While Byzantine civilisation thus stagnated, the Saracen civilisation for a time actually gained by contact with it, inasmuch as Byzantium possessed, if it could not employ, the treasures of old Hellenic science and philosophy. The fact that such a fructification of an alien civilisation could take place while the transmitting community showed no similar gain, is tolerably decisive as to (a) the constrictive force of religious systems under certain conditions, and (b) the nullity of the theory of race genius. Yet these very circumstances have been made the ground of a preposterous impeachment of the "Semitic" character in general, and of the Arab in particular.
Concerning no "race" save the Celtic has there been more unprofitable theorising than over the Semitic. One continental specialist after another[374] has explained Semitic "faculty" in terms of Semitic experience, always to the effect that a nation has a genius for becoming what it becomes, but only when it has become so, since what it does not do it has, by implication, no faculty for doing.[375] The learned Spiegel, for instance, in his work on the antiquities of Iran, inexpensively accounts for the Jewish opposition to sculpture as a matter of race taste,[376] without even asking how a practice to which the race was averse had to be forbidden under heavy penalties, or why the same course was held in Aryan Persia. Connecting sculpture with architecture, he pronounces the Semites averse to that also; and as regards the undeniable building tendencies of the Babylonians, he argues that we know not "how far entirely alien models were imitated by the Semites."[377] Only for music does he admit them to have any independent inclination; and their lack of epos and drama as such is explained, not by the virtual inclusion of their epopees and early dramatic writings in their Sacred Books, and the later tabu on secular literature, but by primordial lack of faculty for epos and drama. The vast development of imaginative fiction in the Arabian Nights is credited bodily to the "Indo-Germanic" account, because it has Hindu affinities, and took place in Persia; and, of course, the Semites are denied a mythology, as by M. Renan, no question being raised as to what is redacted myth in the Sacred Books. For the rest, "the Semite" is not fitted to shine in science, being in all his branches "almost totally devoid of intellectual curiosity," so that what philosophy and science he has are not "his own"; and he is equally ill-fitted for politics, wherein, having no political idea save that of the family, he oscillates between "unlimited despotism and complete anarchy."[378] Apart from music, his one special faculty is for religion.
Contemporary anti-Semitism may fairly be surmised to underlie in part such performances in pseudo-sociology, which, taken by themselves, set up a depressing suspicion that numbers of deeply learned specialists contrive to spend a lifetime over studies in departments of the history of civilisation without learning wherein the process of civilisation consists. On Spiegel's method—which is that of Mommsen in dealing with the early culture-history of Rome—the Germanic nations must be adjudged to be naturally devoid of faculty for art, architecture, drama, philosophy, science, law, and order, since they had none of those things till they got them in the Middle Ages through the reviving civilisation of the Mediterranean and France. And as the Greeks certainly received their first impulse to philosophy and science through contact with the survivals of the old Semitic civilisations in Ionia, they in turn must be pronounced to have "neither a philosophy nor a science of their own"; while the Spartans were no less clearly devoid of all faculty for the epic and the drama. It is the method of Molière's doctors, with their virtus dormitivus of opium, applied to sociology.
The method, nevertheless, is steadily popular, and is no less freely applied to the phenomena of Arab retrogression than to those of imperfect development in the Semitic life of antiquity, with some edifying results as regards consistency. Says a French medical writer:—
"There is no such thing as an original Arab medical science. Arab medical science was a slavish imitation from the Greek. And the same remark is true of all the sciences. The Arabs have never been inventors. They are enthusiasts, possessed with a passion for anything new, which renders their enthusiasm itself evanescent. And in consequence of this incapacity for perseverance, they soon forgot the lessons in medical science which they had once acquired from the Greeks, and have fallen back into a state of the most absolute ignorance."[379]
The method by which Arab defects are here demonstrated from the arrest of Arab civilisation is a simple extension of that by which Spiegel demonstrates the original deficiencies of the ancient Semites, and Mommsen the incapacity of the Latins to do what they did not do. A certain race or nation, having at one time attained a considerable degree of civilisation, and afterwards lost it, is held to have thus shown a collective incapacity for remembering what "it" or "they" had learned. The "they" here is the correlative of M. Taine's "we"—a pseud-entity, entirely self-determining and strictly homogeneous. The racial misfortune is set down to a fault pervading the whole national character or intellect, and peculiar to it in comparison with other national characters. Conditions count for nothing; totality of inherited character, acting in vacuo, is at once the summary and the judgment. Anyone who has followed the present argument with any assent thus far will at once grant the futility of such doctrine. "The Arabs" had neither more nor less collective faculty of appreciation and oblivion than any other equally homogeneous people at the same culture-stage. It is quite true that they had not an "original medical science." But neither have any other historical "they" ever had such. The Greeks certainly had not. The beginnings of medical knowledge for all mankind lay of necessity in the primeval lore of the savage; and the nations which carried it furthest in antiquity were just those who learned what others had to give, and improved upon it. The Greeks must have learned from Asia, from Egypt,[380] from Phœnicia; and the Romans learned from the Greeks. The Arabs, coming late into the sphere of the higher civilisation, and crossing their stock in the East with those of Persia, in the West with the already much-mixed stocks of Spain, passed quite as rapidly as the Greeks had done from the stage of primitive thought in all things to one of comparative rationality as regards medicine and the exact sciences; and this not in virtue of any special "enthusiasm" for new ideas, but by the normal way of gradual collection of observations and reflection upon them, in communities kept alert by variety of intercourse, and sufficiently free on the side of the intellectual life. Such was the state of the Saracens in Persia and Spain in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries; and their social evolution before and after is all a matter of natural sequence, not proceeding upon any peculiarity of collective character, but representing the normal reactions of character at a given culture-stage in special political circumstances.
