"The towns which arose along the coast of Asia Minor and on the Greek mainland were no longer administration centers of an irrigation society. They were trading towns in which the old-time feudal landlords had to fight a losing battle with an independent, politically conscious merchant class. ...The merchant trader had never enjoyed so much independence, but he knew that this independence was the result of a constant and bitter struggle. The static outlook of the Orient could never be his. He lived in a period of geographical discovery comparable only to those of sixteenth-century Western Europe; he recognized no absolute monarch or power supposedly vested in a static deity. ...he could enjoy a certain amount of leisure, the result of wealth and of slave labor. He could philosophize...The absence of any well-established religion led many... into mysticism, but also stimulated its opposite, the growth of rationalism and the scientific outlook."