The living past, a sketch of western progress

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THE LIVING PAST

THE

LIVING PAST

A SKETCH OF WESTERN PROGRESS

BY

R S. MARVIN, M.A.

SOMETIME SENIOR SCHOLAR OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
OXFORD

Gird on thy sword, O Man — thy strength endue,
In fair desire thine earth-born joy renew ;
Live thou thy life beneath the making sun,
Till Beauty, Truth, and Love in thee are one.

ROBERT BRIDGES.

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK
TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY

HUMPHREY MILFORD M.A.

PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY

PREFACE

PUBLIC interest in history is clearly on the increase.
There is, however, one obstacle to its effective study
which is growing likewise, and has in recent years become
serious and even threatening. Not only is mankind,
by thought and action, constantly accumulating the
material for fresh history, but our knowledge of the past
is, by the exploration of the world, by the discovery of
fresh documents, above all by the widening of our notion
of history itself, becoming immeasurably fuller and more
complex. The growing interest seems to run some risk
of being smothered by the abundance of its food.

The study needs a clue, especially in England where
our accustomed methods of teaching and the exigencies
of examinations have hitherto precluded the more general
view, and the student who comes to the great subject
in somewhat maturer years is apt to feel lost in its
immensity. The keen teacher anxious to extend his
knowledge and improve his methods, the workman in
his tutorial class, are well aware of the difficulty. It will
increase, for ourselves and others, as time goes on, unless
we take steps to meet it.

2234783

vi Preface

The clue which this little book follows is no new dis-
covery. It first came clearly into view with Kant and
the philosophers of the eighteenth century. Take Kant's
theory of universal history as the growth of a world-
community, reconciling the freedom of individuals and
of individual states with the accomplishment of a common
aim for mankind as a whole. Add to this the rising power
of science as a collective and binding force which the
century since Kant has made supreme. You have then
one strong clear clue which, with the necessary qualifica-
tions, seems to offer in the field of history something of
the guidance and system which Newtonian gravitation
gave to celestial mechanics in the seventeenth century.
The growth of a common humanity ; this is the primary
object to keep in view. But it will prove vague and
inconclusive, unless we add to it a content in the growth
of organized knowledge, applied to social ends.

The greatest encouragement which has occurred to
me during the two or three years spent upon the book,
came at the close, in Mr. Bryce's Address on April 3,
1913, as President of the International Congress of
Historical Studies. It agrees so strikingly and in so many
points with the view which I have suggested, that a few
words must be quoted. ' The world,' he said, ' is becom-
ing one in an altogether new sense. . . . More than four
centuries ago the discovery of America marked the first

Preface vii

step in the process by which the European races have
now gained dominion over nearly the whole earth. . . .
As the earth has been narrowed through the new forces
science has placed at our disposal . . . the movements
of politics, of economics, and of thought, in each of its
regions, become more closely interwoven. . . . Whatever
happens in any part of the globe has now a significance
for every other part. World History is tending to
become One History. . . . The widening of the field is
also due to a larger conception of History, which (through
the aid of archaeology) now enables us faintly to discern
the outlines of a process of slow and sometimes interrupted
development of mankind in the Old World during a
period each one of the divisions of which is larger than all
the time that has elapsed since our first historical records
begin.'

To write a small book on such a theme is to court
innumerable errors, but it enables me to ask one favour
of the reader, and it is this : whatever his own preference
may be, however keen his critical faculty, to . read the
sketch as a whole, and to give the author the benefit of
the doubt that his particular point may' be implied when
it is not expressed or only omitted in necessary deference
to the settled plan.

It will be obvious that the book, brief as it is, could not
have been completed without the suggestion and advice

viii Preface

of more friends than I can mention. But there are four
whose assistance I must here gratefully acknowledge by
name. Miss F. M. Stawell for helpful counsel in several
parts ; Mr. Frederic Harrison for stimulus and en-
couragement, and for reading a large part of the book
in manuscript ; Professor Gilbert Murray for criticism
of chapter 4 ; Mr. Lawrence Stratford for kind co-opera-
tion on the Index.

F. S. M.

May 20, 1913.

CONTENTS

i

PAGES

LOOKING BACKWARD 2-7

Man seems to become keen on moulding and improving the
future just as his interest and knowledge of the past increase.
' Thinking backward and living forward.' The idea of progress
needs definition. Clear advance discernible in at least three
great branches of human activity — knowledge, power over
Nature, and social organization. Necessary in tracing historic
progress to follow the clearest threads.

THE CHILDHOOD OF THE RACE .... 10-27
Man's tools have given the best concrete evidence of his
advance, from flint-axe to steam-engine. Prehistoric tools
identified in the middle of the nineteenth century led to the
mapping out of the stages of early culture. At first appear-
ance man already shows the main distinctive traits of human
superiority, fire, tools, language, art. But Eolithic remains
suggest stages by which he may have arisen from the purely
animal. Physical and intellectual development went hand in
hand. Service of anthropology in portraying the early process
as a whole. The two great stages of prehistoric culture,
Palaeolithic and Neolithic, clearly divided by their content,
and in England by physical conditions. England in earlier
stage joined to the Continent. Palaeolithic man inferior in
arts, except of representation ; survives the glacial period.
Extent of practical advance of Neolithic man well shown by
the perfection of his stone weapons and growth of social

x Contents

PAGES

organization. But on this side a strict limit, except for the
possibilities of abstract reasoning implied in language.
Wealth of early language and its relation with the germs both
of science and religion.

3

THE EARLY EMPIRES 30-45

Physical conditions necessary for larger settlements. Simi-
larity of development all over the globe. The Mediterranean
world selected for study in view of the sequel, and first the
two great river-valley civilizations east of the Mediterranean.
Their points of likeness. Chronology starting about four
millenniums B.C. Interpretation of hieroglyphic writing in
the last century has revealed an early world of thought. Its
dependence on religion, which was the basis of large, orderly,
and conservative communities. Next to this work of con-
solidation, the great contributions of these theocracies to
progress were the beginnings of measurement and writing.
Towards the first Egypt did most in measuring the land,
geometry, Chaldaea most in measuring the heavens, astronomy.
Alphabetic writing has a similar origin in both. Towards the
close of this period the movements of two sets of tribes herald
the approach of another age.

4

THE GREEKS 48-90

The last millennium B.C. is primarily the age of Greece and
contains the turning-point in history from a regime of tradi-
tional authority to one of freedom, inquiry, and progress.
The Greeks one of a more northerly group of tribes akin to
ourselves. Their geographical position promotes movement
and intercourse, while keeping them in touch with the older
civilizations. First third of their millennium a time of mari-
time expansion and settlement. Homer, the document of
their age, takes final shape towards its close. It arose in Ionia,

Contents xi

PAGES

the first home of the Greek spirit. Here ' philosophy ' was
also born, and here the first stand took place against the power
of the East. The origin of exact science in the geometry of
Thales and Pythagoras. The first efforts of abstract thinking
completed at the time when Athens, after the defeat of Persia,
becomes leader of the Hellenic world. Athens in the fifth
century B. c. represents the culmination of the Greek spirit in
the second third of their millennium. Plato and Aristotle
come at the close of this and usher in the last period of review,
the completion of Greek science and the decay of Greek
nationality. The wider conception now appears of human
brotherhood and the ' Inhabited World ' as fatherland. But
the scientific evolution persists after Macedonia and Rome
have suppressed the independent Greek states. Greek science
culminates in the last century B.C. with the foundation
of trigonometry and the consequent first sketch of a scientific
astronomy, and with the completion of a consistent body of
geometrical truths, including the beginnings of mechanics.
Side by side with the kindred ideas of abstract or general
truth in science and ideal beauty in art goes the development
of humane feeling. Herein also the Greeks were pre-eminent,
but their scientific achievement gives the clearest measure of
their advance.

5

THE ROMANS 92-117

The Latin tribes akin to the Greeks. Their geographical
position, and especially that of the city of Rome, important
factors in determining the historical evolution. The great
words which we inherit from their language well describe their
national work and compare significantly with the scientific
terms derived from Greek. They are social, legal, and consti-
tutional. The Roman millennium may be dated somewhat
after that of the Greeks, from whom they derived much, both
in early and later days. It extends into the fifth century A. D.,

xii Contents

and lasts transformed another millennium in the East. The
essential Roman movement begins at the close of the sixth
century B.C., when consular and senatorial government takes
the place of the primitive monarchy. Its development con-
sisted in the parallel extension of Roman power without and
equalization of civil rights within the city. This was com-
pleted early in the third century B. c. The second century
establishes their power in the Mediterranean : the last century
B.C. sees the old republican government crushed by the ex-
cessive weight of empire placed upon it. The five hundred
years of Empire were the consolidation of the Mediterranean
world and its gradual permeation by Greco-Roman ideas. Its
constructive effects were permanent and beneficial, though
the original organization wore out and fell into decay. Roman
laws the most striking embodiment of their genius and their
most valuable concrete legacy, comparable to the science of the
Greeks, and through Stoicism connected with Greek philosophy.

THE MIDDLE AGES . . . 120-137

Another millennium will cover the ' Middle Ages', from the
fifth century A. D., when the Western Empire breaks up, to the
fourteenth, when the Catholic-Feudal system falls into decay.
The centre of Western evolution during this period is to be
sought in the religious organization, and its achievement in
a further extension of the consolidation by Rome, and the
imposition of a uniform spiritual discipline on this larger area.
Around this new centre of spiritual life there is much disorder
in the political field. New nationalities forming on the ruins
of the old provinces, and general retrogression in science and
letters. The Papacy at Rome inherits some of the prestige of
the old Empire, and by the conversion of fresh nations extends
its power. At the middle point of the millennium the revival
of the Western Empire in alliance with the new spiritual chief
creates an ideal for mediaeval government. But the subse-

Contents xiii

quent triumph of the spiritual power over the temporal showed
its greater strength. It corresponded with needs felt by the
best men of the age, and was the guiding influence in its
greatest movements — the Crusades, the religious orders, the
universities, and scholastic philosophy. The thinkers of the
thirteenth century, and above all Dante, express the new
spirit as a discipline imposed by divine Love on all nations
and on the individual soul.

THE RENASCENCE AND THE NEW WORLD . . 140-166
By the end of the thirteenth century the Crusades and the
revival of study in the universities had set in motion new
currents of thought. The Papacy, by overstraining its au-
thority, fell in the fourteenth from its supremacy, and was
for a time in subjection. Meanwhile ancient literature and
thought were recovered first through Latin and later through
Greek authors. This discovery creates a fresh ideal for leading
thinkers outside the limits of church authority which had pre-
vailed for a thousand years. In the fifteenth century another
stimulus to mental and social movement comes from the ex-
ploration of new lands and new routes by the navigators,
culminating in the discovery of the New World at the close of
the century. The general ferment in men's minds assists the
break up of the old Catholic-Feudal system and the rise of
strongly organized national governments outside and some-
times opposed to the Papal order. The wealth flowing in from
the New World and the extension of commerce creates keen
rivalry between the rising Powers, but the general unity of
Western Europe and the similarity of moral and intellectual
ideas, induced by Roman and Catholic incorporation, still
persist. Shakespeare well represents this, leaning rather to
the older ways, while at the same moment the foundations are
being laid of the new science which is to transform the world.

xiv Contents

THE RISE OF MODERN SCIENCE . . . 168-193

The pioneers of modern science, as of the revival of learning,
appeared in Italy, which played in the fifteenth century
something of the role of Greece in the ancient world. The
scene of the best painting and art, it was also the first meeting-
place of men of science. Galileo, at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century, founds modern mechanics and by his telescope
enlarges men's view of the universe and leads to the formation
of the first consistent account of the phenomena of the heavens
by Newton. Newton, completing the work of his predecessors,
establishes qn a rational basis the theory which Copernicus
had first launched. This is one of the two main currents of
seventeenth-century science. The other is the development
of mathematical method, in which Descartes, Newton, and
Leibnitz play the chief part. The Royal Society founded to
promote physico-mathematical research. Scientific method,
thus elaborated, is an extension of Greek ideas, and akin to
language in unifying men's minds, as well as correlating the
phenomena which it describes. It becomes the most potent
link in human society.

9

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION . . . 196-216

Newton's death brings us to the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution. The new science is directly connected with the
new expansion of machinery through the steam-engine. A
series of improvements in the smelting of steel and iron also
take place about the same time. The decade 1760-70 saw the
first cotton-mill set up and the first feasible steam-engine.
The first Manchester steam-worked cotton-mill in 1789. Eng-
land becomes unquestioned leader in the new development,
largely through physical and geographical conditions. The
revolution means the factory as unit in industry in place of the
home. Much further specializing in labour goes with aggre-

Contents xv

gation of labour in factories and towns. The enclosures in the
country increase the drift into the towns. The towns promote
social organization of all kinds, and are essential to subsequent
reform. Thus science organizing industry has its human
corresponding to its mechanical side. But on the human side "
grave, if inevitable, drawbacks.

IO

THE REVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND POLITICAL . 218-240
The industrial revolution incomplete and even disastrous if
not accompanied by a change in the general aim of government
and all collective action. What this should be was expressed
by leading thinkers, especially of France and Germany, in the
latter part of the eighteenth century. Human efforts should
be combined to secure a state of greater freedom, happiness,
and enlightenment for every individual. Such an aim had
never before been adopted or even conceived by any govern-
ment. Applied suddenly, without regard to her past history,
and by men unequal to their task, it led in France to a military
and aggressive despotism, and ultimately to reaction. The
change in the temper of revolutionary France from freedom-
loving to conquering, alienates the sympathies of her best
friends, and the resistance of England was necessary and bene-
ficial. The final issue of the Napoleonic war is an age of
tempered and constitutional progress rather on English lines.
But many abuses and ancient obstructions had been cleared
away in its course. Other aspects of the new spirit which
caused the Revolution were an attachment to Nature, a deeper
and more emotional music, and freer and simpler types of
literature.

II

PROGRESS AFTER REVOLUTION . . . 242-263

From the time of the settlement of 1815 to the present there
has been marked growth, especially on those sides of human
life which were set out at the commencement — knowledge in

xvi Contents

the form of specialized science, power over nature by engineer-
ing and the application of science, and social organization, both
within each country and between different nations throughout
the world. But behind these the new spirit of humanity and
progress, which appeared before the Revolution, is at work. It
becomes active in France and England before the middle of the
century, and after various hindrances is now generally domi-
nant. Science, vastly extended, has become more biological
than mechanical. The ideas of motion and of growth first
introduced into mechanics in the seventeenth century now
permeate the whole of science. Science begins to co-operate
with the spirit of social reform, and has already effected an im-
provement in public health and the conditions of life. This
work of scientific reform brings the nations together and is
the strongest safeguard against international strife. Science,
engineering, common ideas and common interests, have now
made the world one in new and real ways ; the three leading
nations of Western Europe actually much more united than
some past differences might let us think. The Concert.

12

LOOKING FORWARD 266-272

The Western World now enclosing the Atlantic, as once the
Mediterranean, has become the dominant influence on the
globe. Man's power has from that centre stretched further
and further, and become immensely stronger in face of Nature.
At the same time he has become more humane, and especially
more careful of the weakest human thing, the child. The
child embodies for him three of his strongest interests, his
sympathy and pity, his interest in origins and growth, and his
interest in the future. He is in our own day devoted to the
future and to the child as he never was before.

APPENDIX ON BOOKS 274

INDEX 283

1
LOOKING BACKWARD

There are no dead.

MAETERLINCK.

1643

THE pious Japanese believe that the spirit of an ancestor
is more powerful than that of his living representative
on earth. To realize and acknowledge the link that binds
you to him is a primary duty, to carry on and extend
his fame would be your greatest glory.

This attitude exemplifies in a personal, religious way
the true relation of each succeeding generation to all
its predecessors, a relation which every step in historical
research renders more indubitable and imposing. The
past has made the present, and we, who are alive, have
the future in our keeping ; not that we can form it at
will, but that it already exists in germ in us, and that
we shall put upon it some impress, great or small, which
will be traced back to us by the retrospect of the future.
To those who realize this, history becomes a matter of
high practical import as well as of theoretical interest.

Two striking facts arrest us at the threshold which
seem at first sight in contradiction. On the one hand,
the past gains constantly in force, for mankind is accu-
mulating a greater store of knowledge and organized
strength, which must determine the character of the
future. On the other hand, by studying the past and
coming to understand the laws of its evolution each
generation acquires greater power as well as more desire
to control the sequel. To follow out this apparent con-
tradiction would lead us to the unfathomable problem
of freewill. But the actual historical solution is evident
and encouraging to our purpose. Man seems to solve it
at the moment, and by the very act of realizing it. For,
just as he begins to acquire some accurate notion of the

Looking Backward 3

infinite process which is gathering ever more and more
urgently behind, he first looks deliberately forward and
resolves to use his powers to modify the future according
to an ideal. Metaphysics apart, we know in fact that
' thinking backward ' has accompanied and inspired a new
and passionate effort for ' living forward '.

Though this is true generally of European or Western
thought since the latter half of the eighteenth century,
we cannot ignore the sceptics and reactionaries who
question either the reality of a forward movement in
history, or the desirability of conforming ourselves to it.
Some of them write books, many more talk and think, of
' civilization, its cause, and its cure '. But when we probe
the matter a little closely, we find that the paradoxes
are either partial or superficial, and that there is no
reason for doubting that general tendency towards human
betterment which is implied in the doctrine of ' thinking
backward and living forward '.

Note in the first place that such a general belief by
no means involves identifying ourselves with every feature
of the contemporary society which has issued from the
past. We may approve of the industrial revolution, and
work for its extension, while labouring to reform the
sordid and mechanical life imposed by it upon thousands
of our fellow men. We may be fighting the excesses of
a sensational press and yet defend the ' liberty of printing '
as one of the most precious achievements and guarantees
of human freedom. Our moral judgement in short,
though itself arising from an immemorial evolution, will
and must at any moment rise superior to the concrete
result of the historical process. We judge and we select

B 2

4 Looking Backward

among the fruits of civilization which time presents, but
we are ourselves part of that fruit, and our very judge-
ment is framed by a comparison of what man has done,
and of what we know him by his proved and inherited
powers to be capable.

With the moral ideal of society we are not here, except
indirectly, concerned ; but we need for our argument
some firm basis of admitted progress on which the threads
of the story may be spun. This is ready enough to hand ;
indeed, the nearness and simplicity of the facts in their
main outline are partly the reason why they are so
generally passed over by the professed historian. Take,
on the one hand, the state of primitive man as we know
him, from his earliest remains, from the study of the
savage and from biological analogy, and compare this
state with that of civilized man as we know him to-day,
and what are the most striking social and intellectual
differences ?

In the first place, civilized man — we speak of him, of
course, collectively throughout — has so vastly greater
a store of knowledge than the savage that the latter seems
by comparison to be as naked in mind as he is in body.
In the second place, the knowledge of the civilized man
is so organized — arranged and applied — that his power
is even greater in comparison with that of the savage
than is his knowledge. He weighs the planets and moves
mountains, while the savage throws stones and counts
to five. In the third place, whereas the savage lives in
small isolated communities, civilized mankind is organized
in closely-knit societies of considerable size, which for
many purposes form one great whole embracing the earth.

Looking Backward 5

Knowledge, power, social unity and organization —
here are three striking differences between the savage
and the civilized man, three differences in which pro-
gressive development can be easily traced, both in historic
and prehistoric times. It is not pretended that they
cover the field of history. Artistic development is touched
by them only incidentally. Law and government appear
as subordinate aspects of social organization. But if we
set out to establish and define the fact of human progress,
we are surely justified in giving the first place in our
treatment to those sides of human nature in which the
historic development is most marked. These will throw
light on the rest, which cannot, of course, be separated
or omitted except for the purpose of exposition.

Hitherto the political historian has practically appro-
priated the whole field, and one school of historians claims
the word ' history ' for political history alone. What
popular history of Greece gives any account of the work
of Archimedes, or even mentions Hipparchus ? Some of
the most approved histories of England allude to Newton
only as Master of the Mint. It is high time, especially
in England, for a determined effort to see and to present
the facts more nearly in their true proportions and, above
all, as a whole. If, as is obvious, the facts are too multi-
tudinous and complex to be comprised in any one formula,
we are only following the canons of any systematic study
in selecting those which give the clearest outline of the
whole to start with. History is the account of man's
achievements, and in particular of the achievements of
the Western leading branch of the human family which
now dominates the globe. Our measure of this achieve-

6 Looking Backward

ment, imperfect as it must necessarily be, is to take the
primitive savage, from whom it is agreed the process
started, and to compare with him the civilized man of
the leading type. We have noted what appear to be
two or three of the most salient differences. To sketch
the story of the change in pictures of well-marked outline
blending into one another, as we know all secular changes
have blended, whether of the earth's surface or of the
societies which have dwelt upon it, this would be a task
worthy of the supreme artist-historian of the future.
Victor Hugo gave us glimpses of it. Shelley could hear
' a great poem which all poets, like the co-operating
thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the
beginning of the world '. But no one has compassed the
idea in clear a'nd popular expression, basing it, as it must
be based, on the growth and application of organized
knowledge. There is a gulf not yet bridged between
the world of letters and of poetry in which Shelley, of
English poets, was the nearest to the conception, and
that of science and industry through which the trans-
formation of society has in our time been going on more
and more rapidly. Strange that the poets tarry in a world
full enough of wonders to make poets of us all ! The
steam-engine which ushered in our present age, and
marks it as surely as the polished axe marks neolithic
man, has already in little more than a century endowed
mankind with an obedient and inanimate force equal to
a thousand million men. No fact in history shows more
decisively the growth of human power and its connexion
with social organization and reform ; and it has taken
place in a moment. But it leads our thoughts backward

Looking Backward j

through ages of accumulating skill and science, and for-
ward to a time when man may be master of himself and
his conditions in ways we can hardly yet dream of, and
when the magic of mechanical art may set free the latent
powers of all for a life of varied exercise and happiness.

The typical portent of an age of factory smoke and
monotonous toil, if thus seen through and lived through,
would become a symbol of progressive human activity
subduing the world.

2
THE CHILDHOOD OF THE RACE

The Child is father of the Man :
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

WORDSWORTH.

FROM tool to tool, from flint axe to steam-engine, is
a striking, palpable measure of man's achievement from
his earliest beginnings to our own days. This must not
be understood to confine the idea of progress within the
limits of the mechanical arts or to suggest that mechanical
tools are the highest product of human intelligence. How
narrow such a view would be will appear before the end
of this chapter. But man's tool-making is so charac-
teristic and progressive, it brings together and exhibits
in working order so many of his powers, that if we were
isolating one aspect only of his activity, the series of his
tools would best display the growth of mind. His anti-
quity, his existence as man further back in geologic time
than had been dreamt of till a few years since, was first
suspected and then demonstrated by the discovery and
examination of his tools.

It had long been known that savage peoples, who had
not learnt the use of metals, made tools and weapons of
stone, and the Roman poet Lucretius two thousand years
ago made the sound and brilliant conjecture that man-
kind, advancing beyond the use of hands and nails and
teeth, had passed through the three ages of Stone, Bronze,
and Iron. But it was not till the middle of the last
century, coincidently with the establishment of a pro-
gressive geology and an evolutionary biology, that worked
flints and human remains embedded in caves and strata
revealed to mankind prehistoric ancestors fighting and
conquering tens and hundreds of thousands of years
before written history begins. LyelPs Principles of Geology

The Childhood of the Race 1 1

began to appear in 1830. Darwin's Origin of Species was
published in 1859. ^n tne interval a French antiquary,
M. Boucher de Perthes, had been speculating on the
origin of certain curiously shaped flints dug up with
remains of mammoth and rhinoceros in beds of gravel
on the slopes of the river Somme at Abbeville. He long
maintained the view that they were human tools, and
published an account of them as Antediluvian Anti-
quities in 1847; but it was discredited by the accepted
notions both of science and religion until the very year
of the Origin of Species, when an English deputation to
Abbeville returned fully convinced, and proclaimed the
discovery at a meeting of the Royal Society on May 19,
1859.

A scientific geology had opened the book of man's
earliest history : it remained for a world-wide study of
its pages, confirmed and corrected by the new biological
view of man's descent, to establish the fact that in many
and diverse regions, under similar conditions, there had
been living, in the remote though not the remotest past,
races of men who appear in its record soon after the
first of the apes, his nearest kin. Fortunately it is not
necessary for our purpose to enter into the question of
man's biological descent. The general conclusion is suffi-
ciently clear, though corroborating links and details are
still to seek. Much may, no doubt, remain concealed,
for our immediate pre-human ancestors, who would com-
plete the genealogical tree, may be embedded in strata
beneath the Indian Ocean, where some still look for
the true original of the garden of Eden. When we
consider, however, that the whole picture of man's

1 2

'The Childhood of the Race

earliest childhood which we possess has been deciphered
by the researches of the last fifty years, it would be
absurd to set any limits to the results which future
inquiries, following the same lines, may produce.

What we already know is sufficient for our purpose
here, and is after all only an extension and a confirma-
tion of those visions of man's ascent from a lower state
which flashes of genius suggested to many thinkers from
Lucretius onwards. The new discoveries enable us to
plan out the vast tract of geologic time, compared with
which historic time is but a minute in a day, and in rough
outline to sketch the main features of human development
which were laid down for all the sequel in those un-
numbered millenniums of pre-history.

Man's first appearance presents us with another aspect
of the great problem of the passage from past to future
from which we started. He appears already surrounded
and distinguished by the typical marks of human reason
and activity of which our later civilization is the un-
folding. He has his tools of various kinds : by these he
was detected. He can make fire and uses it to cook his
food. This we know by the charred bones among the
remains. And though we can have no direct evidence
of spoken language in a cave or bed of gravel, yet we are
assured by a study of the lowest living savages that
language, often of a varied and abundant kind, always
co-exists with such conditions as have been unearthed
from prehistoric times. He is thus distinctly man, and
each of these marks of his humanity is something new
and unknown to the highest of the lower animals with
whom we are compelled on general grounds to assign

The Childhood of the Race 13

him a common descent. Here, then, appears to be a sharp
breach in the continuity of past and present which sug-
gests a problem of surpassing interest. On the side of
bodily structure we passed it over, although this aspect
has received perhaps the closest approximation to a solu-
tion. On the intellectual side it is nearer to our subject
to consider what is really involved in the question. Can
we say that any one of those new and characteristically
human accomplishments, if analysed into its simplest
mental elements, contains a single trait or act not to be
paralleled among the animals ? Take tool-making. The
ape picks out the stone best fitted to break his nut : this
tool-using involves selection and the adaptation of an
external implement to carry out an imagined end. The
man notices that stones broken in a certain way will
cut as well as crush. He picks these out and then
begins to imitate the breakage by breaking others. Tools
of this simplest type have lately been discovered, to
which the name of Eolithic has been given. There
is nothing here different in kind from activities ad-
mittedly animal and found in various connexions among
the animals. Fire is no doubt an invention more difficult
to reconstruct with any certainty on any one theory :
probably it was arrived at by various routes. But in
a world much fuller of natural fires than now, it was
most likely to be reached early by a being whose wits
had been set working by his necessities and his success.
Language, of all problems the most intricate in detail,
seems in general principle the easiest to understand from
this point of view. All the latest researches have tended
to widen that basis of instinctive and imitative cries on

14 The Childhood of the Race

which we may suppose articulate speech to have been
built. If these suggested probabilities are accepted —
and we are in a region where certainty in detail seems
unattainable — then man's creative powers, his highest
attribute, are seen to be, like all things else we know,
the issue of a slow and often imperceptible process of
combining new material and movement with the old.
He becomes a maker, not by a sudden leap or inspiration,
but by a gradual extension of familiar acts, and this first
great step, which now stands out in sharp relief against
the background of time, was not essentially different from
that daily process of past to future which we noticed at
starting, and which contains in itself a perennial problem.
Often at later moments of recorded history there have
been creative acts which have produced things in them-
selves more marvellous, more to all seeming like an Athena
from the head of Zeus. Such are Greek science or modern
music. But in these cases there are links to be found,
and we are not dealing with those unfathomable abysses
of time in which we now know that the earliest creative
acts of man took place. In those long ages of change
and growth when human thought and activity were
slowly knit together, no wonder if some of the intervening
generations and stages in development have sunk out of
sight, like subsiding strata in the ocean. In the higher
animals, as in the lower races, the civilized man can trace
features of his past, embodied and alive : but to the
animals he looks across a gulf.

Besides his upright frame, man had from the first one
physical advantage over his nearest of kin among the
animals, which, small in itself, has had an incalculable

The Childhood of the Race iy

influence in promoting his advance : some have seen
in it the chief cause. Compared with the ape's, man's
feet and hands are so differentiated that the feet have
become a better basis for standing and the hands better
instruments for handling. The latter is the greater
difference and incomparably the more fruitful in results.
Man's hand is broader and — most important point — the
thumb is longer, more flexible and more opposable to
each of the ringers. He thus gains a means of grasping,
turning about, measuring and comparing, which is given
to no other being. He can handle and he becomes
handy. Looking at a series of stone implements, from
the rudely chipped flint of the gravel drift to the per-
fectly fashioned and finished axes of the Danish peat
moss, one might be content to sum up the prehistoric
evolution as a progress in handiness, and rest upon the
hand as the sufficient cause. Such a line of thought is
full of suggestion, especially for the right education of
the young human being, which should in broad outlines
represent the education of his kind. But as a complete
account of the actual process it would be one-sided to
the point of perversion. Hand and mind have worked
together from the beginning, and it would be at least as
probable to argue that advancing mind had occasioned
the selection of the fitter hand, as to conclude that the
developing hand brought with it an increase of mental
power. Both grew together, and one of the greatest
intellectual services that anthropology, or the study of
early man, can render, is to compel us, as it can in these
simpler times, to see the process of human evolution as
a whole, before it breaks up into the complexity of

1 5 The Childhood of the Race

branches which bewilders us in later times. In the same
way it is misleading, as some have done, to attempt to
isolate one intellectual faculty as the primary cause of
man's advance ; to say, for instance, that it was his
memory which gave him the advantage. We cannot say
that it was specially in memory that the first man out-
stripped his fellows, for in strength of memory it would
be easy to match man's power by the animals', and the
higher races by the lower. What we are rather led to
infer is that a general mental readiness, including quicker
observation and a greater power of adapting an old means
to a new end, was then as now the most potent force,
and that this was assisted by, and in turn promoted,
those advantageous differences in bodily structure which
were developing simultaneously. This is no scientific
explanation, but simply a statement of the problem as
a whole, putting foremost those two aspects of it on
which most seems to depend. What we see before us
is, that, at the earliest stage of which we have authentic
remains, man had already won his way to a position of
superiority. He was originally, no doubt, mainly fru-
givorous, like the apes ; but when we find him, he has
begun a career of successful warfare by killing other and
larger animals, using their flesh for food and their bones
for tools. This is the achievement of the Cave or Palaeo-
lithic man whose stage is so remote, so far below that
of the Danish peat moss or the Swiss lake-dwelling, that
it is only the facts that both used stone implements and
neither have left written records, that lead us to speak
of them together. For us in England the gap between
the Old Stone Age and the New is marked in the most

The Childhood of the Race 17

striking way by the fact that in the days of the Old
Stone men England was still a part of the continent of
Europe and the Ouse a tributary of the Rhine. This
Palaeolithic Age comprised the last glacial period in the
northern hemisphere, when glaciers extended over half
the continent of Europe and England had the present
temperature of Spitzbergen. The Old Stone men did
not first arise under such conditions as these : we know
them in our own country in far earlier times, when the
climate was more nearly tropical. But they lived through
the cold, the men with the least equipment of science or
external appliances facing and surviving the severest test
which nature has yet imposed upon the western world.
They had no arts but those of fashioning the weapons
of the chase, and those simple tools which would enable
them to flay the animals and sew their skins for coverings.
They could make a fire, but we have no evidence of the
rudest pottery. They could kill the wild animals, but
had not learnt to tame a single one as a companion in
the hunt. Among their remains there are no traces of
religious rites nor of the least respect paid to the dead.
There are no signs of any higher life, except their
marvellous drawings, some scratched on bones and horns,
which show the figures of men and animals with a charm
and truthfulness suggesting the artistic spirit of old China
and Japan. In this one point we know them to have
surpassed their successors of the Neolithic Age, and they
display that delight in reproducing their impressions,
that directness and completeness of perception which are
noticeable generally in children, and in such primitive
people as the Bushmen of our own day.

1543 C

i 8 The Childhood of the Race

A culture such as this spread doubtless over all the
habitable globe and filled by far the longest stretch in
human existence. It was the age of the hunter, and,
limited though his activities were, we know enough of
the powers of endurance involved, the unexampled train-
ing of the senses, the ingenuity of the devices of the
chase, to realize that through all its slow course man
was advancing and receiving an education of the most
thorough and fundamental kind. Little as we can ever
know of it, from one point of view this period must
always impress the imagination as no other can. These
human figures, the least human of all and apparently the
weakest for the task, were conveying to the future,
through untold ages, often against the greatest odds of
nature, the germs of an activity and a world of thought,
of which they had not themselves the smallest inkling.
The thought has something of the same effect upon us
as the contemplation of the cosmic forces of light and
gravitation and electricity, acting over the abysses of
space.

We have now to turn sharply to the other end of the
Stone Age, that period which just preceded the use of
metals. And if we are to attempt a brief estimate in
one composite picture of the sum of human achievement
before recorded history begins, two general considerations
must be borne in mind. One is that the process of change
throughout the prehistoric ages was by gradual, almost
imperceptible steps, well shown by the close sequence of
any series of prehistoric tools. The further back we go,
the slower seems the movement, the more unbroken the
descent. The other, that, though the broad outlines of

The Childhood of the Race 19

the evolution are similar throughout the world, and even
in detail we are often surprised by close resemblance, yet
great differences, both in the nature of the culture and
the speed of its development, were necessarily caused by
differences of natural environment. Eastern herdsmen
were tending their flocks on the plains, while Tierra del
Fuegians were heaping mussel-shells on their freezing
shores. How potent such external causes were we shall
have abundant evidence in later chapters. But coming
to Western Europe, we are able to realize with some
fullness the point which civilization had reached before
metals, on the scene which was to witness its highest
growth. It is really nearer to our own than to the
culture of the cave, and in point of time far nearer.
The continent had then taken its present shape. Great
Britain was an island and Europe severed from Africa.
The intercourse and influence of Asia on the western
world had been for some time vigorous. Grain and other
plants for food had been introduced from the East. All
the great fundamental arts, spinning, weaving, pottery,
as well as those connected with the tilling of the soil,
had long been practised. All the domestic animals which
we have since retained, but never increased, had been
tamed. It is but a step from this to the use of bronze
and iron, which, when first used, were fashioned closely
after the model of the tools of stone. How closely in
form may be seen by comparing an early bronze axe
with its prototype in stone. How closely in time is
shown in a vivid way by those peat-moss excavations
in Denmark, where three successive layers will be exposed
in one place, the top containing remains of beech-trees

c 2

20

The Childhood of the Race

with the iron axes used for cutting them, the second
layer oak with bronze, and the lowest, pine with the
polished stone-axe, which is the typical tool of the Neo-
lithic Age.

This tool, which we put first of concrete symbols,
deserves some special notice. When you examine them
in hundreds together at the Copenhagen Museum you
wonder if accuracy and finish in manual work could go
further. In fact their perfection shows us how short a
distance mere manual dexterity can take us on the course
of human activity subduing the world. It reaches its
highest point in the settled communities just before the
dawn of history, especially in the great civilizations of
which we speak in the next chapter and of which the
people of the East now retain most traces. In fashion-
ing these tools of stone — axes and hammer-heads and
arrows — the New Stone men were carrying to its con-
clusion the primaeval tradition of the men of the cave.

Their own special contribution to civilization con-
sisted in developing inventions and arts which have gone
on spreading in countless varieties and ramifications ever
since, and largely form the framework of later civilized
life. It would be out of the scale and purpose of this
sketch to describe any of these in detail. But one may
say in general that most of the fruitful practical devices
of mankind had their origin in prehistoric times, many
of them existing then with little essential difference.
Any one of them affords a lesson in the gradual elabora-
tion of the simple. A step minute in itself leads on
and on, and so all the practical arts were built up, a
readier and more observant mind imitating and adapting

The Childhood of the Race

21

the work of predecessors, as we imagined the first man
making his first flint axe. The history of the plough
goes back to the elongation of a bent stick. The wheel
would arise from cutting out the middle of a trunk used
as a roller. House architecture is the imitation with
logs and mud of the natural shelters of the rocks, and
begins its great development when men have learnt to
make square corners instead of a rough circle. And so
on with all the arts of life or pleasure, including clothing,
cooking, tilling, sailing, and fighting.

One or two reflections are suggested, which concern
the other aspects of the societies in which these things
took place and the ultimate tendency of human pro-
gress. One is the observation that this exuberant growth
in practical skill did not bring with it a corresponding
development in the artistic powers of expression which
were so remarkable in the more primitive man. There
is a marked comparative dearth of objects showing delight
and skill in representing external things : the artistic
impulse seems to have become absorbed in decorative
and formal work such as we find on the pottery in neo-
lithic remains. Such a diversion of interest and attention
is natural enough, and appears at many points in later
history.

Another more certain and far-reaching line of thought
concerns the positive implications of this advance in the
practical arts. What does it imply as to the general
social and intellectual level, how far does it take us on
the great highway ? It involves clearly a far higher
degree of social stability and organization. To build
a permanent dwelling and cultivate the soil implies the

22 The Childhood of the Race

collection in one place of a larger number of people for
a longer time than would be possible to hunters. Hunting
no doubt goes on, but it gradually becomes one among
other occupations. Now every such aggregation of indi-
viduals involves some form of social order and govern-
ment. Even the lower animals have this, and men when
they have their flocks and crops to share, and all the
growing complexities of relationship and inheritance to
settle, soon develop an order and a code of rules, minute
in detail and rigidly enforced. This leads to the recogni-
tion of some centre or organ of authority, the head of the
clan or tribe. On the more strictly moral and intellectual
side, there must be too, under such conditions, a great
advance in social feelings, in sympathy, in patience and
forbearance. This is not to overlook the barbarous and
inhuman customs which disfigure nearly all savage life.
Much of this is survival, much is dictated by the inflexible
laws of honour and religion. But settled life with many
people, in close and constant intercourse, pursuing various
occupations, brings with it necessarily a training in toler-
ance, in fellow-feeling, in common interests amid diverse
pursuits. The domestication of animals in itself involves
a persistence in kindly treatment and a careful study of
the character of other creatures, which connote a moral
calibre immensely higher than that of the first men of
the cave.

In all this we may mark advance, general and indis-
putable. But we have to ask ourselves how far on such
lines as these we can imagine human societies progressing
towards the goal which we now see was set before them.
The transformation of the wild huntsmen into the settled

The Childhood of the Race 23

village community, with varied arts, is a profound one,
and has given us much which is still part of the social
fibre. But it does not place man in a position from which
we can imagine those great steps forward which raise our
highest hopes. His march so far is pedestrian : it clings
to the needs of daily life and revolves in the routine.
He has to reach the stars and the future. Where in the
achievements hitherto described are we to look for the
impulse which is to carry him beyond the sphere of
practical interests into the region of world-embracing
and illimitable thought ? The roots of this later growth,
we may be sure, are to be found even in man's humblest
origins, for in no case can there be a full-blown flower
without a seed.

We turn back to the nature and history of language
which we saw reason to associate even with the scraping
of the reindeer's bones in the primaeval cave. Like all
his other activities, language is an art, which man de-
veloped slowly, advancing by minute steps in extension
and co-ordination from the crude and shapeless beginnings
which we can only imagine. But language has two quali-
ties which distinguish it from the other arts, and make
it the special instrument for carrying forward man's
organized activity beyond the working necessities of the
small community. These two qualities are of the essence
of language and of language alone, and their complete
comprehension fully defines it. It is social and at the
same time abstract. Each of these points demands some
illustration. In the first place language is social, the art
of communication. The cries of the animals and the
infant demonstrate this, and every advance in language

24 The Childhood of the Race

implies not only that men have more to say to one
another, but also that a larger fund of agreed notions
has been arrived at which may be put into words. It
is thus social, both in its original purpose and in every
stage of its growth. It facilitates the progress of the
other arts, but itself aims far beyond them. We can
imagine the invention and gradual perfecting of the pre-
historic tool without the use of language, though no
doubt in practice language powerfully assisted the pro-
cess. But we cannot imagine the formation of a clearly
articulated social order with rules and traditions without
language ; still less can we imagine the appearance among
early men of that world of fancy and speculation which
was to them both science and religion. It is on this side
that the second quality of language becomes pre-eminent,
its power of abstraction. It is so closely allied to reasoning
that the same word has sometimes been used of both :
the two combined and indissoluble have given man that
power which has ultimately enabled him to distance not
only the animals but his own beginnings by a height
which seems from the lower steps quite inaccessible.

The question is of supreme importance and merits
careful thought. The first cry of the animals is no doubt
a sign, and so far resembles language. The wild goat
may have its special sound to arouse in the mind of its
fellows or its young the idea of the wolf or other ravening
enemy and lead to flight. As a sign or signal it performs
the part of language and implicitly brings two ideas
together, that of wolf and that of flight. But it goes
no further. Language, before we can properly speak of
it as such, has made this implication explicit. It has

The Childhood of the Race 25-

become to mankind the instrument for analysing certain
common qualities from particular things and making
general statements about them. It conveys the general
fact in a compendious form that all animals of a certain
kind are ravening enemies, that all plants of certain colour
and shape are sweet or poisonous, and so on. There is
contact and comparison at both ends of the process, of
particular objects of sensation at one end, of many human
minds in social intercourse at the other. Language is
the conducting wire which effects the fusion and enables
the ideal world of thought to come into existence.

The savage first revelling in the powers of speech —
herein again resembling the child — uses it rather to
expand his fancy than closely to define his thought.
Thus we have all that wealth of legend and natural
poetry which is the glory of primitive people, the delight
of childhood. So it is that language gives form to
religious ideas and is the essence of a mythology.

We find also in this early growth of reasoning in
language the germs of that accurate thought, fitted to
the recurring impressions of sense, which develops later
into science, and here, as in so many other sides of life,
the study of early man throws light on the permanent
bearings and harmonies of our nature. The first general
conclusion expressed in language about the qualities con-
nected with a group of objects is in the direct ancestry
of all scientific thought. The savage, who concludes that
all plants of a certain form and colour possess a poison
of certain powers, may begin to reason deductively. He
has taken the longest and most important step towards
combining his perceptions in a form capable of indefinite

2.6 The Childhood of the Race

extension and application. We can in theory advance
directly from such a primitive generalization to the
equation and the calculus. But this is in theory only,
reading backward into its simplest elements the elabora-
tion of later thought. In practice, however, the pre-
historic man comes nearer to science than he possibly
can in language or in theory. He knows how to lever
with a stick the stone he cannot raise in his hands. But
the world had to wait for Archimedes to give it the
theory. The Egyptians of the Third and Fourth Dynasty
could build with the utmost accuracy and solidity massive
and complicated buildings, while their manuals of geo-
metry would not satisfy a Seventh Standard. So practice
throughout precedes theory, but, before theory comes,
practice cannot advance towards the greatest issues for
which man is destined. And it is in language that reason,
which provides the theory, grows and finds its necessary
expression.

With the earlier man, however, as with the child,
expression in language was a luxuriant thing, an end and
a delight in itself, even more than a means to engineer
and economize thought. Well for us if we could have
secured the latter, without sacrificing the former with
all the pleasure and poetry that it implies ! In no other
respect does the childhood of the race seem to us now
so enviable as in its power of vivifying and weaving
myths round every object and event in nature. This gift
was pre-eminently the savage art, in this our primitive
ancestor was most the maker and the type of poets. All
nature was alive to him. In everything he saw a force
and a spirit like his own. And, like the child, man had

The Childhood of the Race 27

to learn by measuring his powers against the powers
without. It was being against being, for everything
outside himself, trees, sticks, and stones, as well as
animals, might be possessed by a kindred spirit to
be conquered or cajoled. It was a world of universal
life and activity, of mingled and rapidly succeeding
pleasure and disaster, of abject fear and groping strength.
The course of ages, the growth of a collective, organizing
intelligence, has brought comparative order, and among
mankind a wider spirit of harmony and mutual aid. But
like most armies on a conquering march, we have spread
solitude as well as peace. We have been ruthless to the
lower natures whom our forefathers reverenced as their
kin and worshipped and fought in turn. Our success,
and our solidarity itself, have formed a barrier between
ourselves and them.

