The Making of Humanity - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ...except to mention '" the triumphs of the Cross over the Crescent," and "the reclamation of Spain from the Moorish yoke," to the influence of Arab civilization--the history of the Prince of Denmark without Hamlet. Dr. Osborn Taylor has even achieved the feat of writing two large volumes on the development of The Mediceval Mind without betraying by a hint the existence of Muhammadan culture. That a brilliant and energetic civilization full of creative energy should have existed side by side and in constant relation with populations sunk in barbarism, without exercising a profound and vital influence upon their development, would be a manifest anomaly. That no such suspension of natural law was involved in the relation between Islam and Europe, is abundantly i Professor Bevan, Camb. Med. Hist. attested in spite of the conspiring of every circumstance to suppress, deform, and obliterate the records of that relation. Its extent and importance have been beyond doubt far greater than it is to-day possible to demonstrate in detail. Like the geological record of extinct life, our knowledge in the matter is derived from the scattered and accidentally preserved fragments of evidence which have been spared by forces universally tending to blot them out. When those conditions, when the obliteration of evidence, its distortion, the persistent prejudice and misrepresentation which fastens upon every single fact, are borne in mind, there can be no doubt that our estimate of that influence must err on the side of under-, rather than of overestimation. It is highly probable that but for the Arabs modern European civilization would never have arisen at all; it is absolutely certain that but for them1, i would not have assumed that...