?0 RENAISSANCES

and in a disintegrating Sinic World in the Age of the Posterior Han as
strong-boxes for preserving an accumulated cultural wealth that was
under threat of being lost through oblivion, and they had been revived,
as we have seen,1 in Orthodox Christendom and in the Far Kast as a
first step towards recovering command of the buried treasures of an
antecedent culture with a view to eventually bringing them back into
circulation out of these golden treasuries. In sheer physical bulk, the
monuments of a Far Eastern encyclopaedism dwarfed the most imposing
structures of the kind that the technological resources of the Modern
West had been able"to produce down to the time of writing, as royally as
the Pyramids at Gizah dwarfed the 'sky-scrapers' on Manhattan Island,
The novelty of the Late Modern Western encyclopaedias lay, not in
their structure or in their scale, but in their purpose and in their spirit;
for, in stealing this weapon from the armoury of a post-Diocletianic
Hellenism, the Western champions of 'the Moderns' against 'the An-
cients' in a seventeenth-century Western Kulturkampf were employing
it neither for the preservation nor for the resuscitation of a 'dead* culture
but for the assertion of a living culture's pretensions to bo worth more
than its predecessor's ghost.

The successive encyclopaedias that were published and republished,
on an ever larger scale and at ever shorter intervals, in a Lute Modern
Western World from A.D. 1695 onwards, were so many manifestos
giving notice of the Westerners' claim to have outstripped the wisdom
of the Hellenes, and so many comptes rendus of the progress achieved by
Western mental pioneers in virgin fields of knowledge, thought, and un-
derstanding. In the intellectual field of Mathematics, Natural Science,
and Technology, which was the realm of an Impersonal Collective Con-
sciousness, these self-confident Late Modern Westerners might prove in
retrospect to have been justified in their belief that they had made ori-
ginal and momentous contributions to the cumulative wealth of Man-
kind. In aesthetic, moral, and religious fields in which a Collective Intel-
lect's privilege of earning compound interest was denied to the seekers
after spiritual treasure, and in which every society, and indeed every
individual human being, was therefore forced to begin afresh Man's
perennial search for the Pearl of Great Price,* Time alone would ahow
whether an Occidental Faust was an any more acceptable candidate for
God's grace than an Hellenic Prometheus. Meanwhile, one thing was
certain; and this was that before the close of the seventeenth century of
the Christian Era a living and lively Western World had given a dead
Hellenism's imperious ghost an unequivocally clear notice to quit.

Can we put our finger on any distinctive feature in the linguistic and
literary renaissance of an antecedent civilization in the history of the
Western World that might account for the Westerners* success in even-
tually shaking off this cultural incubus by their own unaided efforts,
when this feat proved to be beyond the strength of both the Greek Ortho-
dox Christians and the Chinese ? We shall find at any rate one clue in the
contrast, which we have noticed already,3 between the spasmodic course

i On pp. s-7-|8, above. a Matt, xiii* 45-46.

s On pp. 62-63, above.