not only a possible, but even a necessary consequence of the assumption. For if I saw a thousand and again a thousand wheels in motion, and believed them to be all driven by one agent, then I should have to conclude that it was a piece of machinery, the minutest portion of which had its movement absolutely determined by the plan of the whole.'[1] 'The fact that Islam is the religion in which that advancement of the study of nature, which we attribute to the monotheistic principle, shows itself most clearly, is connected with the peculiar talents of the Arabs . . . , but also undoubtedly with the circumstance that Mohammed's monotheism was the severest of all.'[2] Auguste Comte also draws the same inferences from the tendency of Monotheism to develop a scientific conception of the world, and makes Monotheism and Scientific treatment exert a reciprocal influence on each other.[3] To which of these opposite deductions from the same premisses shall we hold? 'Which is right?' every educated man will ask, and immediately infer the in adequacy of such general characterisations, and the wide room thereby opened to arbitrariness and error, in case it should be attempted to erect upon them a history of civilisation or an ethnology.
Now this foundation is exactly that on which Renan's assumption of the absence of mythology from the Semites rests an assumption which can by no means be admitted, first, because it is unhistorical; and secondly, because it would necessarily follow from it that race-distinctions differentiate the psychological bases of intellectual activity. 'The Semites cannot form a myth,' is a proposition the possibility of which could be allowed only if such an assertion as 'This or that race has no digestive power, or no generative power,' could be treated otherwise than as an