Perhaps in this age of history, when men's minds are
turning to their own origins and the origins of all they
see, one of our oldest instincts may live again. The
poets of nature and the cult they have aroused, the
greater love and care for animals among civilized people,
the reappearance of a delight in fairy tales of beasts
and birds and trees, the whole philosophy of evolu-
tion which links us up afresh with all animated things,
are signs of a reviving sense of universal kinship. In this,
as in some other aspects which our story may suggest,
man seems able, with maturer powers, to renew his
youth.

THE EARLY EMPIRES

The art of measuring brings the world into subjection to man;
the art of writing prevents his knowledge from perishing with him.

MOMMSEN.

WE pass from those hundreds of thousands of years
which must be allowed for man's existence on earth, and
the tens of thousands which may stand for the later
Stone Age, to the last millenniums during which great
communities have been formed and the records of history
begin.

All over the world the conditions of that early life,
which were described in the last chapter, have been dis-
covered, with the modifications which we should expect
from varieties in race and differences in geographical
position and climate. Such modifications persist and
extend, as we know, throughout historic time : it is
more significant for our purpose to note the wide-
spread similarities. From China to Peru, wherever the
physical conditions were favourable, great communi-
ties gradually arose, which present the same general
features of organization and appear to rest on similar
principles of order and belief. The geographical con-
ditions, which would favour such settlements, may be
readily understood. The settlement will need some easy
means of internal communication to facilitate the inter-
change of ideas, and enable a common government to'
be maintained. It must have a fertile soil which will
permit it to remain settled in the territory and acquire
some wealth. And it must be sufficiently isolated and
protected from external disturbance to allow the develop-
ment of civilizing pursuits. Mountains and desert, sea
and river-basins, combine in various parts of the world
to give mankind this opportunity. It is most perfectly

The Early Empires 3 i

realized where, as in India, China, Mesopotamia, and
Egypt, you have large rivers irrigating their basins and
providing a constantly fertilized soil, and where moun-
tains and sea enclose the country, while permitting a
certain amount of foreign intercourse.

Many causes, largely geographical, combined to make
the Mediterranean countries the scene of the most rapid
advance in civilization. With our eye therefore on the
sequel, we concentrate our attention at this stage mainly
on the two great river-valley civilizations nearest to the
eastern side of the Mediterranean, from which the
' classical ' world arose, and to which is now added,
as a third factor, the kindred culture of the Aegean,
centring in Crete. In thus limiting our view we are in
no sense belittling the achievements of other races in
other regions. In many points, more perhaps than we
are yet aware of, the East contributed to Mediterranean
culture : in some ways we have still to learn and to
assimilate its spirit. But the Mediterranean current has
conquered and pervades the world, and those who will
follow its progress must keep their eyes fixed on the
main stream, and treat all others either by way of supple-
ment or of comparison.

So far indeed and even later — until the advent of the
Greeks — it is the uniformities of human progress that
most impress us. Not till they appeared, the- chief
moving factor in the Mediterranean world, could that
sharp line be said to exist between the progressive and
the backward, the civilized and the barbarian, which has
divided the world ever since. East and West moved on
till then with fairly equal steps, and we concentrate our

THE EARLY EMPIRES

The art of measuring brings the world into subjection to man;
the art of writing prevents his knowledge from perishing with him.

MOMMSEN.

32 The Early Empires

attention on the great civilizations near the Mediter-
ranean, mainly because they are on the scene and provide
the material, for the quick-moving drama which was to
follow.

The civilizations of the two great river-basins, the Nile
and the Euphrates, are so much alike in their history
that a common origin has often been suggested for them,
and even if we assume, as is most likely, an original
independence, the mutual borrowings and intercourse
must have been both early and frequent.

The broad coincidences in their chronology are signi-
ficant, and lead on gradually from the first fixed point
in history, when at the end of the fifth millennium B.C.
the Egyptian calendar was settled, through the conquer-
ing, centralizing period which culminates early in the
second millennium, into that new life which begins to stir
with the movement of the Jewish and Hellenic tribes.
The first fixed point is an interesting and familiar one,
having been accepted for nearly 2,000 years as the date
of the ' Creation of the World '. We know it now not
only as the beginning of the Egyptian calendar, but also
as the first moment at which we can be confident that
the men, now called Sumerians, had settled in the lower
Euphrates valley, bringing with them the seed of a higher
culture and, above all, the elements of cuneiform writing.

In substance, too, the evolution of the two civilizations
is strikingly alike. Smaller communities of varied racial
origin are slowly welded together under conquering
chiefs, whose power is supported by a religious system,
also slowly elaborated, in which the divine and human
are so closely intertwined that ultimately in each case

The Early Empires 3 3

the ruler and the leading deity are practically identified.
In each case a lower and an upper kingdom are finally
amalgamated round a central city, in the one case Mem-
phis, in the other Babylon, some way removed from the
river's mouth. In each case the priestly order, in close
alliance with the throne, devotes itself, in opulence and
leisure, to the elaboration of the theological system by
a study of the heavens. In each case these observations
give valuable material and stimulus to later science, and
especially in two spheres of their activity results are
achieved of the highest lasting service to mankind. To
their beginnings in measurement and calculation we owe
most of our common units of time and space, and to their
invention of writing probably the foundation of our own.
It is these written records which have revealed them to us,
and formed also to them one of the strongest links between
successive generations. In each case, too, we note in the
earliest periods an extraordinary freshness and fineness in
their artistic work, which is similarly marred later on in
both by the extravagances of conquest and the rigidity
of convention.

A curious analogy of another kind between the two great
river-empires is seen in the fact that on the frontier of each
there was another civilization, in contact with it and acting
as a channel to Greece. Egypt has the Minoan or Aegean
empire on its sea-front, and Babylonia has the Hittites on
the highlands of Asia Minor. Neither of these is as yet
so fully known as the culture of the Nile and of Mesopo-
tamia, and neither is so perfect a type of the civilization
which summed up the slow process of primaeval time.

Our discoveries in this third great stage of human

1543

34 The Early Empires

progress (counting the Old and New Stone Age as distinct
periods) are far greater in detail and much more com-
plete and significant than those belonging to the earlier
stages : they constitute, in fact, one of our most signal
triumphs in patient research and imaginative reconstruc-
tion. Ancient tombs and the sites of ancient cities have
yielded their evidence, oftenest in the form of artistic
objects, fragments of sculpture or pottery, jewellery or
utensils of metal. Inscriptions and written records on
rock or clay or papyrus roll have been deciphered and
their data compared with the other evidence, with the
traditions handed down by the classical writers, especially
of Greece, with every reference which they make to
a tribe or a place or a person, mythical or real. It is
a strictly scientific process, analogous to that by which,
as we have seen, the evidence of caves and fossils has
been collated with that of living animal forms to com-
pose the record of man's biological history. And in
archaeology it is the written record which plays the part
of the living animal form in the history of species. For
in the written record we have before us what the men
of that age actually thought and were concerned with, as
in the living animal form we have the actual result of
one line of the evolutionary process ; and by the witness
in each case of the speaking document, whether of bygone
thought or bygone life, we may bring together and
interpret the other scattered and inarticulate remains.

The hieroglyphs of Egypt and the cuneiform writing
of Babylonia are a discovery of the last few decades,
and by that one achievement Champollion and Grote-
fend placed us really nearer to the ancient Egyptians

The Early Fmpires 37

and Babylonians than were Herodotus and the other
Greek writers who first studied and wrote about them
more than two thousand years ago. But in one impor-
tant point the first Greek students of ancient Egypt
were not misled, and have left the right clue for under-
standing the structure and history both of Egypt and
all the other early communities at the same stage of
culture. This primitive writing which they saw engraved
on the walls of tombs and temples, but could not read,
was to them a ' hieroglyph ' or ' sacred writing ', devised
by the priests and used for religious purposes. Herein
they point back to the true origin of Egyptian unity, the
root of all the strength of theocratic civilization. ' The
Egyptians are exceedingly religious — or god-fearing —
beyond all other men ; ' so Herodotus wrote, before
entering on the details of their history. It was the
only such community he had personally investigated ; it
remains to us the most perfect type of the primitive
theocracy, the one most completely isolated in its early
stages from outside influence and interference.

To us, as to him, the religious spirit and the religious
framework appear the most striking features of these
societies, when we compare them with the earlier civiliza-
tions of the cave or the lake-dwelling or the nomad tent.
We note of course their greater size, their more abundant
material resources, the exquisite fineness of their artistic
work, their massive architecture and their elaborated
codes of law. But beneath and surrounding this is the
religious structure which inspired and held it all to-
gether. It is this which marks them all unmistakably,
from East to West, and has gained for such civilizations

D 2

3 6 The Early Empires

the name of ' Theocracies ', implying the union in their
system between the earthly ruler and the powers of the
other world, which to these early thinkers was as real —
in the same sense — as our own, and much more populous.
At no other stage in history are we so much impressed
by the conservative aspect of the human spirit. The
whole fabric of theocratic life and thought is found to
be built up of earlier elements of immemorial antiquity,
of those spontaneous beliefs in fetishes and spirits which
marked the earlier stages of culture. Primaeval custom
and belief, preserved, amalgamated, and transformed,
grew at length into a firm rich soil in which the new ideas
of the Greeks could take root and nourishment. In
thus preparing the soil for a progressive spirit to work
upon, we recognize a necessary and fundamental service
of the theocratic ages. But on the side of organization,
for bringing and holding together the largest societies
which had yet been upon the globe, our debt to these
communities is even greater. This the Greek spirit
would seem to have been incapable of achieving. They
might quite well have invented writing without the
aid of Egypt, and possibly did so in their disguise as
Cretans. They might, without the Babylonians, have
learnt to divide the circle into 360 parts and the year
into months. But for the task of building up a great
society round one centre of government, the scientific
intellect is of itself unsuited : it is a probe before it is
a link. This, by slow elaboration on a religious basis,
the men of the river-valleys accomplished, and handed
on as the goal of a practicable ambition to the Persians,
to Alexander, and to the Romans.

The Early Empires 37

Hence at this point, in tracing the growth of an organ-
izing human activity in the world, we are bound to
give a larger space and greater weight to the religious
beliefs of the people than either in the ages before or
in those which immediately succeeded.

From the spontaneous worship and mythology of primi-
tive culture, elaborate and co-ordinated systems arose,
linked inextricably with the fortunes of the tribes and
rulers who had professed and carried them to victory.
It was an age-long process due to a multitude of causes
and not only, or even mainly, as certain eighteenth-
century philosophers believed, to the interested machin-
ations of the priests. The typical scheme which emerges
in the middle of the theocratic millenniums and is fami-
liar to us in the orthodox polytheism of Greece and
Rome, the scheme in which the sky, the sun, and the
planets hold high place and the deities of the earth
and daily life are under their control, is by no means the
primitive one. To the earliest philosopher the trees,
the rivers, and the teeming earth were the more potent
deities, and of the heavenly bodies the moon was the
first to arrest his awe and speculation. Its movements
are more readily calculable, and it reigns in the dark
night more obviously surrounded by a host of minor
lights. It was prolonged reflection and a more mature
intelligence which perceived the superior importance
of the sun and raised him to the high place which he
holds in all the later systems. This step the Egyptians
and Babylonians in their prime, like most corresponding
civilizations, had long taken. Among the host of local
and tribal gods which followed and assisted the fortunes

3 8 The Early Empires

of their worshippers, one aspect of the Sun-god became
supreme in Egypt, and in time the Pharaoh was identified
with him. At first the deification followed death and
led to that sumptuous and stupendous provision for the
dead which is one of the wonders of the world and has
been the means of preserving the records of their early
history. In later times the living Pharaoh is divine and
the theocratic scheme is complete. Doubtless the cor-
porations or orders of the priesthood counted for a large
share in this evolution. In Egypt they are said at one
time to have owned a third part of all the land, in the
name of the gods whom they served. The self-interest,
which is obvious, the trickery, which must have been
frequent enough, are subordinate considerations in view
of the strength of the beliefs and of the social cohesion
which are implied in such a system. It is noticeable
that in Egypt, where the theocratic idea was most fully
realized, the social structure persisted the longest in the
least altered form. Their religion, by its practices and
institutions as well as its belief, held these societies
together in time as well as in space.

Order and consolidation, therefore, based on religion,
mark this stage of progress, with results varying in varied
circumstances. One feature was prominent in one civiliza-
tion, which was less marked in another. In the East caste is
a distinguishing feature of the system, and strengthens its
social conservatism. Now caste, as such, was unknown in
Egypt, though the principle of heredity had full sway in
the ruling and priestly families, and, speaking generally,
occupations followed the hereditary rule. The fellah's son
remained a fellah, just as the priest's became a priest. Such

The Early Empires 39

is the simplest rule of social continuity, and it appears in
human evolution side by side with the worship of an-
cestors. Both are strong but crude expressions of the
awakening consciousness that the past is living with us,
that we are but the passing agents of an eternal spirit
to which we owe all we have and are. Egypt is here
also the most striking instance. China made a more
general and moralizing use of ancestor-worship. But no
other nation ever made so steady and supreme an effort
to protect their great dead and perpetuate their memory
as did the Egyptians throughout the long ages of pyra-
mids, rock-tombs, and embalming. They spent them-
selves upon it, and in return we have learnt more about
them than of any contemporary people. Their tombs are
storehouses of the art and literature of the time. Jewellery,
glass, furniture, objects of all kinds for the sustenance
and recreation of the dead, were placed there, with papyri
and inscriptions recording their titles and achievements.
The rocky hills which enclose the Nile basin are full of
such tombs, and the plains are studded with pyramids
great and small, built with the same end in view. These
structures, especially the Great Pyramids, which go back
to the beginning of the fourth millennium B.C. — the date
of which we noted the curious fortune above — are the
most eloquent stone documents in the world. They mark
the culmination of the political system based on religion
from which the Old Kingdom and civilization of Egypt
arose. They express in its most imposing concrete form
the spirit of sacrificing the present to the safeguard and
glorification of the past. They imply wholesale slavery and
the wholesale devotion of human life to a public though

4o The Early Empires

extravagant purpose. For us they have the special value
of recording, as clearly and more permanently than any
book, the extent and the strength of the mental grasp and
practical skill of the men who planned and executed them.

A colossal building, of neatly-finished, closely-com-
pacted stones, of simple design and homogeneous in its
parts, heavy and stable, and without light or sense of
movement, the pyramid is no inapt image of the society
which erected it. It certainly stands as a fit symbol of
the country to which a universal ancient tradition ascribed
the origin of the science of measuring.

That the origin of science in the strict sense was due
to the Greeks will be seen in the next chapter : that
man from the earliest ages was accumulating the experi-
ence and the practical skill which are the raw material
of science, we have already seen. In the latter sense the
men of Egypt were treading in the path already worn
by generations of earlier workers, and which other people
were treading independently. But they had two advan-
tages. Their land was specially in need of measuring
after inundation, and specially easy to be measured.
And they had growing up among them a strong and
numerous body of priests, who were undoubtedly the
class, both here and elsewhere, who carried forward to
the furthest point before the advent of science, the
collection of observations and measurements on which
true science was to work. The strength of the Egyptians
in geometry must be judged rather by their works
than by the faulty theorizing to which allusion has
been made. The planning of such a building as one
of the greater pyramids, the perfect finish and fitting

The Early Empires 41

of every stone, the mechanics of transport and elevation,
are clearly an achievement of the highest practical skill
as well as of commanding intellect, however limited the
analysis may have been of the principles involved in the
work. How far this had actually proceeded we cannot
with any certainty affirm. The extant treatise of the
second millennium B.C. may easily be the work of a careless
or unintelligent scribe or school. But it is certain that
there is no positive evidence that even the architects
and engineers of the pyramids had any comprehension
of the abstract laws either of figures or of motion. It
may be that they never advanced beyond the conception of
angle as slope and that the abstraction of angular distance
was the crucial step which they were never able to take.
This fundamental act of generalized measurement the
Greeks accomplished, and it is connected in the tradition
with Thales. The stories of the Egyptian methods of
astronomical measurement fit in with this conclusion ;
the hours of the night being determined by the passing
of certain fixed stars over different parts of the watch-
keeper's person, who was seated on the ground with
a plummet before him. The position of the stars would
then be noted on the tables as ' in the centre ', ' on
the left eye ', or ' the right shoulder ', and so on.

If the Egyptians were the pioneers of geometry, or
measurement as applied to the land and terrestrial
objects, the Babylonians were of greater force in
celestial measurement and observation. They had wider
plains for their star-gazing, and were more in touch
with the nomad tribes to whom star-gazing was an
immemorial and absorbing interest. The Babylonians

42 The Early Empires

had from early days those temple-towers of seven stages,
which served as observatories and marked their knowledge
and reverence of the seven planets. To them, too, we
owe the week with its seven days, and the signs of the
zodiac, which did not make their way into Egypt until
much later times. But there is no more evidence in
Chaldaea than in Egypt of any scientific analysis of their
observations, or of rational inference as to the properties
of the bodies observed and the causes of events. On the
contrary, in both cases the study of the heavenly bodies
was closely connected with superstitious uses. The stars
were studied for their supposed influences on human life
and not as the basis of human science, and the Chaldean
priests must be reputed rather as the founders of astrology
than of astronomy. But in this case, as often later in the
history of thought, the by-products were more valuable
than the immediate purpose.

If, as was suggested above, order and consolidation
should be regarded as the special marks and contributions
of these civilizations to general progress, it is easy to
see how their achievements in measuring and calcu-
lation and writing arose from and assisted this main
purpose. The measurement of land was an essential
condition of the orderly co-operation of a large number
of individuals, or of corporations, cultivating a continuous
territory. The measurement of time was no less neces-
sary for the common performance of public functions,
especially the religious ceremonies for which the whole
calendar seems originally to have been devised. The
week, as is well known, was formed by assigning a day
in turn to each of the principal heavenly powers who was

The Early Empires 43

supposed to preside over it. The months in Egypt were
in the same way named after the principal festivals
celebrated in them. The monarch, too, as in the course
of history he became more imposing and divine, de-
manded more careful and elaborate records of his life
and reign and deeds. His festivals had to be fixed by
the astronomical calendar. All these occasions, therefore,
which were an organic part of the whole social order,
necessitated the continual and accurate observation of
the heavens, and promoted the development of calcula-
tion and the invention of mechanical aids, such as the
sun-dial and the clepsydra, in which the Babylonians
appear to have made the most advance. It was they
who divided the circle of the heaven into 360 degrees,
and the day and hour into the parts we still employ.
The choice of these numbers involves a knowledge of the
advantages of the duodecimal as well as the decimal
system of numeration. In Egypt the latter was the
basis, though their methods of calculation appear to us
now intolerably cumbrous.

Great as were these services of the old theocracies in
the beginnings of measurement and calculation, perhaps
our alphabetic writing, which we also owe to them, was
a still greater debt. It emerges in recognizable form
at about the beginning of the last millennium, an example
of simplicity won after centuries of complicated and
competing signs and scripts. The point in history at
which this was achieved was, as we shall see, near the
time at which the spirit of the Greeks was to break through
the old fetters of custom and superstition. It is a memor-
able coincidence that the rock-hewn inscriptions, high

44- The Early Empires

above the ground at Persepolis, which first aroused the
interest of scholars a hundred years ago and led to the
deciphering of cuneiform, commemorated the kings of
that widest, but least organic of the theocratic empires,
which the Greeks challenged in their immortal struggle
for national existence. This decipherment, carried on in
parallel lines for cuneiform and Egyptian, revealed far
more than the mere meaning of the texts. The prodigies
of toil and ingenuity which the complexities of the
problem evoked were rewarded by the confirmation of
many old truths, by the discovery of many new ones,
by the re-creation of a world of thought and action, such
as the one column of Hammurabi's laws in the Louvre
Museum, is sufficient, when interpreted, to establish.
The two scripts were closely similar in their origin, yet
in their diverse history they grew to be a perfect symbol
of the whole circumstances and character of the civiliza-
tion from which they sprang, and which they held
together. The Egyptian preserved more faithfully the
marks of its birth, and remained, like the people, more
secluded in its original home. The cuneiform passed
over a wider area, and was more worn away and altered
by the various nations which adopted it. At the time
when, in Hammurabi's column, it was used to express
the central document of Babylonian social order in
2000 B.C., it was also passing, in correspondence, over
Armenia and Asia Minor and even into Upper Egypt
itself. The Egyptian script also shows best the pictorial
origin of writing, and is at the same time the most com-
plex, for it employed at once signs at all stages of their
evolution, the picture of the thing, the conventionalized

The Early Empires 45-

picture for the syllable, and the mere letter or dis-
tinguishing mark. Both systems bear evidence of their
religious origin, just as the Greeks had noticed their
religious use in the hands of the priests. The earliest
hieroglyphs were probably symbols of fetishes, pictures
of planets, birds, snakes, &c., drawn for the purposes
of magic or religion.

Before the scene changes from this slow-moving
culture of the Nile and Mesopotamia to the quick life
of Ionia and Hellas, another source of progress must
be noted, closer akin to the theocratic system, but
one which did not bear its full fruit till later in history.
As the Greeks were settling in the lands surrounding the
Aegean, another set of tribes, of Semitic birth, travelling
in the region between the two great river-basins, began
also to occupy the narrow strip of territory which was to
be associated with their fame. Each nation had one of
the narrowest and hardest areas of the Mediterranean
basin for its national birth ; each was to play a decisive
part in the history of the world. Each had been long
in contact with the ancient systems which it was des-
tined to supersede; each had a new element to com-
municate to human thought which would in the end
transform it and embrace the world.

The faith of Judaea has now, through its great book,
become a light for us to many of the recesses of the
ancient story. It was then a glow, small but intense,
hidden under the colossal forms of decadent empires.
It did not break out and kindle the West until Greece
and Rome had done their preliminary work.

THE GREEKS

Primum Graius homo . . .

Irritat animi virtutem, confringere ut arcta

Naturae primus portarum claustra cupiret.

LUCRETIUS.

WE noticed in the last chapter many striking coinci-
dences in culture, and two striking coincidences in date.
At about the same period, towards the end of the fifth
millennium B.C., the two great river- valley civilizations
which speak to us through Egyptian hieroglyphics and
Sumerian cuneiform, appeared in clearly ordered and
definite shape. And towards the end of the second mil-
lennium B.C. the migrations and settlements of the Jewish
and Hellenic tribes took place, which contained, both in
their likeness and unlikeness, so many germs of life, full
of moment for human progress. The parallel of the two
national movements has exercised a powerful fascination
on the philosophic mind reflecting on history. To Renan
there were two worthy objects for lifelong study and
exposition, the evolution of the Jews and of the Greeks.
Having given one life to the former, he longed for
a second to devote to the latter. In England we are
familiar with the elaborate contrast between the Hellenic
and the Hebraic elements which Matthew Arnold traced
in modern life and thought. In the field of literature
comparative studies have been made of the Hebrew sagas
and the Homeric poems with illuminating results. At
every point the parallel, and the contrast, teem with
suggestion, which is not, however, germane to our present
argument. The special contribution of the Hebrew genius
to human thought, though it appeared in curious simul-
taneity with that of Greece, did not enter the main
stream of progress till some time later. This last mil-
lennium B.C. is the age of Greece. At its beginning we

The Greeks 49

see the Greek race and language and ideas slowly emerging
from the welter of wandering tribes and fighting barbar-
ism ; at its conclusion the foundations of science and art
and civilization, firmly laid on the broad lines where they
have rested ever since, had been adopted, enclosed and
fortified by the practical genius of Rome. Greece had
then done her work ; Rome was in the midst of hers,
and the moral and religious spirit, due originally to the
Hebrew prophets, found a spacious and well-defended
world for its expansion.

The millennium of Greece, then, must be regarded as
the turning-point in western history, and, through the
West, of all the world. It is of supreme importance and
unique, in three respects, of what it ends, of what it
achieves, of what it leads to. It ends the old primaeval
rule of tradition and authority. It achieves the most
beautiful and perfect creations in language and plastic
art which the world has seen, and within the shortest
time ever known for such an evolution. It leads directly
to the formation of modern science and the civilized
system in which we live : it is the decisive step in the
advance of man's power over nature.

The Greeks were a branch of that Aryan or Indo-
Germanic group of peoples to which we ourselves belong.
Amid the cloud of myth and conjecture in which the
primitive history of the group is surrounded, one point
stands out firm and clear : all branches of it use a speech,
similar in its structure, similar in its commonest and oldest
words ; identical therefore, so far as we can judge, in its
beginnings. They were all more northerly people than
those we have hitherto mentioned — the Egyptians, the

1543 E

yo The Greeks

Chaldaeans, the Hittites, the Jews — and covered a long
stretch of land from northern India to southern Russia.
The Greeks did not call themselves by that name, which
they acquired much later in their settlements in southern
Italy. They had, in fact, no common name until the
seventh century B. c., when they adopted the name
' Hellenes ', and referred its origin to a mythical ancestor
of all their tribes, called Hellen, just as the Jews called
themselves the sons of Israel. When the migrating tribes
of the Hellenes first appear in the dawn of history,
streaming from the north and covering gradually the
lands and islands of the Aegean, they come as Achaians,
Dorians, Aeolians, lonians, and many more. Each name
has its own story, the heroes of the earliest legends
and lays being often imaginary figures, personifying the
tribes, just as Hellen was later on adopted as the original
ancestor of the whole race, with its four main branches
as his sons. How far they found in these Aegean lands,
in Crete, in Attica or elsewhere, men akin to themselves
in blood or speech, we shall not here inquire. It seems
probable enough, both here and in other floodings of
prehistoric lands by the tumultuous waves of migrant
barbarism. What we need for our present purpose is to
note that historic Greece, the Greece which has formed
the thought and civilization of the western world, dates
its rise from after the time when these migrations from
the north had settled down, that in a thousand ways
historic Greece looks back to those northern lands where,
at Dodona, they had their oldest shrine, and on Mount
Olympus the family home of their official gods.

The lands thus overrun between the second and the

The Greeks 5-1

last millennium B.C. contributed, by their own conforma-
tion, no small share to the direction which the evolution
of their invaders was to take. They contain the largest
amount of sea-coast in proportion to area which you
could find anywhere in the world. The coast through-
out is broken up by innumerable inlets both large and
small, and the archipelago is so closely studded with
islands that small boats can pass with ease from one to
another on a summer's afternoon, never out of sight of
land. The land itself is by no means fertile, and inter-
sected within by mountains as the coast is by sea. But
for the artist, for all to whom clear impressions are of
value, it has a quality of colour and of sharp-cut out-
lines, of mountain against sky and land against sea, unique
in Europe if not in the whole world. In the general
trend of its communications it is important to observe
that the whole peninsula, with its main inlets and its
fringe of connecting islands, looks towards the east, just
as markedly as the Italian peninsula looks towards the
west. So the northern settlers were led on into contact,
both peaceful and hostile, with the peoples of the East.

These geographical factors played their part in the
historic evolution, here as elsewhere. They are here very
clearly marked, but that they were the main determinants
of Greek life and thought we cannot say. We note them
only, and note also that, in the sequel, the Greeks
descending from an inland stock, where as yet no common
word for a ship had been in use, became in their new
Surroundings a seafaring and a trading people. The ' wet
ways of the sea ' became their highroads and knit their
world together, as paved roads did the Roman Empire.

£ 2

5" 2 The Greeks

There were no paved roads in Greece. The largest
political union which Greece in her days of freedom
succeeded for one short moment in holding together,
was the Athenian empire, a maritime league which took
the place of one which had grown up in the early
centuries of the millennium round Delos, the little central
island of the Aegean, market and forum and holy place
for Greek traders and travellers, especially of the Ionian
branch.

This maritime expansion is the capital fact in the first
third of their millennium. By the seventh century their
lands are settled ; they have sent out their colonies east
and west ; they have come in close touch with their
neighbours and are learning from them. The middle
third of the millennium is the time of mental expansion
and the climax of the national life. They have the
national poems of Homer nearly in their finished shape.
They fight and defeat the Persians. They face the
problems of the world as free and reasonable men :
abstract science and philosophy begin and their art
receives its perfect form. The last third is the period
of review : their ideas are absorbed and permeate the
world, while their own national spirit and initiative
decline and die away.

The first division of the Greek period cannot here be
more than mentioned. Essential as its study is for the
comprehension of Greek civilization as a whole, we are
in this sketch attempting something different. We are
trying roughly and very briefly to piece together, at the
places where they join, the main sections of that line of
human progress which has led to our present western

The Greeks $ 3

civilization, especially in its aspect of a collective triumph
over natural forces. In this process the Greeks played
a leading part, but they did not appear as leaders until
they had emerged from their state of northern migratory
tribes, had met the more advanced peoples of the East,
and had learnt what they had to teach. For in their
wander-years they were as far behind the Egyptians,
Babylonians or Phoenicians in culture or achievements
as were the northern barbarians on the fringe of the
Roman Empire. Nothing is more significant of this than
the comparative lateness of the use of writing among the
Greeks. Egyptians and Cretans had been for ages using
it, and able to teach the Greeks at the time when their
traditional lays were being handed on from mouth to
mouth. But they appear finally to have adopted, with
ingenious modifications, the alphabet in a Phoenician
form, from those rival traders whose path they crossed in
the Aegean and whom they were to supplant as chief
merchants and channels of communication in the Medi-
terranean world. Hardly any Greek inscriptions date from
before the seventh century, when their intellectual leader-
ship begins.

The Homeric poems are the most precious relic of this
earlier period, though they were being altered and edited
well into the centuries of the zenith, when Athens had
become the centre and leader of Greek life and thought.
It is this continuous tradition and rehandling which
make Homer a document of such supreme value for
history as well as literature. We have in it the back-
ground of the older civilization of the Aegean, with its
highly developed order and its marvellous art, as revealed

f4 The Greeks

in the diggings at Troy and Mycenae and, above all, in
Crete. And in front of this background the Greeks of
the migration carry on the action of the piece in the full
vigour of barbarous life, while everywhere their details of
later life and touches of more developed thought remind
us of the process of revision. This epic, more than any
other, grew up with the people which gave it birth,
born from the heart of their being and fed by their
life-blood.

Think of the circumstances which called the poems forth,
the round of festivals and public gatherings which the
wandering minstrels visited, where the lays, treasured
up and constantly revised and added to by the schools
of singers, were submitted afresh to the applause and
criticism of eager men, full of their local and personal
ambitions, in close touch with all the interests of that
young and thriving world, ready to respond to any touch
of fire or pathos or beauty. It was this open, common
public of sympathetic minds which made possible an art
of winged words, and shaped and polished them to the
general taste. No doubt, too, it was this environment
of their birth which gave point and vigour to the latent
idea in the poems, that the Greeks are the advance-
guard of a newer civilization assailing the forces of an
older and lower world. For Homer first strikes the key-
note of that conflict of West with East which held the
mind of the Greeks throughout. The tribal conflicts
enshrined in the legends of the Trojan war become the
first moving of the national spirit in its destined strife.
The Persian war is the later true epic on the same theme,
and it lasts all through the Greek centuries until the

The Greeks 55

conquests of Alexander stretch it to breaking-point, and
with the advent of the Romans a greater western power
appears, which absorbs and converts to new ends the
achievements of the Greeks.

It was to an Ionic public that the Homeric, poems were
addressed, and it was in Ionia that the great outburst of
Greek intellectual genius took place in the seventh and
sixth centuries B.C., at the beginning, that is, of their
central period, the turning-point of human history.
It is another curious and significant coincidence in
chronology that this point corresponds closely with the
age of the Jewish prophets, who first enunciated that
system of morality based on religion, which in its later
development has encircled the globe.

Ionia is primarily that sea-coast fringe of Asia Minor
where the immigrant Greeks had settled, and where they
came in contact, both round the coast and over the inland
plateau, with the older and wealthier civilizations of the
nearer East. To all these people the lonians were the
Greeks, the lawan of Eastern literature. The Lydians
were their nearest neighbours ; behind lay Phrygian
highlands and the old trade routes leading on to Baby-
lonia ; and round the coast Greek ships would sail to
Cyprus, meet the Phoenicians in their own sphere of
influence, and reach Egypt without crossing the open
sea. From this sea-coast many of the islands were settled,
and some have held that the settlement of the Greek
mainland itself was by a reflux tide of immigration, which
had first passed into Asia Minor by the narrowest sea-
way, across the Bosphorus. Here, at any rate at this
period, was the scene of the most intense life in the

5 6 fhe Greeks

f

Greek world. It was the centre of commerce, as well
as the birthplace of science, and the two went hand in
hand. Thales, the first name in Greek philosophy, was,
among his other activities, a salt merchant, just as Plato,
two hundred years later, dealt in oil. By the end of the
seventh century the Greeks of Ionia had become the
leading traders of the Mediterranean : they had distanced
their Phoenician rivals and learnt their secrets : they had
a settlement in Egypt and were on friendly terms with
the new Egyptian monarchy, which had lately established
itself in the Delta, and they were in alliance with the
active Lydian monarchs, whose dominions touched, and
in some places included, the Ionian settlements on the
central sea-coast of Asia Minor. Just here, where Greeks
and Lydians were in constant intercourse, and just at
this moment, before the advent of the first philosopher,
another of the great practical inventions in human history
made its appearance, the first coined money, which bears
a Lydian stamp. It bespeaks the need of a uniform,
acceptable and easily transported, medium of exchange,
in the busiest centre of commerce which the world had
yet seen.

Of the twelve associated Ionian cities the most impor-
tant was Miletus. It had already taken the lead in sending
out its colonists east and west and north. It was to fire
the train of the national rising against Persia later on.
Its harbour, now sanded up and idle, was the central
mart of the Ionian world, and sent out and received
voyagers from every quarter. Of these Milesian travellers
and merchants the most famous in the ancient world was
Thales, the first of the philosophers, of that new type

The Greeks 5-7

of man who was to be the special organ of the Greek
spirit.

Now it is essential, before we speak of any definite
results, to realize what is implied by this term ' philo-
sopher ' when used of Thales and the early thinkers
of Greece. In later ages and often in our own day
the word ' philosophy ' is carefully defined to exclude
precisely those parts of the thinking of the early Greeks
which proved to be of most permanent value ; and this
definition, when carried back into the period when
4 philosophy ' was understood in a larger sense, has led
to the presentation of a singularly mutilated picture of
early Greek thought in most of the so-called ' histories
of philosophy '. The crude speculations about the origin
and nature of things in general, interesting as they are
as evidence of the new spirit of free inquiry, and not
without occasional flashes of brilliant insight, were neces-
sarily premature and bound to be superseded by fuller
knowledge. These are presented to us as the main results
of the thinking of Thales or Pythagoras, while their solid
achievements in the history of thought are passed over
as belonging to another department called ' science '.
The early thinker knew no such distinction, and we are
bound also to treat his work as a whole — ' science ' and
' philosophy ' — and to consider it as an integral part of
the development which was going on simultaneously in
all parts of the Greek domain, commerce, art, philosophy,
and politics.

The Sophos or Wise Man, then, as the new type of
hero was first called, was a person of intellect above his
fellows, who applied his mind freely to the facts of the

f8 The Greeks

world around him, not without the guidance of others,
but without subservience to tradition or authority, and
anxious to use his knowledge for the common good.
Such was the Thales of the legend, such was Herodotus
later on, as his own history reveals him. Thales was the
chief of the ' Seven Wise Men ' of Ionia, as his city
Miletus was the chief of the twelve Ionian cities. The
story attributes to him wisdom of every kind. He advised
his fellow-citizens to form a closer political union among
the Greek states of Ionia to resist aggression when the
day came. But this form of wisdom it was always most
difficult and finally impossible for the Greeks to practise.
Of speculative wisdom, whatever his actual personal
achievement may have been, he was the acknowledged
pioneer. He was regarded as the founder both of general
philosophy and of the abstract sciences of astronomy and
geometry. But the alleged facts of these theories and
discoveries are slender : that he found in water the origin
of things, that he predicted the solar eclipse of 585 B.C.,
that he discovered some half a dozen geometrical truths.
The particulars in each case rest on scattered statements
in various authors, years, sometimes centuries, later in
date. It is impossible, therefore, to reconstruct a personal
history. There is less chance, in fact, of ever knowing
what the personal Thales did for science than of dis-
entangling the supreme and fundamental poem in the
Iliad. But as in so many cases what we really know is
the most important part of the story : and these points
appear certain. There had appeared by the end of the
seventh century B.C. a new type of mind among the most
advanced of the Greeks, the lonians of Asia Minor, the

The Greeks 5-9

man who by dint of travel and comparing his own
observations with what he heard from others, arrived at
new conclusions which sometimes proved to be great
general truths, widening out into floods of light over
facts hitherto mistaken or unexplored. Thales was one
of these, who succeeded in thinking. out more than his
fellows, or in making a greater personal mark on his
contemporaries. He travelled, as all such men would
travel, in the land of the oldest culture and deepest
learning which they knew, and in Egypt studied what
the priests had to teach in medicine, in astronomy, and
in geometry. That more discoveries are ascribed to him
in geometry than in any other branch, agrees perfectly
with all the other evidence, and with the very nature of
exact science. No real progress could be made in scientific
astronomy or physics until a foundation had been laid
in mathematics, and into mathematics, and through
mathematics into the whole realm of exact science, ' no
one could enter who could not geometrise '.

Here, then, at the threshold, stands the inquiring
Greek, and no man can say how much in that first
crucial step was due to the Egyptian teacher, how much
to the quicker-witted learner, who was to carry out the
new and deeper conclusion into the world and help to
build up a structure of thought, of which there is cer-
tainly no trace before the Greeks.

It has been supposed that the first theorem in geometry
— which was attributed to Thales — was an observation
based on the drawing of squares in circles which had
been a common feature for ages in Egyptian ornament,
as no doubt elsewhere. A reflective mind observing the

6o The Greeks

identity of the angle in the many positions in which the
square would be drawn could, one would think, in the
end not resist the conclusion that the ' angle in a semi-
circle is a right-angle '. Obvious as it seems when once
observed, the observers and the draughtsmen of ages had
avoided the conclusion, or rather had never formulated
in exact and general terms the truth which must have
been implicit in their minds. It was this exact and
general statement of a true relation which constituted
the beginning of abstract science. It was a momentous
step, one of the great turning-points in history, and due
entirely, so far as our knowledge goes, to the contact of
the new, vigorous, and inquiring spirit of the Greeks with
the old learning and art of the settled communities of
the East, especially of Egypt. But new and important
as it was, it concerns our general belief in the continuity
of human progress to consider how closely it followed
the line of thought linked with action, which we traced
from the time of the first maker of a tool onwards.
Language itself was, as we saw, the first expression of
a general observation, when the earliest hunters accepted
some common sounds to indicate the objects and actions
of the chase. So, when man came to name the circle,
he had already perceived in a vague, unanalysed way the
common quality of perfect roundness. We cannot believe
that any animal has this perception, and the lowest savage
has certainly not expressed it. The next step comes when
the drawing of the circle elicits the latent knowledge of
its most obvious property, that the circumference is the
locus of all the points touched by the end of a string or
stick revolving round the centre. So far pre-scientific

The Greeks 61

man had gone : the first theorem of Thales is but another
step in the analysis. The perception itself of the right
angle in the semicircle does not appear much more dif-
ficult than that of the equality of the radii : its wider
scope arises from its formulation in exact and general
terms, and from the circumstance that the observation
brings together two distinct classes of figures, triangles and
circles, and sets up a universal relation between them.

This one theorem must serve as a type : it would only
distract attention from the main thread of our sketch to
multiply examples. The other philosophers of the time,
many no doubt who are not recorded, were engaged in
similar discoveries and speculations. Most of them con-
tribute some thoughts to astronomy or mathematics : all
of them theorize freely about the origin and nature of
the unknown universe, without regard to previous theo-
logical or mythological beliefs. This is the new temper
which is rising among the Greeks, and these two aspects
of it are to be traced together throughout — the one
boldly critical and sceptical towards current dogma, the
other tentative, but steadily constructive of new truths.
And side by side with the abstract speculations of the
philosophers there was going on, through seafaring and
the widening relations of commerce, a real enlargement
of the world's horizon, not unlike that which two thou-
sand years later accompanied the Renascence, with similar
results on men's minds.

But one school of sixth-century philosophers stands
out above all the rest. The Pythagoreans were indeed
much more than a school of philosophers. They were
a brotherhood on a moral and religious basis, which

62 The Greeks

for some time had a great political influence among
the Greek states of southern Italy. Their founder
was an Ionian, but of Samos, the rival state to Miletus.
The island of Samos lies across the entrance to the
gulf of Miletus, and commands its harbour. There
was naturally incessant rivalry and feud, and the Samians
were always allied with the Dorian cities of the
mainland, Corinth and Sparta, in their struggles with
the lonians. There was possibly some Dorian blood
in Samos ; at any rate their Dorian affinities are worth
remembering when we consider the general character
of the Pythagorean system. For the Dorians, especially
at Sparta, stood for the harder side of the Greek
character, for conservatism and rigid discipline and
self-repression. And the teaching of Pythagoras leant on
one side so much in the direction of the old religious
doctrines that there was some confusion between the
writings of his school and those of the Orphic adepts,
the leading mystic sect. In any case Pythagoras was
clearly concerned above all with the direction of life,
and regarded his scientific speculations as subordinate to
that end. As a general discipline, however, the doctrine
had no sufficient basis, either in theory or the facts of
the time, and was doomed to failure, though full of fine
and inspiring thoughts, anticipating the Stoics ; while
as a contribution to the growing body of scientific truth,
the teaching of the school was the most considerable
before the great age of Athens. The social discipline
had little scope beyond the limits of the brotherhood,
and that was soon dissolved, but, as a means of stimulating
their scientific studies, it must have had for the time

The Greeks 6$

a powerful influence. It brought into science that co-
operative spirit, tempered by public action and criticism,
which we saw at work in the rise of the epic. The story
was that Pythagoras, who had been born at Samos about
the year of Thales' eclipse of the sun, 585 B.C., was driven
away from his native town by the tyranny of Polycrates,
when he was between fifty and sixty years of age. He
had already travelled and absorbed what the old schools
of Egypt and the East, and the new philosophers of
Ionia had to teach. He must already have matured his
system and made his mark. He migrated, after his expul-
sion, to Crotona, a Dorian city in southern Italy, and
there the foundation of his brotherhood and his active
career took place. The order was dispersed by the middle
of the next century, but before that time they had put
together most of the geometrical truths which were
current in the time of Plato and are preserved to us in
Euclid. The fact is so easily stated that its magnitude
is likely to escape us. This body of mathematical truth
remained the bulk of what men had thought out on the
subject until after the Middle Ages, until in fact the
new analysis of Descartes and the calculus of Newton
and Leibnitz. It contained far more than the elementary
geometry now learned in schools, for there was as well
a good deal which we now regard as part of advanced
arithmetic, the theory of proportion and of the properties
of numbers, besides the beginnings of solid geometry and
the discovery of incommensurable quantities. The result
of this hundred years of early Greek thinking was the
mental discipline of the western mind up to our own
time, and the fixed keystone of all exact science. What

most hindered the immediate application of the results
to practical uses, and the extension of the powers of
calculation which has taken place in recent centuries,
was the want of a convenient system of numeration.
Even for an alphabetic system men had to wait for the
Greeks of Alexandria, and for the little, all-important
device of the cipher, until the Arabs introduced it from
India in the Middle Ages. These were the happy
thoughts of smaller men, which made the machine work
smoothly. The great construction had been done by
Greeks in their prime and very largely by the school of
Pythagoras. It was said many years later, that in the
time of their troubles, ' when they had lost their money,'
the Pythagoreans decided to publish their geometry in
a book which was called The Tradition about Pythagoras.
The story fits the case so well and is so interesting, that
one would like to be allowed to believe it. It shows us
the brotherhood treasuring as their most valued possession
that part of the master's teaching which was to prove
his best, and doubtless adding to it so long as they
held together. It would fix the date of publication
towards the end of the first half of the fifth century
B.C., when the wars in southern Italy, which broke up
the school, had reached a climax. The wealth and glory
of Athens were then attracting the intellect of the world,
and ' philosophy ' itself began to find a price. The same
city would soon receive the first great book of science,
which had but lately seen the final edition of the first
great epic.

Of the other teachings of Pythagoras less need be said,
for, where they were not purely mystical, they had more

The Greeks 65

the character of brilliant guesses and less of verified
truths. The predominant influence of numbers in the
universe, which was a leading tenet of the school, while
it led to much extravagant hypothesis, suggested also
some pregnant truths. They saw, for instance, that the
different pitch of musical notes followed a numerical
relation between the length of the strings. In astronomy
their contributions were striking, though less exact or
firmly based. They were the first thinkers on record to
have conceived the earth as a globe, revolving with the
other planets round a central fire. Not only the moon
but the sun also shone by reflected light from this central
source. Copernicus stated that this theory first suggested
to him the true explanation of planetary movement.

