THE INCONCLUSIVENESS OF FEELINGS 425
in an eighteenth-century Western World there was a consensus in this
sense, and the very passage of Gibbon's general observations that has just
been quoted may have been a half-conscious echo of a kindred passage
in Turgot's Second Discours, delivered at the Sorbonne on the nth
September, 1750, sur les Avantages que V&tablissement du Ckristianisme
a procures au Genre Humazn.

'Tout se rapproche peu a peu de 1'equilibre, et prend a la longue une
situation plus fixe et plus tranquille. L'ambition, en formant les grands
etats des debris d'une foule de petits, met elle-meme des bomes a ses
ravages; la guerre ne desole plus que les frontieres des empires; les villes
et les campagnes commencent a respirer dans le sein de la paix; les liens
de la societe unissent un plus grand nombre d'hornmes; la communication
des lumieres devient plus prompte et plus etendue; et les arts, les sciences,
les moeurs avancent d'un pas plus rapide dans leur progres. Ainsi que les
tempetes qui ont agite les flots de la mer, les maux inseparables des
revolutions disparaissent: le bien reste, et rhumanite se perfectionne.'1

As for Gibbon's optimism, this was so robust that it inveigled a tem-
peramentally sceptical eighteenth-century mind into committing itself
to a credulous declaration of faith in the perpetual progress, not merely
of the Western Civilization, but of Civilization in general.

* Since the first discovery of the arts, war, commerce, and religious zeal
have diffused among the savages of the Old and New World those in-
estimable gifts: they have been successively propagated; they can never
be lost. We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every
age of the World has increased and still increases the real wealth, the
happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the Human Race.*

The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire had been the
last chapter in the history of the breakdown and disintegration of the
Hellenic Civilization,2 and this disaster that had swept away an imposing
society had been within the knowledge of post-Hellenic Western Man
ever since the first shoots of a new civilization, affiliated to the defunct
Hellenic Society, had begun to sprout among the rubble of the fallen
empire's ruins at the turn of the seventh and eighth centuries of the
Christian Era. Gibbon had found the subject for a monumental work in
this debacle of a universal state which was also the debacle of the culture
which that oecumenical body politic had incapsulated; and, in the first
paragraph of his first chapter, he had described it as ea revolution which
will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the Earth*.
Can one contemplate a skull without being reminded of his own mor-
tality ? To a Western student of History in A.D. 1952 it was not at all sur-
prising that Gibbon's subject should have impelled him to inquire
whether his own Western Society might not be in danger of being over-
taken, in its turn, by an antecedent Hellenic Society's fate. From a mid-
twentieth-century Western angle of vision it did, however, appear
flmggmg that, when. Gibbon had once faced thia question, he should
have answered it, in transparent good faith, in the extravagantly opti-
mistic terms of the sentences above quoted,

i Turgot, A, R, J.: CEuvres (Paris 1844, Guillaumin, a vols.), voL ii, p. 599.
* See IV. £v. 58-63,