Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/142

126 poetic is the destiny of man; his melancholy vicissitudes, his uneasy search into causes, his just complaint against Heaven. We have no need to learn this from any one. The eternal school for this is the soul of each individual.

In Science and Philosophy we are exclusively Greek. The search into causes, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, is a thing of which there is no trace previous to Greece; a process we have learnt from her alone. Babylon had Science, but not the real element of science, an absolute fixidity of the laws of Nature. Egypt had knowledge of geometry, but she did not produce the Elements of Euclid. As to the old Shemitic mind, it was in its nature anti-philosophical and anti-scientific. In Job, the search into causes is almost represented as impiety. In Ecclesiastes, science is declared a vanity. The author, prematurely disgusted, vaunts his having learnt all that is under the sun, and of having found nothing but weariness. Aristotle, nearly his