Abstract

In at least two of his writings, F. S. C. Northrop some time ago suggested an interpretation of the spiritual foundations of Oriental and Occidental civilization which he used as a basis for understanding, among other things, their differing approaches to moral and legal order. Rooted primarily in Biblical and Greek sources, the West, he said, has concentrated on and developed the theoretic component of experience. This component is one wherein the nature of things is taken to be, not the directly observable material of sense and immediate experience, but rather that which is designated by theory through the rational construction of hypotheses and theories. Nature, so to speak, is not the nature found in the directly experienced, but that postulated or inferred by reason and science as lying “behind” or “above” direct experience and accounting causally for it.