According to Lecky, “The first stage to toleration in England was due to the spirit of scepticism encroaching upon the doctrine of exclusive salvation”; and “the extinction of the spirit of intolerance both in Catholic and Protestant countries--due to the spirit of rationalism--was the noblest of all the conquests of civilization.” But as rationalism itself is chiefly the consequence of scepticism and the result of inquiry, it is obvious that in a deeply fundamental sense, the world is very considerably indebted to science or the spirit of scepticism. Indeed all knowledge has arisen from experience, and the desire to search into the root of things--to know what is what. Without curiosity and scepticism, human thought would have long since stagnated and the world remained sunk in ignorance. As Ghazali says, “No knowledge without assurance deserves the name of knowledge.” Seeing is not always devouring. Curiosity is not necessarily gluttony, or “scepticism, that curse of the intellect,” as Victor Hugo calls it. Gluttony is unnatural, unwholesome, and bestial. It is not so much overdoing, as a flagrant abuse and outrage of a natural appetite. It is a kicking against the pricks--a flying in the face of Providence. But curiosity as an instinct direct from Nature is healthy, therefore the use of it as also wholesome stands in need of stimulus and encouragement. So Tennyson said of Shelley:-- “There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.” In this righteous sense Mohammed was curious. As one of her own selection, Nature had specially endowed him with curiosity. He was one of her human, sensitive plants. As an observer, all his senses were developed and on the alert. He not only saw, but felt every vibration that thrilled, as it were, the very soul of the first great mother. In every flitting cloud, as in every fugitive thought, he was conscious of an unseen Power. A look-out man rather than a prophet, it was thus he groped or rather felt his way until he felt God. “I feel that there is a God,” said La Bruyère, “and I do not feel that there is none: that is enough for me; the reasoning of the world is useless to me: I conclude that God exists.” It was in much the same vein of self-argument that Mohammed communed to himself. Having felt God, God became for him a necessity: more so even, an essential--an absolutism which banished all else from his mind. The thought that there was no God did not occur to him. But the thought that other gods could exist in the same universe with the one omnipotence was to him as monstrous as it was unthinkable. Besides Him there was no room for any other. The very thought in his estimation perished from inanition and sheer inability of conception! The trinity of Christianity was to him as impossible and unacceptable as the antediluvian or later polytheism of his own countrymen.