from a foreign source. Demokritos, as we know from himself (Clemens Alex., "Stromata,” i. c. xv.), was the most travelled man of his time; had seen and learned more of distin

guished barbarians than any contemporary Greek. But he expressly says that the Egyptian mathematicians did not excel him. The later story of his journey to India is evidently mythical. There is a passage in Plato on which both Ritter ("Hist. of Philos." vol. i. 151) and Zeller ("Geschichte der Philos." i. 23) lay great stress ("Repub." iv. 435), where love of money, the passion of the merchantman, is ascribed to the Phoenicians and the Egyptians, but love of knowledge, the passion of the philosopher, to the Greeks. If the latter had been obligated to the former to the extent that Philo and Iamblichus and Clemens represented, it is impossible Plato could have so denoted their distinctive characteristics. It is certain that the Greek mind was greatly stimulated by contact with what are called, with vague and inaccurate generality, the oriental nations, but the stimulus was not due to philosophies which existed there. Travel was a greater means of culture then than now, and the culture it gave helped to develop the philosophical capacities of the Greeks-a much better thing than giving them philosophies.

by sense rather than by intellect, interpreted it by faith rather than by reason, Their religion explained its being; and the explanation was sufficient. To desire more had been not only superfluous, but impious.

Philosophy was the peculiar and distinctive creation of the Indo-European spirit. Its faith idealized a living and present nature, had no dim intuition or distant theory of how it had begun to be. The Indo-Europeans did not think of asking in their spontaneous and imaginative period, how has nature come to exist. They were satisfied with the existing, the cosmos, which lived and created life. It was enough to know that Earth, the all-fruitful Mother, was folded in the embrace of Heaven, the all-fertilizing Father. The gods were by their very names held fast in nature, parts of the universal system, its first and highest born, but still its children, unable to transcend the limits imposed by their birth. Indra was to the Hindu the all-conquering, the beautiful, ruddy and lustrous as the sun, hurling thunderbolts which could pierce the clouds, the cities of the Asuras, but his functions were natural, not supernatural, those of a creature, not of a creator. Zeus was to the Greek the cloud-compeller, the wielder of the thunderbolt, the bright and beneficent deity to whom the Athenians prayed

ὅσον ΰσον, φίλε Ζεῦ,

but he was active in the system as made, had no relation to it as a maker. The Indo-European could not, like the

Semite, "through faith understand that the worlds were made by the word of God," for his god was in the world, one of its phenomena, needing to have his own being and becoming explained.

But a world unexplained by faith was a perpetual challenge to reason. The man could not remain for ever an imaginative interpreter of Nature, satisfied with the present, incurious as to the past. Its interpretation by the intellect was as necessary to the man as its interpretation by the imagination had been necessary to the child. The more the reason grew, the more it was confronted by the question-How has this universe of gods and men come to be? Once it was asked it could not but be repeated, each attempted answer but provoking another, the mind being at once fascinated and stimulated by the immense and gloomy depths into which it was compelled to look. Yet the search for the answer would be along lines determined by the implicit premiss. As there was no idea of a cause that transcended nature, the cause would have to be sought within it. But the search, though starting from one premiss, might be along two divergent lines, a subjective and objective. The subjective would seize the life immanent in nature and man, and resolve all phenomena into an emanation from it; the objective would seek the primal cause in what seemed the most active element in the world of visible appearances. The one would be metaphysical, the other physical, but