ng anything like a general prevalence
of tolerance or of free-thinking. And this brings us to the second
point,--that Mohammedan civilization was, on the whole, rather a
skin-deep affair. It was superficial because of that extreme severance
between government and people which has never existed in European
nations within historic times, but which has always existed among the
principal races that have professed Moslemism. Nowhere in the Mohammedan
world has there ever been what we call a national life, and nowhere
do we find in its records any trace of such an intellectual impulse,
thrilling through every fibre of the people and begetting prodigious
achievements in art, poetry, and philosophy, as was awakened in Europe
in the thirteenth century and again in the fifteenth. Under the peculiar
form of unlimited material and spiritual despotism exemplified in the
caliphate, a few men may discover gases or comment on Aristotle, but no
general movement toward political progress or philosophical inquiry
is possible. Such a society is rigid and inorganic at bottom, whatever
scanty signs of flexibility and life it may show at the surface. There
is no better illustration of this, when well considered, than the fact
that Moorish civilization remained, politically and intellectually, a
mere excrescence in Spain, after having been fastened down over half the
country for nearly eight centuries.

But we are in danger of forgetting our main theme, as Dr. Draper seems
to do, while we linger with him over these interesting wayside topics.
We may perhaps be excused, however, if we have not yet made any very
explicit allusion to the "Conflict between Religion and Science,"
because this work seems to be in the main a repetition en petit of the
"Intellectual Development of Europe," and what we have said will apply
as well to one as to the other. In the little book, as in the big one,
we hear a great deal about the Arabs, and something about Columbus and
Galileo, who made men accept sundry truths in the teeth of clerical
opposition; and, as before, we float gently down the current of history
without being over well-informed as to the precise didactic purpose of
our voyage. Here, indeed, even our headings and running-titles do not
materially help us, for though we are supposed to be witnessing,
or mayhap assisting in, a perennial conflict between "science" and
"religion," we are nowhere enlightened as to what the cause or character
of this confl