The paths of poetry and of philosophy lead us to Athens
and to the beginning of the fifth century B.C.: art and
politics tend to the same point, though we shall here
only indicate the convergence. At the same time that
men's minds were stirring towards free inquiry into the
causes and nature of things around them, they began to
claim their due share in ordering their own lives and
governing the communities to which they belonged. The
two impulses spring from the same or kindred roots, and
though we find from time to time a free philosophy
flourishing under tyrannical or alien rule, in the long run
the two are incompatible. Greece was approaching in
the sixth century the greatest of the crucial instances
in history. The Greeks of the earlier period had, like
the Homeric tribes, been ruled by kings. It was under
the kings that they had settled the lands of the Aegean
and founded their city-states. The city-state, or polis,

1543 F

66 The Greeks

enclosed by its wall, was the greatest contribution of the
Greeks to the practice and theory of government, and
it arose in monarchical times from the grouping of a
number of villages together for purposes of defence. But
though due to the kings and probably in its origin impos-
sible without them, it tends invariably to a popular form
of government. By the seventh century the kingship had
almost universally disappeared, except for certain titular
or ceremonial posts, and the only real question in debate
was the extent and the form of popular control. The
rule of the nobles followed normally that of the kings,
but during thfe century in which we have traced the rise
of philosophy, there was a general movement towards
extending and equalizing the rights of the whole people.
Athens was to see the democratic principle carried to its
furthest point ; but before this was reached she passed
through certain changes which have a bearing on our
general argument.

In Athens, as elsewhere, the early monarchy had been
replaced by an aristocracy before the seventh century,
and by the end of that century the commonalty were
feeling in an acute way some of the effects of the new
movement in the Greek world. Economically, they were
enslaved by debt and by that accumulation of land in
the hands of the few rich : politically, they were no
longer willing to leave all power, judicial as well as
executive, in the keeping of a small aristocratic class. At
this point one of the noblest figures of antiquity appeared
in Athens — Solon, himself belonging to the aristocracy,
but compelled by his father's impoverishment to travel
and trade abroad. Many stories are told of his sayings

The Greeks 67

and doings in Ionia, in Lydia, in Egypt, and further east.
He was a leading example of the early Sophos, and was
included among the famous Seven. But in his case the
conditions in Athens and his personal position there
enabled him to carry his wisdom into practice. In middle
life, having done certain external services to his native
city, he was empowered to carry out a scheme of reform,
economic as well as constitutional, which laid the founda-
tion of the later commercial prosperity and popular
government of Athens. The details are obscure and
disputed, but the net result was the abolition of the
weight of debt, a large increase in the number of free-
holders, and the inclusion of a popular element into the
membership of the assembly and of a newly-formed law
court. A change in the system of weights and measures
was made, which facilitated Ionian trade : and so the
Sophos, experienced in the wisdom and travel of the
East, became a fresh link between Athens and the Ionian
world, and a source of social and political equality, as
well as enlightenment, to his native city.

The sixth century in Athens, as well as in many other
Greek states, saw the rise and fall of a number of rulers
called ' tyrants ', who relied usually upon popular support
as against the old aristocracies. Peisistratus and his sons,
who followed Solon in Athens, did a great deal to further
the interests of the city in art as well as in commerce.
These ' tyrants ' largely modelled themselves on the
example of the progressive Lydian monarchs, who had for
many years been on friendly terms with the Greeks, and
consulted the Greek oracles. But like everything political
in Greece, the ' tyrants ' had an unstable seat, and when

F 2

58 The Greeks

Croesus, the last of the Lydian monarchs, was swept
away by the advancing tide from Persia, the Greek
' tyrannies ' in most cases soon followed. Just before the
crucial impact of East and West at the beginning of the
fifth century, Athens, after dismissing her ' tyrants ', took
a long step further towards democracy. When the
moment arrived, she was the unquestioned leader in the
national struggle, and she was the state which had made
the boldest experiments in governing herself.

Step by step with the growing freedom which we have
traced in Greece — freedom and new construction in
thought, freedom and experiment in government — the
largest, but the least stable, of the empires on the old
theocratic basis was being built up round the warlike
tribes of the Persians. It was inevitable that some such
power should erect itself on the weakened remnants of
the Eastern kingdoms. Cyrus, who determined the leader-
ship in favour of the Persians, was a wise and tolerant
ruler as well as a successful commander. The state he
founded and organized had extended itself before the
end of the sixth century over Assyria, Babylon, Syria,
Phoenicia, Egypt, Lydia, and all Asia Minor. It was in
touch with the Greek states of the sea-fringe and had
stretched out a hand over some of the islands. It was
the greatest portent in government which the Greeks —
or indeed the whole world — had yet seen. For a time
most of them bowed the head. But the Great King at
Susa seemed immeasurably remote, and it was found that
at close quarters the well-armed and compact phalanx
of the Greeks could bear down a much larger number of
the archers and lighter-armed men from the East. The
first outbreak was on a local quarrel at Miletus. Even

The Greeks 69

here at the first challenge, and before the magnitude of
the final issues had been thought out, the Athenians did
not hesitate to enter the fray. They marched up with
the Milesians and burnt Sardes, once the Lydian capital,
now a local centre of the Persian rule. This was in
498 B.C., two years within the century which was to see
Greek power and intellect at its height, with Athens at
the head. The burning of Sardes was but a signal and
an incident. The citadel never fell, and the Greek force,
as they marched back to the coast, were overtaken and
defeated. The revolt was crushed, but the Athenians
became marked men.

The immortal story which follows was handed on, and
adorned at every point, by the nation of the most gifted
story-tellers who have ever lived. It inspired the * father
of history '. It was sung by two of the greatest of Greek
poets, one of whom played his part in the greatest of the
battles. It was the critical stage in the salvation of the
Greek spirit of freedom from a levelling and deadening
hand which would have hindered for ages, if not killed, the
new life which had to flow unchecked in the veins of the
leading stock in the human family before man's com-
mand and unification of the world could effectually begin.
As landmarks in this movement the names of Marathon
and Salamis, of Miltiades and Themistocles, hold their
place for ever. To the Greeks of the time it was a terrify-
ing moment, and their success appeared the most mar-
vellous event which had ever happened, the gift of the gods.
We, who know the sequel, can see even greater issues,
of a kind and scope transcending altogether the outlook
contemporaries, and may well tremble when at so

my turns in the story the action seems to depend on

7o The Greeks

one man's vote or one man's defection, some clever trick
or casual fatality. Such appearances are often the illusion
of distance, or the exaggeration of romance. But in the
case of Greece there was always a fundamental uncer-
tainty in the fatal disunion of the cities, and the frequent
instability of public men. At the height of the crisis
many Greek states were found on the side of the enemy,
and the union between Athens and Sparta, to which the
final success was due, hardly survived the return home
of the armies. Yet it was the golden opportunity for
union. Athens had been the moving spirit in the defence.
They had first taken up the challenge and at Marathon
had shown the Greeks how to win. In the interval
between the campaigns, by following Themistocles and
building the fleet, they had prepared for Salamis. In the
decisive campaign, though Sparta had led by land, Athens
had sacrificed her temples and her homes. But the oppor-
tunity was thrown away. Sparta refused the overtures
of Athens, and Athens, after a short attempt at concilia-
tion, preferred the path of aggrandizement and empire.

It was left then to Athens alone to exhibit to the
world the most brilliant fruits of the triumph of free allied
states over ill-compacted and reactionary despotism : she
had assuredly the best means of feeling and expressing
what it meant. Pindar and Aeschylus are the contem-
porary voices. Pindar, though a native of the hostile
town of Thebes, glorifies Athens as the ' brilliant, violet-
crowned and famous city, the support of Hellas', . . . ' the
city whose sons have laid the shining foundation of
freedom'. And Aeschylus, who fought at Salamis, and
has given us in the ' Persae ' a document unique in
history, a contemporary play describing one of the

The Greeks 7 r

decisive battles of the world, by one of the greatest
poets, who himself took part in it, speaks of his fellow-
citizens as men who had ' never been called the subjects
or the slaves of any one '.

The war brought splendour to Athens, and fifty years
of empire ; but the lasting result for mankind was some-
thing deeper. It focussed in Athens, a more central
point for the whole Greek world than Ionia had been,
all the light in art, science, philosophy, and literature
that had been growing for two hundred years. Athens
became the acknowledged intellectual leader, the meeting-
place for philosophers, the school of learning and of
teaching, which, though eclipsed later on by Alexandria,
continued for nearly a thousand years. The men who left
their homes in 480 B. c. to be burnt by the Persians were
founding the first and greatest of all universities.

The outward sign was the rebuilding of the city in all
the glory and beauty which the greatest school of Greek
architects and sculptors could devise. The Parthenon,
the city's central shrine for Athena, its patron goddess,
became in its new form the most perfect building, most
beautifully adorned with sculpture, which the world has
ever seen. The material basis was the wealth of the
maritime federation which Athens had now grouped
round her : the informing spirit was the genius of Greek
art, which had been gathering strength and shape for
two hundred years and had now found its outlet : the
executive hand was Pericles, who sums up for us the
knowledge and power of Athens at her greatest moment.

He held his place in the city by the direct will of the
people, a result of the rapid growth of democratic govern-
ment since the ' tyrants ' were dismissed, above all since

72 The Greeks

the outbreak of war with Persia. Themistocles had built
his fleet and won Salamis by throwing himself on the
support of the whole people. Pericles in the same way
depended on his power of moving the popular assembly.
By this time all the old ' archonships ', and the smaller
offices as well, were filled by lot in accordance with the
democratic theory of the day. The post of one ' Strate-
gos ', or general, was still reserved for election, and this
Pericles held, becoming thereby, so long as he maintained
his hold on the assembly, a popular dictator, persuading
the people and expressing their will, forming their deci-
sions and enforcing them, from day to day. The Funeral
Oration, which Thucydides puts into his mouth, is the
best example of how this subtle process was accom-
plished in the hands of its greatest master. In such
a speech Pericles partly interpreted the feelings of those
around him, partly suggested to them the unique value,
the higher implicit purpose of the life they were living,
and of the city they were building around them. He
idealized it to them as the model of splendour and
moderation, just as the poets and artists were idealizing
their gods and legends in stone and verse. Pheidias, the
sculptor of the Parthenon, put the figure of Pericles on the
very shield of the goddess in her inmost shrine ; Sophocles,
the poet, was his friend, and from Anaxagoras, then
settled in Athens, he learnt the liberating and rationaliz-
ing philosophy of Ionia. Such teaching as that of Anaxa-
goras agreed perfectly with his own sense of harmony
and self-restraint, and produced a character which could
claim at the last as its highest merit that ' through Pericles
no Athenian citizen had been made to mourn '.

The Greeks 73

This alliance at Athens, in the person of Pericles, of the
most advanced thought with the strongest political force
and centre of democracy in Hellas, was the capital fact
of the fifth century B.C. Hitherto the Ionian cities in
Asia Minor and the Pythagoreans in the west had stood
for the vanguard of thought. Now Athens becomes the
centre, and Anaxagoras, not himself one of the greatest
founders, gains through this fact a leading influence. He
was interested in mathematics and astronomy, and intro-
duced into the physical speculations of the lonians the
new idea of an element called ' Mind ', which, moving
about among the particles of other kinds, might in the
course of ages reduce them to order ; clearly an inspiring
thought, rather of moral than of scientific value, less based
in fact, less suggestive of scientific conclusions than the
atomic theory which the greater Democritus, his junior
by some thirty or forty years, handed on to Epicurus,
Lucretius, and the modern world. But Anaxagoras con-
tributed more to the intellectual growth of Athens, for,
calm and disinterested like all the greatest of the Greek
teachers, he used his powers and his philosophy of reason
to free his pupils from the terrors of superstition, and to
give them ' a religion of peace and good hope '. Such
teaching, like that of Socrates later on, was suspect to
the crowd of Athens, and only Pericles could save him
from a sentence of death. The whole story is full of
suggestion, most of all, perhaps, of the conservative
religious mind of the Athenian people, and of the distance
which still separated the mass from those whom we are
bound to regard as the mouthpiece of the best thought
of the age.

74 The Greeks

So it is that those, like the artists of the Parthenon or
dramatists like Sophocles, who were acceptable to the whole
people, did not attempt to question or destroy the old
beliefs, but only to raise and purify them. In their work
the accepted legends and divine figures remain, idealized
by the new spirit of beauty which, with the spirit of
abstract and general truth, makes up the genius of Greece.

For the first time in the world's history men had
become conscious of their own gifts and powers, and were
endowed richly with the means of expressing their con-
sciousness. At the end of a period of awakening thought
had come a stroke of the most marvellous and successful
action. Those who had stood for free, strong manhood
had trampled on the mass of lower and invading force
which had threatened to overwhelm it. The exultation
was immeasurable, but it did not desert the home from
which it sprang, nor the gods who had assisted in the
triumph and would share the joys. It is because they
hold this central position, maintaining and transfiguring
the old religion with all the arts and in the full light of
a new day, that the Parthenon and Sophocles represent
most perfectly the Greek spirit at its zenith. The gods
became the strongest and most beautiful forms of men,
unlike the primitive gods of nature or the grotesque
animal forms and planetary forces of the theocracies.
And in the midst of the glory of the Periclean age we
have from Sophocles a paean of human power in the
famous chorus of the Antigone which might well be
taken as the motto for the whole Greek movement:
'Of air strong things none is more wonderfully strong
than Man. He can cross the wintry sea, and year by

The Greeks 75-

year compels with his plough the unwearied strength of
Earth, the oldest of the immortal gods. He seizes for
his prey the aery birds and teeming fishes, and with his
wit has tamed the mountain-ranging beasts, the long-
maned horses and the tireless bull. Language is his, and
wind-swift thought and city-founding mind ; and he has
learnt to shelter him from cold and piercing rain : and
has devices to meet every ill, but Death alone. Even for
desperate sickness he has a cure, and with his boundless skill
he moves on, sometimes to evil, but then again to good.'

No one before the Greeks could have said that ; no
one since the Greeks has said it with the same simplicity
and confidence. It is indeed more than two thousand
years before we find another utterance at all comparable.
Shakespeare recalls it and, in the fuller light of modern
science, Shelley, in the ' Song of the Earth ' in Prometheus
Unbound. A comparison of the modern with the ancient
poet is singularly instructive, the new thoughts in
Shelley being as striking as the old, and marking several
stages which the human mind had traversed in the
interval. One point is specially relevant here and throws
light on the general intellectual state of this mid-fifth
century B. c. in Athens. The nineteenth-century poet
lays most stress on the power of collective human thought
in penetrating the secrets of the universe : Sophocles
dwells from first to last on man's practical skill in the
arts of life. It was this side which naturally first impressed
man's mind when he became self-conscious ; it was also
the aspect of intellectual activity most prominent in
Athens at the time of her expansion.

The greatest steps in abstract science were not made at

76 The Greeks

this time, although it was the age of the widest popu-
larization of knowledge and the testing of new ideas.
The leading mathematicians were Pythagoreans, enlarging,
editing, and expounding the achievements of the school.
Physics and astronomy were still in the stage of conjecture,
while the large schemes of the origin and development of
things, promulgated by the lonians, were beginning to be
met by criticism and denial. But descriptions and practical
studies began to abound, and the concrete results of art
and science and persevering effort were dazzlingly evident.
The Parthenon was there, showing the utmost delicacy
and skill in its construction and a knowledge of curves,
of which the full properties could not yet have been
theoretically explored. Sculpture, too, admitted to be
unsurpassed and unsurpassable, not only in its execution,
but in the knowledge of anatomy, which makes the head
of a horse, as well as the human figure, a living, breathing
thing. We are prepared for the appearance at about
the same time of the first great name in medical science,
Hippocrates of Cos.

In medicine, as in geometry and astronomy, the Greeks
had first gone to school to the priests, and here, too, they
became pioneers of a new method, although their know-
ledge of the facts was never sufficient to put them on
the same high level which they reached in the more
deductive sciences. Hippocrates, who took the crucial
step, was a pupil of Democritus, who in his theory of the
atoms attained as much scientific truth as was possible in
primitive physical speculations before the advent of veri-
fied experiment. To the scientific spirit of Democritus
it was no doubt largely due that Hippocrates was able

'The Greeks 77

to add to medicine a number of careful observations, and
above all a notion of the action of the whole environ-
ment of the patient on his state of health. The titles of
two of his works which survive indicate their method :
Prognostics, meaning a forecast of the natural course which
the disease would take ; Air, Water and Place, indicating
the three main factors which normally affect the health.
In each case we have the beginnings of sound method at
work amid the darkness which necessarily surrounded the
functioning of the organs before Harvey's discovery, and
when dissection was in itself an offence against the dead.
Under such conditions the achievement of Hippocrates,
definitely separating medicine from the old priestly tradi-
tion and assigning it to the realm of natural causes, was
perhaps the most notable step in the science of the fifth
century B.C.1 His saying that the love of art, especially
the art of healing, was after all identical with the love of
man, may fitly stand beside the great chorus in Sophocles.
Another art, which arose and flourished at the same
time, had no small share in determining the direction of
philosophy. The profession of the Sophists enjoyed in
later days an entirely evil fame, partly owing to its own
perversion, partly to the highly-coloured picture which
Plato gives of it, outraged by the fate of his master,
Socrates. The Sophists appeared in the middle of the

1 ' Men considered a matter to be " divine " on account of their
inexperience and wonder that it was not like anything else ' . . . ' So
magicians and quacks alleged the divinity of this disease to cover up
their want of skill. If the patient recovered, their charms and quack
remedies were justified ; if he died, their excuse was complete ; they
were not responsible, but the gods." Hippocrates : ' On the Sacred
Disease '. (Wilamowitz-Mollendorffj Greek Reading Book, 270-1.)

78 The Greeks

fifth century, prepared to give the youth of the leading
cities the sort of higher education which the rising demo-
cracies demanded and the knowledge of the day could
provide. The popular assemblies, which at Athens and
elsewhere had become all-powerful, could be ruled by
men who had acquired the gift of clear exposition
and persuasive speech. Thus it was that a training in
rhetoric, valuable in itself and leading to that perfect
prose which was another feature of the age, was liable
to uses dangerous to the state and pernicious to the
user. Triumph and not truth tended to become the
object of the Sophist's art. And the turn in the intel-
lectual movement of the age gave a still more profound
bias in the same direction. Just at the moment when
a new interest in moral, social, and political questions
was being aroused, there came a reaction against the
physical and cosmic speculations which had flourished so
richly in the early centuries. A deep unrest and scepti-
cism set in on matters about which the first philosophers
showed easy confidence. Perhaps after all there could be
no truth about these general questions, and victory in argu-
ment was not merely the best, but the only way. Mean-
while men had to live and the city to be governed, and it
was in this field of moral and political discussion that the
Sophists and Socrates were alike engaged. The difference
between these was rather in the spirit of the teacher.
The Sophists were a professional class living, and often
becoming rich, on their teaching. Socrates refused any
payment and died because his method and doctrines
offended too wide and powerful a public.

We noticed how the Greeks for the first time succeeded

The Greeks 79

in giving their gods a human form and character. It is
still more striking that they are themselves the first real
human beings in history. This fifth century, distin-
guished for so many things — for its new sense of pity
and humanity in literature — is full of living men and
women, acting and speaking, as we can imagine ourselves
to see and hear them. Among them all we know Socrates
far the best, the first figure in history whom we know
intimately. For this we have to thank mainly the tran-
scendent interest of his character, but also in no small
share the new prose writing, which from this time onward
begins to come down to us in large quantities. Through
all these circumstances we know Socrates better than
many persons in our own recent history, far better, for
instance, than Shakespeare : and with Socrates we know
his circle, and feel that we might have joined in those
conversations with the rest. Doubtless it is the great
soul of the man — his single-heartedness and sympathy —
which draws us to him as it drew his contemporaries,
and created a world around him which is still alive. But
he was also very really the child of his age, and carried
out, to high purpose and with the insight of genius,
a similar task to that of the Sophists. Like them express-
ing the tendency of the time, he gave his thoughts to
social rather than physical questions, and roundly de-
nounced inquiries which had not a direct bearing on
human life. Like theirs, his method was oral questioning
and speaking. But in the purpose and result of his
teaching he achieved something which proved of decisive
value for the maturity of Greek thought, and hence for
all time. His questioning aimed at rousing the persons

8o The Greeks

he taught to self-examination, to testing their vague
ideas and establishing truer definitions. In this he
challenges the scepticism of his own and later ages and
leads to the validity of clear, common, and tested opinion,
from which Aristotle starts in the next generation and
which is the basis of all science. And in the main thesis
to which he is always leading, he lays the foundation of
social science as both Plato and Aristotle were on varying
lines to develop it, that the individual lives only in and
through the community, which is both the source and
the test of his value. This, like many other weighty
truths, had been implicit in society from the beginning,
but it had never before been formulated and made a rule
of conduct. When Plato says that ' each of us is not put
into the world for himself alone ; at the call of the
fatherland it is impossible not to follow ', we know
that he is speaking his master's most cherished truth.
Socrates was its first prophet and it led him to death.

No time could seem more unpropitious for the doc-
trine ; or was it the very extremity of the case which
led to its first utterance ? The chance of a permanent
reconciliation between the rival heads of the Greek states
had been lost just after the brightest hopes of the Persian
war. Athens had used her place as head of the maritime
states for purposes of aggression and the exploitation of
her allies. She had paid the penalty in their revolt and
the general hostility of Hellas, and in the middle years
of Socrates' life had been passing through the long-drawn
agony of the Peloponnesian war. Before his death the
downfall had come, the surrender of the city, the destruc-
tion of the walls ; and while most hard-pressed from

The Greeks 8 r

without, she had been most deeply torn within by con-
tending factions and vindictive passion. It was just then,
in the struggle of parties over the fate of their stricken
city, that the man fell who had preached and practised
the citizen's duty as the highest and most comprehensive
rule of life.

We are here within that last third of the Greek mil-
lennium which we distinguished at starting as the period
of review in philosophy and decline in national power and
spirit. This character is clearly true both of the work
and the lifetime of Plato and Aristotle, the greatest
Greek figures in the fourth century B.C., when the power
of Macedon was steadily preparing to engulf the petty
states of Greece exhausted by their internecine feuds,
before handing them over two hundred years later to
Rome, the final incorporator of the western world. In
exact science, the mechanical framework of modern
thought and life, it is difficult to assign a definite
share to either of the great philosophers, for the
reason that their work was so comprehensive and so
largely based on that of previous thinkers. In the case
of Aristotle, that part of his work in which he showed
most remarkably his own powers of observation and
originality of view — his biology and politics and ethics —
is precisely that on which his information was necessarily
the most incomplete and liable to correction as life and
society moved on. But on the social side, as summing
up the constructive elements in Greek moral and political
thought and putting out ideas of noble life, they have
been ever since among the most potent forces in the
world. Both had the good fortune to live through the

1543 G

82 The Greeks

pagan Greco-Roman period and to be accepted in the
Middle Ages as Christian philosophers in disguise. They
have thus served in a special way, not open to any other
Greek thinker, to keep unbroken the thread of philosophic
thought in the western world. But their very vitality
and canonization entailed in the end a serious obstruction
to progress. For when at the Renascence men unearthed
the results of the Greeks in the exact sciences and went
on where they had left off, in the case of the philosophers,
whose work had been perpetuated, transformed, and hal-
lowed, their wildest fancies became gospel and their
obvious errors indisputable truth.

Plato, who was the friend and immediate follower of
Socrates, developed in the Dialogues his master's teaching
in the most glorious shape in which a disciple has ever
been able to clothe his master's ideas. They are prose
poems, full of fancy, enthusiasm, humour, and profound
thought, written in the most graceful and persuasive
language which was ever achieved even in Greek. Hence
their assured immortality, as a glowing picture of Greek
life and thought, as well as the strongest impulse in
literature to a spiritual vision. Of special sciences, Plato
was by his inward bent most interested in mathematics,
and especially in geometry. He gathered round him a
group of men engaged in mathematical research, and was
probably in part the cause of the advance in these studies
in the following hundred years.

Aristotle, who was forty years his junior, and first came
to Athens as a member of his school, was a mind of
another bent, positive and critical, keen on observation
and on building up a complete structure of objective

The Greeks 83

knowledge, a biologist, while Plato was a mathematician.
The contrast is sharp enough, but it has been over-
pressed in the schools and histories of philosophy : it is
more to our purpose here to lay stress rather on the
two main issues in which they agree, and which lie at
the root of that co-operative human force subduing the
world, of which we are tracing the rise in this sketch.

Looking back, each of these two great theses may be seen
in the germ in the teaching of Socrates ; looking forward,
each extends far beyond the scope not only of what
Greek science had achieved in the fourth century B. c.,
but of what is even yet accomplished two thousand three
hundred years later.

The first main thesis is this, that there is a body of
connected truth which men study, which leads up from
the simplest and most general laws to the highest and
most difficult to apprehend, that this knowledge is of
the first importance both for the individual soul and
for the society of which it is a part. Readers of the
Republic will remember the wonderful passage in which
Plato develops this thesis from the more disciplinary
point of view, nearer to his master's. The sciences, as
he elicits them in the conversation, are arithmetic, geo-
metry, with special commendation for solid figures,
astronomy, or solids in motion, harmony and dialectic.
They are the studies which make the most demand on
the deductive intellect, and they are presented in the
best order for drawing the learner's soul from the elusive
and conflicting details of sense to eternal and harmonious
truth. Aristotle's scheme of knowledge is more compre-
hensive and objective : he offers in different parts of his

C 2

84 The Greeks

works matter relating to all the main branches of science,
and though he finds the mainspring of education in
a habit of mind rather than in knowledge, yet he too
would consider the discovery and contemplation of truth
as the highest employment for the individual, and know-
ledge as the guide of collective action.

The other main thesis on which the two philosophers
are agreed is that man is by nature, as Aristotle put it,
a ' political being ', that he can only develop his powers
in association with others, and that these associations
must follow accepted principles of justice and order.
Both philosophers devote their crowning treatises to
moral questions, as conditioned by life in an ordered
and civilized society. Plato in the Republic traces the
analogy of the individual soul with a society, showing
how each can only exist harmoniously and realize its
highest nature if it is governed by a principle of justice.
Aristotle, treating the same truth in a more practical and
concrete way, using the terms in the widest sense, presents
ethics as part of politics, for without a social environment
there can be no morality. He then studies in detail
the types of character and government which best serve
the end of happiness and good living.

In these treatises, and especially in those of Aristotle,
we have the ripest wisdom of Hellas on social and political
questions, so far as it was attainable under the specially
Hellenic conditions of civilized life in a limited sphere,
centred in the city-state. The limiting conditions were
serious but obvious : the student can hardly miss them
in making his application of the conclusions. There is
the limited citizenship within the city walls, the hordes

of slaves, the undeveloped women, the mass of barbarians
beyond the gates. No doubt it was the narrow and
simplified problem which made a first approximate solu-
tion possible. But before the Romans came, or Chris-
tianity had breathed a world-wide spirit into the realm
of morality and religion, the conditions of the older
Hellas had themselves enlarged. Side by side with
Alexander's conquest of the East came a wider social
philosophy which had its roots also in the teaching of
Socrates, but did not reach its full growth until the
Romans had incorporated the whole civilized West. This
was the Stoic system, which had its origin with Zeno,
who took up one aspect of the Socratic teaching in
Athens in the generation following Plato. We shall see
its full development in the Roman world. Like Plato and
Aristotle, it rested on an ethical basis, but the sphere and
sanction of morality was to be sought in a universal law of
nature with equal rights and equal duties for all mankind.
This was the great stride in theory which was to follow the
strictly Hellenic view. Meanwhile the teaching of Plato
and Aristotle on moral and social questions, on education
and on government, continued and will always continue
of supreme interest, not only for its positive and per-
manent wisdom, but as representing the first reasoned
answers to the largest questions in life, from the most
gifted people in the world coming to them with an
open mind.

In the path of exact science some long steps further
were to be taken by the Greek genius before its light
died away at last in the alien atmosphere of Alexandria.

The two main lines on which the Greeks went furthest,

8rf 'The Greeks

mathematics and astronomy, are closely connected
throughout : the former culminates with Archimedes in
the third century B.C., the latter with Hipparchus in the
second. Nothing more can be done here than give two
or three of the greatest names and indicate the general
scope of their achievement.

Up to the time of Plato Greek mathematics was mainly
the work of the Pythagorean school. He studied this,
and roused a wide interest in the further study. The
fourth century contains many distinguished names in
mathematics, of which Eudoxus is probably the greatest.
At its end comes Euclid, rather the compiler than the
discoverer. His Elements have the special interest of
being the first connected treatise which survives ; but
for the origin of its various parts we are at the mercy
of tradition, probabilities and chance quotations and
references to earlier mathematicians in later writers. The
quest is an exciting one, not unlike that of analysing
Homer, and the results in detail cannot be much more
certain. Eudoxus, who, after the Pythagoreans, probably
contributed most, was in relation with Plato in early life
and with Aristotle later on. He founded a school at
Cyzicus, near the sea of Marmora, where Miletus, the
birthplace of philosophy, had sent a colony four hundred
years before. It will be noted how Greek science, after
the concentration at Athens, again flourishes rather on
the circumference of the Hellenic world.

After the fourth century and the summary of Euclid
comes the greatest name in all Greek science, Archimedes,
whose life fills the greater part of the third century and
brings us in contact with the conquering Romans at his

The Greeks 87

native city of Syracuse. The stories of his life, the golden
crown, the lever to lift ships, the terrifying engines of
war, his death while drawing diagrams in the sand, are
striking evidence that the struggles of mind with nature
need yield to no other part of history in dramatic interest.
He is the first pure man of science whose works have
come down to us, including not only his treatises on
geometry and mechanics, but also his letters. They show
a man of noble simplicity, full of appreciation for the
work of others.1 He wishes his discoveries to be placed
by the side of those of Eudoxus, who had led the way to
his greatest triumphs, the quadrature of curves and the
comparison of solid volumes by the method of Exhaustions.
Eudoxus had proved that the cone was the third part of
the circumscribing cylinder : he showed the sphere to be
two-thirds. In the modern world, which can attack such
problems by means of an infinitely more expeditious
calculus, this part of his work will be rather studied as
a monument of mental force and ingenuity, and his fame
will remain attached to the sciences of mechanics and
hydrostatics of which on the statical side he is the undis-
puted founder. Another name to be associated with his
is Apollonius of Perga, ten years his junior, who on the
side of pure geometry carried the work of the Greeks
nearest to the conception of a generalized analytical
treatment which was established by Descartes. His

1 ' Conon (who was then dead) would have discovered and made
manifest all these things and would have enriched geometry by many
other discoveries besides. For I know well that it was no common
ability that he brought to bear on mathematics and that his industry
was extraordinary.' — Heath's Archimedes, 151.

88 The Greeks

extant work, from which we know this, is on the conic
sections to which he first assigned their general properties
and probably their names.

Slightly earlier than the two greatest of the Greek
geometers came the two pioneers in a scientific astronomy,
Aristarchus of Samos and Eratosthenes, both members
of the school of Alexandria. Both are famous for attempts
on sound geometrical principles to solve two astronomical
problems. Aristarchus, by calculations based on the
angular distances of sun, moon, and earth at the moment
of half-moon, arrived at the comparative distance of the
sun from the earth, vastly inferior to the truth but vastly
greater than had hitherto been supposed. Eratosthenes,
by comparing the height of the sun at zenith at the
same moment at Syene and Alexandria, and dividing
the result into the whole circumference of the sphere,
gave the first scientific approximation to the size of the
earth. In each case the idea of the method is the
important thing : there were no instruments sufficiently
accurate for the observations ; and above all there was
no trigonometry.

For this, and the consequent establishment of a
scientific astronomy, the world has now learnt that it
must look to Hipparchus, the greatest thinker in the
second century B. c. His work is known to us mainly
through the writings of Ptolemy, who in the second century
A. D. summed up both ancient astronomy and geography
in the book which the admiring Arabs afterwards named
Al Magest. As the Greeks had finally decided for
the geocentric theory, their system could, as astronomy,
have only a provisional value : but it was nevertheless

The Greeks 89

scientific in so far as it rested on a mass of laborious
and faithful observations, gave a true account of many
phenomena, and made verified predictions about all the
commonest celestial events. Roman writers after Hip-
parchus have spoken of the effects of Greek astronomy
in allaying superstitious dread and implanting a sense of
universal order in the popular mind. This sense had
no doubt been growing ever since the Chaldean astrono-
mers had watched the stars from the plains of Babylon
and first taught the Greeks to observe them. But we
should perhaps now give even more weight to the stimulus
gained from astronomy for all kinds of scientific thinking,
and especially for mathematics, the first field of science.
It was the need of his astronomy that led Hipparchus to
trigonometry, and trigonometry permitted the first mathe-
matical tables to be drawn up and the first comprehensive
view to be obtained of the mechanics of the universe.

Hipparchus was still observing in the island of Rhodes
when Achaia had become a Roman province. The old
motto and boundary for the expansion of Greece was
from ' Achilles to Alexander ' ; it suggests movement
and conquest and the vigour of youth. From another
point of view, more cognate to our present purpose, from
' Thales to Hipparchus ' would better describe the mental
progress to the Greeks. In taking this measure, we are
not limiting our view to the mechanics of intellect or
asserting that a mathematical lemma is in itself more
valuable than a play of Euripides. But, as with the
savage, we found that no better measure of their advance
was available than a comparison of their tools, so with
the Greeks their progress in science is the most charac-

90 The Greeks

teristic thing, bound up with the rest of their achieve-
ments, but more clearly progressive and more persistent.
For their science was still growing, when literature and art
were reminiscent, philosophy stagnant, and freedom dead.

The scientific spirit, therefore, of the Greeks shall
stand first in their account. But with it and through
it we must try to read the other aspects of Greek
life and thought. Its kinship with the growth of
personal and political freedom is suggested by the story
of events. Its relation with their idealizing art is, on
the grounds of the common intellectual tendency, still
more certain ; each aims at rising above the particulars
of sense and attaining a general and perfect form. In
the sphere of social life and government, though the
means were wanting to great achievements, the same
spirit of analysis and ideal reconstruction has given to
later ages, through the great philosophers, the best pos-
sible sketches within their limits of the fundamental
conditions of success.

And there are throughout the Greek story traits of
character, not strictly intellectual, which yet have many
links with the same movement of the mind. They failed
to build lasting political unions, they fought violently
and sometimes treacherously among themselves, yet in
their literature, as in their life, there may be traced a
growing sense of human fellowship, a respect for others,
a delicacy of feeling and a care for immaterial things
to which neither the theocracies before nor the Romans
after could lay claim. These were considerable elements
to be infused into the coming world They are not
the least of our debts to Greece.

THE ROMANS

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(Hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

VIRGIL.

THE Romans, who were to absorb and enforce the work
of Greece, and to form the strongest union yet seen
among the leading peoples of the world, were another
branch of the same Indo-Germanic or Aryan group.
They were indeed closely related to the Greeks in blood,
in language, and in early history. If Celts and Teutons
and Slavs are cousins to the Greeks, the Romans are
brothers. The number of terms common to the two
languages, beyond those going back to the common Aryan
stock, suggests that the two races had dwelt some time
together after the other branches had broken off. Thus
they have common words dealing with houses, agriculture,
boats, vines, clothing, the family, the gods, and primitive
government. The Romans, or Latins, came, like the
Greeks of the migration, from lands north of their historic
home, but unlike the Greeks, whose entry on the scene
was celebrated in splendid sagas going back to the time
of their migration, the Romans, when we first find them,
in the dim dawn of their history, are already settled in
the central Italian plain, and already by force and policy
binding the neighbouring communities to themselves, as
allies.

Their geographical position in Italy was as important
a factor in their evolution as the conformation of the
Aegean was to the Greeks. Rome is in the middle of
the west coast of Italy, in a fairly fertile plain and on the
banks of a navigable river^ some fifteen miles away from
the sea. Every point carried weight. Their soil, not
too fertile to deprive them of motives for expansion, was

The Romans 93

fertile enough to repay cultivation and to leave some-
thing over for foreign trade. For commerce the settle-
ment was specially well placed. It was defensible, in
a central position, and not on the sea though easily
accessible from it. Being in the middle of the peninsula,
they had the best possible chance of stretching across it,
of barring north from south and ultimately of gaining
command of the whole. Above all, while early in touch
with the neighbouring Greeks, their own trend was as
markedly to the west as the Greeks' was eastward. It
was, as we shall see, their western expansion, giving them,
at the first great crisis in their history, Spain, and at the
second, Gaul, which built up the empire and enabled
them to bring together the whole Mediterranean world.

But powerful as these geographical influences must
have been, it would be an even greater mistake to rely
mainly upon them in the case of the Romans than in
that of the Greeks ; for, looking back as far as the eye
can penetrate the mists of early Rome, we see there in
language, national character, laws and religion, the germs
of those principles of action and policy to which at every
point in their triumphant progress their success was
demonstrably due. It was clearly a case of perfect suit-
ability between the developing organism and its environ-
ment.

The great words which we owe to the Latin language,
especially those which go back furthest in their history,
shed streams of light upon the causes of their national
success. ' Fas ' and ' Jus ', that which is right or binding,
the former from the religious, the latter from a more
social point of view, are two of the oldest and most

94 The Romans

venerable. From ' Jus ' come ' justice ', ' jurisdiction ',
' jurisprudence ', abstract and general terms of course,
but elaborated and embodied by the Romans in a system
so efficient that it has largely survived its authors, and
remains as an endowment to the modern world. ' Patres ',
' Patria Potestas ', ' Familia ' are as characteristic of the
Roman as ' home ' of the English ; and though the word,
like other scientific terms, is Greek, Rome is the classical
example of the ' Patriarchal Theory ' as the typical
form and root of all complete political organization.
' Social ', ' society ', and the newly coined ' socialism '
and ' sociology ' all recall the Latin ' socii ', and with it
the successive steps and method of their expansion. And
' religion ', the greatest word of all, is as characteristically
Roman as ' philosophy ' and ' mathematics ' are Greek.
Whether we trace 'its origin to the root which signifies
' going over again ' and observing one's duties to the
gods, or to the root which means ' binding ' the individual
to something outside himself, in either case ' religion '
reminds us rather of the Roman who veiled and bowed
his head in worship, than of the Greek who looked up
to Heaven when he sacrificed.

The force of their legal genius and social organization
appears at every turn in Roman history ; the special
qualities of their primitive religion, as compared with
that of the Greeks, are less obvious in the story, but
highly significant of the issue. Whereas the early Greek
was always weaving legends about his gods, connecting
them with his own national origins, and in the heyday
of his art figuring them in pictures and in marble as the
most beautiful imaginable forms of human beings, the

The Romans 9^

Roman wove no legends and made no images. His gods
were of the useful and practical order, presiding over
every act of his daily life, every operation of the fields.
There was a goddess of child-birth, a god of sowing and
of harvest, a divinity protecting every cross-road and
honoured at every hearth and every doorway.

A god presided over the march of the army, and in
another form gave it the victory and sanctified the faith
of the treaty that ended the war.

It was the religion of men who in the days of their
strength went as a duty from following the plough to
leading an army, and, whatever the enterprise, never
faltered or turned back.

The period covered by their national development
may, like that of the Greeks, be put roughly at a thousand
years; but the Roman millennium begins later and extends
well into the Christian era. If we reckon the Greek period
from the time when they had occupied the Aegean archi-
pelago and had begun to send out colonies, the Roman
must be dated from their consolidation of the Latin
communities at the beginning of the fifth century B. c.
It comes to its climax at the beginning of the Christian
era, when the light of Greece as a nation has gone out,
and it lasts into the fifth century A.D. when the Western
Empire is broken up and a barbarian king rules in Rome.
The Eastern Empire continues for another millennium the
ideas of both Greeks and Romans, but with substantial
changes. We shall only notice here a few of the most
salient points in this Roman evolution, those which best
illustrate the way in which they built up their marvellous
structure of law and government, and established the

9<f The Romans

ideas of social order which are their bequest to mankind,
as science and philosophy are the gift of Greece.

Both aspects of human activity are closely intertwined ;
both are essential to the task of human co-operation in
subduing the world ; but whereas the Greeks contributed
most to arming man's mind for the struggle, the Romans
did most to enable men to work in an orderly sequence
and harmoniously one with another.

The material for the study of Roman origins is meagre,
compared with the wealth of legendary story in Greece.
The little community on the Tiber was at first governed
by kings of the heroic stamp, like those of Greece. North
of the Latins, in what is still called Tuscany, lived the
mysterious people, whose remains, so strikingly resembling
those of Mycenaean Greece, we are only now beginning
seriously to study, and whose language is still unread.
The later kings of Rome were of this race, Etruscans,
and to them the early city seems to have owed its military
organization and much of its defensive strength. The
Tarquins or Tarchons (Etruscan for a ruler) held sway
in Rome at the same epoch when the ' tyrants ' of Greece
were ruling their communities round the Aegean and in
southern Italy. Towards the close of the sixth century
B.C. the Tarquins were expelled from Rome by a move-
ment parallel to that which destroyed the tyrannies in
the Hellenic world. At this point the characteristic
Roman movement begins. It had a twofold aspect, con-
solidation and equality of rights within the state, exten-
sion of territory and organization without.

After the monarchy, the magistracies which took its
place were at first assumed without dispute by leading

The Romans 97

men of the ' patrician ' order, i. e. the original clans
who founded the city. But there were besides these,
and soon to be set in sharpest opposition to them,
a mass of the non-patrician, or ' plebeian ' classes, who
are variously supposed to have arisen, either from a dis-
tinct subject race or, more probably, from the dependants
who gathered round the patrician houses. The internal
movement of the early centuries consisted in the adjusting
of the relations of the conflicting orders, and gradually
admitting the unprivileged to equality of rights with the
older tribes. In this the Romans showed the same con-
spicuous skill in practical affairs which guided them at
all later crises till decay set in. They faced each grievance
as it arose, and adjusted their laws and constitution to
meet the new necessity without discarding the old order.
Side by side with this went the external movement, by
which the power of the republic was gradually extended
till it first formed the central and strongest state in the
peninsula, then incorporated the whole, and finally em-
braced such large and varied territories that, in the last
century B.C., the old republican government at the centre
broke down, and, by another Roman adaptation, gave
place to the empire. The two movements, within and
without, were, as we shall see, linked closely and causally
throughout.

Two consuls elected for a year by the patrician assembly
assumed all the powers exercised by the kings, and like
them became the first of the Patres, the fathers of the
state. The ' fathers' power ' or ' patria potestas ' gave
them the priestly function of taking the auspices. They
led the armies and presided over the assembled fathers

1543 „

y8 'The Romans

in the senate, which they consulted as their ' family
council '. They were the chief judges, and, like a father
in his family, had power of life and death. In an emer-
gency full powers — the ' imperium ' — might be conferred
on one man, the dictator, most often needed to lead the
army in a crisis. As the work of the state became more
complex and grew in bulk, this simple form of government
proved inadequate : it was but a duplication of the king
to checkmate a despot. Gradually the consuls' functions
were distributed among other magistrates, of whom the
praetor, or chief legal magistrate, came next in rank.
His title was, in fact, originally an alternative for the
consul's ; in later history he became the mouthpiece
for Roman genius in building law. Proconsuls and pre-
fects were added later to represent the consul and praetor
in colonies and other communities beyond the walls.

The internal movement, the fight of the plebeians,
was for defence against arbitrary power, for election to
the magistracies themselves, for recognition of their own
assemblies as well as those of the older clans or ' gentes ',
and for the gradual equalization of all civic and political
rights. The struggle was long and persistent, but it was
composed at every stage by some characteristic Roman
stroke, and ended before the crisis of the last century B.C.
in the complete assimilation of the plebeian classes. The
questions which were then at issue were on a wider plane,
but still had points of contact with the old class struggle,
and their treatment called for a still larger exercise of
the same gifts which gave the republic its unique and
immortal triumph in the earlier centuries.

