To form some idea of the arbitrariness of schemes founded upon some universal characteristics, we have only to glance over the literature which sprang up as soon as Renan’s dictum was uttered, either to refute it, or to work his hypothesis still further—a regular host of dissertations fighting on this side or on that.[49] On reading these, we see clearly how worthless such clever fancies are, that enable one to embrace with a stroke of the pen a domain which geographically fills more than half of the inhabited world, and chronologically stretches from the highest antiquity down to the most recent time. For even Renan’s antagonists have fallen into his radical error: they have taken one-sided schemes and characteristics, only _different_ ones from Renan’s. How passive and elastic these schemes are, shall be shown by an example of some importance, which will convince us that the inferences drawn from ethnological characteristics are never anything higher than arbitrary sleight-of-hand, which any investigator can manipulate to his own purpose. To this end we will place side by side the inferences which Renan has tacked on to his hypothesis, and a talented German’s conclusions, which also essentially take Renan’s basis as the correct starting-point. We speak of Lange, who also starts from the principle that the Semites grasp natural phenomena in combination, the Aryans in multiplicity, and that therefore the former naturally incline towards Monotheism, and the latter towards Polytheism. But let us see to what windings and deductions this dogma leads on both sides. We hear Renan say: ‘Or la conception de la multiplicité dans l’univers, c’est le polythéisme chez les peuples enfants; c’est la science chez les peuples arrivés à l’âge mûr.’[50] Quite the contrary is affirmed by the German historian of Materialism, who says: ‘When the heathen sees gods everywhere, and has accustomed himself to regard every separate operation of nature as the domain of a special demonic action, he throws in the way of a materialistic explanation difficulties a thousandfold, like the offices in the Divine household.... But Monotheism here stands in a very different relation to science.’ ‘If a uniform mode of work on a large scale is attributed to the one God, the mutual connexion of things in their origin and action becomes not only a possible, but even a necessary consequence of the assumption. For if I saw a thousand and again a thousand wheels in motion, and believed them to be all driven by one agent, then I should have to conclude that it was a piece of machinery, the minutest portion of which had its movement absolutely determined by the plan of the whole.’ [51] ‘The fact that Islâm is the religion in which that advancement of the study of nature, which we attribute to the monotheistic principle, shows itself most clearly, is connected with the peculiar talents of the Arabs, ... but also undoubtedly with the circumstance that Mohammed’s monotheism was the