756 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

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.'1

In these concluding paragraphs Gibbon—prudently recollecting cer-
tain considerations that had emerged from a celebrated controversy be-
tween the respective champions of the Ancients and the Moderns2—is
at pains to refrain from drawing too optimistic a conclusion from the
cumulativeness and collectiveness of Mankind's progress in Technology.
He readily admits that the wind of individual genius bloweth where it
listeth ;3 and he goes so far as to concede that the corporate culture-pat-
tern of a civilization may be precarious. He is content to follow Turgot4
in making for Technology the relatively modest claim that the humbler
skills providing an agrarian society's fundamental necessities of life 'can
never be lost* ;s and twentieth-century Western sociologists and econo-
mists would perhaps find little to quarrel with in this Gibbonian thesis.
Yet a Western historian who had lived to see the moral collapse of the
Western Civilization in the twentieth century would hesitate to follow
Gibbon in assuming it to be self-evident that a recrudescence of canni-
balism in the Western World was quite so unlikely as a discontinuance
of agriculture there; and, in agreeing that 'the imperfect cultivation of
corn or other nutritive grain and the simple practice of the mechanic
trades' are 'hardy plants' which 'survive the tempest and strike an ever-
lasting root into the most unfavourable soil', a twentieth-century Wes-
tern Christian, would certainly not 'acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion
that every age of the World has increased, and still increases, . . . the
happiness,... and perhaps the virtue', as well as 'the knowledge, ... of
the Human Race.' Indeed, on the morrow of a Second World War that
had laid Europe and Eastern Asia in ruins, a Western historian writing
in A.D. 1952 might also be inclined to dispute even the proposition that
'the real wealth* of Mankind was inevitably increased by the progress of
a Technology that could be used just as effectively for destruction as for
production.

Gibbon's unargued assumption that progress in Technology and pro-

1 [*5]. 'The merit of discovery has too often been stained with avarice, cruelty, and
fanaticism; and the intercourse of nations has produced the communication of disease
and prejudice, A singular exception is due to the virtue of our own times and country.
The five great voyages, successively undertaken by the command of his present Majesty,
were inspired by the pure and generous love of Science and of Mankind. The same
prince, adapting his benefactions to the different stages of Society, has founded a school
of painting in bis capital, and has introduced into the islands of the South Sea the
vegetables and animals most useful to human life.'

2 See pp. 62-73, above. 3 John iii. 8.

'Les arts mecaniques n'ont jamais souffert la meTne Eclipse que les lettres et lea
sciences sp6culatives.'—Turgot, A. R. J.; 'Plan du Second Discours sur 1'Histoire Uni-
verselle dont 1'Objet sera les Progres de 1'Esprit Humain,' in CEuvres, nouvelle Edition,
(Paris 1844, Guillaurnin, a vols.), vol. ii, p. 666. Compare eundem, 'Second Discours sur
lea Avantages que I'Etablissement du Christianisme a procures au Genre Humain'*
delivered at the Sorbonne on the nth September, 1750, ibid., vol. ii, p. 608, cited
already in this Study in. III. iii. 139, n. 3.

s Among the higher intellectual activities, the same claim ia made for mathematics
alone by Gibbon in another context: 'The mathematics are distinguished by a peculiar
privilege, that, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede*
(The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, lii, quoted on p. 701,
above),