In the first step of this internal movement we see its

The Romans 99

intimate connexion with the growth of Roman power
without. The loyalty of the plebeians in the army was
in the first year of the republic secured by the grant
of an appeal to all the citizens, in their ' centuries ',
against any capital sentence, except that passed by a
dictator. And early in the fifth century, the first century
of republican history, the next great step was taken,
which proved still more decisive in the sequel, the con-
cession to the plebeians of a magistracy of their own,
the ' tribunes ', whose prerogative it was to protect any
plebeian against a patrician officer under a special oath
of sanctity for their persons. This institution, which
soon developed its unexampled powers, was due to the
demands of plebeian legionaries, just returned from a
successful campaign. Shortly after followed the first
step in the incorporation of Italy, the alliance with the
other Latin communities of the Campagna, which enabled
Rome to face with greater security both the Etruscans
to the north, whose yoke she had just thrown off, and
the rude hill tribes who surrounded the Latin plain to
the south and east, and were the next obstacle in the
way of her advance. Within a few years from this the
plebs had succeeded in getting promulgated the first
code of Roman law, the famous Twelve Tables, the
fountain from which the stream of written law flowed
on in widening courses through all the ten centuries of
Roman history, until the great jurists of the empire
reviewed and collected it for the use of all civilized men.
The Romans then, as the Greeks democracies just before,
were unwilling any longer to accept the oral traditional
judgements of patrician magistrates on matters of life

H2

ioo The Romans

and death, person and property. The story ran that
a special mission was sent to Athens, before the Tables
were drawn up, to study the laws of Solon, which had
been in force there for over half a century. However
this may be, we know that Rome was deeply indebted
to Greece both early and late in her career. The differ-
ence in the result was due mainly to the greater practical
skill with which Rome developed her system, assimilating
as she went all that came to her from without.

The fourth century continues the parallel progress in
Rome's development. Within the state, citizens of all
classes were being gradually admitted to all the magis-
tracies. Without, Rome was steadily extending her sway
over the middle and southern parts of the peninsula,
a process broken only in this century by the startling
invasion and burning of the city by the Gauls, or Celts,
from the north.

The beginning of the third century sees perhaps the
most striking of all the coincidences between the outer
and the inner movements. In 287 B. c. a law was carried
giving measures passed by the plebeian assembly the force
of law, without the sanction of the Senate ; and twelve
years later we have the last decisive victory, which gave
the supremacy of all Italy, south of the Arno, to Rome.
Pyrrhus, the Macedonian adventurer, who attempted to
set up a Greek empire in the west without reckoning
with the Romans, was expelled, and the Greek states in
the south were finally brought into the Roman system,
with which they had been for the most part on friendly
terms.

Thus at the beginning of the third century the founda-

The Romans 101

tions of the empire had been firmly laid by consolidation
within and without. As all citizens had been required
for the work of conquest, so all had been admitted to
full and equal rights : this is the short but adequate
formula for the whole process from within. Externally,
the subjugated and allied peoples were bound to Rome
by a system which forbade all external relations except
through the suzerain power, preserved as far as possible
local institutions, and rewarded the faithful by grants of
closer relationship, franchise, intermarriage, and com-
mercial privileges.

In the next period this consolidated and victorious
power proceeds, from the basis of an allied and firmly
united Italy, to incorporate the whole Mediterranean
world.

We can only notice the two critical points. The first
is the struggle with Carthage in the second century : the
second Caesar's conquest of Gaul and subversion of the
republic just before the Christian era.

In the first, Rome takes up and completes the tradi-
tional struggle of centuries before between the Greeks
and the Phoenicians. At the same moment that the
eastern Greeks were vanquishing the Persians at Salamis,
the Phoenicians from Carthage had been defeated by the
Greeks of Sicily. But the Greek victory was inconclusive :
Carthage had flourished still more in the two centuries
since, and now faced the Romans as an unavoidable
barrier to that western expansion on which their empire
depended. Rome or Carthage must rule Spain, and from
Spain Gaul and the whole west. Rome had the advantage
of her position, her national character, and her kinship

102 The Romans

with the western people. Carthage had her wealth, her
trade, her ancient traditions, and the greatest military
genius of antiquity, bound by ancestral enmity to pursue
the war with Rome. In the second Punic war, when
Hannibal ranged undefeated over the whole of Italy and
marched up to the walls of the city, the Roman spirit
was seen at its best, strengthened by the republican
discipline of three hundred years. Senate and people
were united, and at the lowest moment of their fortunes
never dreamt of peace without victory. It was found
impossible to form any rival combination in Italy against
the Romans. Hannibal was never beaten, but Rome won.

At the second point — Caesar's career — the scene has
changed. Rome is triumphant. Carthage has disappeared,
and Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and northern Africa have come
under Roman rule. The East has been invaded, and
Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria brought into the
Roman sphere. Gaul and northern Europe still remain
untouched, and meanwhile such new social evils and
difficulties in government have arisen as only the strong
hand of one master can redress.

The old republican government was unable to cope
with the growing burden thrown upon it. New pro-
vinces, large permanent armies under successful generals,
masses of new wealth, new ideas and alien people were
flowing in. Neither the system nor the spirit of the
rising capital of the world was equal to its task. Imagine
— a rough analogy, of course — a House of Lords, not
hereditary, but composed for the most part of returned
proconsuls, enriched with the spoils of war and the
extortionate government of provinces, claiming control

The Romans 103

of army, finance, and all foreign affairs. This was the
Senate, and it was faced by a popular House, which
had in theory the right of passing laws and appointing
magistrates, but which, through the pressure of the new
wealth and new nobility, had gradually in practice re-
linquished all real power.

Such were the conditions, which only awaited a suc-
cessful general, with sufficient political insight and
sufficient force, to overcome all his rivals and seize and
reorganize the state. Several returning generals had
attempted it, as the nominee of one party or the other.
Caesar was the first who combined all the needed qualities
and possessed them in such a degree, that, though the
jealousy of outraged nobles allowed him but a few months'
power, he was able to lay down the lines on which the
reconstruction was to proceed, and became in title, as
in reality, the founder of the Empire. A patrician by
birth, he was by family tradition on the popular side :
by genius he was able to rise above mere party differences,
and see the real needs of the state and the only means
of satisfying them under the conditions of the time. His
senior and rival, Pompey, had won his power by a com-
mand in the East, where he had cleared the seas of pirates
and settled the Roman provinces in Asia Minor. It was
left for Caesar to come back to Rome as the conqueror
of Gaul, the keystone of the West. The ' imperium ' of
the commander in the field became at last in his hands,
as Dictator, the supreme power in the city itself, and
the short five years between his return and his death,
interrupted by the war with Pompey, were used with
unflagging energy to carry out the most urgent reforms,

104 The Romans

and lay the foundation of the imperial system of the
later half of Roman history. We shall notice only those
which illustrate our central theme.

The outlying parts of the Roman state, which were
ultimately to profit most by the Roman system, were at
this time the most impoverished by it. Governors, tax-
gatherers, and usurers had been for years battening upon
the provinces almost without restraint. Caesar checked
this by a system of * legates ', dependent upon himself, and
thus kept in his own hands the command of the armies and
the government of provinces. Italy, too, had suffered by
depopulation and the absorption of the old small farms in
large slave-worked estates owned by the new capitalists.
Caesar settled his own veterans and others on the land,
with as little disturbance as possible to existing rights, and
required owners to find employment for a certain number
of free labourers. New settlements, too, were made at
Carthage and Corinth and many decayed towns in Italy.
His government of Rome itself was equally wise and vigor-
ous, but the problem of how to fit the new imperial power
into the old republican forms he did not live to solve. It
was left for the lesser genius and greater tact of Augustus.
Julius himself was content, during his tenure of power, to
govern as Dictator. This office, frequently used before in
republican history, was now, in the last year of his life,
made for the first time ' perpetual '.

The murder of Caesar delayed the final settlement for
thirteen years, and imposed a long and desolating war
upon the Empire. When in 28 B. c. Augustus finally
overcame his rivals, he was able, at his leisure and in
the safety of general exhaustion, to elaborate a system

The Romans

of absolute rule under republican forms, which is the
greatest triumph of Roman statecraft and the strongest
evidence of his own skill in management. All the
republican magistracies were retained and treated with
formal respect. The Senate was consulted and considered
in theory to be the source of all power and the arbiter in
all legislation. But the new Princeps sat among them,
' primus inter pares ' by courtesy, but being armed with
both the ' imperium ' of the commander and the ' pote-
stas' of the old tribune, able in fact to do with the
Senate and with the whole government as he pleased.

At this moment we enter on the period of Rome's
greatest power, when having absorbed, so far as she was
able, the Greek results in philosophy and art, she pro-
ceeded to administer during the last half of her millennium
all the countries of the Mediterranean and the near
East. It was a profoundly important but a less critical
era than several which had passed. At the crisis of Greek
national life and thought against Persia, the onlooker
might well have been in doubt as to the issue ; and
when the rising power of Rome was pitted against the
greatest naval force of the Mediterranean, a different
result might have been predicted. Again, at the crisis
of the republic, it would have been a bold forecast that
in less than fifty years the whole Roman world would
be consolidated, enlarged and peaceably governed by one
undisputed master. But, after the work of Julius and
his nephew, there was so great a change, both on the
face and in the spirit of the western world, that uncer-
tainty gave place to unquestioning confidence and rest.

As in Athens after the Persian struggle so now the

io 6 The Romans

greatest poets of Rome were inspired to celebrate the
triumph, but in a different tone. For whereas the Greeks
hailed a new wonder, the victory of allied bands of free-
men over an old-world foe, Virgil and Horace sang the
return of the golden age which had preceded all the
troubles and conflicts with which man's actual experience
was filled. Another race of gods had descended in the
emperors, who had restored the fabled peace and plenty
of prehistoric days and founded another age of virtue
and prosperity which would continue and increase for
evermore. Not freedom and conflict, but repose and
happiness were now the notes. Much courtly compli-
ment, no doubt, much natural relief and exultation at
the settlement ; but yet the wise observer might well
have thought that now at last a permanent centre of
government and civilization had been established from
which in time all the surrounding barbarism might be
transformed. And by devious paths and through many
apparent disasters, this has in substance taken place.
The Roman Empire was in essence the embryo of the
modern world, and Europe and the West to-day are Rome
enlarged.

The main elements from which this new world was
to arise had been growing together for many years.
From the earliest times, as we have seen, the Romans
had been indebted to Greece ; the City-State itself,
of which Rome was the triumphant example, was in
many essentials a Greek institution. In the second cea-
tury B.C., when Rome had finally defeated the common
eastern foe, and Roman armies had made their way into
Hellas, the study of Greek, its language, its art and its

The Romans 107

philosophy, became the fashionable type of education ;
and in the age of Cicero, a hundred years later again,
the Greco-Roman spirit, of which the empire was the
administrative embodiment, was fully and consciously
developed. Cicero himself is the best type of it, for
with the studied impartiality of the compromising mind,
he combined a sincere attachment to old Roman virtues
and institutions with a keen and open-minded interest
in Greek philosophy and new ideas. Few passages in
ancient literature are more significant, or come home to
us with a more modern touch, than the familiar story
which Cicero tells of himself as commissioner in Sicily,
how he searched out the tomb of Archimedes and found
it at last all overgrown with brambles, and how he cleared
the cylinder and sphere, the symbols of Archimedes'
crowning theorem, and restored to Syracuse the memory
of her greatest citizen, which, says he, but for a man
from Arpinum — the country town in Italy where he was
born — they might have lost for ever.

The western world was thus preparing for the great
amalgamation of the Empire, and the last century B. c.
is full of such convergences. At its commencement we
have the preaching of Stoicism in Rome, that phase of
Greek philosophy which was the most congenial to the
Roman temper, and was to inspire the noblest rulers of
the Empire in its prime. In this movement also Cicero
played a leading part, presenting in his moral treatises
the Stoical ideas of the time, especially those of Panae-
tius, a leader of the school, who had divided his time
between teaching in Athens and in Rome. The full
results of the system appear two hundred years later,

io8 The Romans

above all in the maturity of Roman law. We note it
here in this age of convergences, as a symptom and
a cause, not only of the union of Greece and Rome in
the Empire, but of the spread of a deeper and more real
sense of common humanity than the world had ever
known before.

And at the end of the same century comes that fire
from the East which was to burn up the remnants of
the old mythologies, and, partly combining with, partly
displacing, the old philosophies, to create in the later
centuries of the Empire a new spiritual force of quite
another order.

Geographically the Empire was, in spite of its size,
a political unit of remarkable symmetry and coherence.
It was practically all the land easily accessible,, from the
Mediterranean Sea, with its centre at Rome rather
inclining, as we have noted, to the West. Like higher
organisms in the animal kingdom, it had its two sides
roughly duplicating one another, in the eastern and the
western portions, which, when the vigour of the whole
body had decayed, fell asunder and formed the western
and the eastern empires of the Middle Ages. But for the
five hundred years of its official unity it remained, with
comparatively small changes of frontier, intact, and
demonstrated by its very existence the force of its
internal unity and the needs which the imperial system
was able to satisfy. One may consider — and in the light
of subsequent events it is easy to be wise — that there
was one serious omission in the ' rectification ' of the
frontier, and one or two mistaken attempts to expand
in a wrong direction. It certainly seems a mistake, and

The Romans 109

was a grave misfortune, both to the Empire and to
Europe later on, that the repulse of Augustus in the
German forests prevented the frontier being carried
forward in that direction to include the Franks and the
Saxons in the Roman sphere, and make the Elbe the
boundary and not the Rhine. The failure to do this
postponed the conversion of Germany till the time of
St. Boniface and Charlemagne, in the eighth and ninth
centuries. It was a mistake of the opposite kind to force
the Roman standards, as Trajan did, on to the Persian
Gulf, and to attempt the incorporation of Parthia.

But the Roman world was in the main the Mediter-
ranean world, and it grew rapidly together, when at last
a conquering people arose in a central position, and with
a gift for organization. Once united under Julius and
Augustus, it remained in extent much as they had left
it, until the last emperor was deposed in Rome. From
many points of view the real unity persisted after its
external forms were worn out and thrown away. Nor
is it even now extinct, though an alien power, strange
in all respects to Greco-Roman ideas, has been for nearly
five hundred years occupying the last seat of empire on
the Bosphorus.

The five hundred years of the Empire fall naturally
into three periods. The first two hundred years, till
the death of Marcus Aurelius, were its era of greatest
prosperity, best government, of growing consolidation
and improvement of the system, especially on the legal
side. The intervals of misrule, the cruelties of Caligula
and Nero and the civil war ended by Vespasian, were
short and limited in their ill effect to a small area, and

1 1 o The Romans

the five emperors who succeeded Domitian were the
ablest, most devoted, and most successful rulers into
whose hands the welfare of the leading portion of man-
kind has ever fallen. The age of the Antonines is rightly
proverbial as an illustration of how well the system could
work under the guidance of good men.

The hundred years which followed, between Marcus
Aurelius and Diocletian, showed the two capital weak-
nesses of the central government, the power of the army
and the difficulties and dangers which attended the suc-
cession of the emperors. The ablest of them would
yield to the temptation of appointing their own sons to
succeed them, however ill-fitted for the post, and steadily
throughout the period the real power fell more and more
into the hands of the armies, who put up and deposed
emperors at their will.

At the beginning of the last period, the two hundred
years from Diocletian to the extinction of the western
empire, a new form of organization was tried, to avoid
the evils of civil war and obtain a succession of experienced
rulers. The Empire was divided for administration into
two parts, East and West, with an Emperor — Augustus —
at the head of each and a Caesar under him in training
for supreme power. In the hands of Diocletian himself,
its founder, the system worked fairly well, but it marked
definitely the point at which Rome ceased to be the
centre of the civilized world. Diocletian fixed his own
residence in the East and that of his colleague at Milan,
and when, forty years later, Constantine for a time
reunited the whole, he placed the new centre at his own
city of Constantinople, built on the site of the ancient

'The Romans

iii

Byzantium at the spot where Europe looks into Asia
across the famous straits. The seat of Empire at the old
centre was thus left vacant for the new spiritual power,
which Constantine at last recognized, and which was to
reincorporate the western provinces as they slipped
gradually from their political allegiance.

Two weighty facts appear in this last period of the
old Western Empire which shed the greatest light on
its ultimate disintegration. The surrounding barbarian
tribes were admitted in larger and larger numbers to
settle within the borders, to replenish its failing popula-
tion, recruit the army, and even hold positions of trust.
And to preserve order, administer justice, and extract
the ever-increasing burden of taxation, a civil service was
established, distinct from the army, but like it dependent
on the emperor himself. This burdensome bureaucracy
of Diocletian and the long and insufficiently guarded
frontiers were potent factors in the decline.

Such is a bald outline of the external facts ; beneath
these was proceeding throughout the unifying process
which, consciously or unconsciously, was the real task
which this government had to perform for the varied
elements which had come together under its control in
the central nucleus of western civilization.

It remains to indicate the main agencies by which this
unity was promoted in the Empire, and the main results,
both in organization and in thought, which have followed
and endure. The study of these is in effect the basis of all
modern history and is in no case yet completed. Of our
own country, for instance, no one has yet given us a full
and living picture as it was in the Roman Age, when for

r 1 2 The Romans

the first time it came within the circle of civilized history.
But everywhere it seems true to say that the further the
inquiry is pressed, the more intimate and binding the
Roman influence is seen to be. It is more than a super-
ficial analogy when we speak of such a system as an
organism, as a body politic. It had its skeleton, or sub-
stantial framework, in the system of fortresses, linked by
paved roads and manned by legionaries, which held
together the diverse lands and multitudes of people from
Mesopotamia to Finisterre, and Hadrian's Wall to Upper
Egypt. Of these there are abundant remains everywhere,
substantial and ksting as all Roman building, and they
contrast significantly with the water-ways of the Greeks.
The centre of the system, controlling and moving the
whole, as the brain the nerves, was the emperor himself,
who united all the threads both of civil and military
administration. At the happiest moment, in the second
century, when the whole body was vigorous and the
mind of a Trajan or an Antoninus was in control, the
general prosperity of the populations affected would
probably have compared not unfavourably with that of
any other epoch before or since. Imperial rescripts, the
thanks of the governed communities, the public works
carried out, sometimes the private instructions of the
emperors, all attest both the humanity and the success
of their government. Of the last class of documents the
correspondence of Trajan with the younger Pliny, when
governor of Bithynia, is the most instructive as well as
pleasing. In these letters the emperor shows himself
to have been, as a man, kindly and laborious, conscientious
in detail, full of the responsibility of his position, as

The Romans 113

a Roman, careful of law and precedent, zealous above
all for order and conciliation, and as an educated European
of the second century A.D., conscious of the rights of
common humanity, proud of the age in which he
lived. The reign of Antoninus Pius illustrated the
same principles with added stress on the need of peace
and economy, and in Marcus Aurelius the very spirit of
Stoicism, austere offspring of the Greco-Roman union,
was at the helm.

But while under such guidance the organized world
prospered and grew both more humane and more
united, the guidance itself was precarious and change-
able, and, even at its best, could not have arrested the
disease inevitable in a system where the principles of
individual and religious freedom were not yet under-
stood. The great emperors were a minority, and the
greatest could not have stayed the depopulation of the
Empire and the growing inroads of the barbarians. Some-
thing, however, which was independent of individuals
and could survive them, was being constantly produced
by the working of the system, and by the union in the
government of the world of the practical genius of the
Roman with a strain of Greek analysis and generalization.
This was Roman law, perfected under the best of the
emperors in the second century, and constituting, enact-
ments and principles together, the most precious definite
legacy of Rome to mankind.

The analogy of Greek science and philosophy is a sound
one. If we were justified in treating abstract thought,
shown both in science and in art, and best measured by
the intellectual evolution from Thales to Hipparchus, as

1543 I

ii4 The Romans

the special characteristic of Greece, in the case of Rome,
the system and science of their laws is the most enduring
product, and the measure of their evolution — from the
Twelve Tables to Gaius or Justinian. But as we might
expect of the greatest work of the eminently practical
people in history, we cannot detach it from their general
activity and treat it as a thing perfect and sufficient in
itself, as we can a Greek statue or Greek geometry.
Roman law is the special expression of Rome's practical
genius in widening precedents to meet new cases, in
building up new structures on old foundations, and using
every bit of the old material that would serve. So it
kept pace with the growth of their Empire and the
widening and humanizing of their ideas. In the earliest
stages, as we saw, its history was similar to that of the
early Greek states and of other youthful people. The
bulk of the citizens, after coming to live together in
a city-state, claimed the protection of a written code
against the violence and unequal rule of the old noble
and wealthier families. This movement created the
Twelve Tables in Rome, as it had led to Solon's legisla-
tion in Athens. Then followed the specially Roman
evolution. The Praetor, the magistrate in charge of the
administration of the laws, was called upon every year,
on entering his term of office, to issue an edict stating
the principles on which he intended to act, and any
modifications in the practice of the courts which he
proposed to introduce. In this way he was able to deal
with the constantly growing mass of new cases and
difficulties caused by the intercourse of Romans with
strangers of diverse customs. ' lus Gentium ' thus meant

The Romans i 1 y

originally the law of these non-Roman peoples, the
common law, as some have said, of the Mediterranean
world, as distinguished from the lus Civile, the birth-
right of the Roman citizen ; and it was naturally at first
regarded as an inferior though necessary exception. But
the progress of reflection and the widening of the area
of comparison caused the jurists gradually to assign a
higher validity to those common notions which were
discovered at the basis of the laws of different nations.
This tended to what we have since called ' equity ', and
it was accompanied by a simplified process in the Roman
courts themselves, where more and more importance
came to be attached to the real purpose and essential
justice of an action, and less to the observance of the old
prescribed formulae.

At this point the influence of Stoicism began to work.
' Living according to nature ' was the crowning precept
of this philosophy, and it had an obvious application to
law as well as morality. The old lus Gentium became
identified with this Law of Nature, and what the praetors
had been doing gradually from year to year through force
of circumstances, the jurists of the Empire began to do
more rapidly and on principle, in order to attain a new
philosophic ideal of simplicity, symmetry, and generaliza-
tion. It was under the Antonines, when Stoicism was
on the throne, that this extension and reform of the legal
system made most progress and Roman law became the
summary of Roman experience enlightened by Greek
philosophy, and the model for later codes.

Returning, then, to the main purpose of our sketch,
we see that among the agencies that have done most to

i 2

n6 The Romans

build up the collective force of man for the conquest of
nature and the improvement of his lot, one of the highest
places must be assigned to Roman law. It was the leading
agent by which the Romans carried out their incorpora-
tion of the West and also their most notable bequest to
the nations who have since taken up the task of the van-
guard of mankind. In a thousand ways, sometimes out-
side the strictly legal sphere, it has worked in later years
to preserve those principles of order and continuity in
development, which the Roman genius first established
in the world. In the law and organization of the Catholic
Church, in methods of local and colonial administration,
even in the essentially diverse feudal system, large traces
may be found of Roman law and Roman procedure. In
matters of pure theory, the realms of moral philosophy
and theology, the same influence has been at work. The
very notion of an ordered progress in human affairs, of
which this book is an illustration, takes its rise in the
study of Roman law. It was in the school of law at
Naples, early in the eighteenth century, that Vico first
conceived and sketched the idea of the ' historic ' method
in studying the past, which has grown in force ever since,
and now dominates our view of history as completely as
Darwin's theory has revolutionized biology. For Vico,
inspired by the history of Roman law, was the first to
suggest that changes in civilization could be interpreted
according to an ordered sequence, which has its moving
force in the growth and change of the collective mind
of mankind from generation to generation. The Romans
had offered in their history the most unmistakable
instance of such a sequence. Their genius was as apt

The Romans 117

for building up institutions and human law as the Greek
for discovering the abstract laws of thought and nature.
And the fact of progress was in the first place more easily
apprehended from the rules and conditions which man
had made to surround his own life, than from the less
visible, though more fundamental, changes in the general
ideas which form our science, philosophy, and religion.
Thus it is that ' progress ' is a Latin word, and that the
Romans first suggested the idea, while we have not even
yet fully realized what the Greeks did for the growth of
the human mind, nor the place which abstract thought
must take in a true view of historic evolution.

The next stage in Western history illustrates this con-
clusion in a striking and unexpected way. At first sight,
in mediaeval Europe Roman institutions seem to have
been completely shattered and the onward course of
science hopelessly obstructed. But in the end it will be
seen that, by a fresh direction of the intellect, the Roman
work of incorporation was being actually extended, and
in power and depth the collective mind strengthened,
though on other lines than the Greeks and Romans could
themselves have understood.

THE MIDDLE AGES

The Papal hierarchy constituted in the Middle Ages the main bond
between the various nations of Europe after the decline of the
Roman sway, and the Catholic influence should therefore be judged
not only by the visible good which it produced, but still more by the
imminent evils which it silently prevented.

AUGUSTE COMTE.

IT was noticed in the last two chapters that two periods
of a thousand years, overlapping but not exactly coinci-
dent, would cover roughly the rise and flowering of the
Greek and Roman genius. Another millennium, following
on the break up of the Roman Empire, embraces what
are still commonly called the ' Middle Ages '. There is
another coincidence with a significant difference. Three
great poetic works have always and rightly been accepted
as signalizing the three great movements ; but they stand
at different points in the course of each. Homer, marking
the emergence of the Greeks from the barbarism of the
migrations and the sagas, comes near the beginning of
their evolution. Virgil, who celebrates the climax of
a work of conquest and incorporation, comes midway in
the Roman period. Dante, who expresses even more
perfectly the essence of mediaeval Catholicism, is almost
its last great voice. It will be seen, as we proceed, why
such a perfect expression of an age so difficult to grasp
could only come when it had nearly run its course.
Built up on the ruins of an ancient system and full of
new life seeking fresh forms and outlets for its vigour,
the mediaeval system impresses us at first more perhaps
by its wealth of contradictions than by any one of those
special features which have led men to call it, sometimes
the ' age of faith ', sometimes the ' dark ages ', sometimes the
' age of chivalry ', sometimes the ' age of law '. It exhibits
elements which justify them all, kings celebrated for their
services to learning who had never learnt to write, orgies

The Middle

121

of savage cruelty in the interests of the purest of religions,
loose lives and ecstatic aspirations, rough hands and
meticulous theory. Light on this, apparent tangle of
interests and motives will only come if we approach it
from the side of religion, the new spiritual life and
organization which was the inspiration of the East into
the old framework of the Greco-Roman world falling to
decay. No better image of the whole has ever been
given than by a recent writer,1 who compares the spiritual
state of mediaeval Europe to an alpine range, on the
lower slopes of which the explorer finds himself entangled
in an undergrowth of pathless thicket, but as he ascends
discovers wide snowfields and soaring peaks, from which
he may survey the panorama of a new world in radiant
light and with majestic outlines stretching as far as the
eye can reach. How far and in what ways did this new
order work to strengthen the collective force of mankind
in its task of subduing the powers of nature and turning
them ultimately to the common good ?

Clearly in one way the loss was immense, if we compare
mediaeval Europe with the world under Trajan, when
cultivated men like Pliny were carrying out the wishes
of an enlightened master, conceived in the interests of
the whole population he commanded. But the imperial
system was in decline long before the Catholic hierarchy
had entered into its full powers. The ideal of the
empire, to embrace in one political orbit all communities
of civilized men, would have become an increasingly
impossible one, as the limits of discovery and human
intercourse were extended : its realization was a miracle
1 H. W. C. Davis, Mediaeval Europe. Home University Library.

I 22

The Middle Ages

of organization in the days of the Antonines. With the
barbarization of the frontiers and the depletion of the old
governing class it broke down, and even before the next
extension of the area of civilization, new divisions had
been formed. In the fourth and fifth centuries, before
the extinction of the Western Empire, we see the nuclei
grouping themselves round the barbarian tribes who had
made good their footing. From these new groupings with-
in the old Roman framework the modern nations of Europe
arose towards the close of the mediaeval period. In
each of the old provinces of the Empire there was an
admixture of new barbarian blood with the old popula-
tion, and the varying blend has left in each case large
traces in the language, government, and general civiliza-
tion of the rising nation. In this infusion of new and
vigorous life into the old associations and organization
we find the germ of modern nationality ; and modern
nations inherit also from the Empire, surviving though
transformed, the notion of a greater whole, containing
and limiting the smaller units.

For the moment, in the early centuries of the Middle
Ages, we are faced by problems of a more rudimentary
kind. The barbarian settlements introduced a form of
social organization, a land tenure based on personal
service, which carried with it certain powers of juris-
diction, capable of almost indefinite extension, and con-
tradicting in essence the theory of civic duty which the
Greeks and Romans had laboured to construct. This
feudal system had its root in the notion of a personal tie
or contract which bound the free warriors of the Germanic
tribes to their leader in battle. The ' count ' or ' comes '

The Middle

123

was one of a band of personal followers of the king or
duke, and after the occupation of the invaded territory
he became endowed with land, a fief of his own, on
condition of swearing the vassal's oath. This was the
origin and simplest form of the theory which in the
later Middle Ages was elaborated into a complete legal
system, embracing the whole society, towns, corpora-
tions, religious as well as secular, and assigning every one
his position in a minutely adjusted hierarchy of persons.
Obviously such a system represented in itself no higher
stage of social unity than the Greek or Roman republics,
or the equality of the Empire. Rather it broke up the
various unities which had been arrived at, and introduced
transverse divisions and interests, which honeycombed
the state. But indirectly it served a wider end. It
threw into stronger relief the unity of the ecclesiastical
order, in which the most characteristic elements of the
Middle Ages were embodied. Its very defects left free
play to the religious spirit and the religious organization
which for the first time in history was constituted as an
independent power, challenging in its own right the
power of the state, and able to advise, to criticize, and
sometimes to control.

How did this new religious power arise ?

We noticed towards the close of the philosophic evolu-
tion of Greece the appearance of a wider conception of
society than had been associated with the city-state of
Plato and Aristotle. The Stoics also were spiritual
descendants of Socrates, but, with the widening of
human intercourse during the last centuries B.C., they
had put forward a wider notion of human society itself.

124 The Middle Ages

They talked of the ' Inhabited World ' as the natural
fatherland of the man who lived according to nature.
Citizens of this state would meet on equal terms, whether
rich or poor, bond or free. A moral system of this kind,
high-minded and severe, without hope and without mov-
ing passion, floated more or less vaguely in the minds of
the best and most cultivated men in the best years of the
Empire. Without any consistent doctrine or the sanction
of revelation, it inspired a simple humanity and taught
fortitude and -self-control to a larger number than had
ever attached themselves to the older philosophic schools.
The gods, too, of the old Olympian pantheon had long
been fading before the wider conceptions of a rationalizing
mind. The time was ripe therefore, and the seed, which
was to fructify in a well-tilled soil, was blown in from the
East, from the nation which, alike in so much of its early
fortunes to the Greeks, had, while the Greek mind was
busy with all the problems of the universe, cherished its
one treasure of an ethical religion, based on the authority
and direct revelation of one God. The second message
of the Jews, spoken this time to all mankind by the
Messiah whom they had been taught to expect, fell on
the western world, when the fusion of Greek and Roman
was complete, 'and their joint energy was running out,
when kindred ideas to the new gospel were already
current, when the one thing needed was a compelling
passion. Little wonder that to Augustine, to Dante, to
the orthodox philosophic historian of all ages the coinci-
dence meant the manifest hand of God.

To Dante the triumphant progress of the Roman
Eagle, which he describes in the sixth canto of the

The Middle Ages i 2 y

Paradise, led all the way to the establishment of the
spiritual empire of the Eternal City, of which the pagan
power was but a prelude. Historically, when in the first
century A. D. the new religious organization sprang up, its
centre gravitated inevitably to Rome. It was the centre
of all communication, the city whose prestige was indis-
pensable for a Church which was to cover the civilized
world. Thither the chief of the apostles had gone to mar-
tyrdom. Later, when Rome lost its political prerogative,
and still more, when in the fifth century there ceased to be
an emperor in Rome at all, the Papacy continued to thrive,
and prospered by the removal of the temporal power.

It was just a century after the disappearance of the
last Emperor of the West when Gregory the Great estab-
lished the Papacy as a centre of European influence,
independent by virtue of its territorial possessions,
respected for the doctrine which it preached and for the
general wisdom and moderation of its judgement. The
Pope continued to profess submission to the surviving
Emperor of the East, and thus maintained the fiction
of a united empire, while by the conversion of England,
and through England of Germany, the area of the new
religious empire was actually extended. And here we
touch one of the main services which the Church rendered
to the world, which had not been, and could not be,
possible for an organization aiming at universal jurisdic-
tion and political control. The missionaries of Gregory
could penetrate where the legions of Augustus had been
destroyed, and thus the new spiritual power, starting
from the vantage-ground which Roman organizing skill
had prepared, was able speedily, by the less cumbrous

126 The Middle Ages

machinery of persuasion, to enlarge the area of Roman
incorporation.

In countries, such as England and Germany, where
the Christianizing of the people was the direct result of
papal action, the authority of the Pope gained fresh
support. They helped powerfully to turn in his favour
the tide which for centuries was wavering all over
Europe, first between the local Churches, as represented
by their bishops, and the general religious authority
of the Roman See, and, later, between the spiritual
authority as a whole and the temporal power of kings
and emperors. The first movement was steadily and
surely determined in favour of the Roman See by the
logic of the system : the Pope became before long
supreme in his own sphere over all spiritual powers and
causes. The second case, the conflict between the rival
powers in Church and State, could not be logically
settled, and the stages in the struggle, its crisis, its
triumphs, its compromises, form landmarks in the history
of the Middle Ages. We shall only touch on them where
they appear to illustrate our main theme ; but their very
existence and the importance they are bound to assume
in any connected and general narrative are proof enough
that we are right in seeking in the religious spirit, and
the organization which embodied it, for the characteristic
and determining factors of the age. Another point
follows. It would be a grossly erroneous view to regard
these conflicts as merely or mainly the expression of
personal or political rivalry. Behind the popes as pro-
tagonists— and well expressed by the best of them — was
the force of a widespread conviction, a spiritual fervour,

The Middle Ages 127

of quite another order than the struggle for aggrandize-
ment which was often the external mark of papal policy.
Here was the soul of the system, the element which it
added for all time to the minds of men. It inspired the
noblest voices through all these centuries, St. Bernard's,
who made popes and reproved them for their pomp and
pride, Dante's, the poet of Catholicism, who puts the
corrupt popes into the depths of hell.

From Gregory, the first great founder of the mediaeval
Church, to the crowning of Charlemagne, the story turns
mainly on the growing friendship between the rising
Papacy and the rising power of the Franks. The Franks
beat back the Mohammedan invaders of Europe and
defended the Pope in his own country. The Pope repaid
their service by crowning Charlemagne, the greatest of
the Franks, as a new Emperor of the West. This point,
though not the culmination of the Church's power, was
always the most attractive to mediaeval eyes, as realizing
most perfectly the ideal of theorists, the complete alliance
of God's two vicegerents on earth, the master of the
sword and the master of the soul. It was but a fleeting
glimpse of the ideal, for Charlemagne's empire, the fruit
of exceptional energy and genius, fell away with him,
and, though cherished for centuries as the most perfect
type of government, it was not, to a more far-seeing
vision, the order of things which Europe most needed
to establish. Unity in the general direction of men's
minds, but local concentration in their institutions and
customs, this was the task and labour of the age ; and
Charlemagne's exploit was chiefly valuable as helping
the Papacy to another stage in its progress towards

128 The Middle Ages

the commanding position of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries.

Before this goal was reached the reforms which are
associated with the name of Hildebrand had to be
attempted, and we have to note the real purpose and
justification of these, and why they were supported by
the best men of the time. Hildebrand himself marred
his work by an excess of personal ambition and over-
reaching statecraft.

The question in the simplest terms was, to secure that
the agents of the spiritual power should be sufficiently
independent to carry out these functions which, as we
assume, were in that age of a high social and moral value.
The opposing princes contended that government would
be impossible if the most powerful and often the wealthiest
class in their realms were free from the ordinary rules of
order and allegiance to them. The question was incap-
able of any complete and logical solution, and the Papacy
used it constantly to push the most extravagant claims,
leading in the extreme form to the assertion of a universal
supreme sovereignty. But this should not blind us to
the real need which was the basis of the papal claim,
and gained for the popes the general following which
they so often had, as well as the advocacy of lead-
ing churchmen and thinkers, until the decay of the
fourteenth century. The Church was there to keep
before men's eyes another ideal of conduct and social
unity, in the midst of habitual warfare, rough living
and selfish aims. Corruption within was only too
easy and too frequent ; if besides it had become
entirely dependent on the very men whom it was

The Middle 4ges 129

its business to correct, it would have dried up from
the roots.

The princes who succeeded Charlemagne in the eastern
part of his domains continually encroached upon the free-
dom and self-government of the Church. These were the
German emperors who kept alive the idea of an empire,
Holy as well as Roman ; but being weak politically, they
badly needed the support of their ecclesiastical vassals
at home. Holding the most eminent political office in
Europe, on the least stable basis of national strength and
unity, they were driven by every motive to assert their
rights against the Roman See as strongly as possible. Hence
the struggle which the mediaeval theory brought with it,
a titanic duel of centuries between Pope and Emperor.

Hildebrand was the most powerful leader whom the
Church party, in its earlier struggle for reform, produced.
Within the Church he carried out disciplinary measures
of the strictest kind, enforcing celibacy on the clergy and
pure elections to Church offices. And in the contest with
the temporal power he pushed the papal claims so far,
and for a time with so much success, that his position
at the end of the eleventh century became the standard
of the high papal party. A hundred years later, Innocent
the Third, following the same lines, succeeded in establish-
ing himself as actual suzerain over a large part of Europe,
including our own country.

The rise of this new strange form of domination had
been slower than that of empires won by the sword ;
but its fall was precipitous. Long before Luther broke
the Christian world in two, the Roman See had lost its
position as supreme arbiter of the states of Europe.

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130 The Middle

A hundred years after its zenith under Innocent the
Pope was a prisoner in the hands of the French, and
when in the fifteenth century his outward prestige was
restored, decay had already set in beneath the throne.
The rise was slow, for the new power had to find fresh
channels for its influence and cover areas untouched by
the old Roman sway : its fall was rapid, for the doctrine
on which it rested absorbed, as we shall see, towards the
end of its evolution, elements that brought with them
the seed of decay ; and the non-spiritual power, the
personal authority in state affairs which the great popes
asserted, was in itself an overbearing and unnatural thing
which provoked a violent reaction.

All this is easy enough to see in the calm perspective
of seven centuries : it is more difficult, though more
necessary, to discern whatwas behind this papal autocracy,
the fresh factors in the general mind of Catholic countries
which were of permanent value in building up a collective
human purpose in the world.

It will be noticed at once that the four or five most strik-
ing products of the Middle Ages followed immediately
upon the Papacy attaining full self-consciousness. Imme-
diately after Hildebrand, before the eleventh century was
out, the Crusades had begun, at the instigation and under
the guidance of the Pope. The next century saw the be-
ginning of Gothic architecture and of the universities.
The early thirteenth, the preaching of the friars and the
formulation of the scholastic philosophy. Within a cen-
tury indeed after the height of the conflict between Hilde-
brand and the Emperor Henry, all these things, the most
characteristic fruits of mediaeval civilization, were in

The Middle Ages 131

flower. They were all things of infinite value, both in
themselves and for what they left behind, and in every
case they were directly inspired by the religion of the
age and under the control of its chiefs. The point is
obvious. We will give the few words available to
pointing out how in each case the movement was the
result of this general tendency of the mediaeval mind,
the effort to bring all the world it knew into subordina-
tion to one supreme religious end.

The Crusades, marred as they were in so many cases
by greed and vice, ill-managed as they invariably were
and futile in their immediate purpose, exhibited the
nations of Europe acting together for a common end as
they had never done before. The Roman soldiery was
a paid profession, and long before the break-up of the
Empire it was impossible to find men enough within
its borders to serve in its defence. The Crusaders
were volunteers, and, while the religious fervour lasted,
they were ready, from every country, in unlimited num-
bers, to leave their homes and face undreamt-of hardships,
with but a faint hope of return and no certainty except
through faidi. Religious mania you may say, or the fear
of hell, playing on the minds of men accustomed to a life
of hardship and war. Partly, but very partially, true.
Many of the Crusaders were quite unwarlike, and many
were saints, and the crusading spirit lasted on through
various transformations, in the war against the Moors of
Spain, in the discovery of the New World, the wars with
the Turks, and the many social crusades of our days.

It has been often shown, that by the Crusades the mind
of Europe was also widened and aroused. Wealth and

K 2

132 The Middle

knowledge of other men and countries flowed into western
lands, where the horizon had been for centuries dominated
by the baron's castle and the Church ; and men of
different ranks in the feudal hierarchy, who had charged
side by side in the service of the Cross, must have learnt
on returning home that doctrines of brotherhood which
before had often seemed to belong only to another world,
might have their applications in daily life.

Gothic churches, which are the chief visible witnesses
to mediaeval life and thought, followed the beginning of
the Crusades. They cover Catholic Europe and speak as
eloquently of the men who raised them as the pyramids do
of the Ancient Egyptians or the Parthenon of the Greeks.
Their art, with its infinite variety and loving care in
detail, its firm substructure and its soaring heights, teaches
us, more than all the books, of the character of architects
and builders, donors and worshippers. But we refer to
them here as another illustration of the depth and
wide extent of that new unity in men's minds which
the Catholic discipline had induced. From Ireland,
Scotland, Scandinavia, Germany, to the old strongholds
of Rome in the south, the evidence is the same, of
common ideas, of readiness to make vast sacrifice of toil
and money for a common worship, of agreement in all
great points of style and spirit. A map of Europe, in
fact, showing the area covered by Gothic churches, com-
pared with the area containing Roman aqueducts and
amphitheatres, would be a chart of the evolution of
modern Europe and the further consolidation of the West.

Let us see what light the new monastic orders throw
on the same point. Franciscans and Dominicans grew

The Middle Ages 133

up side by side, and both were authorized by Innocent
in the height of his power. A comparison of these with
the old monasticism should give some measure of the
advance in Catholic thought and organization since the
first hermits of the Thebaid. St. Anthony, the earliest
type in the third century, St. Benedict, the Italian of
two hundred years later, St. Dominic, the Spaniard of the
thirteenth century, stand for the three great stages ; for
St. Francis, although his order became the most numerous
and famous of all, rose like a star apart. In each of the
three types there is the same root-idea of personal sacrifice,
of separation from the pleasures of the world, and the
devotion of all one's powers to something supreme,
beyond the world of sense. But see how a widening
social outlook transforms the solitary ascetic into the
missionary agent of a world-wide power. St. Benedict
suppressed bodily mortification and enforced life in a
common house and prayer and above all work ; and
from this type of monk came the first great pope,
Gregory the Great, in the sixth century. In the last
stage, to which in principle all later orders belong, the
monk became in name as well as in spirit a friar or
brother, and his order was approved by the head of the
whole Church. He was a soldier and an emissary, sent
east and west to spread the truth and gain adherents
to the greater society of which his own was but a branch.
His personal sacrifice becomes a part, and an infinitely small
one, of the purpose and order of an all-embracing scheme,
eternally planned and eternally efficient. His single lamp of
faith and love is merged in that ineffable glow of light and
happiness which radiates in Dante's circles of the blessed.

134 The Mid file Ages

We are passing gradually in our illustrations from
the more concrete manifestations of the mediaeval
spirit to the more purely abstract and intellectual. The
universities, therefore, with their scholastic philosophy,
come last. In point of time, too, they are its latest and
most perfect fruit. In the history of thought indeed the
mediaeval period means the elaboration of scholasticism,
and St. Thomas Aquinas, whose life exactly fills the two
middle quarters of the thirteenth century, is the final
voice in Catholic philosophy. In this sphere he is
still authoritative, but we notice it here only so far as
it throws light on the nature of that further discipline
which Catholicism was imposing on Western Europe,
collectively and individually, while for the most part the
scientific spirit was lying dormant.

Two points are clear which bear directly on the main
thread of our argument. One, that at the close of the
Middle Ages man was not on the whole better equipped
by his knowledge of the laws of nature than he was in
the hey-day of Greek science. Isolated improvements had
been here and there effected by the Arabs and the Hindus
in numeration and the beginnings of algebra, and Roger
Bacon had made some marvellous anticipations of experi-
mental science. But, broadly speaking, the intellectual
standard of Europe at the end of the thirteenth century,
after the death of St. Thomas Aquinas and just before
Dante wrote, was not so high, on the purely scientific
side, as that of Alexandrian Greece in the second cen-
tury B.C. St. Thomas, the greatest of the schoolmen,
expounds and adapts the theories of Aristotle, so far as
they are consonant with the revelations of Scripture.

The Middle Ages 1 3 5-

But on the other side of the picture, we see the
social force and unity of the vanguard of mankind
immensely strengthened by the process of these un-
scientific centuries ; and this development was no less
essential to the coming conquests of mankind than
scientific knowledge itself. When at the Renascence
the spirit of inquiry awoke again, it spread as rapidly
as it did, and won triumphs both in thought and action,
largely because in the interval a wide and compacted
social area had been prepared by mediaeval discipline,
compared with which the sphere available for Alexandrian
science was limited and feeble. And this strengthening
and binding discipline must be reckoned with, not only
as it affected society collectively, but also in its results
on individuals. May we not believe that, besides the
formation of a stronger and more homogeneous Western
Europe, a stronger and more harmonious type of
European character had been cultivated by the Catholic
regime ? As in the early Roman Empire historians have
misled us by lurid pictures of isolated acts of infamy and
misrule, so in the Middle Ages, especially when dealing
with the faults of prominent men and institutions, the
attention is apt to dwell unduly on the plague-spots and
the dirt. The great and widespread art of the cathe-
drals proclaims the contrary, and the strength of the
Renascence itself in art, discovery, and science. Both
the stimulus and the repression of the mediaeval doctrine
and discipline had borne fruit, whatever were its evils
and limitations.

