religion in that part of northern Europe which is about the Baltic
Sea. Thence the body of this people appear to have wandered toward
central Asia, where after ages of pastoral life in the high table
lands and mountains of their country it sent forth branches to India,
Asia Minor and Greece, to Persia, and to western Europe. It seems ever
to have been a characteristic of these Aryan peoples that they had an
extreme love for Nature; moreover, they clearly perceived the need of
accounting for the things that happened in the world about them. In
general they inclined to what is called the pantheistic explanation of
the universe. They believed a supreme God in many different forms to
be embodied in all the things they saw. Even their own minds and
bodies they conceived as manifestations of this supreme power. Among
the Aryans who came to dwell in Europe and along the eastern
Mediterranean this method of explaining Nature was in time changed to
one in which humanlike gods were supposed to control the visible and
invisible worlds. In that marvellous centre of culture which was
developed among the Greeks this conception of humanlike deities was in
time replaced by that of natural law, and in their best days the
Greeks were men of science essentially like those of to-day, except
that they had not learned by experience how important it was to
criticise their theories by patiently comparing them with the facts
which they sought to explain. The last of the important Greek men of
science, Strabo, who was alive when Christ was born, has left us
writings which in quality are essentially like many of the able works
of to-day. But for the interruption in the development of Greek
learning, natural science would probably have been fifteen hundred
years ahead of its present stage. This interruption came in two ways.
In one, through the conquest of Greece and the destruction of its
intellectual life by the Romans, a people who were singularly
incapable of appreciating natural science, and who had no other