speculation is due to a variety of associations, partly incidental to the ordinary activities of our nineteenth-century life, partly peculiar to the character of our modern thought. The everyday life of Europe in general and of England in particular is now habituated to social contrasts greater than ever before fell within the positive range of human knowledge. While civilised nations stand face to face by aid of press, telegraph, steam-engine, their differences, once thought so considerable, have almost ceased to attract attention compared with the countless grades of Eastern and Western barbarism which adventure, commerce, or missionary zeal have brought home to us as living realities. At the same time, the historical faculty, in which Macaulay rightly places the great superiority of modern over ancient culture, enlarged by new ranges of comparison and contrast, has since the Renaissance and Reformation cast off the shackles which impeded its freedom in Athens and Rome. The overweening contempt for foreigners, which in the Greek and his imitative conqueror despised the lights of comparative inquiry lying all round their march of conquest, was impossible among the variety of nationalities and languages which rose out of the ruins of the Roman empire. The recovery of Greek literature, even while it diverted national literatures into imitations of itself, fostered this growth of conscious comparison. And, after the individual had dared to question the authority of creed with a freedom which Greece and Rome ventured to apply to their myths only when their vitality had perished, the fruits of historical criticism (untimely in the sneering nihilism of Voltaire and Gibbon) needed little but improved knowledge of India and the East in general to ripen into an abundant harvest. It is this harvest which the nineteenth century