We can best appreciate the nature of this stimulus and
this restraint from the writings of the systematic thinkers

1 3 6 The Middle Ages

who came at the end of the evolution and summed up
its ideal tendencies, above all in Dante, who added the
insight of a poet and the force of a great character to
all the learning of the schoolmen.

Comparing it with the spiritual state of the Greco-
Roman world towards the end of paganism, the feature
which most impressed us in the Catholic order is the
unity of belief and religious practice which it imposed.
Where rival deities and cults had been contending
in rich variety and without restraint, the Church
substituted one system, slowly elaborated from the
simplest origin, admitting by degrees the metaphysics of
Plato and the logic of Aristotle, but always, until the
disruption of the sixteenth century, one in form, har-
monized by intellects, from St. Augustine onwards, fully
equal in acuteness and comprehensiveness to all except
the very greatest of the Greeks. As a work of organiza-
tion, proceeding with equal steps on the theoretical and
the practical side, it is unquestionably the masterpiece
of co-operative skill in history. As such it gives the key
to the greater compactness of the society where it reigned ;
and when we look at the body of doctrine itself we can
understand something of the strengthening and harmoniz-
ing power which sent men to die gladly at the ends of
the earth in order to bring in others to the realm of
certainty and love.

For in Christian theory there had been, from the
moment of the Redeemer's birth or death, another society
founded, in which the temporal distinctions of rank and
wealth were unknown, and which would ultimately redress
them, in which the bond was love and its basis the

The Middle <dges 137

certainty of faith. The social unity of all mankind, the
common action and purpose of the universe, which had,
as we saw, been floating as vague ideas before the eyes
of the later Stoics, became articles of faith, guaranteed
by the most powerful organization in the world. Scrip-
ture and Aristotle combine in Dante's Paradise, as in
St. Thomas before him, to demonstrate that there is one
principle which rules the heavenly bodies in their certain
courses and by the same law the souls of men. As surely
as we see the former revolve in their orbits, so surely is
mankind created to work together for the salvation of
all. They go, St. Thomas tells us, to their appointed
end of good living,' as the arrows of a divine bowman
who cannot miss. His goal is distant and unseen by
mortal eye, but reason demands it and revelation has
made good the claim.

So much perhaps might have been possible to a pre-
Christian thinker. But in the highest heaven of Dante
we hear a closing note, which with the others makes
a full chord which had not sounded before the Christian
era. The same one Principle, he tells us, which governs
the spheres and guides men to salvation, is ' Love which
rules the sun and the other stars '.

To bring together the two realms of man and nature
under one Law of Love, this was the ideal purpose of
the new order and explains its force in spreading and
strengthening the social unity of Western Europe. In
spite of countless failures and constantly recurring errors,
much has already been built on this foundation, and the
future, while bringing fresh elements to the fabric, will
build still more.

THE RENASCENCE AND THE
NEW WORLD

Next to the discovery of the New World, the recovery of the ancient
world is the second landmark that divides us from the Middle Ages
and marks the transition to modern life.

LORD ACTON.

ALL through the silent centuries of the Middle Ages
there had been here and there, in monasteries and cathe-
dral schools, isolated students of pre-Christian books.
Being in the realm of the Roman Church, they
studied mainly Latin writers, and Virgil in particular
enjoyed a singular immortality. The Greeks, too, were
never quite forgotten, and in the capital of the Eastern
Empire there was throughout an active centre of Greek
speaking, Greek writing, and, in a debased form, of Greek
ideas. But the most vigorous intellectual life in the
West, until the thirteenth century, was undoubtedly that
sustained by the Mohammedan power in Spain, which
cultivated all the arts and sciences, and restored to Europe
something of the Greek philosophy which it had for-
gotten. To the Arabs of that period we owe not only
several advances in mathematics and medicine, but the
knowledge of Aristotle, which was to play so large a part
in the development of the scholastic philosophy and all
that it involved.

But towards the close of the Middle Ages, before
Dante's life at the opening of the fourteenth century, two
great movements had taken place which did much to
quicken these smouldering fires and arouse further study
and bolder thinking. These were the Crusades and the
universities. Each in a different way laid Europe under
a debt to the East, the universities for a large part of
their science, the Crusades for half their chivalry. And
each movement, while from one point of view a culmina-
tion of the Catholic-Feudal spirit, was in another aspect

The Renascence and the New World 141

the beginning of a new age, for each brought with it the
seeds both of decay and of new growth.

The first step necessary for the Western mind, about
to enter on the period of its great expansion, was to
realize that there was a world of knowledge and activity,
a world in time and a world in space, outside the area
which the Church had guarded and cultivated for a
thousand years. The study of the ancients, which the
universities encouraged, revealed the world of history :
the Crusades were the first general step towards the
discovery of New Worlds, east and west. These were the
turning-points of the Renascence. One WQ} the method
of study, the other the method of travel, then, as now,
the two unequalled agents for widening the mind.
The progress of study dissipated the notion that
Aristotle and Plato were Christian apologists, born out
of due season : and other minds, weighing the pros and
cons of Catholic doctrine as conscientiously as St. Thomas,
could not always come down on the orthodox side of
the argument. In the world revealed by travel visitors
to the East discovered other views of religion than their
own, but consistent both with a civilized life a*nd a high
standard of thought and morality. Such was that strange
parliament of religion which Friar William addressed on
the steppes of Tartary in the middle of the thirteenth
century, and reported to St. Louis.1

1 ' Mangu Cham, emperor of the Tartars, in the year of our Lord,
1253, when the lord King Louis of France sent Brother William to Tar-
tary, said to the Christians assembled before him in the presence of the
said friar : " We have a law from God delivered by our divines, and
we do all that they tell us. You Christians have a law from God
through your prophets,and you do not do it." ' See Bacon's Opus Majus
(ed. Bridges), i. 400. Also the report of William Rubruquis himself .

142

From both these sources, then, the ferment grew
which, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, had
initiated that progressive movement which is marked in
our current histories by titles in crescendo, Revival, Renas-
cence, Reformation, Revolution, all words beginning with
the prefix implying change, until we come down to our
own days, when possibly we may discover that a name
with a deeper shade of meaning is becoming needed.

The Renascence recalls us to the main thread of our
story, and points clearly to the sequel. The contribution
of the Middle Ages was on lines so distinctive that they
have frequently been described as a period of retrogression,
and we have seen that there is some truth in this account ;
though on the other side of the picture the Catholic disci-
pline of the Middle Ages added to man's wealth and power
matter of infinite value which has still to work out its influ-
ence in the process of the world. Now, before a general
forward movement could take place, the side of man's
nature which had suffered under the mediaeval system
needed to be made good ; and it is this repairing task which
is shown as the Revival of Learning or the Renascence.

The former term properly describes the earlier stage ;
the later was the more general movement affecting all
sides of life. In this chapter we are glancing rapidly at
the whole — the three centuries which followed Dante's
death, the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth. With the
seventeenth we reach the rise of modern science, as a
vigorous and independent growth.

Much of the movement of these three centuries takes
the form of violent conflict and destruction. It is easy
to allow one's mind to dwell too much on this aspect,

The Renascence and the Nerv World 143

and to let the constructive work, more silent but incom-
parably more important, pass by unnoticed. This ten-
dency vitiates a good deal of the accustomed presentation
of history, which has offered us the wars of religion as
the main topic of an age when adventurers were adding
a New World to Western civilization, and Galileo's tele-
scope revealing a new universe to mankind. It is easy,
too, from the same cause to drop into the belief that the
destructive work accomplished in such a period went
further and deeper than it did, to imagine a tabula rasa
where there was really the erasure of a few figures, the
putting of an old picture in a new frame. The Pope's
authority was destroyed in England and a new Lutheran
Church established in Germany, but the moral discipline
and the intellectual habits fashioned by the incessant and
authoritative influences of a thousand years remained in
the mass untouched, and altered slowly, like the building
of the earth's strata or the change of species.

That the fourteenth century was a period of decay,
after the collective efforts and large construction of the
two previous centuries, is evident from many signs. The
Papacy had lost its eminence, and was for a large part
of the time in exile under the control of France. The
new religious orders which had arisen a hundred years
before to evangelize the world for Christ and his Vice-
gerent had yielded in many cases to the faults of the
world which they set out to correct. To this Dante is
our witness at the beginning of the century, and Wiclif
at its close. The Crusades of the earlier centuries, which
had united Christendom for a common religious end, had
given place to a Hundred Years' War between the two

144

leading nations of the West, which devastated both coun-
tries for selfish and material ends, and left a legacy of waste
and suffering, of mercenary fighting and national enmity.

The ideal of a Christian comity of nations under the
joint aegis of Pope and emperor was thus, in fact as in
theory, receding from men's grasp. But at the same
moment the study of literature, which the universities
had fostered, was leading gradually to the reconstruction
in the minds of an elite, of an ancient world of art and
learning, of enjoyment and of government, outside the
pale of Catholic traditions and belief.

Latin was the first channel of this new culture. It
was the foundation of half the popular speech of the
West and all its religious rites. The starting-point in the
new movement was the discovery that under the con-
temporary superstructure of language there lay hidden
an earlier, more polished and perfect building, which
man's mind had fashioned many centuries before, and
where an ordered thought had lived and flourished,
untrammelled by the narrow limits of the mediaeval
dwelling. Virgil, the poet and prophet of ancient Rome,
lived again, instead of the mediaeval magician who had
usurped his name. Cicero became the standard of dic-
tion, instead of the Vulgate and the schoolmen. The
first stage in the Revival is that associated with the name
of Petrarch in the fourteenth century. But as in the
excavation of ancient sites the unearthing of the first
hidden city is often the prelude to the discovery of
larger and finer remains beneath, so the revival of classical
Latin was followed by the more potent renascence of
Greek. Beneath the Roman city a still more spacious

The Renascence and the New World 145-

and beautiful dwelling-place for the human spirit was
gradually revealed, where Homer and Aeschylus, Thucy-
dides and Plato, had moulded the subtlest thoughts into
the most exquisite forms which the world has ever seen.
This was the second stage, the Renascence of the fifteenth
century, when the destruction of Constantinople hastened
the flow westward of Greek books and Greek scholars
which had been for some time in progress. And in the
latter part of the century the newly discovered printing
press sent out from Italy in their most glorious shape
most of the ancient authors, Greek as well as Latin.

But this work of restoration by itself tended to make a
pleasure-garden of what was once a busy city. It is not
therefore in the literary taste of the Renascence, nor in the
renewed enjoyment and expression of the beautiful in art
which quickly followed, that we should look for its chief
fruits. Precious as was the movement which gave the
world Raphael and Michelangelo, its wider and more
indirect results must count for most in our present
sketch. It gave men increased confidence in their native
powers and a determination to seek and inhabit worlds
of thought and action beyond the Church's sphere. It
inspired them not only to study and enjoy the structures
of ancient thought which had been revealed, but to build
new cities of their own on larger plans.

The return to Greece, which is the key-note of the
movement, suggests many interesting parallels and
touches many points of real indebtedness. In the new
movement Italy takes the place of ancient Greece. Again
an intellectual movement goes side by side with world-
activities, with adventures by sea, with geographical dis-

1543 L

1 46 The Renascence and the New World

covery, with the eager political rivalry of independent
city-states. The north of Italy at the Renascence closely
recalls, as Freeman has shown us, the vigorous life of
the Hellenic cities in their prime. They have the same
intense local pride, the same dissensions, the same readi-
ness to recognize and reward beauty and effort in creative
thought. The art of the Renascence is primarily Italian
art, and the finest printed books, unequalled since, came
from the Venetian presses. The most original and con-
structive thinking, the work of Machiavelli, of Copernicus,
above all of Galileo, was done either by Italians or under
Italian influence. Columbus was a Genoese, and the
compass which guided him across the Atlantic had been
made a practicable instrument by Italian sailors early in
the fourteenth century.

Such many-sided activity, coupled with the similar
political conditions, takes the mind back inevitably to
Greece, and the comparison is a fruitful example of
historical analogy. We shall not follow it here, but
rather indicate the actual working of the old Greek leaven,
recovered and introduced into a new society, wider and
closer knit than the old, transformed as we have seen in
some essential points, but yet reproducing many features
of the old theocracies of Egypt and Asia from which
Greece sprang.

There was again, though in another shape and with
a nobler spirit latent within, the hardened crust
of religious forms and traditions, which, as of old,
awaited the irresistible impulse of free and consecutive
reason to break and give passage to fresh life. This was
the task of ancient Greece, and hence, when men began

The Renascence and the New World 147

again at the Renascence to exercise freely their powers
of thought and action, they found themselves at every
point working where Greek workers had been before.

Church doctrine itself had of course been also moulded
largely by the ingenuity of Greek minds : but at the
Renascence men invoked the Greek spirit of an earlier age,
before philosophy had turned her back on nature, and the
Byzantine theologians had tied up affairs of state with the
finest threads they could spin from theological argument.

Examples of the debt to Greece abound in all the
special sciences which began to revive in the fifteenth
century ; we shall only notice here one or two aspects
of the indebtedness which have the widest bearing. The
name ' humanist ' itself which was borne by the scholars
of the Renascence, though a Latin word, has the ring
of Greek philosophy and training. Man's nature was
again to be considered in its completeness, its physical
and intellectual sides having due scope, as well as its
moral and religious needs. And on the moral side an
end was sought in the life of the citizen, sometimes also
in the life of individual pleasure, rather than in con-
formity to any formal religious rules, framed with an eye
on another world. Such a change in the direction of
discipline brought dangers and evil with it, but at its
best, as we see it in the educational system of Vittorino
da Feltre, it combined the strictness and reverence of
a sound Catholicism with the breadth of view and open-
mindedness of a new culture which was older than the
Church itself. Vittorino is a notable figure in the move-
ment, not for any originality in his ideas, but as a repre-
sentative man, combining both Latin and Greek culture

L 2

148 The Renascence and the New World

and covering in his lifetime the later fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries. He preserved in his school the old
knightly idea of physical training by hunting and martial
sports, but he added to it all that Greek and Latin letters
could at that time afford, and, by preferring mathematics
and astronomy to the schoolmen's logic, showed how
much nearer the humanists were to the Greek than to
the mediaeval scheme of knowledge. This was before
the printing press had spread the knowledge of Greek,
or the fugitives from a Mohammedan Constantinople had
increased the number of its apostles. The latter part
of the fifteenth century gives more abundant evidence,
in the nature of its art, in the spread of ' academies ', in
the translation and adaptation of Greek books. Johann
Miiller, a German who studied Greek in Italy, applied
his literary knowledge of Greek to the advancement of
science. He translated the works of Ptolemy and the
Conies of Apollonius into Latin, and returning to Nurem-
berg, founded an observatory, where he produced his
' Ephemerides ', or nautical almanacs, based on Ptolemy,
which enabled the navigators of the succeeding years to
travel unknown seas. Later again than Miiller we have
Copernicus, the Pole, studying astronomy at Bologna,
and imbibing there the Pythagorean notions of the
sphericity and movement of the earth, to which he tells
us he owed the first glimpse of his own theory.

Thus by the end of the fifteenth century the reinfusion
of the old Greek spirit into Western Europe was in active
process, and we reach the year 1500, which, like so
many turning-points between the centuries, stands for
a real climax in human affairs. Gutenberg's printing

The Renascence and the Nerv World 149

press, transferred to Italy and used in the service of the
humanist revival, had already, in the first fifty years of
its existence, issued all the leading classical authors, and
put in currency the vivifying ideas of Greek philosophers
and men of science. The work of the navigators had
achieved its crowning triumph, and Columbus had
brought back the news and some of the wealth of the
New World. Copernicus, teaching mathematics and
studying astronomy in Italy, had conceived his great idea,
which was to transform men's notion of the material
universe. And 1500 is midway in the life of Erasmus,
who more than any one embodies for us the views and
feelings of a wise, learned, and cautious man, surveying
the course of events at that critical moment with a heart
set on the progress of human happiness and knowledge.
The world was getting larger ; in extension, both East
and West were being brought into contact with Western
Europe, the old nursery of the highest civilization of the
globe, and, intensively, the growing mass of knowledge
was pressing on the shell in which the discipline of the
mediaeval church had encased both life and thought.
Cautious wisdom hoped that the old forms would yield
gradually and adapt themselves to the new growth. We
recognize now that larger forms were needed, and that
true continuity is to be found not in the history of any
political or religious organization, but in the strengthening
of the general social and spiritual force of mankind, in
the deepening of man's powers over nature, and in the
knitting closer of all the members and branches of man-
kind throughout the world.

But surveying the scene as Erasmus did, we too might

1 5-0 Tht

well have hoped and worked for an issue free from the
loss and conflict of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, we might have thought that knowledge would
spread within the limits of the old order, and the world
be civilized according to the Catholic idea, with the
Pope as centre of spiritual and intellectual life, harmoniz-
ing the worldly ambitions of the temporal powers. Still
more, if any thinker in that age could have foreseen the
horrors of the religious wars, the rage for gold, the
devastation of the new lands in the West, he would
certainly have desired and striven to preserve some source
of moral and spiritual authority which might check the
evil. But when the evils happened, often in the worst
imaginable form, the check was found wanting.

It is fortunate for a ' progressive ' theory of history
that we are not required to believe that what happens
is always the best that could have happened. Looking
back now from an age when the whole planet has been
explored and knit together by steam and electricity, when
not the Church but its monopoly has been destroyed,
when a compact fabric of scientific knowledge stands
supreme in the intellectual world, we have not to ask
what might have been, nor how we might have desired
or forecast it, but what these three centuries of the
Renascence actually contributed to the results achieved.

Erasmus lived at the height of the crisis, on the high
dividing land from which the waters were flowing rapidly
into the ocean of modern life ; he could not discern all
the channels which that flood would take, though he
knew the main current and faced the future. If we take
another step forward, and ask what had been accomplished

The Renascence and the New World ifi

by the beginning of the seventeenth century towards the
attainment of the modern goal, we may be able with
some clearness and certainty to distinguish a few large
features. We may put first, as Lord Acton does, the
discovery of the New World which preceded the out-
burst of science in modern times, as the colonies and trade
of the Greeks did in the ancient world. Next in order
of the results of the Renascence — understood, of course,
in its widest sense — would come the disruption of the
Church, accompanied, on the one hand, by a strong revival
of spiritual life, both in the dismembered Church and in
the new churches formed from it, and, on the other hand,
by an increase of national and state authority, especially
under the leadership of vigorous monarchs such as the
Tudor house in England. Last, but ultimately most
important of the results, would be the foundation, by the
beginning of the seventeenth century, of modern science,
achieved by recovering the work of the Greeks, and
adding to it a stricter and wider use of observation.

It will be seen that all these movements have a close
interrelation and common roots in the general awakening
of men's minds in Western Europe, and all of them tend,
though by various courses, to the common end of a united
human force, subduing and civilizing the world.

The voyages of discovery which led, with Columbus,
to a New World at the end of the fifteenth century, had
been proceeding with increased skill and daring for over
a hundred years. They began with the Crusades, and
had in the earlier stages much of the crusading spirit.
The north-west corner of Africa was the spot where the
navigators, who were afterwards to reach India and

ij-2, The Renascence and the New World

America, first learnt their business. Here Genoese and
Portuguese seamen disputed with the Barbary Moors for
the glory of the Cross and the conquest of the Guinea
coast. This coast was to the Saracens the ' Bilad Ghana ',
or the Land of Wealth, and the wealth consisted in the
first instance of negro slaves, for whom the ships of Prince
Henry of Portugal pressed down the coast and watched
the shores. But behind the kidnapping of the blacks
there was in Prince Henry's mind the larger idea, partly
religious and partly political, of founding a great Christian
dependency for Portugal on the banks of the Senegal.
In 1445 his ships at last reached that point, the
furthest aimed at in the earlier period, discovered a great
river flowing from the east, and brought back a good
cargo of negroes to their master. It was just at the
moment when the Christians of Constantinople were
making their last desperate appeal to Western Europe
for help against the Turks, and Gutenberg's press was
issuing the first printed document we know of, an indul-
gence from the Pope for all who would volunteer for
service in the East.

But Prince Henry's more lucrative crusade had also
a religious link with the East. It was supposed that the
Senegal was a western branch of the same waters which
flowed to the Mediterranean by the Nile, and that by
this means communication might be set up with the
Christians of Abyssinia, and a great Christian kingdom
established in the south, to balance and hem in the
Mohammedans of the north of Africa. •

So far the wider notion of circumnavigating Africa
and trading with India by sea had not occurred. But

"The Renascence and the Nerv World 1^3

in the forty years which followed a great change came.
There was a continual extension of the trading spirit
and a growing boldness in navigation, and the study of
the Greeks, helped by the printing press, placed better
science at the service of seamen, who had by now acquired
sufficient confidence to make use of it. These forty years
saw the Portuguese push further and further south, adding
an ' Ivory ' and a ' Gold ' coast to their slave-raiding
centres, and varying their sources of wealth. At last, in
1485, Bartholomew Diaz, partly by accident, partly by
the bold facing of unknown seas, rounded the Cape and
looked across the Indian Ocean, just six years before
Columbus set sail from Palos.

All through the century which preceded the most
famous voyage in history, and especially in the latter
part of it, after the invention of printing, the science of
geography and the art of map-drawing had been develop-
ing rapidly, and the recovery of Ptolemy's works was the
most powerful stimulus. The knowledge of them in the
West began early in the century, and various translations
and adaptations, and extensions of the maps which they
contained, were made, until in 1474 Toscanelli produced
the chart which was to suggest and guide the voyage
across the Atlantic. Nothing could illustrate better the
difference which the restoration of Greek science effected
in mediaeval ideas, than to compare the projection of
Ptolemy, based on the measurements of Hipparchus, with
the maps of the Middle Ages, such as the very curious
and complete one preserved in Hereford Cathedral. In
the former, if we correct one serious mistake in the length
of a degree of longitude, we have a substantially accurate

delineation of the world as known at the time, set out
on a consistent plan based on measurements of latitude
and longitude. Here are the essentials of a scientific
treatment of the subject. In the latter we have an
arrangement, partly ideal, partly picturesque, of all the
places and people whom the author happened to have
heard of, and to think of interest, circling round Jerusalem
as the divine centre of the world. It was not until the
positive had replaced the picturesque as the guide to
knowledge that the age of great discoveries could begin.
Columbus, as we know, accomplished his task and finished
his days in the firm belief that he had reached the eastern
shore of Asia : but the new truth that possessed him far
outweighed his error. He realized for the first time, and
lived in the belief, that the earth being a sphere, you
are bound to come at last to the east if you go far enough
west, and that the right direction is to follow the latitude
in which your goal is placed.

But the crusading spirit had still a large share in
Columbus. The Spanish sovereigns were reducing the
last stronghold of the Moors when Columbus was solicit-
ing the help of one European monarch after another, and
it was not till after Granada fell, in January 1492, that
Columbus received his commission. Then he went out
under the flag of a united and triumphant Catholic
Spain to subdue fresh lands and people to the faith. The
coincidence brought Spain into the field and broke the
monopoly of the Portuguese, who had been playing with
Columbus's plans and followed his expedition with jealous
eyes. Thus in another sense the voyage was a turning-
point, for it marks the change to exploration of which

The Renascence and the New World 175-

the search for gold and competitive commerce were the
dominating motives. The wealth of the Spice Islands
in the East, and the flood of gold from Mexico and Peru,
weighed down the balance, and Columbus became the
last of the Crusaders as he was the first of the great
scientific seamen. In 1493 the Pope was asked to define
the new sphere of oceanic enterprise between the leading
competitors, Portugal and Spain, and the line drawn
gave Brazil and all east of it to Portugal, and the West
to Spa;n.

The next century was to see another form of arbitra-
ment, a fight for power at sea between Christian nations,
fiercer than the old crusades.

After Columbus's first two voyages discoveries followed
in quick succession. Within four years the mainland had
been touched, and Cabot, another Genoese, who had
independently of Columbus conceived the idea of reaching
Asia by the Atlantic, had discovered Newfoundland. In
the same year as Cabot's voyage Vasco da Gama had
crossed the Indian Ocean and set up the Portuguese flag
at Calicut. In three years more Brazil was occupied,
and in 1516 the Pacific was sighted from a peak in Darien.
In 1521 Cortes entered Mexico, and in the following
year Francis the First, anxious that France should have
her share, commissioned an Italian seaman to survey the
coast of North America from Florida to Newfoundland
in his name. The rush was breathless, and the effect on
men's minds at home widespread and profound. In
1516, the year in which a European eye first looked on
the Pacific, Sir Thomas More published his Utopia, the
narrative of an imaginary traveller who had stayed behind

i ?6 The Renascence and the New World

in America after Vespucci's voyage of a few years before?
and had made his way home by the western seas, as
Magellan actually did six years afterwards. On his way
home by this untraversed sea, More's Hythlodaeus dis-
covers an unknown island, where men were living a happy
communistic life, following learning and eschewing war,
free from the evils and superstitions of the Old World.
It is the spirit of the literary Renascence at its best,
critical and awake, stimulated by the new discoveries,
but rather looking back to Plato, as Bacon's Utopia of
a hundred years later looks forward to the future and the
triumph of modern science.

Before Bacon wrote, the great awakening had gone
much further, and had brought some results in its train
which would have surprised the men of 1500. The bulk
of the wealth derived from the new discoveries went, by
the accident of Columbus's commission and the Pope's
award, to Spain. Already, before the gold and silver
of Mexico and Peru had begun to flow into the Spanish
coffers, the disruption of the Church had taken place,
and the Spanish king, Charles V, who was at the head
of the largest domains in Europe, as well as Holy Roman
Emperor, became by conviction and position the cham-
pion of the old order. The spread of knowledge and
the peaceful reformation from within, which Erasmus
had worked for, had proved impracticable, and most of
northern Europe, with Luther as the national voice of
Germany, was arrayed outside and against the Church.
Such was the state of Europe when the wealth of the
New World was thrown into the scale. The position of
France and England was as yet undecided. It seemed

The Renascence and the New World 1^7

as if the hand of God had blessed the last crusaders, and
was supporting with inexhaustible resources the cause
of the Holy Church and Holy Empire. But the event
was otherwise. The goal of a common human society,
working together for the conquest of nature and the
improvement of life, was not to be reached so easily :
for this voyage it was not sufficient to take a straight line
across the untravelled sea, sure that if the one direction
could be preserved, you would come to land at last.

Ultimately the New World was to prove one of the
strongest links of human unity, lying, as it does, geo-
graphically midway between Western Europe and the
oldest civilizations of the East, and affording in its wide
expanses opportunity for diverse races and religions to
shake off readily any traditions and prejudices which had
proved obnoxious in old surroundings, and to settle with
amicable freedom and sufficient space. But immediately
it added fresh matter for dispute to the rival powers
of the awakening and aggressive West.

Both France and England were inevitably drawn to
challenge the overbearing strength of Spain, and in
England the fight was more decisive, for her firmer stand
on the religious question made the issue appeal to every
element in the national spirit. The story fills the latter
part of the sixteenth century, and remains the most
stirring epoch in English annals, only surpassed by the
story of Holland, who made her own challenge and won
her own victory over the common foe of freedom in the
decade before the great Armada. In Holland the struggle
was more heroic, for a country no larger than Yorkshire
was in revolt against its hereditary masters, the masters

iy8 The Renascence and the Nero World

also of the wealth of the New World. Philip the Second
who had succeeded Charles as head of the Spanish
dominions, just three years before Elizabeth came to the
throne of England, continued the policy of his father
with a smaller nature and blinder fanaticism. He had
less capacity for understanding the beliefs and ideals of
others, more unreasoning obstinacy and foolish confidence
in the power of mere money. The Dutch revolt under
William of Orange gave to the modern world the same
example of national freedom in government which the
Greeks had given to the ancients. It was indeed in some
ways a greater feat than the Greek repulse of Persia,
for the Persians had never been the acknowledged rulers
of Hellas and the Greeks were better able to defend
themselves at sea than the Dutch. It was a more dis-
interested fight than our own, for conquest to us meant
sea-power and a share of the Spanish trade, even more
than freedom, and Spanish galleons were first and fore-
most treasure-ships.

In 1584 William fell by the bullet of an assassin sent
out by Philip, but the freedom of Holland had been
won ; and four years later the defeat of the Spanish
Armada dealt the death-blow to Spanish power at sea.

France, under the ambitious leadership of Francis the
First, had been anxious to secure her share of the New
World. Francis had claimed the coast of North America,
which he had surveyed, and called the country New
France. French settlements were attempted on the
banks of the St. Lawrence, and by French Protestants
on the coast of Brazil. Frenchmen, too, had taken
a share in the plunder of Spanish treasure-ships. But

The Renascence and the New World 1^9

the religious wars which fill the latter part of the century
in French history postponed her Elizabethan period for
another generation. It was not till after William of
Orange and Elizabeth had won power and national free-
dom for their countries that France found a ruler com-
parable to them in Henry the Fourth. Then at the end
of the century France took her due place in that balance,
or concert, of European states which was emerging from
the tumult of the last three centuries as the modern
equivalent for the mediaeval empire with its outworn
theory and shadowy chief.

This was the issue of the barbarian settlements which
had broken up the Roman Empire in the fourth and
fifth centuries. The Renascence, with its weakening
of the Church, its conflict of the national chiefs with
the Pope, the increase of trade and consequent rise of
a middle class, and the quickening of national rivalry by
the new wealth and settlement of new lands east and
west, had brought the slowly moving process to rapid
fruition. The change was equally marked in all the
leading nations of Western Europe, Germany and Italy
alone remaining for later consolidation. In them the
mediaeval conflict of Emperor and Pope had made rents
in the national life which took longer to repair. But
France, Spain, and England, however much they differed
on religion, agreed in rallying more closely than before
round their royal house, and constituting at that period
a real national unity which has never since been broken
up, and appears to us now to be a natural type of human
association, the model of those which have arisen in later
years.

i do The Renascence and the New World

The fact is of great importance in tracing the growth
of human unity, equal perhaps to that of adding new
continents to European ken. For we cannot imagine
any firm and consistent relations between men over large
tracts of our planet, without stable compact groups in
smaller areas. It may seem a truism, but, like many
truisms of to-day, it has been established by ages of
struggle against manifold difficulties. The system of
nationalities, as we know it, is the result of all the historical
process of the past, and is still in course of change. But
the Renascence was a marked stage in the development.
Nothing had been thought of before — or could have
been thought of — comparable to the ' Great Design ' of
a Concert of independent States, a federal European
Republic, which was attributed to Henry the Fourth at
the beginning of the seventeenth century. It implied
the transformation of the mediaeval conception of one
empire and one church into something much more elastic,
offering more scope for variety, both in government and
religion. It arose directly from the revival of Greco-
Roman notions of government, in a world where the
Middle Ages had impressed a real unity of character and
purpose on populations now long settled and attached to
a definite fatherland.

The end of the fifteenth century and the sixteenth
produced in the three great Western states sovereigns of
remarkable vigour and force of character. This was,
of course, partly accidental, but largely also the working
out of feudal and mediaeval conditions, hastened by the
new factors which the Renascence introduced. The dis-
orders of the feudal system, illustrated at home by the

The Renascence and the Nen> World idi

Wars of the Roses, and internationally by the Hundred
Years' War, came to a climax and a clearance towards
the end of the fifteenth century. In England the exhaus-
tion of the country and of the old nobility made the way
easy for the Tudors, and their burden light. In France
at the same moment Louis the Eleventh, a king of excep-
tional ability and astuteness, was subduing one by one
the insubordinate fiefs which had divided the country
and let in the English at the beginning of the century.
In Spain the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella united
Aragon and Castile, and the united kingdom added to
its prestige by expelling the last remnant of the nation's
traditional enemy. These events were synchronous in
the different countries, and, in each case and others like
them, were accompanied by an active advance in the
administration of justice and the foundation of a better
centralized and stronger government.

This was the general position when at the crisis of the
period, about 1500, the two dramatic events occurred
which reacted so powerfully on the sequel. The dis-
coveries East and West, and above all in the New World,
further stimulated the ambitions of the newly strength-
ened monarchs, and brought them fresh wealth and
territory. And in 1521, as Cortes was entering Mexico,
Luther burnt the Papal Bull and the Canon Law at
Wittenberg.

We noticed in the last chapter the doctrine of the
Church only in so far as it seemed to affect the discipline
and general direction of men's minds which the Middle
Ages were imposing on Western Europe. In the same
way the differences of doctrine which became acute at

1543 M

1 6 z The Renascence and the New World

the Reformation will only concern us here as strengthen-
ing the working of the other conditions which we have
described, and giving added force to the revival of energy
which was breaking out at every point.

The story of the Dutch Republic and of Elizabethan
England shows how strongly reforming zeal fortified the
spirits of the rising nationalities ; the next century has
the shining example of Sweden, and we can hardly think
of Germany as a nation without Luther. But it would
be a serious error to limit the operation of this cause
to countries which championed the Protestant side when
the field was set. Like all great movements in a connected
environment it worked variously, but with a certain effect
on all parts of the area. France, which was for years in
the balance, though it found its place ultimately under
the politic Henry on the Catholic side, was no longer
Catholic in the same sense. The Church became more
national, the crown more powerful, and the national
spirit was heightened by the struggle. Even Spain, the
protagonist of the Catholic cause, became less dependent
on papal authority after the movement than before. In
this respect, then, we may trace a general effect, a
strengthening of the national units of the allied Europe
of our dreams. But this is not all. The Reformation,
regarded as a deepening of the religious life and a moral
and spiritual purification, touched Catholic and Protes-
tant alike. Despite the vices of a later day, the Restora-
tion in England and the Regency in France, there was,
after the outbreak of the Reformation, a new and purer
spiritual life, a more self-denying zeal in Catholic com-
munities, as well as Puritan, which has never died out

The Renascence and the New World 163

since. The revival and unrest of the Renascence found
in this its proper check, in a revival of another kind ;
for Xavier and Borromeo, Fox and Bunyan, though
divided in name, belong essentially to one family, the
children of St. Bernard and St. Francis.

It was an age of conflict, to be long continued on
many fields. The greater is the need, therefore, to note
the common features, the continuity with the past, and
the new links forging for the future, for it is by these
elements that humanity will grow and gain in strength,
when the Thirty Years' War and the St. Bartholomews
of all parties and creeds have been expiated. And per-
haps of all the connecting and organic features in the
three centuries of the Renascence, the most remarkable
was the final rally and revival on the Catholic side, which
is commonly called the Counter-Reformation. This has
a twofold aspect, both implying a profound community
and continuity of feeling in spite of apparent divisions.
On the one hand, the Catholic reformation showed the
operation in both camps of a similar spirit, seeking a truer
moral and religious life. On the other hand, the mass
of the population, especially in the southern countries
which had been most completely Latinized by the Roman
Empire, demonstrated the real vitality of the old beliefs
and organization against the powerful motives which
drew both kings and nations away from Rome at the
beginning of the struggle. France, the central country,
was the crucial case. Whereas William and Elizabeth
needed a strong and definite Protestantism to gain the
full allegiance of their people, Henry was compelled to
win Paris by a Mass. In the next century, when, after

M 2

i <*4 The Renascence and the New World

the devastating war in Germany, the balance of popula-
tion and territory was finally struck, it was found to be
in favour of the old religion.

The year 1600 serves very well for a pause and a
review, for by that time we can see something of the
accomplishment as well as the crisis of the Renascence.
The main lines of the political and religious settlement
had been by then determined, though half the population
of Germany were to be destroyed and her progress put
back for more than a century in adjusting the details.
By 1600, too, the Renascence had justified its special
task of setting again on foot the old creative spirit of the
Greeks in science and philosophy and all the arts of life
and beauty. The new vigour which had come into the
world had already revealed another unsuspected hemi-
sphere, and pointed to the true place of our planet in
the celestial system. It had already in art produced the
finest expressions of the ancient ideal working through
Christian minds. In ways of life and speech, the con-
fidence of action and the capacity to enjoy, it had already
wrought more change in the civilized world than any
period between the Greeks in their prime and the age
of inventions which was still to come. The definite
construction of modern science comes somewhat later,
when the men of the seventeenth century take up the
threads, and work out long trains of systematic reasoning
in physical science and philosophy. In 1600 Kepler and
Galileo had begun, but not completed, their discoveries,
and even thirty years later Galileo was compelled on
pain of death or imprisonment to adjure his belief in
the Copernican theory, And in 1600 it was still possible

The Renascence and the Nen> World 16?

for Giordano Bruno to be burnt alive for proclaiming
a new philosophy, based on Copernicus, which would
sweep away the old scholasticism and build up another
conception of the universe, as philosophers have been
more slowly succeeding in doing ever since. The begin-
nings had been made ; Tycho's observations had laid
the foundation for Kepler ; Gilbert had given the first
scientific sketch of magnetism and electricity. But the
more comprehensive discoveries were yet to come, and
Bacon had still to sound the trumpet for a general
advance.

It was an age of new life and promise for the future.
The greatness of the old world had been discovered, and
new wealth, new continents, new ideas were crowding
in, which raised high hopes and pointed forward to
a modern world which might equal, and in power and
size must far surpass, the glory of the old.

The grandest figure, standing, as Dante did, at the
close of the period which he most perfectly exemplifies,
remains to find his due place here, before we pass to
consider the sequel of the great awakening in its more
far-reaching effects on society and thought. The year
1600 is a landmark in Shakespeare's life, nearer to his
maturity than to his youth, but midway in his richest
harvest-time. He, more than any. one, reflects all that
was best in that age of ardent feelings, vigorous life,
and agitating thought ; and he transmutes all into the
pure gold of immortal and universal art. He gives us
the enthusiasm without the party strife, movement and
action without destruction, a mind open to the new
advance, but with fullest sympathy for all the past. He

1 66 The Renascence and the New World

sees the simple facts of life, hallowed and surrounded,
as men were used to see them, by kingly authority and
religious rites. The Church, the friars, the crown, the
sceptre, are as sacred to him as they were to all the
multitude who accepted them with affection and imme-
morial reverence. He is Catholic to the Catholics, patriot
in Elizabethan England, philosopher in his deep question-
ings on the nature and purpose of our being.

And above all there rises the characteristic note of the
Renascence, proclaiming the supremacy of that ' godlike
reason which looks before and after ' and must not ' fust
unused '....' What a piece of work is man ! how noble
in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form and moving
how express and admirable ! in action how like an angel !
in apprehension how like a god ! the beauty of the
world ! the paragon of animals ! '

It is a note which comes from a past two thousand
years away, and when we hear it, the famous chorus of
the Antigone rings again.

8
THE RISE OF MODERN SCIENCE

If one were to endeavour to renew and enlarge the power and
empire of mankind over the universe, such ambition (if it may be
so termed) is both more sound and more noble than the other. Now
the empire of man over things is founded on the arts and sciences
alone, for nature is only to be commanded by obeying her.

LORD BACOX.

SHAKESPEARE summed up for us the spirit of the
Renascence at its height ; Shakespeare's greatest English
contemporary is the best herald of the coming age. For
Bacon, too, stands exactly on the dividing line between
the centuries, and, while he shares to the full the en-
thusiasm and the sense of power which the age of dis-
covery had inspired in western Europe, he adds to these
the two fundamental traits which distinguish the great
founders of modern science in the seventeenth century.
One is the critical spirit, determined to sweep away the
false Aristotelianism and mere authority which obstructed
the progress of effective knowledge : the other, the new im-
pulse to turn to nature as the source and material of truth,
and on the truth of nature to build a system for the general
amelioration of mankind. Bacon's voice was a trumpet call
to both the destructive and constructive tasks, and, though
in power of thought and in definite contributions to science
he was far surpassed by many of his contemporaries and
successors, we may trace his influence in all the sequel.

The new movement, however, was to grow round
definite and constructive ideas, which would knit men's
minds together as the first discoveries of geometric truth
had built up the early structure of science in the minds
of the Greeks. Bacon, with all his prophetic zeal, was
too much distracted by other interests to take a share
in the actual building. He was distracted by his erudition
and his literary gifts, and still more fatally by the interests
of wealth and worldly success. The actual builders were
men of intense and unbroken devotion to the pursuit of

The Rise of Modern Science 169

truth. Something had appeared again in the world like
that first passion for inquiry, that community of effort
in science, which bound together the sages of Ionia, and
formed the brotherhood of Pythagoras. From the six-
teenth century onwards there was again a class of men
in Europe nearer akin to the old Greek philosophers than
any who had been seen for nearly two thousand years,
men full of interest in the working of the world around
them, facing varied problems with equal zest, and accept-
ing no solution but such as their own intelligence could
approve. In their close relationship among themselves,
as well as in their openmindedness and breadth of interest,
these new philosophers recall the old. They corresponded
copiously, they issued intellectual challenges and scruti-
nized eagerly all new ideas. They sought out one another
and founded societies, and, with occasional quarrels and
disputes as to the priority or independence of their work,
they were united in the common hope that the new
fabric of knowledge, growing from their labours, would
increase after them and be of inestimable value to mankind.
The pioneers in this work, as in that of the revival
of learning, arose in Italy. For Italy, as we have seen,
offered the first theatre in the modern world for the
spirit of ancient Greece to reappear and play her part of
intellectual leader ; and the new science was historically,
in Bacon's phrase, a ' renewal and an enlargement ' of
the science of the Greeks. It was in Italy that Copernicus
had lived and studied and taught. There Leonardo da
Vinci had applied his insatiable genius to all branches of
art and science. Bruno had died there in expiation of
the boldness of his new philosophy, the first complete

170 The Rise of Modern Science

scheme to dispute the sovereignty of Aristotle. And in
the first decades of the century of science Galileo had
laid in Italy the foundation stones of modern physics
and mechanics by adding a new experimental method
to correct and extend the ancient mathematics. But
when Italy had rekindled the beacon, there were many
heights around to take up and pass on the fire. This
the long process of the Roman and Catholic incorpora-
tion had secured. France, England, and Germany were
now ready, and Bacon and Descartes, Newton and Leib-
nitz were to spread the light world-wide.

It was an international work, within the area of that
smaller progressive world, which Greek intellect, sup-
ported by Roman power, had divided from the rest of
mankind. Within this area it was shared in common by
many minds in all the leading nations ; and at every
step forward, from Galileo's telescope to Darwin's theory
of evolution, it will be found that several were busy on
the same problem at the same time, and often the light
flashed on more than one independently and simul-
taneously. The joint effects, which we are now after
three hundred years beginning to realize, have given to
the west of Europe, and its off-shoots across the Atlantic,
the definite primacy among the nations of the earth.
In these countries, from the Renascence onwards, the
development of human knowledge, and the resulting
power and wealth, have proceeded with accelerating
speed. Every year the task has become more urgent of
holding together these growing forces, and subordinating
them to the common good.

