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98 and the brilliant Greco-Roman civilisation would have had no successor, or after a time, thanks to municipal institutions, and when the waters of destruction had found their level, a certain form of social order, a coarse copy of the society of the ancients, would have been gradually established. In the latter case it is easy to foresee to what a height of civilisation we should have attained. China is there to give us an idea of it. Hollow forms which only serve to hide, and that faintly, a state of barbarism in social habits, a hopeless want of moral vigour and taste for the infinite, a certain barrenness and incorrigible shallowness of mind, the grossest superstitions joined to the most listless indifference to religious and scientific truth—such would have been our condition. It is quite possible that under such circumstances the recollection of a human being indistinctly known by the name of Pythagoras would have floated in our memories as the Buddha of the West. We should have had our Mussulmans brought by the invasion of the Arabs, but no change would have