THE -INCONCLUSIVENESS OF FEELINGS 429
tory going on for a historian to feel quite safe.*1 In May 1793 Gibbon
fled from Lausanne for the insular asylum of which he was a native.
Racing breathlessly round the wide arc described by the east bank of the
Rhine while revolutionary French armies were bartering the fortresses
guarding the western approaches to the river, the historian-refugee
managed to make his way to England via Holland; but his Muse had
been silenced and his spirit broken; and he added nothing to his laurels
before his death on the i6th January, 1794.

The verdict on an eighteenth-century Western Society's self-satisfac-
tion was

'Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you; for so did their
fathers to the false prophets.'2

'I have said: Ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High;
but ye shall die like men and fall like one of the princes.'3

Nemesis was the inevitable consequence of hybris in both Hellenic and
Hebraic belief;4 and the nemesis which a Modern Western Society in-
vited by succumbing to a Gibbonian Weltanschauung was the death that
had overtaken so many other representatives of the species. Intimations
of mortality from experiences of the French Revolution might have been
expected to have been the last testament of an English man of letters
who had lived to see the French Revolution break out two years after he
had finished writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire; but Gibbon left the message to be delivered, sixty years after his
death, by a French aristocrat of perverse yet, in some points, prescient
genius, Count J. A. de Gobineau (vi'Debat AJ>. i8i6-82),5 who was born
in the year following the close of the General War of AJD. 1792-1815,
and who published his Meisterwerk late enough to include Western
Industrialism as well as Western Democracy in his prophetic indict-
ment, and to find the death's head that was to be*his grand piece justifica-
tive in the wreckage, not of Rome, but of Tiahuanaco.6

'Pour la vapeur et toutes les decouvertes industrielles, je dirai aussi,
comme de rimprimerie, que ce sont de grands moyens; j'ajouteral que
Ton a vu quelque fofs des precedes n£s de decouvertes scientifiques se
perpetuer a 1'etat de routine, quand le mouvement intellectuel qui les
avait fait naitre s1etait arrete pour toujours, et avait laisse perdre le secret
theorique d'oii ces proce'des emanaient. Enfin, je rappellerai que le bien-
€tre materiel n'a jamais ete qu'une annexe exterieure de la civilisation, et
qu'on n'a jamais entendu dire d'une socie"te qu'elle avait vecu uniquement
parce qu'elle eonnaissait les moyens d'aller vite et de se bien v§tir. . . .

*Nous croyons, nous, que notre civilisation ne perira jamais, parce que
nous avons rimprimerie, la vapeur, la poudre a canon. L/imprimerie, qui
n*est pas moins connue au Tonquin, dans Pempire d'Annam et au Japon
que dans PEurope actuelle, a-t-elle, par hasard, donn6 aux peuples de ces
contrees line civilisation meme passable ? . . .

1 Young, G. M.: Gibbon, 2nd ed. (London 1948, Hart-Davis), p. 172.

* Luke vi. 26. 3 ps. ITTTM. 6-7. ^ + See IV. iv. 345-^1.

s The political background of de Gobineau's racial theory of History has been indicated
in II. i. 216-17.

6 For Tiafauanaco, see die passage of a work by P. A. Means that has been quoted in
the present Study in II. i. 322.