The whole problem of Oriental "influence" has been obscured, and the solution retarded, by the old academic habit of discussing questions of mental evolution in vacuo. Even the reaction against idolatrous Hellenism proceeded without due regard to historical sequence; and the return reaction against that is still somewhat lacking in breadth of inference. There has been too much on one side of assumption as to early Oriental achievement; and too much tendency on the other to assume that the positing of an "influence" on the Greeks is a disparagement of the "Greek mind." The superiority of that in its later evolution seems too obvious to need affirming. But that hardly justifies so able a writer as Professor Burnet in concluding (Early Greek Philosophy, 2nd ed. introd. pp. 22-23) that "the" Egyptians knew no more arithmetic than was learned by their children in the schools; or in saying (id. p. 26) that "the" Babylonians "studied and recorded celestial phenomena for what we call astrological purposes, not from any scientific interest." How can we have the right to say that no Babylonians had a scientific interest in the data? Such interest would in the nature of the case miss the popular reproduction given to astrological lore. But it might very well subsist. Professor Burnet, albeit a really original investigator, has not here had due regard to the early usage of collegiate or corporate culture, in which arcane knowledge was reserved for the few. Thus he writes (p. 26) concerning the Greeks that "it was not till the time of Plato that even the names of the planets were known." Surely they must have been "known" to some adepts long before: how else came they to be accepted? As Professor Burnet himself notes (p. 34), "in almost every department of life we find that the corporation at first is everything and the individual nothing. The peoples of the East hardly got beyond this stage at all: their science, such as it is, is anonymous, the inherited property of a caste or guild, and we still see clearly in some cases that it was once the same among the Hellenes." Is it not then probable that astronomical knowledge was so ordered by Easterns, and passed on to Hellenes?