Contemporary anti-Semitism may fairly be surmised to underlie in part such performances in pseudo-sociology, which, taken by themselves, set up a depressing suspicion that numbers of deeply learned specialists contrive to spend a lifetime over studies in departments of the history of civilisation without learning wherein the process of civilisation consists. On Spiegel's method--which is that of Mommsen in dealing with the early culture-history of Rome--the Germanic nations must be adjudged to be naturally devoid of faculty for art, architecture, drama, philosophy, science, law, and order, since they had none of those things till they got them in the Middle Ages through the reviving civilisation of the Mediterranean and France. And as the Greeks certainly received their first impulse to philosophy and science through contact with the survivals of the old Semitic civilisations in Ionia, they in turn must be pronounced to have "neither a philosophy nor a science of their own"; while the Spartans were no less clearly devoid of all faculty for the epic and the drama. It is the method of Molière's doctors, with their _virtus dormitivus_ of opium, applied to sociology. The method, nevertheless, is steadily popular, and is no less freely applied to the phenomena of Arab retrogression than to those of imperfect development in the Semitic life of antiquity, with some edifying results as regards consistency. Says a French medical writer:-- "There is no such thing as an original Arab medical science. Arab medical science was a slavish imitation from the Greek. And the same remark is true of all the sciences. The Arabs have never been inventors. They are enthusiasts, possessed with a passion for anything new, which renders their enthusiasm itself evanescent. And in consequence of this incapacity for perseverance, they soon forgot the lessons in medical science which they had once acquired from the Greeks, and have fallen back into a state of the most absolute ignorance."[379]