It is customary to consider the ancients as people in a lower state of development, barbarous, superstitious, and even foolish, and to look upon our present-day generation as having attained the crest of an evolutionary process, as having reached a high degree whose glorious result--civilization--we perceive around us. That individuals existed in former times who were highly intellectual, knowledgeable, sane, and sensible is yet a notion that we who have been glamoured by Broadway skyscrapers and metropolitan railways find difficult to entertain. How did those early prehistoric Egyptians, with little experience and less machinery, construct such architectural masterpieces as the Pyramids? Where did they obtain astronomical knowledge so marvellously developed that they could calculate to a nicety the exact period of the revolution of the sun, the exact distance of the earth from the sun, and the exact circumference of the earth? Who taught them to construct the Great Circle of Gold which marked the positions of the rising and setting of the chief stars, to take observations of these stars with meticulous care and exactness, and to discover that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is always 3.1416? By what means did the Indians of the pre-Christian era arrive at so much mathematical knowledge? How did they come to invent the numeral and the decimal or to anticipate the discovery of the algebraic symbol and the trigonometric sine? How did the Chinese devise printing methods and publish newspapers more than a thousand years before they appeared in Europe? All these cultural developments could only have occurred among peoples who paid some regard to brains. How could the Orientals have known such things if they were entirely barbarous races, if they had not learned, cultured, and intelligent people among them? Thus reason reveals what arrogance denies. Those critics who laugh at the ancients merely because they are dead and did not have the good fortune to live so late as our twentieth century will yet learn the truth of the trite proverb that he laughs best who laughs last.
-- Notebooks Category 15: The Orient > Chapter 1 : Meetings of East and West > # 102
