If we go back to the origins of Western civilisation, we find that what it has derived from Egypt and Babylonia is, in the main, characteristic of all civilisations and not specially distinctive of the West. The distinctive Western character begins with the Greeks, who invented the habit of deductive reasoning and the science of geometry. Their other merits were either not distinctive or lost in the Dark Ages. In literature and art they may have been supreme, but they did not differ very profoundly from various other ancient nations. In experimental science they produced a few men, notably
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