Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/869

Rh works of eachof the greater ancient nations looking toward something it could not quite attain; taken up and carried on by some other people, which still fell short of the yet higher aim set before it, and so on. "Egyptian thought was characterized by crass confusion," analyzed nothing, had no clearness or consistency or power to discriminate and classify. Its ethics consequently remained unsystematized precept, and, "with all the picturesque elaborateness of a future life, no thought of spiritual immortality was reached." All its art and literature and religion, as we have them, point to this conclusion. In Babylonia the earliest Sumerian and Accadian peoples were subdued by the stronger but less cultivated Semites, who acquired their civilization and built upon it one distinguished by the strength and practical intelligence of its toil, which was sustained for twenty centuries. Then came the Assyrians, whose ideal was power and who created nothing. The Chinese had a mighty power of industry, with docility to national government, and the faculty of ethical formulation which produced their classics and their distinctive modes of thought. The Aryans of India possessed qualities of mind and spirit out of the reach of all these peoples, with a turn to philosophic thought, and were able to produce the Vedas, the Brahmanic philosophy, and its reaction. Buddhism. Those of Iran developed the ideas of a dual warfare between good and evil, with the final triumph of the good and of life over death, with the "grand and spiritual" conception of the supreme Lord of Good revealing himself to his prophet. The Greeks sought logical consistency, the highest beauty in things physical and mental, to make the most of life in its manifold aspects, and to get the most out of it. The Romans consolidated and exalted the family and the state, built up institutions, systematized the law, and constructed enduring public works, but originated little. The Hebrews held the conception of God, "one living personal, righteous, immediate in his governance of the world he made; and the supplementing thought of man created in his image, bound to obey his will and imitate his ways. The development and the greatening of the Hebrew personality was to lie in the enlargement of the thought of God, and in the endeavor to conform human conduct to his will and ways ever more largely known." Finally came Christianity, including and setting forth the highest and farthest possibilities of life; affording scope for the inclusion of all qualities and capacities of mankind, and for the development of the whole man in the service of God; predicating veritable relations between God and man; and touching and ordering all things in man's daily life.

All the world admires an adventurous spirit, and no one to-day holds a higher place in the world's esteem on this account than Fridtiof Nansen. The personality of this young man of thirty-five, who has already accomplished the only crossing of Greenland by a European and has at one leap advanced the farthest north point of arctic explorers by nearly three degrees, could not fail to be of deep interest, and the interest increases the more one knows of him. A fittingly picturesque account of his life and labors has been brought out in a handsome volume by the Messrs. Longmans. His biographers show us clearly that Nansen has always had