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24 Yet, whatever may be the influence exercised by Semitic peoples upon the world, and whatever may be the forces that have originated with them, they were themselves influenced by this world strongly and variously. The forces put out by the great culture-peoples of former times do not run in parallel lines, but intertwine and intermingle. That which goes forth as flood may return as an ebb-tide. No one people is exclusively the giver, no one entirely the receiver. The commerce of the human mind is like unto that of the body. The giver of to-day is the receiver of to-morrow. And so it has been with the Semites. Japheth has dwelt in the tents of Shem; but Shem, also, has not spurned the habitations of his brother. A good deal of the mythology of ancient Greece has its roots in the religious conceptions elaborated by Babylonian priests; many of the legends about the gods on Olympus have their origin in the stories told about Anu and Bel and Tammuz. But, in later times, Greece repaid its debt to the East, by giving it a philosophic terminology and the framework for a systematic theology. The whole Mohammedan and Jewish philosophy of the Middle Ages, reaching back to that curious fusion of East and West in the Neo-Platonic Schools of Alexandria, is but an echo of the thoughts elaborated by Stoics and Peripatetics in ancient Hellas. Jewish tradition has the conceit that Plato and Aristotle imbibed wisdom at the feet of the Rabbis: a quaintly Eastern method of acknowledging this dependence. It is true that Babylonian astronomy and medicine and mathematics laid the basis for the labors of Ptolemaeus, Galen, Hippocrates, and Euclid; but, at a later time, their works were translated into Eastern tongues and their names became household ones for Syriac, Hebrew, and Arabic literati. In our own day modern Arabic and Hebrew belles-lettres are strongly under the influence of the great writers of Western Europe, and a great many of the works of Shakspere, Dante, Goethe, Racine, and Moliere can be read in Semitic translations. It is these influences of the most