ABSTRACT
One of the characteristics of the age people live in is that they are forever trying to explain it. That the analogy is striking no reader of Spengler will deny who can endure Spengler's procrustean determination to make the evidence fit the theory. Although the disposition to scientific thought may be said to have originated in remote antiquity, it was not until the Sixteenth Century of our era that it ceased to appear spasmodically and as if by chance. The Greeks had their schools on the shores of the iEgean, in Sicily, and in Alexandria, and in them some of the conclusions and much of the spirit of scientific inquiry was imaginatively anticipated. The active pursuit of science is a matter, then, of only a few hundred years. The practical consequences in the form of useful inventions are still more recent.
