So was it with one instance. And so was it on the whole, generally. The guise in which nature presented herself to the eye of the Egyptian was grand and simple. Nature to him meant the broad beneficent river; the green plain; the naked bounding ridge on the right hand, and on the left; upon, and beyond these the lifeless, colourless desert; above, the azure depth traversed by the unveiled sun by day, and illumined with the gleaming host of heaven by night. Here were just five grand natural objects, and there were no more. We rehabilitating to our mind’s eye the scene, must add a sixth, the orderly, busy, thronging community itself. But to them these five objects were all nature. No dark forests of ancient oak, and pine; no jutting headlands; no island-sown seas; no hills watered from above, nor springs running among the hills; no cattle upon a thousand hills; no shady valleys; no smoking mountains. Just five grand objects; everywhere just the same, and nothing else. Their thoughts and sentiments could only have been a reflection of nature (their mind as a glass reflected nature), and of the instincts which the form of society nature had imposed upon them gave rise to. And their acts could only have been the embodiment of their thoughts and sentiments, which must needs have been in harmony with surrounding nature. And hence the character of the people, which was grand and simple; but withal sensibly hard, somewhat rigid and formal, without much tenderness, and with little geniality; solid, grave, and serious. Under such circumstances the individual was nothing. There could be no Homeric Chieftains; no Tribunes of the people; no eccentricities of genius. The community was an organism, of which every member had his special functions and purpose; a well-ordered machine which did much work, and did it smoothly. This complete organization of society—it was what the gifts and arrangements of nature had enabled them to attain to—had brought them face to face with the ideas of law and justice. But under their form of society—and it has not been different under other forms the world has since seen—it was understood that some laws, which were necessary, were not good, and that justice did not rule absolutely. We see—it shows itself in all that they did—that their minds were too thorough, and logical, to rest satisfied under these contradictions; they therefore worked out for themselves to its legitimate, and complete development the old Aryan thought of a life beyond this present existence: this was that western world of theirs, in which no law would be bad, and in which there would be no miscarriage of justice. And thus it came to be that their doctrine of a future life was the apotheosis of their social ideas of law, and justice, and right.