Max Weber: Selections in Translation

It is both inevitable and right that someone who is himself the offspring of modern European civilisation should approach problems in world history with the following question in mind: through what concatenation of circumstances did it come about that precisely, and only, in the Western world certain cultural phenomena emerged which, as at least we like to think, represent a direction of development of universal significance and validity?

Only in the West is there a ‘science’ which has reached a stage of development which we today would accept as ‘authentic’. In other cultures, especially in India, China, Babylon and Egypt, we can find empirical knowledge, reflection on the problems of the world and of life, philosophical and theological wisdom of great profundity (though the full development of a systematic theology is unique to Christianity, as influenced by Hellenistic thought, and is only hinted at in Islam and some Indian sects), and extremely sophisticated scholarship and observation. But Babylonian astronomy, like every other, lacked the mathematical foundations first laid by the Greeks: a fact which, indeed, makes the development of Babylonian astronomy in particular all the more astonishing. In Indian geometry there was no concept of rational ‘proof’ – another product of that Greek genius which also created mechanics and physics.