and yet reverent--identical with that which happily is beginning to
prevail in our own day. They defied those very volcanic and
meteoric phenomena of their land, to which their countrymen were
slaying their own children in the clefts of the rocks, and, like
Theophrastus's superstitious man, pouring their drink-offerings on
the smooth stones of the valley; and declared that, for their part,
they would not fear, though the earth was moved, and though the
hills were carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters
raged and swelled, and the mountains shook at the tempest.

The fact is indisputable. And you must pardon me if I express my
belief that these men, if they had felt it their business to found a
school of inductive physical science, would, owing to that temper of
mind, have achieved a very signal success. I ground that opinion on
the remarkable, but equally indisputable fact, that no nation has
ever succeeded in perpetuating a school of inductive physical
science, save those whose minds have been saturated with this same
view of Nature, which they have--as an historic fact--slowly but
thoroughly learnt from the writings of these Jewish sages.

Such is the fact. The founders of inductive physical science were
not the Jews; but first the Chaldaeans, next the Greeks, next their
pupils the Romans--or rather a few sages among each race. But what
success had they? The Chaldaean astronomers made a few discoveries
concerning the motions of the heavenly bodies, which, rudimentary as
they were, still prove them to have been men of rare intellect. For
a great and a patient genius must he have been, who first
distinguished the planets from the fixed stars, or worked out the
earliest astronomical calculation. But they seem to have been
crushed, as it were, by their own discoveries. They stopped short.