What is peculiar to the Saracen civilisation is its sudden origin (taking Islam as a history by itself)[381] under conditions reached elsewhere only as climax in a long evolution. The rise of Islam has the twofold aspect of a barbarian campaign of plunder and a crusade of fanaticism; and though the prospect and the getting of plunder were needed to ripen the fanaticism to full bloom,[382] the latter was ultimately a part of the cementing force that turned a horde into a community. The great facilitating conditions for both were the feeble centralised system maintained by the Christianised Empire, and the disintegrating force of Christianity as a sectarian ferment. In Egypt, for instance, the hatred between rival schools of Christian metaphysic secured for the Arabs an unresisted entrance into Alexandria.[383] It needed only a few generations of contact with higher culture in a richer environment to put the Saracens, as regards art and science, very much on a level with the stagnating Byzantines; and where the latter, possessed of their scientific and philosophical classics, but imprisoned by their religion, made no intellectual progress whatever, the former, on the same stimulus, progressed to a remarkable degree. There has been much dispute as to the exact measure of their achievements; but three things are clear: (1) that they carried the mathematics of astronomy beyond the point at which it had been left by the Greeks; (2) that they laid the foundations of chemistry; and(3) that they intelligently carried on surgery and medicine when the Byzantines, having early in the Christian period destroyed the Asklepions, which were in some degree the schools of the medicine of antiquity, had sunk to the level of using prayers and incantations and relics as their regular means of cure. Curiously enough, too, the Saracens had the merit, claimed for the Byzantines, of letting their women share rather freely in their culture of all kinds.[384] What is more, the later Saracens of Spain, whatever the measure of their own scientific progress, were without question a great seminal force in the civilisation of Western Christendom, which drew from them its beginnings in mathematics, philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine, and to some extent even in literature[385] and architecture,[386] to say nothing of the effect on the useful arts of the contact of the Crusaders with the Saracens of the East.
As to Arab medicine, see Withington, as cited, pp. 139, 170; and Sprengel, History of Medicine, French tr. vol. ii (1815), pp. 262-64—a passage which contradicts Sprengel's previous disparagements. Compare p. 343. The histoire particulière in this chapter (v of Sect. 6) generally countervails the hostile summaries. Sprengel proceeded on the prejudice (i, 215) that there was no "rational science" anywhere before the Greeks; as if there were not many irrational elements in the science not only of the Greeks but of the moderns. A much better qualified historian of Arab medicine, Dr. Lucien Leclerc, writes (Histoire de la médecine arabe, 1876, i, 462) that in the eleventh century "the medical productions [of the Arabs] continue to develop an independent aspect, and have already a certain stamp of originality. Already the Arabs feel themselves rich on their own footing. We see appearing certain writings not less remarkable for the novelty of the form than for the value of the substance." Again, Dr. Ernst von Meyer, the historian of chemistry, sums up (Hist. of Chemistry, M'Gowan's tr. 2nd ed. p. 28), that "the germs of chemical knowledge attained to a marvellous growth among the Arabians." It may be noted that there is record of a hospital in Bagdad at the beginning of the ninth century, and that there were many there in the tenth (Leclerc, i, 559).
A rational argument is brought against Semitic "faculty" by Dr. Cunningham, it should be admitted, in the contention that the Phœnicians figured poorly as copyists of Greek art (Western Civilisation, p. 69, following Renan). But this argument entirely ignores the element of time that is needed to develop any art in any civilisation. The Phœnician civilisation was overthrown before it had time to assimilate Greek art developments, which themselves were the work of centuries even in a highly favourable set of conditions. Nöldeke, though less unscientific than Spiegel, partly follows him in insisting that Phœnician architecture copied Egyptian, and that the later Semites copied the Greek, as if the Greeks in turn had not had predecessors and guides. Starting with the fixed fallacy that the Semites were "one-sided," he reasons in a circle to the effect that their one-sidedness was "highly prejudicial to the development of science," while compelled to admit the importance of the work of the Babylonians in astronomy. (Sketches from Eastern History, Eng. tr. pp. 15-18.)