Note 9 — Chapter XI · RACIAL APTITUDES

“In matters of political and ordinary justice between man and man they fell short of their ideal often enough, but they had the reasonable ideal: the barbarians had none. The Egyptians were an imaginative race, but their imagination was untrammelled by the sense of proportion: their only thinker with reasonable and logical ideas, Akhenaten, soon became as mad a fanatic as any unreasonable Nitrian monk or Arab Mahdi. Ordinarily speaking, Egyptian and Semitic ideals were purely religious, and so, to the Greek mind, beyond the domain of reason. The Babylonians, Assyrians, and Phœnicians cannot be said ever to have possessed any ideals of any kind.”