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 construction of the material universe.  So with geometry.  It might begin as an investigation of the relations of particular triangles, squares, and oblongs, but it developed into an attempt to grasp the nature of space relations and to understand them as depending on simple common principles.  This is to say that in the hands of the Greeks these subjects first became sciences.  But a still greater subject also became in their hands matter for disinterested rational inquiry.  They developed what Aristotle called the science of Reality, or, as we call it, Philosophy—­the attempt to approach by the rational criticism of experience the problem of the nature and origin of the universe and of man’s place therein.  They propounded the fundamental questions which still occupy the highest intellects of mankind.  They laid the foundations of method and bequeathed to Europe the terminology which all exact thinking requires.  Even when we speak of method we are using an Aristotelian term, and when we distinguish one subject from another we are employing the Latin translation of the word which Aristotle introduced.  In a word, modern thought, scientific and philosophic alike, has a unitary origin.  It is derived from the Greek.