r three generations to produce a
racer from a stock of draught horses. Evolution does not proceed by
such vaults as this would imply. Celt, Goth, Hun, and Slav must undergo
progressive development for many generations before the population of
northern Europe can catch step with the classical Greek and prepare to
march forward. That, perhaps, is one reason why we come to a period of
stasis or retrogression when the time of classical activity is over.
But, at best, it is only one reason of several.

The influence of the barbarian nations will claim further attention as
we proceed. But now, for the moment, we must turn our eyes in the other
direction and give attention to certain phases of Greek and of Oriental
thought which were destined to play a most important part in the
development of the Western mind--a more important part, indeed, in the
early mediaeval period than that played by those important inductions of
science which have chiefly claimed our attention in recent chapters.
The subject in question is the old familiar one of false inductions or
pseudoscience. In dealing with the early development of thought and with
Oriental science, we had occasion to emphasize the fact that such false
inductions led everywhere to the prevalence of superstition. In dealing
with Greek science, we have largely ignored this subject, confining
attention chiefly to the progressive phases of thought; but it must
not be inferred from this that Greek science, with all its secure
inductions, was entirely free from superstition. On the contrary, the
most casual acquaintance with Greek literature would suffice to show the
incorrectness of such a supposition. True, the great thinkers of Greece
were probably freer from this thraldom of false inductions than any
of their predecessors. Even at a very early day such men as Xenophanes,
Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Plato attained to a singularly rationalistic
conception of the universe.

We saw that "the father of medicine," Hippocrates, banished demonology
and conceived disease as due to natural causes. At a slightly later day
the sophists challenged all knowledge, and Pyrrhonism became a synonym
for scepticism in recognition of the leadership of a master doubter.
The entire school of Alexandrians must have been relatively free from
superstition, else they could not have reasoned with such effective
logicality from their observations of nature. It is almost inconceivable
that men like Euclid and