The movement will appear, more directly than any

The Rise of Modern Science 171

other part of our story, to fit into the evolution of that
collective human force which is growing and compassing
the conquest of the world. What can be said about it in
these few pages will deal with those aspects which have
a special interest from this point of view. It will be
seen how closely the different parts and actors in the
movement hang together, forming a model, as well as
a stimulus, to human co-operation, how firmly the whole
was rooted in the past, in spite of many outward symp-
toms of severance and revolt. The scientific method
which was now evolved will appear in its essence near
akin to that supreme social agent among earlier men,
language, of which this special value was noticed in the
second chapter. And the applications and concrete effects
of the new method will form a large element in all the
sequel, from the industrial revolution onwards, wherein
that mechanical phase of scientific knowledge which was
settled in the seventeenth century, has already enabled men
to utilize natural forces and modify their own way of living
to a degree unexampled and undreamt of in earlier ages.
The essential characteristics of this development of
science were sufficiently well understood by many of
those who were actually engaged in promoting it. In
the full swing of the movement, while Newton was
meditating as a youth on the geometry of Descartes and
the Arithmetica Infinitorum of Wallis, a meeting of men
of science, following on several in Oxford, was held in
London, at Gresham College, in 1660, which virtually
founded the Royal Society. In the first journal of the
Society there is a memorandum, dated November 28,
which states that ' amongst other matters that were

172 The Rise of Modern Science

discoursed of, something was offered about a designe of
founding a Colledge for the promoting of Physico-
Mathematicall Experimentall Learning '. This expresses
exactly in three words the three essential qualities of
the first modern scientific movement, before biology had
arisen to claim separate treatment by the Society and
a dominant interest in the world of thought. The new
learning, or science, which the Society set out to en-
courage in the seventeenth century, was to rest on
experiment, but its main object was to connect the pro-
cesses of nature with mathematical law. In its object
it was following, extending, and improving the methods
of the Greeks ; by applying experiment it added that
necessary condition, for want of which the physics of
the Greeks had remained abortive, and they were limited
to geometry and the beginnings of statics and astronomy.
While the new scientific movement has this capital
advantage over the ancient in point of method, in point
of subject-matter it offers both a significant analogy and
a significant difference. For two hundred years, from the
Copernican controversy till after the death of Newton,
the elaboration of mathematics was the leading feature
of modern science and its conspicuous success. This was
in conjunction with astronomy and physics, which were
gradually brought within the scope of the improved
methods of measurement : and it was astronomy that
first attracted the inquirer in modern times and estab-
lished his mechanical laws, just as it had implanted the
first notions of ordered sequence in the primitive and
ancient world. The mechanics of the celestial bodies
have thus played the decisive part in the formation of

The Rise of Modern Science 1 7 3

our scientific ideas ; and the progress of discovery has
been from the mass, those greatest masses which attract
and dominate our vision, to the infinitely small, the
particle of physics and chemistry, about which our real
knowledge seems only beginning in recent years. But
modern science, starting again with astronomy, advanced
at once to an entirely new position : it is here that it
differs so significantly from the ancient. The new
mechanics are dynamical and involve the reduction of
problems of movement and growth to mathematical law.
Ancient science, and, on the whole, ancient society, did
not advance beyond the beginnings of statics, the first
notions of balance in mechanics, and order in the state.
Modern science begins with a law of motion and is crowned
by the conception of an ordered progress in history.

We will begin our sketch, as the story began, with
astronomy.

It was remarked in Roman times l that the establish-
ment of astronomy by the Greeks had given a sense of
order and security to the public mind, and allayed super-
stitious fears. This process had been going on for
ages before the Greeks, above all in those millenniums
of Egyptian and Babylonian history, when the priests
began to record with some rough accuracy the regular
positions of the brightest of the heavenly bodies. It was
thus that the stars in their courses first gave man the idea
of seeking for other uniformities in the complex and chang-
ing tangle of the world below. They were the first great
instance which he observed of order in external nature
beyond man's will, and they impressed the lesson on him
1 See chapter iv, pp. 88 and 89.

174 The Rise of Modern Science

in a hundred ways. They taught him on the plains of Chal-
daea to measure time, they led Hipparchus to trigonometry
and Ptolemy to geography. Now with the re-awakening of
the western mind they were to illustrate the reign of law
and the scope of a co-ordinating intellect on a scale tran-
scending all the known limits of magnitude and distance.
Newton, the greatest name in this co-ordinating work,
gained from his own rival Leibnitz the highest eulogy
ever paid to a man of science. ' Taking mathematics,'
said Leibnitz, ' from the beginning of the world to the
times when Newton lived, what he had done was much
the better half.' Even if we went as far as that, it would
still be necessary, from the historical point of view, which
is after all only the point of view of complete truth,
to recognize the fact, that Newton, the greatest founder
of mathematical mechanics, comes as the last of an
inseparable series of observers and speculators, who all
busied themselves mainly about the phenomena of the
heavens. Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler,
Newton, not one of these names can be dissociated from
the discovery of the greatest of all laws. Copernicus,
starting, as he tells us, from an old Greek idea that the
earth itself, like all the heavenly bodies, revolved round
some central fire, set on foot one of the two most
momentous scientific controversies which have ever raged.
It lasted over a hundred years, and only disappeared at
last before the accumulation of evidence, binding together
terrestrial and celestial facts, which in the hands of
Galileo, Kepler, and Newton showed irresistibly one
great system, acting, broadly speaking, as Copernicus had
surmised, but on a far vaster scale and by virtue of a more

The Rise of Modern Science 175-

universal principle than he had conceived. It is, indeed,
the coincidence of these proofs, the fact that Kepler, by
using the conic sections of the Greeks, was able to explain
the revolution of the planets, and that Newton combined
Galileo's law of falling bodies with the movement of the
spheres, that will appeal to us most in making this study
of the growth of human unity. It illustrates, as we shall
see later, the essence of scientific method as a whole.
The steps in the proof are of extraordinary interest, and
show the natural co-operation of several independent
minds, working consecutively to attain the one simplest
and most consistent explanation of a vast number of
hitherto uncorrelated facts.

Copernicus's hypothesis of a circle for the revolution of
the planets was doubtless the first rough approximation
which would occur to the mind : it had behind it the
unbroken tradition of every system of representing the
heavenly movements and was hallowed by the meta-
physical notion that the circle was the ' most perfect '
of all lines. Kepler, who came to the problem fortified
by the exact discipline and rich stores of observation of
Tycho, discarded the circle, with all its epicycles and
eccentrics, and tried the ellipse. It was his first discovery
and the first real simplification of the problem, which
had been confused by artificial corrections of the original
inaccuracy. It led almost immediately to his second law,
that the straight line joining the planet to the sun sweeps
out equal areas in any two equal intervals of time. In
this second law he dealt with the variation in the
rate of motion of the planet, and, finding it move faster
when near the sun and more slowly when away from it,

176 The Rise of Modern Science

brought us a long stage further towards the final solu-
tion which was to be reached by the joint labours of
Galileo and Newton. The two laws, with a full history
of his inquiry, were published by Kepler in 1609, just
at the moment when Galileo was making his first observa-
tions with the newly-discovered telescope.

The telescope, like so many capital inventions, was hit
on almost simultaneously by several minds : a spectacle-
maker in Holland first made the discovery effective.
Galileo was at the time professor of mathematics at
Padua. It was nearly twenty years since he gave his
crucial challenge to scholastic science at Pisa, and he had
become in the meantime the leading teacher and man
of science in Italy, With only a hint of the Dutch
invention to help him, he set to work at once and made
a telescope himself, magnifying to three diameters, and
had soon improved it to the extent of thirty-three.
Through this instrument he was the first inhabitant of
our planet to see the mountains and ' seas ' of the moon,
the phases of Venus, the spots on the sun, and the satel-
lites of Jupiter. The next year, 1610, he published his
results to the world in the Sidereus Nuntius, and became
the most famous man of science in Europe. Twenty-
eight years later, old and blind and still under the ban
of the Inquisition, he received in Florence a visit from
the poet of English Puritanism, himself to fall on ' evil
days and evil tongues '> and sit for years in darkness.

If thought is a battlefield, Galileo had made one of its
most decisive movements. It stirred the imagination
and extended the outlook more than any other discovery,
and it did not appeal to the lower or irrelevant passions

The Rise of Modern Science 177

which the New Worlds of the navigators had aroused.
These new worlds offered only intellectual conquests. The
first victory was gained by a man, and in an age, capable of
pressing it home and deriving full benefit from the success.
Every point was shown to have a bearing on the Coper-
nican controversy, and though Galileo professed, in his
Two Chief Systems of the World, to offer an impartial
statement of both sides, his own side was quite obvious,
and the day was won. Later on, the same results, and
others which the telescope continued henceforth to yield,
gave material and confirmation at every turn to the
mechanical generalization which Newton was to build
up with the aid of the more abstract part of Galileo's
scientific work.

Galileo, as the founder of modern mechanical science,
added to the rudiments of statics which the ancients,
principally Archimedes, had handed down, an entirely
new idea of fundamental importance. This was the con-
ception of acceleration, which arose in the first instance
from his study of falling bodies, at Pisa and later, under
conditions which made fairly accurate measurement pos-
sible. From these experiments he gained the law of the
uniform downward acceleration of bodies falling to the
earth, of about thirty-two feet in the second added every
second. Newton, with the genius which perceives true
resemblances between remote and apparently discon-
nected facts, turned this conception of uniformly acce-
lerated motion to the phenomena of the heavens. Are
all the planets, he asked himself, falling towards the sun,
and all the satellites, our own and those of Jupiter,
towards their own planet, by the same law which Galileo

1543 N

178 The Rise of Modern Science

had discovered to govern the fall of the stone ? This
was the supreme effort of his imagination, the most
fruitful instance in history of the unifying tendency of
thought, seen more or less in all its aspects, but above
all in mathematics, the ' art of giving the same name to
different things '. Following where the question led
him, he came to the other great conception, that of
' mass ', which, with ' acceleration ', completed the quite
new elements in the modern mechanics then arising. The
rest consisted in defining in accurate relations, the equa-
tions of which the Greeks had the first notion, the mutual
influence of these ' masses ' on each other, producing
' acceleration ' according to measurable circumstances of
space and time. Galileo's law for falling bodies was seen
to be a special case relative to the earth : looked at from
the celestial point of view, the same principle gave
Newton the law, that the acceleration of all the planets
towards their centre was inversely proportional to the
square of their distances from it. ' They are all falling
bodies, but going so fast and so far off that they fall
quite round to the other side, and so go on for ever.' l

Kepler's laws were thus completed and explained. We
noticed that his second law touched on the rate of motion
of the revolving planets, which moved more quickly when
nearer to their central, or focal body, in those elliptical
orbits which he had just discovered. This was in 1609.
Ten years later he had published his third law that there
is a fixed relation between the cubes of the distances of
the planets from the sun and the squares of the times of
their revolutions. They move more slowly the further
1 W. K. Clifford.

The Rise of Modern Science 179

they are away, in that ratio. Both these laws were
shown by Newton to be only deductions from, or varied
expressions for, the same relation which Galileo had
detected in the falling stone. Both of them were essential
to the growth of his mind on the subject. In 1665, his
twenty-third year, he had a period of intense mental
activity which lasted into the following year. He dis-
covered at this time, as he tells us himself, among other
important theories, ' first the binomial theorem, then
the method of fluxions,' and then ' began to think of
gravity extending to the orb of the moon, and having
found out how to estimate the force with which a globe,
revolving within a sphere, presses the surface of the
sphere, from Kepler's rule (the third law) I deduced that
the forces which keep the planets in their orb must be
reciprocally as the squares of their distances from their
centres : and thereby compared the force requisite to
keep the moon' in her orb with the force of gravity at
the surface of the earth, and found them answer pretty
nearly. All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and
1666, for in those days I was in the prime of my age
for invention and minded Mathematicks and Philosophy
more than at any time since '.

It is a curious commentary on the popular view of
history, that, while any schoolboy could tell you that
the two years Newton refers to were the dates of the
Plague and the Fire, purely local accidents, not one
person in ten thousand, children or adults, would con-
nect them with two of the most profound and far-reaching
events in the history of the world, the invention of the
infinitesimal calculus and of the law of gravitation.

x 2

i8o The Rise of Modern Science

It was inevitable to treat of Newton in connexion with
Galileo and Kepler, as their work in mechanics forms an
inseparable whole, but in doing so we passed over for
the moment the contribution of the man who was in
some respects the central figure in the new scientific and
philosophic movement of the century. In point of time,
Descartes comes between the earlier group of scientists,
Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, and many more, whose lives were
largely spent in the sixteenth century, and the later
group, Newton, Huyghens, Boyle, and the rest, who were
entirely children of the seventeenth century. Descartes'
life, begun just before the sixteenth century closed, filled
almost exactly the first half of the seventeenth. He was
considerably junior to Galileo, but lived as his con-
temporary for over forty years. He was studied with
respect by Newton, who was born in the year of Galileo's
death. In point of doctrine, too, he takes a middle
place ; looking as far and boldly to the future as any
in that age, he yet has many leanings and attachments
to older systems. The great iconoclast of scholasticism,
the immortal founder of a philosophy based on the simple
fact of self-consciousness, he yet never appreciated the
bearing of Galileo's work, nor admitted the motions of
the earth, and in his own theories, both physical and
physiological, was largely dominated by preconceived
ideas, as remote from the facts as the ' perfect line ' and
the ' perfect number '. With this side, however, we have
no concern here, nor with the validity of his metaphysics.
He plays a part in our sketch, as having anticipated in
so many ways the modern spirit, still more perhaps as
having initiated one of the greatest improvements in

The Rise of Modern Science 1 8 1

mathematical method. His artificial physics and physi-
ology were due to the fact that his scientific interests
outstripped his powers of verification. He meant his life
to show that all knowledge could be brought within the
scope of one incontrovertible method, and all knowledge
was not quite ripe.

The one method was that of mathematics, which
Descartes conceived could be reduced to a series of
truths, so simple and self-evident that it was impossible
for the mind to entertain the opposite. Starting from
this point, he thought it would be found that all know-
ledge could be gradually brought into the same inter-
dependent and invincible system, and he attempted in
his own lifetime, the shortest of the great scientists of
the age, to give examples from all branches. His interest
in the ultimate utility of this well-founded and syste-
matic knowledge, especially in the parts affecting human
life and health, was equal to that of his great English
predecessor, ' Verulam ', to whom he several times refers
in his letters. His superiority to Bacon lay in the fact
of his much greater concentration. All his science — and
he would apply the same rule to any one else desiring
to attain the same end — arose from the intensive cultiva-
tion of his own spirit, which was enlarged, as he tells us,
by the unfolding of every new truth in surrounding
nature. But this individual culture was by no means to
stop at the individual ; for thus, he says, * we shall be
able to find an art, by which, knowing the force and
action of fire, water, air, stars, the heavens and all other
objects, as clearly as we know the various trades of our
artisans, we may be able to employ them in the same

1 8 2 The Rise of Modern Science

way for their appropriate uses, and make ourselves the
masters and possessors of nature. And this will not be
solely for the pleasure of enjoying with ease and by
ingenious devices all the good things of the world, but
principally for the preservation and improvement of
human health, which is both the foundation of all other
goods and the means of strengthening and quickening
the spirit itself '.

To follow out the points of contact between the self-
evident method of Descartes and the scientific methods
of later days would take us too far afield, nor is it strictly
relevant to our purpose ; but the reconciliation, which
he was the first clearly to suggest, between the fullest
individual culture and the pursuit of a social end, is
a note which we shall need to keep in mind in all that
follows. As Descartes first strikes it, it leans strongly to
the side of the individual : the three centuries which
have succeeded him have done something to emphasize
his social undertone.

These general tendencies of a great thinker, invaluable
as they are, must also necessarily be incalculable. No
one can accurately estimate the influence of the con-
versations of Socrates or the dialogues of Plato. But we
have in the case of Descartes a definite discovery in
scientific method of the first importance, of which he
describes the genesis, in a fragment of his autobiography,
from the practice of his own rules of simplifying every
problem to the utmost, and co-ordinating all the common
points of every subject. He dates the discovery exactly,
as Newton does his, in the winter of 1619, when he was
serving in the Austrian Imperial army at Neuburg on

The Rise of Modern Science \ 8 3

the Danube. It is one of the notable coincidences in
personal history that both Descartes and Newton were
twenty-three years of age when their minds were most
active and they made the greatest discoveries of their
lives. The passage in the Discourse on Method is a classic
in the history of thought. He had studied a little, he
tells us, in his earlier youth, parts of three arts or sciences
which he thought should help him in his newly formed
design, of arriving by a true method at the knowledge
of everything of which his mind was capable. These
three subjects were logic, geometry, and algebra. But
logic, as he had learnt it, seemed at best to be rather
a means of explaining to others what one already knows
than of extending one's knowledge. The geometry, or,
as he calls it, the analysis of the ancients, suffered from
being always restricted to the consideration of figures
and not of lines, their simplest element ; while the
algebra of the moderns is confused and obscure by the
particular rules and symbols in which it is expressed.
What was needed was a method which would combine
the advantages of all three without their defects, for it
seemed obvious that in philosophy as in government, the
fewer the rules the better. Analysing then still further
the ' analysis ' of the ancients into its simplest form, of
lines rather than figures, he turned to algebra for the
co-ordinating, synthetic part of his method. ' To hold
these lines together, or to express several in one form,
algebraical symbols were needed, the shortest possible :
and thus I borrowed the best of geometrical analysis and
of algebraical, and corrected the faults of one by the
other.'

184 The Rise of Modern Science

The step forward in the art of thinking was a long
one ; it fully deserves to be commemorated side by side
with Newton's great discoveries nearly half a century later
in the years of the Plague and the Fire. In relation
to one of them, Newton's method of fluxions, Descartes'
discovery was as essential a part as Galileo's law of falling
bodies was of the law of gravitation. For Descartes'
analysis was in fact one stage in the continuous process
of integrating and simplifying mathematics which was
going on throughout the century, and of which the
calculus of Newton and Leibnitz was the supreme and
most fruitful effort.

The Geometry of Descartes was first published as
part of the Discourse on Method, of which it is the most
brilliant illustration. It also illustrates in the aptest way
that transformation of the persistent past which is the
subject of our study. Descartes starts from the geometry
of the Greeks. He has before him the summary of
Pappus and the Conic Sections of Apollonius. He takes
a linear problem of Pappus and shows how it can be more
simply solved and stated by his new method. He quotes
Apollonius, still the leading authority on the conies, and
then, in the light of his own new application of algebra
to geometry, arrives at the momentous discovery that
while any straight line may, by the use of his two co-
ordinates, be expressed as an equation of the first degree,
the conic sections are the geometrical expression of equa-
tions of the second degree, the circle being but a special
case of the ellipse. If the inward vision could affect us
with as strong emotions as things we actually see, we
should recognize here a wonder even greater than Galileo's

The Rise of Modern Science 1 8 f

satellites of Jupiter and mountains on the moon. And
the way of reaching the result is of capital importance.
The great thinker uses the past, not only as all of us
are bound to do, unconsciously, as the air we breathe,
but deliberately, taking the old problems and the con-
clusions of his predecessors, thinking them out again
in the fresh light of a later day, and gaining at last
a new form, adapted to the growing unity and efficiency
of the human mind.

It was an age of mathematicians. Others were working
at kindred problems to that of Descartes, and he himself
effected many other improvements, inferior to that of
his great discovery, but comparable to those improve-
ments in our arithmetical notation which we noticed as
due to the Arabs and the Hindoos. Some apparently
very obvious simplifications in the notation of algebra,
due to Descartes, have probably been as effective in
mathematical research as the Hindoo cipher has been in
arithmetic. But the continuity of the main line of
advance must retain our attention, especially as the next
step brings us to the mathematical expression of that
fundamental conception in modern science which dis-
tinguishes it from the science of the Greeks, the idea
of movement and continuous growth. Compared with
this, even Descartes' geometrical analysis, essential as it
was, must take a subordinate place.

With the invention of the calculus in the seventeenth
century we reach the last stage yet known to us in that
art of measuring which brings the world into subjection
to man, and of which we traced the first accurate begin-
nings in the early settled communities which built the

i 8 6 The Rise of Modern Science

pyramids and gave us the week. In view of the new
problems which modern science was now to solve, even
the Greeks, with their immensely more penetrating and
ingenious minds, must be classed rather with tlje pyramid-
builders than with the modern physicist. The new factors
in the problem of measurement which now emerged,
were the intimately connected questions of infinitesimal
quantities and continuous movement or growth. Of
these we may say that the Greek mind had faced them
only to be baffled and confused, while, before the Greeks,
they had not been realized at all. Yet when once thought
out, above all, when once expressed in convenient sym-
bols, it is now found possible to give a real grasp of the
potent instrument which has been elaborated for their
measurement, to boys at school before the end of their
sixteenth year. Descartes did not reach the solution,
but he pointed the way, and when he criticized the
Greeks for confining their geometry to figures, he put
his finger on the cause of their failure to advance. The
limited figure excludes the infinite, and the ' perfect '
circle proved in more than one respect an impassable
barrier to the free development of ideas of magnitude
and direction. Archimedes, who in his method of
exhaustions, made the nearest approach in the ancient
world to an effective treatment of the problem involved,
did so by gradually approximating the curved figure
which he would measure to the nearest many-sided figures
of which the correct measurements were known. When
once Descartes had shown that any curved line could be
expressed in equations of such generality that they were
equally true for any points on the curve, the question

The Rise of Modern Science 187

could be approached from quite another point of view.
Thus, whereas Archimedes, and all, including Kepler,
down to the age of Descartes, were endeavouring to find
curved areas by approximating them to rectangular
measurement — what was called in the old days the
quadrature of the curve — the new method approached
the problem from the side of the infinitesimal increment
in the measurement of the curve as it moved from point
to point.

This measurement, made possible by Descartes' method,
was, like other great discoveries, led up to by a multitude
of partial efforts, and actually made, independently and
with different notations, by Newton and Leibnitz. Leib-
nitz' notation, following more closely the system of equa-
tions which Descartes had introduced, has survived for
most purposes. Newton's, significantly enough, is still
used for increments of time.

Descartes' analytical method consisted in the reference
of every point in the line or curve studied, to an arbitrarily
fixed point or origin, by means of two varying perpen-
dicular lines or co-ordinates. Given the origin — and
where we fix it does not matter, for every object observed
must have an observer — we can by means of these co-
ordinates follow the changes in position of any point
whatever. Either of the co-ordinates, as they vary
together, is said to be a function of the other, and their
relation at any point is expressed in an equation with
two variable quantities. In this, its simplest form, the
idea has now become part of our common thought, and
even children in the elementary schools are plotting
their rule-of-three sums by Cartesian geometry. The

1 8 8 The Rise of Modern Science

differential calculus starts here and goes further. Given
a curve of which we can by its equation lay down any
length or number of points that we desire, what is the
law of its growth or falling off, that is, the direction of
its movement at any point ? To solve this problem with
sufficient generality is to be able to describe in shorthand
any regular movement, for an electric current, the motion
of a train, the cooling of a molten mass can all be repre-
sented by a curve, as truly as the section of a cone. And
the solution is found by a process exactly similar to that
of determining what is the tangent or touching line to
the curve at any point. Solutions of this, the particular
case, were actually offered to Descartes by at least one
contemporary mathematician : they were the preliminary,
partial glimpses which have preceded every great advance.
It was left for the wider synthetic mind of Newton and
Leibnitz to take in the bearing of the question as a whole,
when it was ripe for solution thirty years later. Then,
when the differential question was solved, it was possible
to return to the original problems of summing up series,
or finding the areas enclosed by curves, which had first
exercised the earlier mathematicians.

Thus another link was forged in the connected method
of the physico-mathematical sciences which the Royal
Society was founded to promote : and the last link was
the strongest of all. For when the laws of physics and
mechanics have reached this degree of generality, they
are able to express on the physical side all changes in
the world of matter from moment to moment, and sub-
sequent laws can, as M. Poincare says, take their places
as fresh differential equations. The other inventions and

The Rise of Modern Scien ce 189

discoveries of the age, the barometer and the microscope,
Mariotte's and Boyle's law of the pressure of gases,
Huyghens' theory of wave-movement, Descartes' and
Newton's work on the composition and refraction of light;
even Harvey's circulation of the blood, must take rank
after the physico-mathematical series which culminated
in the calculus. It will be noticed, too, that the other
scientific work of the age was mainly of a kindred nature,
centring round the great discoveries in mechanics, those
laws of movement which were its characteristic feature.
Even Harvey's was a mechanical one, and commended
itself as such to Descartes before he would accept the
true account of the movements of the earth. But it
was in fact premature, for chemistry was not yet founded,
and still less a knowledge of the chemical and other
functions of living bodies.

As Harvey by his great discovery anticipated in 1628
the foundation of biology, which in its main outlines falls
within the nineteenth century, so there were throughout
other occasional anticipations of later advances in the
more complex branches. Chemistry was not definitely
founded as a science till the eighteenth century ; but in
1674 John Mayow, another early member of the Royal
Society, alighted, by some ingenious experiments with
candles and small animals, on the existence and funda-
mental property of oxygen, a century before the fact
could find its place in a co-ordinated system.

Such instances bespeak the intimate similarity of all
scientific truth ; and their isolated position brings out
stih1 more clearly the general trend of seventeenth-century
science. It was, as that early meeting in 1660 declared

jpo The Rise of Modem Science

it, a physico-mathematical movement, and as such it ran
its course before the more complex sciences of life took
definite form. It has grown continuously ever since, and
by its connexion with other sides of life, especially with
industry and the practical arts, it has become the most
powerful and typical branch of science as the agent in
subduing the forces of nature to the use of man. Before
the end of Newton's life, who is the culminating figure
-in the movement, it had done its great preliminary work.
It had given men a new and incomparable instrument of
research, and had established in their minds a new and
consistent view of the mechanics of the universe. New-
ton, one of the longest-lived of the philosophers of his
day, as Descartes was one of the shortest, lived till 1727,
the year before the birth of Black, who was to give sub-
stantial help on the scientific side to Watt in the con-
struction of his steam-engine. His life thus brings the
modern scientific movement to the point where it touches
the industrial revolution which is its counterpart on the
practical side.

We have sometimes measured in previous chapters the
real advancement of a period by the comparison of an
earlier and a later figure on the same line of progress,
Thales and Hipparchus for the Greeks, the author of
the Twelve Tables and Gaius for the Romans, the flint-
axe and the steam-engine for the practical arts. The
publication in 1687 of Newton's Principia, the Magnum
Opus of seventeenth-century science, suggests a similar
comparison, more impressive perhaps than any other. It
was essentially the same human mind which had once
counted fingers and matched pebbles in the primaeval

The Rise of Modern Science 191

cave, and was now reaching to the stars, measuring the
speed of light and reading its own riddles in" the un-
fathomed depths of space. On the one hand the savage,
struggling to five as the limit of his number ; on the
other, the astronomer studying the double stars, so
distant from us that our whole solar system, if seen at
all, would be but a speck, and finding in their motion
fresh illustration of the conic curves of which Apollonius,
Descartes, and Newton had expressed the law : and
between the two there is real identity as well as progress.
This journey, from the furthest bourne of human
thought to the threshold of triumphant science, might,
had we full knowledge, be mapped out completely in
similar consecutive steps, sometimes quicker, sometimes
halting, with stretches without apparent movement, but
all of kindred nature and tending to the same goal.
We have in previous pages had some glimpses of the
more critical passages on the way, and noticed points in
the movement specially germane to our general theme.
This growth of science is by no means the whole of
civilization, but it holds a commanding position in it,
and several features in the scientific evolution seem
identical with the conquering social spirit itself. Like
language, the method of exact science has a double
aspect, the external facts which it brings together and
arranges, and the human minds of which it correlates
and expresses the thought. Now on each side of this
double process the unifying action of scientific thought
is its most striking feature. On the objective side
it carries the generalizing process of language much
further and applies it exactly. Where language gives the

192 The Rise of Modern Science

same name to like things, science, seeing deeper, can give
it to the superficially unlike, and express by the same
equation the fall of the stone and the revolution of the
planet. The first century of modern science has furnished
us with abundant instances, and the same tendency per-
sists throughout. It is the logical essence of the process,
though we are here not concerned with the logic but
with the social aspect of the fact. Just as the method
consists objectively in collecting resemblances from the
complex of phenomena and expressing them in the
simplest exact general statements or laws, so, on the side
of the human minds perceiving the resemblances and
formulating the statement, there is a corresponding pro-
cess of comparison and unification. The differential
equation, though Leibnitz suggested its precise form,
sums up the consensus of innumerable minds, the earliest
savages who noticed the likenesses of things around them,
the first measurers who agreed to lay out their fields and
decorate their buildings on a common scale, the Greeks
who formulated the similarities of figures in the first
equations, the Arabs who improved the notation, the
thinkers of the seventeenth century whose genius, co-
operating, through many minds, carried the idea of a
common law into the recesses of space, and expressed
it so concisely that it has become the universal and per-
manent intellectual currency of mankind.

The instrument thus forged in scientific method was
not yet able to knit up the globe, for minds sufficiently
advanced were still few and confined to a small area ;
nor was it yet in touch with the practical powers which
were to effect the industrial and social revolution of later

The Rise of Modern Science 193

years ; but it was firmly established as the natural and
fundamental link of progressive human society.

It is the most perfect expression of human unity, and
the means best adapted to promote that unity. For it
arises from the simplest facts of common experience, and
grows by the co-operation of the mass of men with
human intellect at its highest. And when developed,
it returns again to widen and strengthen the common
intelligence and increase the common good. Above all,
more perfectly than any other form of thought, it
embodies the union of past and present in a conscious
and active force.

1543

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

A century has elapsed since the invention of the steam-engine
and we are only just beginning to feel the depths of the shock it gave
us. But the revolution it has effected in industry has nevertheless
upset human relations altogether. New ideas are arising, new
feelings are on the way to flower. In thousands of years, when, seen
from the distance, only broad lines of the present age will still be
visible, our wars and our revolutions will count for little, but the steam-
engine, and the procession of inventions that accompanied it, will
perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or chipped stone of
pre-historic times : it will serve to define an age. If we could rid
ourselves of all pride, if, to define our species, we kept strictly to
what the historic and pre-historic periods show us to be the constant
characteristics of man and of intelligence, we should perhaps not say
Homo Sapiens, but Homo Faber. BERGSON.

o 2

SOON after the death of Newton, after the completion
of the first essay of modern science, man's new intellectual
instrument came in touch with his old practical, tool-
making and tool-using, instinct, which M. Bergson rightly
treats as a constant and progressive characteristic. These
two sides of his activity had been in necessary relation
from the first, but the seventeenth century had seen
an exceptional outburst of the abstract, generalizing
spirit. The purely intellectual instrument had now far
outstripped in fineness and power the concrete tools with
which man alters and fashions the world around him.
The eighteenth century was to witness such a sharpening
and strengthening of tools as the world had never seen
before. It was the historic meeting-place of Homo
Sapiens and Homo Faber, a capital step in the onward
march of mankind towards the conquest of nature.
Scientific intellect was now wedded to practical skill, the
old skill of the smith in engineering, of the weaver in
manufacturing, of the farmer in agriculture : and the
face of the world, almost everything we see and use, has
been changed as the result. But the meeting of Homo
Sapiens and Homo Faber was not only that of scientific
intellect and practical skill in the abstract. The small
band of thinkers and inventors came in touch with the
mass of the workers who were to be organized by the new
system, the new methods of production necessitated by
elaborate and intellectualized machinery. This is the
social side of the historic meeting-point, and ultimately
the most important : for it leads to the socializing of

The Industrial Revolution 197

science which is involved in popular education, and the
socializing of the products of the improved machinery
by social reform, which became the increasingly pre-
dominant interest of the succeeding century. Of these
large and more remote consequences we shall only touch
the first fringe in this chapter, and shall leave the un-
finished edges in our last. The revolution was, like all
other events, the natural sequel of what had gone before,
but it was distinguished by its greatly accelerated rate
of movement, and by the profound changes in society
as a whole which it affected.

The changes in the western world from the latter part
of the eighteenth century onwards are essentially a part
of the same movement which began in the thirteenth
century, was quickened by the revival of learning, and
brought to a height by the meeting of the Man of
Science with the Man of Tools. It was the speed of
the changes in the later years which made them revolu-
tionary. And there is also a material difference in the
later years in point of depth. The revival of learning
was an aristocratic thing. A few fine people cultivated
the arts and re-discovered the ancient leaven which
was to leaven the lump. But the condition of the
mass was little altered, and where altered not always
improved, from the thirteenth century till after the
industrial revolution. Nor was the scientific movement
a popular one. It was developed by a small number of
distinguished persons, and patronized by kings and princes,
who sometimes, like Charles the Second, themselves
played with the new toys. It led to the efforts of the
enlightened and reforming monarchs of the eighteenth

198 The Industrial Revolution

century, but it did not affect the whole of society, until
the sweeping changes in the life of the people, which
resulted from the union of science and industry, brought
men together in masses and made all men think.

We noticed in the last chapter the sequence of dates
which connects the life of Newton with Watt's steam-
engine, the decisive event in the industrial revolution.
Black, whose discoveries in latent heat helped Watt to
the invention of his condenser, was born in the year after
Newton's death, and made his discoveries about 1760
when he was just over thirty. Besides these discoveries
in the latent heat of steam which were of immediate
practical application, he became one of the founders of
scientific chemistry by establishing the fact, which Mayow
had surmised nearly a hundred years before, that bodies
lose by combustion a measurable quantity of some sub-
stance which he called ' fixed air '. Black's work has thus
a double or treble interest, as a connecting link between
science and industry, and a foundation stone of modern
chemistry by extending measurement to another order
of physical facts. Watt himself was a man of thorough
scientific training, based on mathematics, and kept in
touch with all the leading thought of the day.

The links are significant, but we must beware of
pressing them too far. The mechanical inventions which
revolutionized industry, followed the establishment of
modern science, and were increasingly aided by it, but
we cannot pass directly from one to the other, as from
cause to effect. Man's inventive and practical powers
develop constantly and spontaneously with the suitable
stimulus of opportunity. Inventions were being made

The Industrial Revolution 199

in the ' dark ages ', and by unscientific people like the
Chinese. The most potent of all educational inventions,
the printing-press, was quite independent of abstract
science, and, side by side with the scientific evolution of
the seventeenth century, a series of inventors, such as
Denis Papin and the Marquis of Worcester, were making
ingenious sketches, which often anticipated the successful
inventions of a hundred years later. The genius of the
mechanical inventor is rather of the practical and organ-
izing kind, ' conceiving and arranging in space the various
mechanisms which are to produce a given effect, con-
trolling, distributing, and directing motive forces '.* The
historic meeting-point of the eighteenth century is really
another example of that integration of human powers of
which science by itself offered so many striking instances.
Just as mathematics, mechanics, and physics all gained
immeasurably by mutual aid, by discovering their identi-
ties and points of contact, so, in the distinct but related
spheres of theory and practice, the eighteenth century
established a closer relationship of the most fruitful kind.
In the steam-engine there was the first contact of
developed science and industrial practice of an imme-
diately and abundantly productive kind, and ever since
the union of powers has been more and more deliberately
pursued.

Converging on the same point, the invention of a
practicable steam-engine just after the middle of the
eighteenth century, came a series of improvements affect-
ing the smith's art itself, the typical craft of Homo Faber.
The manufacture of steel and iron was being revolution-
1 Condorcet.

zoo The Industrial Revolution

ized by the application of coal to smelting, and by a series
of improvements in the process. By 1761, when Watt and
Black were in consultation, the blast-furnace had made
possible the large and cheap supply of iron without which
the steam-engine would have been abortive.

Here, then, begins the real age of Iron, not a degrada-
tion, as poets had fabled, but a stage in advance, difficult
indeed and crossed by terrible evils, but based on some
of the most solid and helpful facts in our environment.
Man awoke to find that he had beneath him in his
* iron-cored ' globe the greatest wealth in the commonest
metal. And it was a wealth unlike that which had given
the metals their order of worth. That was the value of
scarcity, this the value of use. The commonest and in
appearance the least attractive of metals was to perform
prodigies of strength. The finest cutting, the heaviest
hammering, were alike its work. It was to build the
highest structures and the largest ships, to link up
continents and pierce the earth.

This decade, between the Seven Years' War which
gave us Canada and India, and the war with the United
States which gave* the New World independence, was full
of consequences for mankind, and in the first place for
England. It was a decade of invention. In 1765 Watt
produced his first practicable steam-engine, with the
separate condenser. It was still only rectilinear in action
and used for pumping. Almost simultaneously the primi-
tive processes of spinning and weaving were being trans-
formed by the inventions of Hargreaves and Arkwright,
Crompton and Cartwright. Arkwright was the main
agent in producing mechanical spinning, as Cartwright

The Industrial Revolution 201

later was the principal inventor ;of the power-loom to
work up the vast quantities of yarn produced. Ark-
wright's first mill for spinning cotton was set up in 1769,
and was worked at first by horses and then by water-
power. This water-worked mill survived in many cases
the introduction of steam, and its remains are a familiar
object in many a Lancashire and Yorkshire valley. By
1775 Arkwright's inventions were complete and ready for
the matured work of the greatest of the inventors. Watt's
engine still needed to be adapted to the regular circular
movement required in a mill. In the following ten years
the difficulties were overcome, and the first cotton-mill,
worked by steam, was started in Nottingham in 1785.
Nottingham and Derbyshire were chosen as the scenes
of the first mill experiments, to avoid the opposition of
the handworkers in the north who saw their livelihood
threatened by the new machinery. The first steam-
propelled cotton-spinning mill in Manchester dates from
the year of the opening of the Revolution in France,
four years later.

The coincidence is one of the most memorable in history.

Of the procession of mechanical inventions which
followed the mere concrete facts are stupendous. It is
said that the steam-engine alone has added to human
power the equivalent of a thousand million men. This
clearly is but a fraction of the mechanical advantage,
the brute force, which man has gained in little more
than a century since the steam-engine began. For we
must add to it the whole of the electrical energy now
employed, the extension of water-power by hydraulic and
other means, and, within the most recent times, the

2O2, The Industrial Revolution

power generated by oil-engines, which alone has been
stated to be equal to two million additional human
hands. Suppose that by these and other mechanical
means man can actually multiply many times his motive
strength and freely organize and direct the result. This
is not far beyond the present problem, and it has been
reached on the lines which Bacon and Descartes advo-
cated three hundred years ago, of studying the ways of
nature so as to command by obeying her. But it may
be doubted whether, if one of the ardent pioneers of the
seventeenth century could awake and see the use that
mankind has made of its vast added powers, he would
be satisfied with the result. One of the wisest men 1 of
the last generation left unpublished among his papers an
essay in which he raised the question, ' whether the
steam-engine was not invented too soon ', and was inclined
to answer in the affirmative. It is a question in hypo-
thetical history, but it puts in an arresting way the
problem of the immense new resources of the last hundred
years, compared with the wisdom and public spirit shown
in their use. Most of us will sadly conclude that probably
no wisdom would have been learnt before the material
was at hand to be wasted in the learning.

The moment of the invention was marked out by
the concurrence of several lines of events. Better
pumping-engines for use in the mines were more and
more needed, as the demand for coal increased. Steel
and iron had been cheapened. Science had just become
able to give the necessary help to guide the inventor :
and the simultaneous inventions in the textile trade

1 Dr. J. H. Bridges.

The Industrial Revolution 203

offered the widest possible field for the immediate use
of the improved engine in other work. The coinci-
dence with the beginning of the French Revolution is
a curious accident, which deserves to be set side by side
with the fact that the fundamental discovery of the
identity of lightning with electricity was made shortly
before by the same man, Benjamin Franklin, who in
1778 induced the French to form the alliance against
England which secured the success of the United States
in their war for independence. In a wider sense none
of the coincidences was accidental, for all the events
sprang from the same exuberant spirit of mental freedom
and confident activity which followed the creation of
modern science, and marked especially the years which
ushered in the Revolution.

In the stage which we are now discussing, England
indisputably took the lead of the world. In the rise of
the new science and philosophy of the seventeenth
century, France and England worked side by side, and
one of the greatest of all the builders, Leibnitz, was
a German ; but in the industrial development England
was easily chief. Many causes contributed to this ; the
geographical and physical deserve perhaps the first place.
Just as we saw in the ancient world the influence, first,
of the great eastern river-valleys, and then of the
Mediterranean and its encircling lands, so now, after
the discovery of the New World and the rise of a new
science and a new commerce, a fresh centre of human
intercourse began to grow around the shores of the
Atlantic. In this new grouping England and France
hold a favoured place, and especially England. Set in

204 The Industrial Revolution

her own seas, clear of her neighbours on the continent
but within easy reach of them, England stretches out
her hands to the West. In years of life-and-death
conflict she had trained her sons to a more perfect
mastery of the seas than any other people, and when
the great streams of modern commerce began to flow,
they passed mainly through her ports. And within she was
as well equipped by nature for the coming development
as she was by position and training for external commerce.
She had large stores of coal and iron, the sinews of the
new war, conveniently placed. Her climate in the north
was peculiarly well fitted for the textile work, and her
population had for generations been engaged by more
primitive methods in the manufactures which were to
be expanded by the methods of science. The greatest
of the practical steps in industrial invention were first
taken by Englishmen, by Watt in the steam-engine, by
Arkwright and his fellows in textile machinery, by George
Stephenson in the locomotive. And England reaped the
main harvest, in wealth, in population, in territory and
international influence. Slowly, as we shall see later on,
other countries have followed England in this industrial
expansion, till she has lately been in some points over-
taken ; but not before the effects of the first transforma-
tion, at the turn of the centuries, have been impressed
for all time on every part of the history of the world.

The textile trades offered the first and most fruitful
experiments in machine production. Of the two main
branches cotton was first affected, which was produced
for the inexhaustible market of India and the East. The
woollen manufacture was transformed later, and has never

The Industrial Revolution 207

reached the same pitch of organization. It was the oldest
and most indigenous of the textile trades, and could trace
its origin to more necessities and circumstances in the
life and history of the country than any other. The
wool of England had been in old days a great source of
wealth, and her main export. Wars with France had
been waged in the Middle Ages on the proceeds of an
export duty on wool, as the revolutionary war was soon
to be decided by the wealth produced by the new textile
manufactures. But for many years the wool, which had
once been exported, had been spun and woven in the
cottages of West Riding farmers and others, who would
themselves complete all the processes and go to market
with the product. It is little more than a hundred
years ago since the small grass-farmers near Leeds might
have been seen there twice a week on the bridge, selling
the rolls of cloth which they had themselves bought as
wool, worked up with their own wives and daughters at
home, and brought to market on their own horses. The
picture is a typical one and illustrates many aspects of
the industrial revolution.

Before the revolution, the family had been the unit
and the home was the workshop. Labour was little
divided up or specialized, and it was carried on in the
midst of the life and operations of the country. After,
the capitalist's business became the unit and the factory
was the workshop. Labour becomes more and more
specialized, each separate process becoming the work of
a separate class of workmen, and new classes of men were
called for, to organize the whole and do the buying
and selling. Lastly, the economy of the large factory,

20 6 The Industrial Revolution

and the convenience of having kindred industries in close
proximity, have created the large towns and brought the
multitudes of workers together. This, from the social
point of view, was the most important part of the change :
since the end of the eighteenth century more than half
the population of the leading countries of the world has
become urban. One instance will suffice. Lancashire, the
home of the greatest of the highly organized industries,
advanced from a population of 166,000 in 1760 to nearly
4,500,000 in 1901, not far short of the whole population
of England two hundred years before.

The growth of the large town and the part which it
was to play in the later development of society, are points
of the first importance, and recall our minds to what
had been taking place on the country-side during the
years of critical change in manufacturing methods. Here,
too, the methods of science and the desire of improve-
ment had been active since the beginning of the
seventeenth century. The brave and indefatigable Dutch,
most stimulating to Western Europe of all the smaller
nationalities, had been the pioneers of improved gardening
and farming. In the sixteenth century they had shown
the world how to fight for freedom : in the seventeenth
they had invented the telescope, produced Grotius and
Spinoza, and given a home to Descartes. On the practical
side of life they were as effective as in intellectual matters.
Modern banking and finance, strong social and inter-
national bonds in later times, were largely of their
devising : and in the middle of the seventeenth century
their example began that transformation of English agri-
culture, which, by the time of the industrial revolution,

The Industrial Revolution 207

had produced crops and animals three or fourfold finer
than they had been a hundred years before. Better
manuring and more constant use of the land, the intro-
duction of root crops and artificial grasses were some of
the principal means employed. Wealth was increasing
as rapidly among the land-owning class as it was soon
to do among the manufacturers. In the general passion
for productive improvement the policy of enclosures
found its strongest support. For two hundred years
landlords had been adding, where they could, pieces of
waste and common to their estates : in the eighteenth
century the process was carried on under Acts of Parlia-
ment, much more extensively, and with much more
suffering and loss to the cottagers and users of the
commons.

We are concerned here with the matter only so far as
it bears on that growth of the town population which is
an essential element in the closer organization of society
which followed.

The better tillage of the soil was not to prove the
rallying point of human industry, hope though we may
for a time when our great societies, organized and
strengthened by the discipline of the ' great industries ',
will return to the natural home of primitive men and all
children, made still more fertile and knit together by
the resources of science. The earliest achievements in
improved cultivation assuredly made no direct advance
towards this goal. The dispossessed and impoverished
cottagers and commoners made their way, some to the
New World, still more to the growing towns, where the
factories were ready to swallow men, women, and children,

208 The Industrial Revolution

and cared little for the technical skill, either of the old
craftsmen or the farm hand. The country was no place
for the organization of labour. It bred quietness, a
leisurely routine, the acceptance of the orders of men
and nature without active complaint or feverish anxiety
to have them altered. That it does this bespeaks it
a natural home for men, for these things are of the spirit
of home. But for the work in hand in the world — the
assimilation of the vast resources which the new science
and mechanical inventions had put in man's command,
and the organization of a society strong, keen, and united
enough to grasp and utilize them — quick exchange of
ideas, vigorous combination of many minds and many
wills were needed. This is the gift of the town.

