such as we know, would arise; but with the present distribution of land
and water, temperature and rainfall, and the complex of plants and
animals which results from their interaction, unity among the phenomena
of culture ceases to be practicable, and it has become hard for some (as
we have seen) even to keep their faith in the unity of human reason.

It was not, in fact, till a rather later stage in the growth of science,
either in the old world, or in our own, that anyone troubled himself
about the existence of such unity at all. That men of alien blood should
behave in alien and incomprehensible ways seemed to the Greek and to the
navigators of the Renaissance equally natural. And Herodotus and Bodin,
to name only pioneers and masters, are agreed as to the cause. Variety
in Man's behaviour is no impish trick of original sin: it is the
response of his single reason to variety in Nature. Only when experience
added intimacy with alien individuals to observations of their habits of
life, did a common humanity in their behaviour begin to be so frequent
and obvious as to cause surprise. Acquiescence in the discovery is
implicit in Thucydides and Hobbes, and confessed in Aristotle and Locke.
Had Europe broken into the Great East in Locke's day, as the Greeks
broke into Persia in Aristotle's, we might have had completer analogy
between the ethnology of Montesquieu and that of Eratosthenes than we
can actually trace. The defect in the writer of the _Lettres Persanes_
is in his knowledge of Persia, not of Paris and London: Eratosthenes, as
we remember, was born in Cyrene and worked in Alexandria.


MAN IN CONFLICT WITH NATURE IN THE NORTH-WEST QUADRANT OF THE OLD WORLD

We come now, from this rather general survey of human faculty, to the
more pertinent question, what sort of unity do we find in human