This view is partly rejected by Grote in two passages (pt. i, chs. xvi, xvii, ed. 1888, i, 326, 413) in which he gives to the "inherent and expansive force" of "the Greek mind" the main credit of Greek civilisation. But his words, to begin with, are confused and contradictory: "The transition of the Greek mind from its poetical to its comparatively positive stage was self-operated, accomplished by its own inherent and expansive force--_aided indeed, but by no means either impressed or provoked_ from without." In the second place, there is no basis for the denial of "impression or provocation" from without. And finally, what is decisive, the historian himself has in other passages acknowledged that the Greeks received from Asia and Egypt just such "provocation" as is seen to take place in varying degrees in the culture-contacts of all nations (chs. xv, xvi, pp. 307, 329). Of the contact with Egypt he expressly says that it "enlarged the range of their thoughts and observations." His whole treatment of the rise of culture, however, is meagre and imperfect relatively to his ample study of the culture itself. Later students grow more and more unanimous as to the composite character of the Greek-speaking stock in the earliest traceable periods of Hellenic life (cp. Bury, _History of Greece_, ed. 1906, pp. 39-42, and Professor Burrows, _The Discoveries in Crete_, 1907, p. 144), and the consequent complexity of the entire Hellenic civilisation. The case is suggestively put by Eduard Meyer (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 155) in the observation that while the west coast of Greece had as many natural advantages as the eastern, it remained backward in civilisation when the other had progressed far. "_Here there lacked the foreign stimulus_: the west of Greece is away from the source of culture. Here, accordingly, primitive conditions continued to rule, while in the east a higher culture evolved itself.... Corinth in the older period played no part whatever, whether in story or in remains." The same proposition was put a generation ago by A. Bertrand, who pointed out that the coasts of Elis and Messenia are "incomparably more fertile" than those of Argolis and Attica (_Études de mythologie et d'archéologie grecques_, 1858, pp. 40-41); and again by Winwood Reade in _The Martyrdom of Man_ (1872, p. 64): "A glance at the map is sufficient to explain why it was that Greece became civilised before the other European lands. It is nearest to those countries in which civilisation first arose ... compelled to grow towards Asia as a tree grows towards the light." But to this generalisation should be put the qualifying clause (above, p. 55) that fertile coasts when developed are defensible only by a strongly organised community.