The gift must be studied with discernment and the eye
of faith. For round the newly forming cities, centres of
so much vital activity for the future, the want of wisdom,
the pre-occupation, the carelessness, the greed, of the
time allowed a cloud of misery and hideousness to gather
thicker than the smoke which enveloped the working of
its mechanical powers. It was a moment of grave external
crisis, added to the working of the greatest experiment
in home industry. How intimately the two were bound
up together, we shall see in the next chapter : with what
better issue we should have met the internal revolution
without the external distraction we can never know.
The main facts are beyond dispute. During the revolu-
tionary war, which followed closely on the general installa-
tion of the steam-engine, and for more than a decade
afterwards, the condition of the mass of the people of
England was probably worse than it had been at any

The Industrial Revolution 209

previous period, while landlords, manufacturers, and
capitalists generally, were making larger profits than
ever. But if on one side of the account there is inhuman
wealth, the hovel and the game-laws in the country, and
the factory child in the town, on the other there is the
stern determination, the hundreds of millions of pounds,
the unnumbered lives of the war with France.

Our thread of science organizing industry, the stage
which the eighteenth century marks in the progress of
a collective human force in the world, will be found to
give some guidance through these amazing contrasts. It
led to the aggregation of workers in towns and large
centres. But the first aggregation took place in such
haste, with such strong inducements to amass wealth and
with so little knowledge of the laws of health or economics,
that evils of all kinds were allowed to flourish, which will
tax severely the more fully developed science and the
more even-handed policy of our own day to eradicate. It
is outside our scope here to attempt any sketch of the social
conditions of the time, and the accumulation of such
details would obscure the one point which it belongs to
our argument to make clear. But two or three steps
have so direct a bearing on the organization which was
to follow, that they must be mentioned.

Largely through the enclosures, poverty in the country
had increased, and the real wages of the labourers were
seriously reduced by bad harvests and the rise in the price
of corn. At last, in 1795, in face of widespread destitu-
tion, a pretty general decision was come to by the
magistrates of the country to supplement the inadequate
wages by allowances from the rates. This had the obvious

1643 P

2i o 'The Industrial Revolution

result of keeping down and further depressing wages :
while, as additional allowances were made for additional
children, a stimulus was given to the production of
children to live on the starvation wages provided. It is
the classical instance of ill-judged benevolence attempt-
ing to remedy the evil consequences of ill-regulated and
precipitate money-making.

The town, attracting labour from the impoverished
country-side, paid it on the average but little more than
the country rates, while the gangs of children, imported
for factory work from the guardians of the poor, received
nothing but their miserable keep. In such a state, with
war and the corn-laws keeping food at famine prices, it
is hard indeed to detect the germ of social hope which
the factory system had within it. It was not till 1824
that, with the abrogation of the conspiracy laws which
forbade combinations of workmen, the natural ameliora-
tive tendencies of the system began to have some play.
The workers from that time onwards began to unite
openly to improve their lot, and the first and, from the
social point of view, the worst period of factory history
came to an end.

By this time a new principle of political action had in
fact gained the ascendant, the doctrine of laissez-faire.,
of which Adam Smith was the greatest prophet. His
book on the Wealth of Nations had appeared in 1776,
with influence in far more directions than we can even
glance at. The doctrine is a part of the general spirit
of freedom which was to blow to so fierce a storm in
France. In England it was the instrument for removing
many of the old restrictions on work and wages, which

The Industrial Revolution

211

could have no place in the new system of large industries
and mobile labour. In the first reaction against the old
regulations, men were apt to think that it was only
necessary to remove every check and let natural forces,
the free competition of workmen and capital, settle all
difficulties. Later experience has shown the narrow limits
of this doctrine, but there were then serious and inde-
fensible obstacles, only waiting for the first vigorous attack.
There was the law of settlements, by which labourers
were chargeable to the poor-law only in the parish where
they had a ' settlement ' ; there was the regulation of
wages by the justices at quarter sessions, the law of
apprenticeship, and the law preventing combinations
of workmen. All these had to be swept away, and the
doctrine of freedom found here an application in England,
while in France it was destroying more exalted and
imposing institutions.

With the removal of these restrictions, especially that
on combination, the organization of labour, which
naturally followed the aggregation of workmen in large
trades and in large centres of population, could proceed.
The century which follows, marvellous for so many things,
might indeed be called, among other names, the century
of organization. Of many causes, the factory and the
resulting town, with its large increase in the general
population, are among the chief.

Adam Smith, in his great book published before the
steam-engine had given its prodigious impulse in the
same direction, points out the importance of the division
of labour in cheap and efficient production. It is far
truer of factory than of agricultural labour, and every step

p 2

212

The Industrial Revolution

in the development of machinery has intensified the
process for good and evil. It is fundamental to modern
industrial organization, so characteristic of it that all
previous labour seems by comparison as simple a thing
as the Leeds farmer-weaver selling his own cloth on the
bridge. In every branch of manufacture, every detail,
the eyelet, the edging, the turn of the screw, has become
the province of a special order of workpeople, manipulat-
ing a special machine, often forming a special organization
to defend their own interests. From one point of view,
narrowing, mechanical, monotonous ; from another, an
impressive lesson in the dependence of every particle in
the social organism on every other and on the whole.
To the countryman, to the workman in a simpler state,
the fact, equally true, is more remote ; the factory
worker is surrounded by his fellows and depends at every
step on what others send him.

With the growing specialization went a growing need
for special means to keep the whole together. This was
equally true of the workmen, the article produced, and
the market in which it was to be sold. Each sphere called
forth new and special organizing skill. The trade unions,
bringing together the workers and defending their
interests, have been the principal agents in developing
this faculty among them. They are, broadly speaking,
the outcome of the factory system and well represent it,
both in its specialized branches and its larger combina-
tions. Often, too, in the century which succeeds its
emancipation, labour is seen striving to attain, like science,
an international unity.

Other forms of organizing skill, arising from the new

The Industrial Revolution 213

order, became prominent at an earlier date. Trade, town,
and government all afford abundant illustration. Each
trade in these conditions requires for its success the per-
fect co-operation of all its parts, just as the complicated
engine does, which provides the motive power. This
co-operation, which we take for granted in any running
concern or running engine, is really the expression in
concrete fact of a vast force of organizing mind, which
has itself grown up with the system, making and being
made by it together. Nor does it reside exclusively in
any one set of minds, though there must be special
organizers, such as foremen and directors. Every person
taking part in such a system has in some degree his spirit
of co-operation heightened. The town even more than
the trade encourages this tendency. It is a common-
place of our contemporary life, as common as the air we
have always breathed and of which till the eighteenth
century, not yet two hundred years ago, mankind was
entirely ignorant, both as to its nature and its operation.
For the business relations, which gave rise to the town,
become but a small part of all the forms of association
by which its members are developed in co-operative
activity : and it grows by its own growth. It is Aristotle's
city-state, writ large, in letter of steel. The necessities of
machine production made the modern town : its organiza-
tion offers to the citizens a larger and fuller life. Iron for
marble, smith's work for sculptor's and mason's — much of
the difference between the modern state and its archetype
is expressed in that change — both as a fact and as a
symbol. Less beauty, less individual work, less freshness
of thought mark the modern structure : but its material

214 The Industrial Revolution

is more durable, the lines of the building are larger, and
the ties and stresses are arranged in the light of a higher
mechanical science.

The whole framework of government was in fact soon
affected by the new organization of industry. The full
effects were not reached till later years when the great
movement for freedom and humanity, which is the sub-
ject of the next chapter, had entered into men's minds.
But from the very beginning of the nineteenth century,
in the darkest period of factory life, there were signs
that the state would not be content to rest in the doctrine
of negative freedom, of non-intervention, with which it
first met the industrial changes. In 1802, prompted by
a memorial from a group of Manchester reformers, Sir
Robert Peel, himself a wealthy manufacturer, passed an
Act imposing some slight obligations in matters of health,
hours of work and instruction, on the mill-owners, in
the interests of the children employed, and introducing
inspection. It was the beginning of the elaborate net-
work of factory legislation, in which England, the pioneer
in factory invention, has again led the world in mitigating
the results. This is one branch of the multifarious state-
activity which has grown in succeeding years with acce-
lerating speed. It has already increased so much that,
though the groundplan of our law remains as it has been
kid down for centuries, by far the greater part of our
statutes and administrative machinery is subsequent to the
industrial revolution. It has grown with it, like our system
of national communications, which is another outward
sign of the working of the organizing mind, so powerfully
stimulated by the events of the period. Good highroads

The Industrial Revolution 215-

with stage-coaches, posts, canals, railways, and telegraphs
— the nervous system of our present society — all is less
than two hundred years old, and most of it directly
connected with the mechanical discoveries.

Now it will be noticed that this organizing activity
is by no means identical with state action, although the
state has shared largely in the general stimulation.
Voluntary forms of co-operation, the organization of
independent enterprise, have been at least as active ;
and the freely formed links are some of the strongest.
This outburst of organizing and unifying activity in
society which followed the industrial revolution is clearly
one of the great stages in the growth of a collective
human force in the world, and intimately related to the
organizing skill implied in the machines themselves. We
may, as Helmholtz in his famous study of the formation
of the eye, find faults still more serious in the social
process. Yet, as it develops, we seem bound to recognize
in this organization of industry by science an indispensable
instrument for furthering the unity and efficiency of the
race : and, more happily than in the case of physical
defects, we have it largely in our own power to effect
a cure.

But the retrospect of the two evolutions, of science in
the seventeenth and industry in the eighteenth century,
must leave very different feelings in the mind. There is
no cloud on the fame of Galileo or Descartes or Newton,
but we cannot think of Watt or Arkwright or Stephenson
without a vision of the loss of life and beauty and happi-
ness which has marked every step in their achievement
and reduced the sum of the benefits which they have

2i 6 The Industrial Revolution

conferred. The former find their goal in a closer and
more comprehensive unity of thought ; and both their
motive and reward are immediate and pure. The work
of the latter struggles to success through all the obstacles
of material difficulties and imperfect human wisdom and
wills. The rewards are mixed and ill-divided, like the
capacities of those through whom they must be reached.
And while the apprehension of a great law is given in
a moment of the individual's life who sees it, the realiza-
tion of great social changes must be measured by another
scale. A generation is a moment when all society is to
be changed. It is just a hundred years since the first
steamer left the Clyde and much less since the first
locomotive engine took persons still alive on a journey
by rail. The interval since is so crowded with events
that we rightly treat it as an epoch : yet in the life of
the species it is but an instant — a flash from the anvil
in the forge of mankind.

10

THE REVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND
POLITICAL

The destination of the human species as a whole is towards con-
tinued progress. We accomplish it by fixing our eyes on the goal,
which, though a pure ideal, is of the highest value in practice, for
it gives a direction to our efforts, conformable to the intentions of
Providence.

KANT, Criticism of Herder, 1785.

WE isolated in the last chapter one aspect of the great
European movement which links the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries together. It is the aspect in which
our own country was most prominent, which has made
most apparent difference in the face of the world and
seems most directly to bear on our main topic, the
growth of the collective force of mankind, conquering
and utilizing the forces of nature. But throughout our
sketch, throughout the rise both of modern science and
modern industry, the need constantly emerged of wider
and more human ideas to give purpose and motive power
to the movement as a whole. One can imagine a
supremely skilful industrial state, based on science and
organized by master minds, in which the whole purpose
was the pleasure and aggrandizement of the few, and
there was no thought of the community and common
ends of man. Such we know the modern system has
often appeared to its more hostile critics. It would be
a ship constructed and equipped with perfect art, but
wanting the guiding mind to take it on its appointed
journey, or, at best, making a pleasure-trip for the amuse-
ment of the upper-deck ; and all the omens tell us that
the voyage would be short.

The picture has value as a warning. But it would be
untrue even of the industrial revolution as we have
sketched it in England, and it entirely ignores the wider
and deeper ideas of human duty and destiny which were
gaining ground at the same time in the western world.
We must now enter on the larger field to complete our

The Revolution, Social and Political 219

view, and in doing so return to that co-operative action
of the leading nations, especially of France, Germany,
and England, which we noted as the issue of the Middle
Ages.

While England was accumulating the wealth which
was to give her and her system the preponderance in
the conflict with revolutionary France, the lead in abstract
thinking, which she had held in the seventeenth century,
passed for the time to the Continent, and primarily to
France. It was France, and above all Lavoisier, who
first co-ordinated the results of the new discoveries in
chemistry and constituted it a science. It was France
that a little later laid the foundations of biology by the
labours of many great men, especially of Bichat and
Lamarck. They were French thinkers who proclaimed
most clearly the new principles of human progress and
unity. It was France who made those principles her
national gospel and staked her existence on teaching
them to the rest of mankind. Hence it followed that
the attempt to realize those principles immediately in
practice became identified with France, as the industrial
revolution was identified with England, though in the
former case it is easy to show that the movement was
really international and to cull similar thoughts from all
the nations of the West. Only the soil of France was
better prepared and her temper more fervid.

One might go back to the Stoical philosophy which
closed the Greco-Roman period, and find in that the
' principles of the French Revolution '. Then, after ages
of local patriotism and tribal mythology, men had begun
to feel the reality of a larger whole, the ' Inhabited

220 The Revolution, Social and Political

World ', where slave and emperor were naturally equal
and naturally bound to follow an equal law. Christianity
had built its first simple structure round the same corner-
stone, and the long discipline of the Catholic Church had
brought permanently together a large civilized nucleus
in the West. Then came the vast sense of power, the
illimitable vistas of possible improvement which entered
into the world with the discoveries of science. The spirit
generated by the whole process in leading minds of
Western Europe may be traced in many statesmen and
writers of the mid-eighteenth century, collectively and
conspicuously in the French group of ' philosophes '
who circled round the Encyclopaedia, and most of all
in the purest and noblest victim of the Revolution, the
Marquis of Condorcet. He will best exemplify the new
spirit in its full strength and with its accidental and
superficial defects. There are three aspects of his social
and historical doctrine, as expounded in the Sketch of
Human Progress, which specially concern us. It is in the
first place a universal doctrine, herein like that of the
Stoics. Mankind is to be united, and ' wars will be
regarded as assassinations '. In the second place all men
are to be equal, at least in their opportunity for happi-
ness and improvement. Slavery is to be abolished, and
all the chains in which, like Rousseau, he saw men
fettered, are to be struck off. Herein the new doctrine,
starting from the same root-idea as the Stoics, is prepared
to give it a more immediate and practical application.
And lastly — the most characteristically modern element —
he taught that man individually, and society as a whole,
is capable of indefinite improvement. ' Nature has set

The Revolution-) Social and Political

221

no limit to our hopes ', and the ' picture of the human
race, freed from its chains, and marching with a firm
tread on the road of truth and virtue and happiness,
offers to the philosopher a spectacle which consoles him
for the errors, the crimes, the injustice, which still pollute
and afflict the earth '.

Condorcet and his burning hopes, written in 1793
when he was bors la loi and hiding from his enemies in
the Convention, may well have the first place among
our witnesses to the new gospel. Though proscribed and
done to death, he was the spokesman of the most typical
and moving thoughts of his nation at the moment when
it was waving the banner of a new life and a new humanity
in the face of the world. But we may find the same
ideas, more deeply grounded in a general philosophy and
expressed with a more comprehensive wisdom, in the
greatest contemporary thinker of Germany. Kant, too,
was largely influenced on the social and political side by
Rousseau, but he was free from the animus against the
past, and especially the religious past, which perverted
so much of the work of the ' philosophes '. In 1784, ten
years before Condorcet's Sketch, five years before the
outbreak of the Revolution, he published his Ideas towards
a Universal History from a cosmopolitan point of view.
This is incomparably the most powerful and pregnant
statement of the views which we are discussing, before
the nineteenth century made them a commonplace.
Kant begins by showing how we can reconcile the freedom
of the individual will with the evolution of society accord-
ing to an ascertainable law. The solution is to be found
in the necessary dualism of the process. Man must

222 The Revolution^ Social and Political

develop as an individual, yet the individual, only realizes
his full powers in a constantly developing society. It is
by regarding social movements in the mass that we
become conscious of their conforming to definite laws.
Of these laws the most important and comprehensive is
that of the growing cohesion of men in societies which
secure the justice and stability needed for individual and
social progress. The capital and most difficult step has
been already achieved in the foundation of well-ordered
political communities : this must give us confidence that
some day the natural issue will result, and a world-
community arise in which wars will disappear, as private
war has disappeared in the separate states. His later
work, Towards Perpetual Peace, appeared in 1795 when
Europe was on the eve of her struggle with Napoleon.
In this he develops the necessity for republican or repre-
sentative institutions, claims for each state the freedom
to control her own affairs, and pictures for the future
a world-federation of such free states.

The cynic may smile at both prophetic figures, Con-
dorcet, hymning an age of peace and truth before he
flees from the storm of fierce passions and viler calumnies
to die alone in a damp cell at Bourg-la-Reine ; Kant,
hailing the advent of a world-republic at the moment
when Napoleon was about to extinguish the liberties of
half a continent and drown Europe in blood. But we
may bear the smile. These men, in spite of seeming
contradiction, were truly the spokesmen of their time.
The conflicts and calumnies, the bloodshed and self-
aggrandizement belong to any age ; they have been
lessened by the lives of the great humanitarian leaders

The Revolution^ Social and Political 223

of the eighteenth century. The really typical utterance
of any epoch is that which rises inevitably from ante-
cedent history, yet gives a new outlook to the new
generation, — thoughts which are stirring in many minds,
and ring out in the voices of genius and insight. Of these
Kant and Condorcet were two, among a host so great and
varied that many names have been given to the period in
which they lived, besides that of the ' Revolution '. It was
the time of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the return
to Nature, and in somewhat later times the Romantic
movement. Through such a maze of interests we
must keep our eye fixed firmly on the leading thread
we have followed throughout, if we are to reach any
conclusion.

But there is one coincidence of dates so striking that
the narrowest summary could not pass it by.

In one year, 1776, in the midst of the crucial inventions
of industrial machinery, three men were born, all of the
first importance in forming the modern spirit from that
mass of eager, expectant life which filled the latter part
of the eighteenth century. They were Hegel at Stutt-
gart, Beethoven at Bonn, Wordsworth at Cockermouth.1
The genius of each was proudly, even fiercely indepen-
dent, yet each combines with the others in that mysterious
unity of texture of which we are aware in subsequent
thought and feeling, and cannot understand without all
its diverse elements.

Hegel contributes to this unity, not the vast super-

1 J. M. W. Turner, the greatest exponent of Nature in colour, almost
exactly coincides with Wordsworth. He was born in 1775 and died
in 1851.

224 The Revolution^ Social and Political

structure of his logic which has divided all those who
have applied their minds to compass it, but the simple
fundamental notion of his Philosophy of History, that
humanity is one progressive and perfectible being or
organism, which advances by becoming more complete
and reasonable. For Reason, as with Anaxagoras, rules
the world, not as an outside force moulding mechanically
the course of things, but Reason embodied in man, and
rinding in man's history its most perfect expression. It
is a fuller and more poetical presentation than Kant's of
the new doctrine of a united and progressive mankind :
it lacks the strictness of Kant's argument, but it colours
and commends its theme by many touches of imagination.
African civilization is the child-life of mankind, Indian
is based on a dream of life and the universe ; while it
is to Hegel that we owe the famous aphorism that the
history of Greece is the life of a glorious youth, typified
at its birth by Achilles and in its decay by Alexander.

Beethoven, as the master of modern music, may seem
at first sight removed from our main subject. Yet, in
music and life alike, he was bound up with all the move-
ments of the revolutionary storm. He was won over by
contact with the crusading armies of republican France,
and hailed Napoleon as the new Prometheus of human
liberty. He turned still more fiercely against him when
he assumed a crown and trampled on those whom he
had set out to free, wrote paeans of triumph for the war
of independence and altered the title of his Heroic
Symphony into one to celebrate ' the memory of a great
man '. His art shows that the relation between music
and social conditions rests on a wider and more permanent

'The Revolution^ Social and Political 22?

basis than the inclinations of an individual. For modern
music, and Beethoven's above all, expresses more movingly
than any words the deepening of feeling, the mingled
cheerfulness and pathos, the straining to the further shore,
the heaven-storming shout of triumphant humanity,
which inspired the Revolution. Music was always social ;
this music, more than any other, bears clearly the im-
press of its origin and nature. No proof could be more
cogent of the reality of that growth of human sympathy
which is one aspect of our theme, than that music
has become, since the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury, the characteristic and pre-eminent art of Western
Europe.

Wordsworth was the third of the great men of 1770,
and long outlived the others. He had the special mark
of greatness in combining intense national and local
feeling with universal sympathies which bound him to
the Revolution. It is the latter aspect which appeals
to us here. Two distinguished features in Words-
worth's teaching thus stand out and proclaim him a
fellow-pioneer with Lessing and Goethe in Germany
and Rousseau in France, of the new and simpler
order of thinking and writing which must form a part
of any world-movement including rich and poor, all
nations and colours, in one community of sentiment
and purpose. These are his preference and defence of
humble people, common themes and simple language ;
and his revelation of the latent feelings which we all have
in us towards the common facts and sights of nature
and which he proclaimed to be religious. In each respect
Wordsworth was the most powerful voice that turned

1643 Q

226 The Revolution^ Social and Political

men ' back to Nature ' at the close of the century. The
' Prelude ' well describes how the two passions grew
together in his mind, the love of nature and the love of
man, and how the great drama enacted in France affected
at each stage the sympathies of one who viewed its com-
mencement with enthusiastic hopes, and felt it a ' bliss to
be alive ', ' with human nature seeming born again '.

We may well enter France in 1790 in Wordsworth's
company. She was standing ' on the top of golden
hours '. The Bastille had fallen and with it the whole
fabric of feudal privilege. The King had accepted the
Constitution, and, as Wordsworth landed at Calais on
the eve of the I4th of July, the whole country was
preparing to celebrate the first anniversary of the national
deliverance. On the Champs-de-Mars in Paris half
a million persons were assembled from aD the eighty-
three departments into which France had just been
divided, and there they witnessed the king swear to
their new charter of freedom and pledged their own
faith. Wordsworth saw only a reflection of the scene in
Calais and the towns and villages he passed on his way
to Paris, but even in * mean cities ' and among the few
he noted ' how bright a face is worn when joy of one
is joy for tens of millions '.

It was here that Wordsworth with a poet's insight
reached the heart of the movement. The Revolu-
tion, -which was to unfold itself in so many blood-
stained pages and end in national disaster and apparent
reaction, was essentially universal and rested on a growing
sense of the common rights and feelings and powers of
all mankind. No less a formula than this will fit the

'The Revolution, Social and Political 2.2.7

facts, and it differentiates the Revolution sharply from the
previous movements, especially in England and the United
States, which many revolutionists used for comparison and
encouragement. The English Civil War and the succeed-
ing Revolution were essentially constitutional. There
were acts of war of many kinds, but both the war and the
political changes which followed it were carried out by
men whose first desire was to re-establish and make clear
what they believed to be the law and constitutional prac-
tice of the English state. Cromwell's work was national,
though the sequel in the hands of William III became
a dominant factor in European politics and the ultimate
result was the world-wide imitation of the English Consti-
tution. TheEnglish movement aimed primarily at widen-
ing and clearing the course of that stream of precedent
which brings us our freedom. The French Revolution
differed, both in the previous preparation of the country
which gave it birth, in the general state of men's minds
which stimulated it, and in the results to which it tended.

We shall see how in the end the general ideas on which
it rested were forced to realize themselves by the slower
and more ordered methods of which England was the
prototype, how Germany was at this crisis drawn into
the triple group of the really leading Powers of Western
Europe, and how after the turmoil of revolution the
commonalty of mankind became steadily a greater and
more substantial thing, drawing closer together, improv-
ing itself within and subduing with increased vigour the
powers of earth to its service.

How was it that, when, in the eighteenth century, the
great humanitarian ideas, born of science and the passion

Q2

228 The Revolution^ Social and Political

for. reform, pressed to the front, they found their natural
home in France, and yet desolated it before they came to
years of discretion ? The answer, as always, is a historical
one, qualified by geography. As England was marked out
by national and physical characteristics to be the scene of
the industrial revolution, so France, the central country of
Western Europe, had long been the clearing-house for new
ideas, the exchange for the intellectual currency of Europe.

In no previous age was this so much the case as in the
eighteenth century, when Voltaire, the greatest sifter
of notions and popularizer of ideas, became master of
the exchange. He did more than sit at his central
office ; he travelled on his business, importing the ideas
of Newton from the rich but somewhat isolated
market of England and personally introducing them
to the barbarous court of Berlin. The currency of
French was indeed at that time so great that Gibbon
and many English writers were almost as much French
as English. France was the second fatherland of every
civilized man and gained for herself education from
the wealth of ideas that passed her doors. But while
thus intellectually stimulated and enriched, she was
not socially so strong or compact as England, nor so
ready to pass without a violent break from her feudal
state to the new conditions called for by the gospel of
equal rights, equal opportunities and the union of all.

France was more centralized and less united than
England. The paradox explains both the possibility and
violence of the Revolution, and its failure at the first
attempt. Just as the feudal system had been more
complete in France than in England, so the triumph of

The Revolution^ Social and Political 229

the Crown in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
had been more absolute. Whereas in England the Crown
had survived by making terms with the local nobility
who stood for the whole country, in France the Crown
had struck them down and drawn the remnant and their
successors into a separate world of its own, the noblesse,
ranged against, instead of at the head of, the rest of the
nation. In England the Petition of Right looks back to
Magna Carta and leads on to the settlement of 1689,
when the aristocracy is put in power. In France the
Crown establishes in the seventeenth century an absolute
authority by its ' intendants ', unchecked by Parliament,
and the nobility become the satellites of Versailles. At
the Revolution therefore the men who could seize the
central government had at their command a perfect
instrument of despotism, but not a homogeneous people.
Compare the history of the identical words ' gentleman '
and ' gentilhomme '. The latter becomes restricted to
a caste, to those of ' gentle ' or noble birth. The former
gradually loses its connotation of blood, and is applied,
practically with the consent of all, to those whose manners
and general breeding evoke respect. England was held
together by her local liberties and by the local power of
that ' gentry ' which in France abdicated in favour of the
Crown, and fell with it.

This horizontal fissure in the social structure of France
before the Revolution accounts for the collapse of the
attempt to carry out the scheme of national reform with
the king at the head. New men, new ideas surged up
from below, captured the more active and intelligent
part of the population and coerced the king. But they

230 The Revolution^ Social and Political

did not really possess him. He was surrounded and held
by the intervening layer of the privileged and obstructive
nobility, small in number but compact, and cut off by
generations of caste feeling from the mass of their fellow-
countrymen, righting, when at bay, with the tenacity
and personal courage of their order. Hence history
seems to have determined a violent issue to the movement,
and, as the inevitable sequel to violence, a temporary
reaction.

But though we are right to seek in the Old World,
and especially in France herself, for the main springs
of the revolutionary movement, the New World also
played a memorable part. The new communities had
been growing there for nearly two hundred years, in
ample space and free from the old ties of class and of
religion which were to make the transition to a new order
in Europe so difficult. Already, more than a century
before, the New World had given the first example to
Europe of perfect religious equality before the law, when
Roger Williams, a New England minister, educated at
Pembroke College, Cambridge, had founded in 1636 the .
settlement of Providence, on the new principle, still
thought dangerous in America, of complete separation
between religious and civil affairs. Even a hundred years
later Rousseau would have punished with death a citizen
who did not accept his new and simplified profession of
faith. In 1776 came the more telling example of the
Declaration of Independence, and the war in which the
French had given decisive help to the revolting colonies.
Franklin, the hero of the lightning discovery, arranged
the treaty between the States and France. Lafayette,

The Revolution^ Social and Political 231

who served twice with the army of independence in
America, returned to command the National Guard in
the earlier stage of the Revolution. So the connexion
was close, and when the French constitution-makers sat
down to draw up the first of their documents, they
borrowed verbally the opening language of the States,
' Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.
Social distinctions can only be based on social utility.'
But the United States were a new country in the hands
of careful and conservative men, while France was an
old one in the hands of revolutionists.

It was little more than two years since Wordsworth had
seen the general rejoicing and friendliness, the welcome
to all mankind, of 1790, before the dream had vanished
and France was in arms against the world. The invita-
tion had become a challenge and the gage of battle was
the head of a king. With all its horrors and the personal
littleness of many of the leading actors, the story will
always remain an immortal heritage of the human race,
ranking beside the defence of Athens against the Persians,
and of Holland against Spain, on the roll of those heroic
national forces that have stood victoriously against over-
whelming odds, in the interest of a cause greater than
themselves. For in spite of defections and revolt it was
the real France which answered to the call of Danton
and marched out to Valmy and Jemappes, as the real
Greece left Athens and met the foe at Salamis. There
were defaulters from both camps, and modern France
was to be made by the regrowth of its true though
mutilated national being, till it had put on again its full
strength and healed its wounds. The court and the

232 The Revolution^ Social and Political

nobility had been now cast off and were in arms against
their country, while in the rear were Bretons, men of
La Vendee, faithful Royalists and Catholics everywhere,
who could not reconcile their old beliefs with the new
national crusade. But it was the true France, the France
of the future, that went forward ; and she carried with her
not only the national interests but an ideal of universal
good.

It is as essential to understand this as it is to under-
stand that later in the struggle England did right and
played an almost equally heroic part in resisting the
Revolution when it became oppressive. What then were
the precious gifts which France in arms was defending
for herself and offering to Europe ? And at what point
could it become lawful, even imperative, to oppose them
if they were the apostles of a new era in human progress ?
The second question may be best dealt with first : Words-
worth in his life-story and Kant in his penetrating view
of the conditions of human progress will indicate the
answer.

Wordsworth stood by the Republic, after the Septem-
ber massacres, after the death of Louis, until ' Frenchmen
became oppressors in their turn and changed a war of
self-defence for one of conquest ', losing sight of ' all
which they had struggled for '. The invasion of Switzer-
land, the suppression of national rights by Napoleon, till
' to close and seal up all the gains of France a Pope is
summoned in to crown an Emperor ' ; these were the
catastrophe of freedom. Kant's principles would have
passed the same judgement, with an even further out-
look. For, while Wordsworth was thinking above all of

The Revolution^ Social and Political 233

personal liberty and happiness, Kant was seeking the
pathway to a state of universal peace and unity, where
individual aims and characters, essentially different, would
be harmonized by common sentiments and interests. But
to secure a strong and healthy whole the parts must be
intact, and therefore he condemned all invasion of the
rights of one people by another. It must be a union of
free and independent nations that will form a world-
society.

Somewhere between the disinterested enthusiasm of
1790 and the end of the century the tide of French
action had become retrograde. The precise point need
not concern us. The new aggressive spirit which
swallowed up the humanitarian ideas of the Revolu-
tion, did not arise primarily from Napoleon, though he
personified it and gave it vigour. It sprang from
the intense national passion that challenged the world
at Valmy and marched on to unexpected triumphs.
That when it reached this phase, it was incumbent
on the threatened states to defend themselves, we
need not stay to argue ; and that the final issue was
then inevitably a temporary set-back to the early hopes
of freedom and progress is equally self-evident. The
stream of history had in its central course become a
raging torrent, and the flooded country-side strove
for a time ineffectually to check and dam it.

But for clearance the flood and the rapid are powerful
agents, and the destructive work of the Revolution was
in many points as useful as the slower construction which
followed and in which we are taking part.

We saw in England how the industrial revolution,

234 'The Revolution^ Social and Political

aided by the new doctrine of laissez-faire, had gradually
removed the mediaeval restrictions on the free movement
and free organization of workmen and employers. In
France the clearing work of the Revolution was compar-
able, though it had a wider sweep. It carried away in
a moment a host of inequalities, o'f feudal privileges and
restrictions, of differences between province and province
and man and man, which Turgot and other reformers
'had laboured in vain to remove. The feudal dues and
rights of the seigneurs were surrendered in one famous
night, within two months of the assembly of the States-
General. The relics of actual serfdom which still lingered
in certain places soon followed in the torrent. New
' departments ', of similar constitution and with no
barriers of customs, took the place of the old ' provinces '.
In all this the Revolution was but completing at a stroke
a natural progress which all enlightened men had wished
to hasten. It was essential that obstacles to the free
union and activity of citizens, which had descended from
an age before the modern state had been conceived,
should be removed, in order that the nation should
combine strongly on a new basis, and take its place in
the coming world-society of vigorous and independent
states. The conquering armies of Napoleon did some-
thing of the same work in many corners of the Continent,
sweeping out obstructive and effete abuses and preparing
the foundations for future building. In Germany serf-
dom was abolished and the ghost of the old Holy Roman
Empire laid at last.

In another and a wider sphere the leaders of the
Revolution did their part to remove the greatest of dis-

The Revolution^ Social ana Political 235-

abilities to the free union of human beings over the
whole planet, by attacking the institution of slavery. On
this the French leaders were by no means the first to
speak. The Quakers in England, following their founder,
George Fox, had been the first united body to denounce
it. Thirty years before the Convention they had decided
to excommunicate from their society any one concerned
in the trade, and before the Revolution began they had
formed "an association for the ' relief and liberation of
the Negroes in the West Indies '. Nationally, however,
the French anticipated us by their society called the
' Friends of the Blacks ', which, with Condorcet at its
head, was working for the abolition of slavery itself, while
the general English movement under Wilberforce was
still concerned only with stopping the trade. In 1794
the Convention freed all the slaves of Haiti, but, through
the reaction in France, England attained the final goal
of general emancipation in 1833, twelve years before her
revolutionary neighbour.

These things, and many more, might in the broad
sense be classed among the destructive activities of the
Revolution, in removing obstacles to free individual and
national development. Looking at Europe as a whole,
and limiting ourselves for this purpose to the period
ending in 1830, — a useful date, — it might perhaps be said
that it was on the destructive side that the Revolution
was most effective. Yet even in the height of the party
struggle and the utmost stress of the fight for national
life against the invader, the Convention succeeded in
launching schemes of constructive reform which have
occupied generations since to carry fully into effect. The

2 3 6 The Revolution^ Social and Political

' principles of the Revolution ', therefore, were not empty
formulae, though of ten transcending the executive powers
of the men who enounced them, or the age that first
saw them written on the orders of the day. The Con-
vention which sat for three years, from 1792 to 1795,
did the constructive work of the first French Republic.
It not only defended the country successfully abroad and
welded the nation together at home, but in numerous
committees took up great subjects that called for
reform, and in each case left fertile suggestions or large
masses of work done and only needing completion or
application. We can only mention two here of special
magnitude and importance. They touch on our main
theme, one looking back to the Romans, the other forward
to the still greater work of raising the whole mass of the
population to a state of full citizenship, which is one of
the first tasks of the succeeding century.

The first is what is commonly known as the Code
Napoleon. It was a commission of the Convention which
first seriously undertook the task, long needed, of codify-
ing French law and bringing it up to date. It handed on
the draft to be completed under the Directory and issued
by Napoleon. It looks back to Roman law in the sense that
the old French law which was its basis was derived from
Roman, and also in the fact that when revised in the
light of the Revolution, it became another complete
code, like that of the Roman Empire, which could be,
and was, largely adopted by other countries both in
Europe and in Central and South America.

The second great undertaking of the Convention was
its scheme of national education, in which Condorcet

The Revolution, Social and Political 237

had been the moving spirit. In this, as in its distribution
of State property and the institution of a popular public
debt, it aimed directly at equalizing opportunity as well
as means, and enlisting all possible talent and interest in
the service of a united and efficient state. The universal
popular schools, though planned, were not at this time
carried out. They waited for general introduction till
almost the same moment as in England, the decade of
our first Reform Bill. But many of the higher and
central schools in Paris were actually established by the
Convention.

The mere fact, however, that the Convention stood
for the nation and did these things, and all else that it
attempted, in the name and interests of the whole people,
was in itself more important than any particular law or
institution. It was the embodiment of popular sove-
reignty, the first assembly in any great European state
elected by all citizens over twenty-five (later twenty-one)
years of a.ge, domiciled for a year and living by their own
labour. Standing as such before France and before the
world, and standing successfully at such a time, its
influence can hardly be exaggerated. It was a potent
stimulus both to nationality and democracy, two guiding
stars in the succeeding century.

Slightly as they have been touched on, we have yet in
this chapter given more details of a few years' history of
one country than will appear in any other. The impulse
to do this is irresistible. The revolt against the Church,
the recovery of the ancient world and the appearance
of a new one, the undreamt-of expanse of human powers
by science and invention, the limitless hopes of further

238 The Revolution, Social and Political

advance and general happiness, all converged in men's
minds about the mid-eighteenth century and created
a reasoned passion which in its higher form was a new
religion. We see the country in which this was most
deeply felt, suddenly awake and begin with feverish haste
to apply its enthusiasm to mending the faults in its own
state and preaching amendment to all its neighbours. The
excitement is breathless. We follow the fortunes of every
actor, and of the whole country labouring in the great
experiment, with closer interest than any other period
of history can evoke. In the thrill of the conflict, under
the fascination of the play of personal character, we are
apt to overlook for the moment the onward march of
the same causes which led to the upheaval in France and
have continued to transform society down to our own
time. Industrial development in England, abstract philo-
sophy and literature in Germany, ideas of progress and
reform in France, these were the most active general
forces in the three greatest western nations at the end
of the century, and the Revolution altered the balance
of each.

In Germany the shock aroused the national spirit
which had been sleeping in the midst of the most brilliant
intellectual development which Germany has ever seen.
The conquering armies of Napoleon kindled a flame which
Goethe had never cared to light. Prussia on land, and
England by sea, had finally subdued Napoleon and driven
France back to her old boundaries and, for a time, to
something like her old regime. In the process the founda-
tions of modern Germany were laid and Prussia estab-
lished in the hegemony of the Teutonic people. The

The Revolution , Social and Political 239

greatness of Germany in the century which follows is
due, partly no doubt to the intellectual giants of Goethe's
age, but still more to the stern discipline of the War of
Liberation and the faithful service of those who en-
lightened and built up the Prussian state at the lowest
ebb of its external fortunes.

The relations with England were, however, the most
important external aspect of the Revolution. While the
honours of Waterloo are divided, the leading share of
England in the whole war is incontestable. It was our
greatest national effort. Except for just over a year
after the Treaty of Amiens, we were continuously at war
with France for over' twenty years from the execution
of Louis in 1793 till 1814 and Waterloo. The cost
was mainly paid by English money, and we accumu-
lated debt about equal to the whole of our present
National Debt. But since 1815, when -British trade
and British perseverance secured their reward, the peace
with France has been unbroken, and now (1913) the
understanding between France and England seems the
most powerful and stable factor in international politics.
Thus, when 1915 is reached, another record century
will have been passed, fit to be commemorated with
the century of Anglo-Saxon peace.

This friendship, following so many conflicts and one
last determined struggle, must have deep causes. Our
next chapter will suggest some of them. But looking
back now over the hundred years since the two coun-
tries emerged from the fight, we shall probably feel
that the chief result attained was the establishment,
by the hard facts of life, by the persistence of national

240 The Revolution^ Social and Political

tradition and the power of wealth, of the supreme
social truths that progress must be subordinate to order,
that violent changes will bring violent nemesis, that
every country, while advancing towards the common
goal of general prosperity and happiness, must do so on
lines marked out by its own genius and history. England,
strong on this side, was weaker in her appreciation of
general ideas, in daring obedience to the dictates of
reason. France wanted the stability and continuity,
the tenacity and self-restraint in which England was
superior.

A new epoch seems to open when men arise who aim
at reconciling both ideals, and nations settle down to
social reform without revolution, to moulding the future
without breaking with the past. Progress after the Revo-
lution, the work of the nineteenth and later centuries,
unites the spirit of Burke and Condorcet in a common
purpose.

II

PROGRESS AFTER REVOLUTION

All the great sources of human suffering are in a great degree,
many of them entirely, conquerable by human care and effort.

JOHN STUART MILL.

1543

NEARLY a century has passed since the settlement of
1815. The main features of this period have left a clear
and universal impression on the popular mind of the
western world. It has been an age of progress, of big
things, of vast increase in knowledge and wealth and
human power. The size of our wonders alone is over-
powering, and that is in truth the least part of the marvel.
Ships now cross the Atlantic which could have carried
Columbus's caravel as one of their life-boats. Single
buildings scrape the sky which would have covered the
whole site of Cnossos and shot above the Tower of Babel.
Many a financier owns to-day more wealth than any
government could have commanded before the age of
progress began. ' England was then a mere nothing,'
wrote a little girl the other day, moralizing on the effects
of the industrial revolution. Judging by any table of
weights and measures, we should have to agree with her :
and some would add that, compared with the ' wonderful
century ', science and human power and ingenuity were
a mere nothing also. The popular view is by no means
to be despised, as many of the greatest thinkers have
told us from Aristotle downwards ; and in this case the
belief itself that progress is the mark of the age, is one
of the most powerful factors in producing the movement.
But it is not quite new in the world. The prevalent
tone of recent decades, the talk of the ' wondrous age '
and the ' wonderful century ', takes the mind back to
the glowing dreams of Condorcet and the pre-revolu-
tionary days. It descends indeed directly from them ;

Progress after Revolution 243

but when we begin to look more closely, we shall find
some interesting and significant differences. There was
in the earlier paeans more call for destruction, the break-
ing of chains and the freeing of slaves : the later are full
of things accomplished, the triumphs of engineering and
the wonders of science. There is more construction to
record, and evils and necessary changes are not so pro-
minent in the picture. If this is to the good, another
difference is less satisfactory. The older visions dealt
more with the coming improvement in human nature,
the infinite possibilities of goodness as well as knowledge.
The later are more material, and celebrate the conquests
of nature, the accumulation of power, and the increase
of comfort.

These are but vague impressions. We will analyse
a little further and see where the maze of modern
events follows the working of those main threads of pro-
gress which we are tracing throughout. The popular
view, though largely justified, is crude and external ; the
facts themselves increasingly complex and multitudinous.
Perhaps we may find in the continued development of
certain leading features of the past both a guide and an
encouragement in the perplexities of the present.

The striking things, which seem to symbolize the age,
are great works of construction and organization, implying
both a high degree of mechanical skill and the command
of vast masses of capital and labour ; the Railway and
Shipping Company which spans a continent and encircles
the globe with its steamers ; the giant ship which carries
a complete town of toil and pleasure across the ocean ;
the gun which can annihilate a fortress and a company of

R 2

244 Progress after Revolution

men miles away with unerring precision. All these rest
ultimately on the powers of which we sketched the earlier
stages in the eighth and ninth chapters — mechanical
science, inventive and constructive skill, and the organiza-
tion, or working together, of large businesses and bodies
of men. Each factor, the calculating science, the con-
structive skill, the combination of men, appears now, in
the last stage of our sketch, as the developed form of
some simple element which we noted for study in our
opening chapter. Each has grown like the tree from the
seed.

But we need a correction in the popular, concrete idea
of progress, which we should gain from such a symbol as an
ocean liner. The science is obvious, and the mechanical
skill, the brute force and the control of natural powers, even
the co-operation of myriads of men, is clearly seen in the
voyage itself and the successful working of the ship. But
what are the terms of this co-operation, the motives and
feelings of the voyagers, the human aspect of the whole
venture ? It was on this side, as we saw, that the men
of the Revolution were most set, and we should expect
to find, if there is truly life in the past, that when the
reaction of 1815 was over, the effort to secure more equal
and humane treatment for the whole population and
greater social union among all, would be resumed and
take its place as one, perhaps the foremost, of the de-
liberate aims of mankind.

It has been so ; but it is not surprising that this human
movement, of which we are ourselves a part, does not in
a casual glance so much impress the mind as those impos-
ing external objects which appear as symbols of the power

Progress after Revolution 245-

and progress of the age. But it is equally fundamental,
and closely allied with the science by which the conquests
of nature have been secured.

We will say here first the few words that are possible
on social reform, then pass on to the extension of science,
especially in its relation to the conditions of life, and
conclude by showing the intimate connexion of both
social reform and science with the growing unity of the
human race.

The reaction which followed the downfall of Napoleon
wore itself out in the succeeding decade. Signs of rest-
lessness soon began to show themselves in France, and
in several smaller countries of Europe and America the
rising spirit of nationality was active in the decade be-
tween 1820 and 1830. Before 1830 arrived the Belgians
had broken away from Holland, the Greeks from Turkey,
and England, at Canning's instigation, had recognized
the South American republics revolted from Spain, thus
' calling into existence a New World to redress the
balance of the Old '. But 1830 is the year from which
our present period of constitutional and progressive
reform may be best dated.

