It meant that certain persons or inanimate objects had been “set apart” from the rest of the world, that they (to use the Hebrew equivalent) were “holy” and must not be discussed or touched on pain of instant death and everlasting torture. A fairly large order but woe unto him or her who dared to disobey the will of the spirit-ancestors. * * * * * Whether the taboo was an invention of the priests or the priesthood was created to maintain the taboo is a problem which had not yet been solved. As tradition is much older than religion, it seems more than likely that taboos existed long before the world had heard of sorcerers and witch-doctors. But as soon as the latter had made their appearance, they became the staunch supporters of the idea of taboo and used it with such great virtuosity that the taboo became the “verboten” sign of prehistoric ages. When first we hear the names of Babylon and Egypt, those countries were still in a state of development in which the taboo counted for a great deal. Not a taboo in the crude and primitive form as it was afterwards found in New Zealand, but solemnly transformed into negative rules of conduct, the sort of “thou-shalt-not” decrees with which we are all familiar through six of our Ten Commandments. Needless to add that the idea of tolerance was entirely unknown in those lands at that early age. What we sometimes mistake for tolerance was merely indifference caused by ignorance. But we can find no trace of any willingness (however vague) on the part of either kings or priests to allow others to exercise that “freedom of action or judgment” or of that “patient and unprejudiced endurance of dissent from the generally received cause or view” which has become the ideal of our modern age. * * * * * Therefore, except in a very negative way, this book is not interested in prehistoric history or what is commonly called “ancient history.” The struggle for tolerance did not begin until after the discovery of the individual. And the credit for this, the greatest of all modern revelations, belongs to the Greeks. CHAPTER II THE GREEKS How it happened that a little rocky peninsula in a remote corner of the Mediterranean was able to provide our world in less than two centuries with the complete framework for all our present day experiments in politics, literature, drama, sculpture, chemistry, physics and Heaven knows what else, is a question which has puzzled a great many people for a great many centuries and to which every philosopher, at one time or another during his career, has tried to give an answer.