In France in that year the Revolution of July set up
a middle-class limited monarchy on something like the
English model, and in England the Duke of Wellington
ceased to be Prime Minister, to be succeeded by Lord
Grey with a pledge that parliamentary reform should at
last be passed. 1830, too, is memorable as the year in
which the first railway for passenger traffic was opened
between Liverpool and Manchester. The immediate and
abundant fruits of the Reform Bill, and the quickening

24<* Progress after Revolution

current of democratic feeling in France, showed that the
humanitarian ideas which gave rise to the first Republic
were now to resume a tempered sway. Before the middle
of the century both France and England had emancipated
their slaves abroad and begun to organize with public
money a state education for all their citizens at home ;
England had carried Factory Acts which extended much
further the protection of the workers begun in 1802, and
by repealing the corn-laws had thrown open to her
growing population the granaries of the world.

The Reform Bill in England and the Revolution of
1830 in France thus nearly coincide as a useful chrono-
logical point whence may be dated a parallel series of
popular reforms in both countries. It has also a strong
personal interest for Englishmen as the meeting-point of
the life-work of our two most powerful and represen-
tative figures on the roll of humanitarian feeling and
reform. Bentham died in 1832 and Dickens published
his first book of stories in 1833. The former, trained
on pre-revolutionary literature, combined French culture
with English conservatism and common sense, and
brought eighteenth-century ideas into the Victorian
era. The latter was to become the great exponent
of English humanity in the nineteenth century, the
apostle in imaginative literature of universal kindliness
and social and educational reform. Both are of capital
importance to our theme.

Bentham is by common consent the moving spirit in the
group of philosophical reformers in England which became
active when the reaction of the war began to pass away.
But his work and ideas have far more than this temporary

Progress after Revolution 247

fitness : they express in a luminous and precise way prac-
tical principles which were to mould public action during
the succeeding period. A singularly clear and ordered
mind enabled him to arrange a confused mass of legal and
political practice in the light of simple principles which
he adopted from others. The ' sensational ' school of
eighteenth-century thinkers, especially Helvetius, gave
him the root-idea that pleasure must be the object of
all individual action. He generalized this and deduced
the simple and practically beneficial conclusion that the
pleasure of all, or ' the greatest happiness of the greatest
number ' should be the aim of all public action and the
test of private morality. The great phrase came probably
from Priestley, but Bentham gave it application and
currency. He had a happy knack of coining useful words,
such as ' international ' and ' utilitarian ', the latter of
which soon became the designation of a school of thinkers.
His most important book, the Principles of Morals and,
Legislation, was published in the revolutionary year 1789,
and on the strength of it he was made a French citizen
by the National Assembly in 1792. His immediate fame
and influence were greater abroad than at home. But
in his later years he gathered round him in London that
group of philosophical radicals, James Mill, Brougham,
Romilly, Francis Place, whose influence was perhaps the
most powerful factor in mid-nineteenth century England.
Bentham's own chief contribution to progress was the
reform of the law on lines of greater simplicity, and what
he called ' utility ', which we should now better under-
stand as ' humanity '. He had in himself a humanity which
commended his principles and endeared his person to all

248 Progress after Revolution

who knew him. With the truest characteristic of humane
feeling it went beyond mankind and embraced the lower
animals. He was a pioneer in the crusade for including
cruelty to animals among offences cognizable by law. It
was a new idea in his time and only gained admission to
the Statute Book in his old age. But it is largely due
to him that, though still imperfect after many amending
Acts, our own law in this matter is in advance of many
other countries, and that other countries have followed
where he led the way. He, too, and his disciples, had the
main share in mitigating the ferocity of our criminal
law which up to 1832 was still hanging persons, even
youths of fifteen, for thefts of over five shillings in
value.

In the year before his death he wrote in an autograph
for a friend, * The way to be comfortable is to make
others comfortable : the way to make others comfortable
is to appear to love them : the way to appear to love
them is to love them in reality. Probatur ab experientia
per Jeremy Bentham, Queen's Square Place, Westminster.
Born Feb. 15 : anno 1748. Written 24 Oct. 1831.'

Through James Mill the succession of reforming opinion
is complete from Bentham to John Stuart Mill and many
men who are still alive and active among us. The root
is there ; the tree has become so many-branched and so
widespreading that no one can compass the whole, and
we are inclined to forget the slim but sturdy sapling that
was planted in days when men still discussed and believed
in general principles. But though we can trace back the
contemporary social movement to its historical antece-
dents, two changes in spirit and method have taken place

Progress after Revolution 249

which would almost remove it from the ken if not the
approval of the men of 1832. It has become in the first
place incomparably more detailed and scientific. This
they would probably have recognized as an advance.
And in the second place it constantly invokes the authority
of the state in a way which they certainly did not foresee
and would probably not have welcomed. Each of these
changes assists the main process which We are tracing in
these chapters, but in diverse ways. That social reform —
the improvement of health, of education, and of the
conditions of labour — should become a more and more
detailed and specialized business is the condition of its
closer connexion with science ; and science justifies
itself most completely when it is able to enlighten and
ameliorate the lives of all. No natural laws can be more
imperative or, bind us more closely and permanently
together, than those which science reveals to us as the
basis of our own life. But that the application of these
laws should be enforced by state-control is clearly a matter
of expediency from time to time.

In our own day the intervention of the State has no
doubt had the effect of consolidating both the nation at
home and nations among themselves. Next to conferences
on purely scientific topics, no recent movement tends so
directly to bring the nations together as international
meetings for the discussion of similar social problems
between different countries. And at home the strong
hand of the State, compelling us all to common action
in the common interest, has been a wholesome corrective
to the anarchy of feudalism and the individualism of the
Renascence and the Revolution. But whereas the unity

Progress after Revolution

of thought and action which science imposes is unavoid-
able, and soon becomes a part of our common nature as
human beings, none of the regulations of the State have
this inevitable character. A whole society will submit
to them and even demand their imposition : but men
alter them constantly and in some cases grow out of them
altogether. It requires no law now to compel the vast
majority of any civilized community to give their children
the elements of education. And so while some of us are
thinking that all this state-regulation must end in a society
where the State is universal owner and lord, it is open
to those of another temper to hold that the State is but
a schoolmaster to bring us to Love — the ' enthusiastic
love of the general good '.*

It would only confuse our argument to give details
of the progress of social reform in the past century.
With a certain ebb and flow, the stream has gone on
broadening and deepening, especially in the last few years.
Is it not written in libraries of blue-books and specialist
treatises ? But one of the three main branches, that of
national health, illustrates in a curiously complete way
that co-operation of different nations and various depart-
ments of human activity which it is our special business
to point out. Among the most certain and important
facts in the social history of the time, facts which find
no place in the ordinary text-book and teaching of
history, is the enormous advance in public health and the
average expectation of life, in our own and other civilized
communities of the West. Some diseases, such as typhus,
have almost disappeared and nearly all show a notable
1 J. S. Mill.

Progress after Revolution 271

decline. The one striking exception is cancer. Now the
whole of the statistics of health, on which this conclusion
is based, which justify experiment and direct public
action in the matter, date from the decade which we
noticed as the beginning of serious and continued effort
at reform. The Registrar-General's records of the death-
rate and its causes date in England from 1836, just four
years after the death of Bentham and the passing of the
first Reform Bill. The records kept have constantly
become more extensive and scientific ever since, until
quite recently, on the initiative of France, an international
Nomenclature of Diseases has been drawn up, which has
already been accepted by about a score of different
nations or communities. Here is a case of the direct
application of scientific knowledge to the amelioration of
life with immediate and palpable advantage ; and neither
one science, nor one nation, marches alone. Statistics
involve high mathematical capacity, and sanitation, with
all the mechanics, physics, and chemistry it contains, has
contributed probably as largely as pure medicine to the
improvement in public health which has been attained.
And all civilized peoples are engaged in alliance on the
same task ; West aiding East in those heroic and successful
attacks on tropical diseases, in which many great lives
have been already spent.

Other branches of social reform would furnish similar
instances, education, the hours and remuneration of
labour, and the art of social legislation itself. Those
will be most effective which rest most clearly on the best
established science, and in the case of health we are
brought in touch with that branch of science, biology,

2 y 2 Progress after Revolution

in which the characteristic development of the nineteenth
century took place.

We noticed that in the seventeenth century, when the
first great construction of modern science was made,
the attention of all the leading minds was concentrated
on attaining a consistent account of the mechanics of
the known universe, the inclusion of the physical pro-
perties of matter in enlarged and corrected mathematical
formulae. The Royal Society was founded to promote
* Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning ', and
this remained for long the prevalent drift of scientific
studies. In the eighteenth century chemical discoveries
and classification were the prominent feature. Cavendish
and Priestley, while continuing the advance of physics
on mathematical lines, laid also the foundations of a new
and independent science by the analysis of air and water,
and Lavoisier brought the newly discovered chemical
facts together and gave them scientific classification and
co-ordination. The nineteenth century constituted bio-
logy. As with most crucial steps in the progress of
knowledge, the name and the root-idea appeared inde-
pendently at the same moment in different countries.
A French thinker, Lamarck, and a German, Treviranus,
published, within a few months of the beginning of the
century, works containing the same new term ' biology '
which was to describe the new science, and the same
fundamental notion of descent with modification. The
question of priority is trivial. The fact of simultaneous
and independent discovery is the best proof of the great-
ness and opportunity of the event. It was, as we shall
see, connected intimately with the general doctrine of

Progress after Revolution

the continued progress of all human things by small and
regular changes. But biology was to demonstrate this
vague conception of the philosophers by concrete examples
of forms which could be seen and recovered from the
rocks, which could be connected in an unbroken series,
submitted to the eye, and traced and measured by the
hand. The idea was to become for the sciences of life
what Newton's law had been for the sciences of matter.
But, though its first enunciation in the first decade of
the nineteenth century is a striking fact, we have to wait
till the middle of the century for cumulative evidence,
a working hypothesis, and popular acceptance. The half
century passed : here and there a thinker would again
affirm the principles of Lamarck and Treviranus ; at last,
in 1858, another double and independent discovery took
place, and Darwin and Wallace announced Natural Selec-
tion as the vera causa of the changes in species which
the earlier biologists had proclaimed in vain.

However Darwin's theory is finally modified, it remains
the dominating influence in all the sciences of life. It
transferred the centre of interest from the life of the
individual to the growth of the species, and made a
similar change in biology to that which the seventeenth
century made in ancient mechanics by introducing laws
of motion. Questions of origin and growth, which had
begun increasingly to interest historians from the time
of Vico onwards, now invaded the whole realm of animate
nature ; and for a time there was a danger that human
progress itself might be explained by a law of struggle
such as Darwin postulated for the survival of the fittest.
* Sociology,' the term introduced by Comte in 1830 to

Progress after Revolution

indicate the laws of human, as distinct from animal,
evolution, suggests the truer line of approach for human
problems. The same law of struggle must, at times and
places, act between human individuals and even com-
munities, as it has been shown to act in modifying species.
But with mankind the higher law prevails, of development
by co-operation.1

Darwin's law, moreover, becomes itself another and
potent link in the unification of mankind, for like all
science it brings together the co-operating and consent-
ing minds, and also gives us an objective unity among
things outside us which were before regarded as separate
beings. In the light of a general law of evolving life, all
animal and vegetable species appear as branches and twigs
and flowers of one great tree springing from a common
root. Earlier thinkers, from the Greeks onwards, had
partial and fleeting glimpses of this conception. The
capital achievement of the last century in science was to
formulate it in a fully articulated shape, adequate to the
facts, and to suggest causes which might be imagined
collectively to account for the process of development.
In this case, as often in studies of such infinite com-
plexity as the phenomena of life, the plan was the thing.
Particular questions of cause and effect will in countless
instances remain perhaps for ever unsettled. But a good
plan has brought order into chaos, and ranked the
battalions of workers in marching array.

Since the Origin of Species, the two most prominent
moments in the history of science have been, first, the
analysis of sidereal light by the spectrum with all its
1 Pliny's ' Deus est mortal! iuvare mortalem '.

Progress after Revolution

consequences, and, second, the revolution in our ideas
of matter by the new discoveries in electricity of quite
recent years. Each case illustrates, as did the law of
biological evolution, the essential quality of science in
bringing together things previously thought unconnected,
in shaking our mental composure with the ultimate result
of inducing a more profound and intimate unity. To
this power we owe the two correlated contemporary
facts, a vast and unprecedented increase in the volume
of knowledge, and a growing harmony and simplicity in
its arrangement. Such principles of settled order in the
best-instructed minds must gradually produce harmonious
developments in the world-society of which they are
a growing part. So one would conclude a priori : it is
hoped that this chapter may conclude with some evidence
of fact.

The Origin of Species was published in 1858. The
science of astrophysics was at that time unknown, and
as some thought unknowable. Within the next decade
the chemical constitution of the sun and stars had been
revealed by the spectrum, and especially by the use of
it by Kirchhoff, who interpreted the black lines which
Frauenhofer and earlier investigators had studied. They
were now found to be the means of identifying particular
chemical elements in the luminous body. All matter in
the universe thus came under a set of laws hitherto
known only to be true of terrestrial matter. It was
another extension of the intelligible order which man's
collective mind had achieved, comparable to that of
Newtonian gravitation, though without the comprehen-
sive sweep which the latter owes to its greater simplicity.

2f<5 Progress after Revolution

It is a link between chemistry and astronomy, as Newton's
was between astronomy and mechanics.

Of the last great moment in science, which now largely
fills the public mind, it must be sufficient to say that,
while it seems at first sight to conflict with the accepted
mechanics of over two centuries, the latest writers assure
us that reconciliation is possible. Again we see a new
form of unification arise in the midst of a new world of
unexpected forces and infinitesimal motions. Electricity,
first roughly apprehended in two of its manifestations
by Franklin, the new motive power of the nineteenth
century, now appears at last as the basis of all matter,
or rather matter seen from another point of view. The
subject is too vast and still too inchoate to have the
social bearing which we are seeking. But it is clearly
on one side a further instance of the identification of
the previously distinct.

Meanwhile the great structures of science as we knew
them at the end of the nineteenth century remain for
practical purposes intact, the calculus and Newtonian
mechanics on the one hand, and evolutionary biology on
the other.

In face of the most recent marvels, the electron in
physics, the aeroplane in engineering, the idea of evolu-
tion, as applied to life at large, is still seen to be the
weightiest fact which the last century of science has
thrown into the scales of philosophy and progress. It
alone can be compared for social influence with the dis-
coveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Just as we then saw the new theory of Copernicus
taken up by thinkers like Giordano Bruno and woven

Progress after Revolution 25-7

into a world-embracing scheme which aimed at super-
seding the older views of life, so now the new tendency
and the new discoveries in biological evolution combined
yet more readily with current notions in philosophy to
produce great schemes of thought and religion such as
those of Comte and Spencer.

They stand here in illustration of the two leading ideas
which marked the age and impress contemporary thought
— the idea of unity and the idea of growth. Of these the
former has been the constant aim of all ideal effort, since
man began to speculate on the world and his own place
in it. The latter was enforced in a novel way by the
new views in biology which showed all creation labouring
together in one perpetual birth, each type producing
others slightly differing from itself, but all connected by
ties of true relationship, and leading to a supreme type
which could dominate the others and incorporate their
best qualities in itself. In the growth of each human
embryo man could even see reproduced before him all
the earlier stages of his animal history. This miniature
being confirmed the vaguer philosophic notions which
had long prevailed, of a continued progress from the
weak and savage to the strong and wise.

Thus science and philosophy both said, Growth and
Unity in thought ; and history and humanity answered,
Growth and Unity in action.

We turn to see how far the course of international
politics bears out the idea of a strengthening common
force in mankind. Between ourselves and France, and
throughout the Anglo-Saxon world, there has been already
a century of unbroken peace ; and it would be easy to

1543 S

2 5" 8 Progress after Revolution

extend the cheerful prospect. We have had no war
with any German-speaking power for an even longer
period. And in Europe as a whole, if we except the
wars of Bismarck and Louis Napoleon, the peace of the
western portion, the more truly European, has been but
little disturbed in the last hundred years. Yet we are
all conscious that this peaceful state does not appear
a stable one. We are uneasy in our dreams. The world
is all more heavily armed than ever, and it seems an
effort of the highest statesmanship to restrain ourselves
and others from flying at a neighbour's throat. The
situation therefore calls for more careful review than
the mere summary of the years in which war has not
taken place. We need to trace the causes which have
provoked disturbance, as well as the forces which, in
spite of recurring danger, are steadily at work, welding
a solid whole which may resist the momentary impulse
to disunion.

A seeming paradox is sometimes the most enlightening
of truths. The very causes which have in this period
led to war and the threat of war are some of those on
which we may ultimately most rely for a state of peace.
Mere restlessness, the habit of fighting, the greed of the
individual conqueror, most of the causes, in fact, which
made earlier ages habitually warlike, have been in
modern times rapidly diminishing all over the globe.
Whatever faults we may justly find with our civilized
contemporaries, these are not among them. Nearly all
recent wars have been due mainly to two causes, nation-
ality and commercial rivalry, and these are factors con-
ducive in the end to peace. They have been often

Progress after Revolution 25-9

complicated and masked by other issues, as the Italian
cause was mixed up with the personal weakness and ambi-
tion of Napoleon III. But the consolidation of national
existence was then at the root in Italy, as it is now
(1913) in the Balkans. The new Italy, the new Germany
which arose in 1870, if made by war, are not thereby
made permanently warlike. Holland and Switzerland,
which won their national existence by arms, are now the
most peaceful members of the western world. The
strengthened Greece and Servia and Bulgaria, the new
nationality which is being born in Albania, will become
at last pledges of peace rather than the spoil of war.

It was as such pledges that Kant postulated strong
national units for the basis of his world-society, and, with
certain obvious dangers and misfortunes, the true view
would seem to be that the modern world is sensibly nearer
to that state than when Kant wrote before the Revolution.

Commercial rivalry as a cause of war goes back, of
course, to a time far anterior to our present chapter. It
has been pressed so hard as a motive in history that one
school of writers would make it the leading interest, and
show us the eighteenth century as primarily the period
of the contest between France and England for the
markets of India and America. No one, remembering
the conflict of Spain and England in the sixteenth, or of
Holland and England in the seventeenth centuries, will
underrate its importance. But even then it was by no
means the leading motive. It played a prominent part,
too, in the eighteenth century, though inferior to the
other causes which were guiding events before the Revolu-
tion. In the nineteenth it has again been present, but the

s 2

2.6 o Progress after Revolution

curative effects of commerce have been at work even
more vigorously. Rivalry for markets has entered largely
into nineteenth - century wars, especially those — the
majority — which have been waged by stronger on weaker
and less civilized people. But now more and more
men are ready to assert that almost any war, at least
between fairly equal powers, would cost more, dislocate
more, prevent more commerce, than it could possibly
recoup by conquest or indemnity. This conviction would
not prevent war, but it accounts for the strictly defensive
tone which is almost universal. We all arm to the teeth,
but purely to avoid the terrible calamity of any one
attacking us.

The links of commerce were always stronger than its
jealousies. It thrives on intercourse and goodwill. In
the last century of our sketch the ties on which it has
been always based have been immensely strengthened by
inventive and scientific skill. The globe is knit up by
steamships and railroads, and still more closely by elec-
tricity, on wires without. People are fed, and all our
comforts guaranteed, by international links, forged by the
engineers. The markets of Calcutta and New York are
almost momentarily in touch with London, and the whole
world-wide fabric of finance responds throughout to the
first breath of alarm. Such sensitiveness and the certainty
of heavy, perhaps irreparable, loss, if war once begins,
are clearly safeguards of peace. They have demonstrably
so acted in recent crises. Yet for the surest guarantees,
the course of this sketch will have prepared us to look in
another, though a connected, quarter. A common activity
is a better defence than a common alarm ; and those

Progress after Revolution 261

activities are most easily internationalized which contain
most science.

Music has sometimes been described as the universal
language, but it cannot, and should not, ever entirely
throw off its local spirit. It must, however universalized,
always express the soul of one man, or at most one society,
at a particular epoch. Science is man's true universal
language, and attains its end the better, the more its
ideas and terms are unified throughout the world.
This process we have seen to be constantly going on,
and in the last few years the international character of
science, and work based upon it, has taken a concrete
form. So many international associations, meeting regu-
larly for scientific purposes, theoretical and practical,
have come into existence, that centres have been formed
to bring such bodies into touch. There can be no
finality about such an organization ; it will change and
move, serving different aspects of international unity.
But at least two such centres have already begun
in places both well situated for the balance of Western
civilization at the beginning of the twentieth century.
At the Hague, in the home of Grotius, father of inter-
national law, and near the seat of international arbi-
tration, offices have been opened for an association of
international societies, and Brussels has followed suit.
It is easy to imagine many useful ways in which the
field might be divided between the two, if both survive.
Both have arisen at a spot equidistant from the three
great Powers which have contributed most to the
civilization of the West, since Italy gave the signal for
a Renascence four hundred years ago.

2.62 Progress after Revolution

The New World has taught us much, encouraged us
still more. It has made the Atlantic for the modern
world what the Mediterranean was to the ancients. But
it has not yet become the general centre of civilized life.
That remains, so far as it can be said to exist at all in
a world so closely knit, on the eastern side of the Atlantic,
and in the midst of the French, Teutonic, and English-
speaking peoples. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries the French and the English filled
a larger space on the stage, and their names would each
exceed those of the Germans on the roll of the great.
But from the latter half of the eighteenth century, the
part of Germany grows ; and if the nineteenth is the
age of steady progress, of profound research and wide
speculation, hers will be the leading name.

Here, in tracing our final thread of international unity,
one feature in German work and temper attracts especial
notice. They were, at the opening of this last epoch, the
nation of the West with the largest gift of abstract thinking
and the smallest proportion of national self-consciousness.
They gave the world the most commanding universal
figure of the age, Goethe, who living, with supreme calm
and a certain indifference, through the storm of the
Revolution and the distress of his own country, has won
an increasing sway over the minds of a later and less
impassioned day. Of his contemporaries and friends, one,
Alexander von Humboldt, became, through international
friendship combined with scientific eminence, the actual
founder of that co-operation in useful research which
now encircles the globe. It was he who, in making
experiments on terrestrial magnetism in our first decade

Progress after Revolution 26$

of reform, persuaded first the Russian and then the
English governments to give him a series of points for
simultaneous observation throughout their dominions.

Thus science became in fact as well as in idea inter-
national, largely through the genius and action of Ger-
many. She remains, as she was, the mother of Goethe
and Humboldt and Helmholtz as well as of Stein and
Bismarck. Thirty years after Humboldt's work, the
Franco-Prussian war inflicted the sorest and deepest
wound of the century in Western unity. Time and the
power of common work and common thought can heal
even this. It grows together as science and social action
grow. Already the unity of the great triple bulwark of
Western progress is more secure than those imagine who
would make Sedan, Fashoda, and Agadir our landmarks
for the period.

Even as this is being written the growing unity shows
itself effectively in overcoming the most dangerous crisis
of recent times, the Balkan difficulty of 1913. It is by
such wise and patient action that the Western ' Concert '
comes into being, and will increasingly assert itself —
strong, far-seeing, and united for the common weal.

12

LOOKING FORWARD

Is it not strange that a little child should be heir to the whole
world ?

THOMAS TRAHERNE.

WE used to be told that the word ' Europe ' was given
to our continent by Greeks who looked across at it from
Asia Minor and thought the coast offered a ' Wide Pro-
spect ' compared with their own ' muddy fens '. The
derivation seems now to have gone the way of attractive
myths. But the fact remains that the land they looked
at, the smallest of the great land-masses always called
' continents ', a mere peninsula of Asia, was to give man-
kind the wide prospect over his destiny and powers which
we have seen broadening at each great step in history.
The little world of the Aegean, which the Greeks, passing
back from Ionia, made the cradle of civilization, was
enlarged by Roman hands into the world of the Medi-
terranean, still a mere speck on the surface of the globe.
But it contained the germs of wider expansion, borne
into it both from Judaea and from Greece. The modern
world is the sequel. The same circle of ideas, of know-
ledge, of activity, of human unity, has for three hundred
years embraced the Atlantic, and in our own time is
continued round the world in the oldest centres of culture
in the East and the newest settlements of Europeans in
the southern seas.

Heaven defend that we should think it final or all-
sufficient, because it is all-embracing ! All that we learn
of the Eastern mind, and the newest philosophies of our
own, combine to show us the limitations of the Western,
scientific, outlook and to suggest the sides on which it
can be deepened and extended. But the Western mind
dominates the world. It has built up the fabric of science

Looking Forward 167

and invention which is justified by success. It has formed
the loose but very real alliance of the great material and
intellectual Powers which can impose their will, when
united, on the rest of mankind. It is, in fact, only by
modifying this general will, by making it at once firmer
and kinder, clearer and more enlightened in its main
purpose, more considerate of the weaker things that cross
its path, that any one people or individual can affect the
destinies of the whole. Hence it must be the first
intellectual duty of every Western to seek to understand
the genesis and nature of this collective mind by which
he is surrounded and controlled as his body is by the air.
He breathes it willy-nilly ; if he is to fly in it or use it
consciously for his own purposes, he must first learn its
laws.

With the possibilities of future action it is not within
our scope to deal. There is to be no chapter on Utopias.
But there is one window on the future through which we
must glance, though the view it gives us will vary with
every gazer, and suggests quite other trains of thought
than those which we have followed hitherto.

Our passage from age to age has revealed a continually
widening expanse, not only of the earth-space that man
unitedly controls, but of the scope of his collective thought,
till, in our own day, he knows by personal visit nearly the
whole globe and encircles it with his activities, while his
thought has gone further than Newton or Galileo would
have ventured, and analyses the stars, as well as describes
the dance of the infinitesimal. Note, then, one of the
most striking of those apparent contradictions which
often meet us and make us almost ready, with Hegel,

26% Looking Forward

to believe in the identity of opposites. It is precisely
this man, with his most developed powers, with his scope
of vision transcending the boldest fiction, with his know-
ledge and force embracing the world, who is for the first
time in history profoundly interested and passionately
attached to the smallest and weakest embodiment of the
human spirit, the child in the earlier moments of his life.
The facts are eloquent. Our own is without question
the age in which man's collective force and knowledge
have reached their highest point. It is also that in which
the care and love of children have taken their place as
the first general solicitude of all civilized societies. No
age before our own could have painted the picture
of ' the innumerable children all round the world,
trooping, morning by morning, to school, along the
lanes of quiet villages, the streets of noisy cities, on sea-
shore and lake-side, under the burning sun, and through
the mists, in boats on canals, on horseback on the plains,
in sledges on the snow, by hill and valley, through bush
and stream, by lonely mountain path, singly, in pairs,
in groups, in files, dressed in a thousand fashions, speaking
a thousand tongues '.l No age before our own attempted
the provision of public money which we have just made,
which Germany and others have done before us, to assist
the mother of a new-born child in giving it the best
nurture and best reception in the world. No age before
our own could have said, or understood the saying,
' Let us live for our children '. We have passed in some
two thousand years from a time when the child was
regarded as the creature, the chattel of his parents, and
1 De Amicis.

Looking Forward 269

might be abandoned, sold, or exposed to death, to a state
of mind in which the child, dear in himself and full of
possibilities, becomes of priceless value to the whole
community, the flower and promise of the world. Just
as he now appears the sum of all the past, the possession
and hope of all as well as of his own kin, so we are prizing
him more and more for himself, and looking in his own
nature for the seeds of power and goodness. A higher
individualism accompanies a fuller social conception of
origin and use.

Let no one shrink from the conclusion for fear of
illicit optimism. To recognize a new standard and
a new achievement is not to ignore the multitude
of glaring cases which fail to attain it. And there can
be no more doubt of the new attitude towards child life
than there is of the new linking up of the world by steam-
ships and electricity. There are stagnant pools of bar-
barism still untouched by the main current of civilization,
and cruelty and callousness to children still linger, with
ther defects from the normal standard of conduct
and feeling. The significant point is that a new
standard in the matter of children has arisen which
sums up with singular harmony the leading traits in our
sketch of progress and turns them towards the future in
a way with which no other feature of our age can compare.

The child, then, in his measure sums up the millenniums
of the growing power and unity of mankind in the past.
This is no doctrine of transcendental mysticism, but
a simple fact, plain to a moment's thought. The great
fabric of science and social organization into which each
child is born stands firm around us, independent as

270 Looking Forward

a whole of the action or volition of any individual, or
even of any individual generation. Yet every individual
is formed by it and carries it on ; at the worst he may
injure or retard its growth ; at the best he will add
a mite to the infinite sum from which his own powers
arise.

Substantially, though not uniformly or exactly, this
has been always the case. In our own day, science, the
closer organization induced by industry, the conscious-
ness of a common humanity, have knit together the
social whole. The child's inheritance has become con-
solidated, and the spirit of its administration has changed
with the change in the property.

All great consolidations of mankind have rested
necessarily on some elements of justice and well-being.
Principles of humanity, and not of tyranny and exploita-
tion, bound together the Hellenic world, the Roman
Empire at its widest, the Catholic Church, the com-
munities of Buddha and Confucius in the East. And
now, of all consolidators, science is showing its supreme
fitness and its kinship with the sense of a common
humanity. It would be a fascinating and untrodden
path, to follow in the ancient world the extension of
scientific knowledge and note its coincidence with the
growth of a more humane spirit in religion, in poetry,
and in law. We believe the agreement would be close
and that it is more than a mere coincidence. But here
the evidence would be slighter and less conclusive : in
the modern world the case is clear. Side by side with the
growth of science, which is also the basis of the material
prosperity and unification of the world, has come a steady

Looking Forward 271

deepening of human sympathy, and the extension of
it to all weak and suffering things. The seventeenth
century, which saw modern science adolescent, ended
judicial torture and religious barbarities for England.
The eighteenth, which carried science further, saw France
abandon torture, and England and France begin to free
their slaves and protect their women and children by
law. The nineteenth, which completed the triumph of
science in. the intellectual sphere, humanized the law and
began the systematic raising of the poor and, above all,
the systematic training of the young. Science, founding
a firmer basis for the co-operation of mankind, goes
widening down the centuries, and sympathy and pity
bind the courses together. At the end of this process,
where both human strength and human sympathy are
at their height, comes the child, fit object for both the
tenderest affection and the profoundest knowledge, at
once the weakest and the richest, the most tearful and
the happiest, the most helpless and the most hopeful of
all created things.

The child stands, too, at the end of another avenue
of thought. We remarked, in treating of the rise of
modern science, that the ancients did not advance on
the whole beyond the simple notions of balance and
proportion, either in mathematics or in social science.
The laws of motion, and still more of organic growth,
were beyond their ken. Galileo inaugurated a new era
with the first true law of motion which man discovered.
The history of modern science, following this, is the his-
tory of the reduction of all kinds of motion and change to
law. First, in the inanimate world curves and equations

272 Looking Forward

were devised, capable of summing up and expressing all
orderly motion : then, within the last century, the
laws of organic growth were investigated and certain
approximations reached. The study of growth carried
the mind further and further back. What has been always
an object of man's untutored curiosity, now becomes
the dominant interest of the latest stage of science. It
craves to know the earliest history of everything, above
all of human institutions and ideas. Here again the child
meets us, the living embodiment of human origins. His
growth unfolds the broad outlines of the past : his
capacities contain the future. He is the epitome of all
the laws of evolution, in the form most nearly touching
our intellectual curiosity, our affection and our hope.

And with the study of the past in all its forms, our
interest in the future has been immeasurably enhanced.
We know that the stream which bears us on from the
infinite behind us will not slack its course, and we begin
to recognize a regular movement and a certain goal. The
stream is unbroken, and the past lives on. But while we
look back with reverence, the heart goes out to those
who are to travel furthest and see the fuller light.

APPENDIX ON BOOKS

1643

IT may be useful to give the names of a few books which
illustrate the argument of the foregoing chapters. The choice
has been guided by three chief considerations. It is, in the
first place, mainly a personal list, books found of use and plea-
sure, and fitting in with the theme of the preceding chapters.
They are, secondly, for the most part easily accessible books,
each section containing some of the primers which provide for
the present age in rich abundance all what Moliere considered
the ideal of a feminine education — ' les clartes de tout '. The
third test has been that, as far as possible, the books selected
should aim at giving a synthetic point of view, looking at all
sides of their subject and seeing it in relation to man's evolu-
tion as a whole. In seeking books of this sort we must turn
to France and Germany, especially the former. To read
easily the languages of the other two members of the real
triple alliance of culture is increasingly useful for us, though
unfortunately not increasingly common. In respect of synthetic
books on history, both nations long anticipated us ; and the
French have acquired a special talent, unmatched in the world,
for clear and attractive exposition of complicated matters.

It will be noticed that works of poetry and fiction are not
included. The great poets, however, have a large share in
earlier pages, and it is almost unnecessary to point out the
value of such books as Scott's Talisman and Ivanhoe for
chapter 6 and Reade's Cloister and the Hearth for chapter 7.

CHAPTER 2. THE CHILDHOOD OF THE RACE

Tylor's Manual of Anthropology (Macmillan) and Primitive
Culture, still the leading books in English.

R. R. Marett's Anthropology (Home University Library)^
a brilliant, short sketch, sane and free from fallacious bias
on the great topics such as race, religion, &c.

Appendix on Books 27 f

Darwin's Descent of Man, and

Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, &c. (Eversley Series), classics
in the history of the subject, the latter interesting on the
controversial stages.

Durkheim's La Methode sociologique (Felix Alcan), the best
short statement of what facts and ' laws ' in sociology really
mean. The volumes of the Annee Sociologique contain
masses of material on special questions, e.g. ' Les Formes
elementaires de la vie religieuse ' in the vol. for 1912.

Rauber's Urgeschichte is a good, general survey of the primi-
tive history of man, with especial reference to geographical
distribution.

On the early history of religion :

Robertson Smith's Religion of the Semites, and

F. B. Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion.

CHAPTER 3. THE EARLY EMPIRES

The Modern Reader's Bible (Moulton — published Macmillan).

Sir Gaston Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, the best
general account of the early civilization of Egypt and
Chaldaea, a beautiful and interesting book (translation
published by S.J.C.K.).

J. H. Breasted, 'History of the Ancient Egyptians (Smith,
Elder, & Co.), short, reliable, and complete.

A. H. Sayce, Ancient Empires of the East (Macmillan), short
and general ; and, on their religious aspects, Hibbert Lec-
tures, 1893, followed by The Religions of Ancient Egypt and
Babylonia.

Flinders Petrie, Religion of Egypt, and many other works.

On the Minoan Age in Crete :

R. M. Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete (Murray).

Baikie, The Sea Kings of Crete, an excellent, short, popular
book (Black).

T ^

276 Appendix on Books

CHAPTER 4. GREECE

Ed. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, the best general history
of antiquity, including both the early empires and the
beginnings of Rome, but mainly on Greece.
Grote.- An abridgement has recently been made by Messrs.
Mitchell and Caspari, omitting the earlier part, which is
mostly superseded, and concentrating on the Athenian
Democracy (Routledge).

Bury, History of Greece, and History of Greece for Beginners
(Macmillan), the best modern political history in English.
Gilbert Murray,' The Rise of the Greek Epic and Four Stages
of Greek Religion (Clarendon Press), full of charm, sugges-
tion, and learning.

Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth (Clarendon Press), a vivid
modern sociological study, largely a commentary on Pericles'
FuneraJ Oration in Thucydides.

Mahaffy,' Alexander's Empire (Story of the Nations Series).
Of the primers we are awaiting Professor Murray's volume
on Greece in the Home University Library and have at present
Fyffe's Primer on Greece and Jebb's on Homer in Macmillan's
series.

On Greek science we are fortunate in having the exhaustive
labours in English of

Sir T. L. Heath, The Works of Archimedes, with the recently
discovered Method of Archimedes (Cambridge Press), Apol-
lonius of Perga (now acquired by the Clarendon Press), and
Aristarchus of Samos (Clarendon Press), practically a history
of Greek astronomy.

Allman, A Greek Geometry from T hales to Euclid (Dublin Press).

Of the Greek philosophers generally the best account now

available in English is probably the translation of Gomperz'

Greek Thinkers in 4 vols. (Murray, first vol. most useful on

the early thinkers down to the Sophists).

Appendix on Books 277

Of the Greek classics in translation the following have some
special connexion with the matter of the chapter :

Herodotus, Story of the Persian War (Tancock — published
Murray).

Plato, The Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito (translation pub-
lished by Dent, with a unique and very curious portrait
of Socrates from an almost contemporary gem). The
Republic (Davies and Vaughan),

Aristotle, Ethics and Politics, and first book of the Metaphysics
(translation Ross and J. A. Smith. Oxford Press).

Xenophon, Education of Cyrus (translation by Dakyns, Every-
man's Library).

For Greek sculpture, only slightly touched on in the chapter :

P. Gardner, Handbook of Greek Sculpture (Macmillan).

CHAPTER 5. ROME

Mommsen's History of Rome (now in Everyman's Library),

with the volume on the Provinces.
Maine's Ancient Law, far the best sketch of the main stages

in the evolution of Roman Law.

Warde Fowler's Julius Caesar (Heroes of the Nations).
Fustel de Coulanges, La Cite antique, a brilliant study of

the City-State with special (and undue) stress on its

religious basis.

Mackail's Latin Literature (Murray).
Plutarch, Select Lives and Select Essays (Clarendon Press).
On the Empire :
Gibbon's Decline and Fall (Bury's edition). A selection of

the most important chapters is given in Frederic Harrison's

Choice of Books.

Dill; Roman Society in the Early Empire.
Gvr&Hdn,- Early Church History (especially for Diocletian).
Bury, Later Roman Empire and Students Roman Empire.

278 Appendix on Books

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Long's translation).

Stuart Jones, Roman Empire (Story of the Nations Series),

Of the primers :

Creighton's Rome (Macmillan).

Warde Fowler's Rome (Home University Library).

CHAPTER 6. THE MIDDLE AGES

Dr. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders ; Charles the Great ;

Dynasty of Theodosius and Theodoric (Clarendon Press).
Bryce, Holy Roman Empire.
Milman, Latin Christianity,
Renan, History of Israel and Origins of Christianity, the greatest

complete treatment of the subject, from an obvious point of

view ; the volume on Marc-Aurele especially noteworthy.
Foakes Jackson, Biblical History of the Hebrews (Arnold),

a useful summary tof a neutral kind.
T. Cotter Morison, Life of St. Bernard, the best biography

of a leading mediaeval spiritual figure.
H. W. C. Davis, 'Mediaeval Europe (Home University

Library), one of the best volumes in the series.
For mediaeval thinkers :
The Introduction to

Dr. Bridges' Opus Majus of Roger Bacon is enlightening.
Dante (Dent's Edition, translated by Wicksteed) and Essays

by Dean Church and J. A. Symonds.
Thomas Carlyle on Dante, in Heroes and Hero Worship ;

Past and Present, for the life of the monks. The latter

is now further illustrated by the volume on Jocelyn of

Brokeland in the ' King's Classics '.
Joinville's Crusades and
Froissart's Chronicles.
D. Murray's Jeanne d'Arc (Heinemann), the documents of

her Trial.

Appendix on Books 279

CHAPTER 7. THE RENASCENCE

Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History (Macmillan).

J. A. Symonds, *Ihe Italian Renaissance, also an abridgement
in one volume, and Life of Michelangelo.

Cambridge Modern History, the chapter on the Age of Dis-
covery.

Washington Irving, Life of Columbus, and of his companions
(in separate volumes).

Ranke's Popes, the standard book on the later Papacy.

On the political side :

Dr. Bridges, France under Richelieu and Colbert (new edition,
with introduction by A. J. Grant. Macmillan).

Biographies : Elizabeth and Cromwell in English Statesmen
(Macmillan) ; William the Silent, Foreign Statesmen (Mac-
millan) ; Richelieu (Heroes of the Nations).

Carlyle's Cromwell.

On English History generally in the seventeenth century :

G. M. Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts (Methuen),
a brilliantly written account of the most critical period
in our national history, scrupulously fair to individuals,
though with strong views as to the main issues.

Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, the classic on the greatest
war of national independence.

On Shakespeare :

Jusserand's third volume of his History of English Literature,
perhaps the best general account.

Milton's Tractate on Education, the best summary of the
humanist ideal.

On the Reformation :

Dr. Lindsay's History of the Reformation (T. & T. Clark).
CHAPTER 8. THE RISE OF MODERN SCIENCE

Bacon, Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum.

Descartes, Discours sur la Methode.

280 Appendix on Books

Mach, History of Mechanics (translation, Kegan Paul & Co.,
London), the best short study of the historical development
of a fundamental branch of science.

Oliver Lodge, Pioneers of Science, a more popular account of
Galilei, Kepler, &c. (Macmillan).

Berry, Short History of Astronomy (Murray) .

Dr. Bridges, Harveian Oration on ' Harvey and his Suc-
cessors ' in Essays and Addresses (Chapman & Hall).

Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (Home University
Library), a most suggestive essay, which should be accom-
panied by some knowledge of the Calculus. On this several
elementary works have lately appeared, among them a very
clever little volume called Calculus made Easy (Macmillan),

CHAPTER 9. INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Mantoux, La Revolution industrielle en Angleterre, much the
best book, with full bibliography ; unfortunately was sold
out within two years of publication (1908) and can now
only be seen at libraries. A reissue or translation is much
needed. /r

/ Industrial Revolution, the smaller pioneer work,

interesting historically (new edition 1901, with life by Lord

Milner).

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations.
Smiles, Lives of the Engineers and Industrial Biography

(Murray).
A. H. Johnson, Disappearance of Small Landowners in England

(with the quite recent special treatises of Tawnay and

Hammond on the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries

respectively).
Hutchins and Harrison, History of Factory Legislation (King

& Co.).
Townsend Warner, Tillage, Trade, and Invention (Blackie),

a small useful book.

Appendix on Books 281

CHAPTER 10. REVOLUTION

Mrs. Gardiner," French Revolution (Longmans), best short

sketch.
Carlyle, French Revolution (Dent's edition, taken with Maz-

zini's criticisms in the 4th volume of his Life and Writings).
Wordsworth, The Prelude.
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Condorcet, Tableau historique des progres de I' 'esprit humain

(Paris, Sjejnheil).
Rousseauj fContrat social.
Kant, Principles of Politics (edited and translated by Hastie,

1891), contains the smaller works on Universal History,

Perpetual Peace, and the Principle of Progress, which are

of high importance.
H. A. L. Fisher, Napoleon (Home University Library), latest

account, impartial, and masterly.
Romain Rolland,' Beethoven (Paris, Ed. Pelletan), a moving

account of the composer's life-work from its personal

aspect.
Ruskin, Modern Painters, gives the new spirit towards nature,

especially as expressed by Turner.

CHAPTER n. PROGRESS AFTER REVOLUTION

McCann, Six Radical Thinkers (Arnold).

Bentham, Theory of Legislation (a new edition by C. M.
Atkinson promised by the Clarendon Press).

Graham Wallas, Francis Place (Longmans).

Mill, ]. S., Autobiography, Liberty, and Representative Govern-
ment.

Comte, Historical Philosophy in vol. iii of Harriet Mar-
tineau's Comte' s Positive Philosophy (Bell).

Darwin, Origin of Species.

H. Poincare, La Valeur de la Science ; Science et Hypothesg ;

282 Appendix on Books

Dernier es Pensees (Flammarion — Bibliotheque de Philosophic

Scientifique — an excellent series).
Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (now in the 3rd edition

— represents in England the attitude of Mach in Germany

and Poincare in France).
On the political side :
G. Lowes Dickinson, Revolution and Reaction in Modern France

(George Allen).
Germany in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester University

Press) . Essays by Holland Rose, Herf ord, Sadler and Conner.
J. W. Headlam, Bismarck (Heroes of the Nations).
E. Martinengo Cesaresco, The Liberation of Italy, by a member

of one of the great liberating families.
Driault et Monod, L1 Evolution du Monde moderne : Histoire

politique et sociale, 1815-1909 (Felix Alcan), the best

general short sketch of the nineteenth century, giving due

place to the different nations and the different sides of

the revolution.

SOME USEFUL GENERAL BOOKS

t
' The New Calendar of Great Men (Macmillan). Biographies

of over five hundred worthies before the mid-nineteenth
century, arranged according to their historical import.
On a larger scale the biographies in the new edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica are generally excellent.

The History of Western Europe (Robinson : published Ginn),
a good example of a type of book which the Americans
have hitherto cared more about than we have. Two
volumes of text and two of illustrative authorities.
(Useful hints for arranging facts and dates in an orderly
time-chart may be had, either from Professor Beesly's Charts
(id. each, Reeves, 83 Charing Cross Road, W.C.) or, in book-
form, from Tillard's Date Book (Rivingtons, is. 6J.).)

INDEX

MAINLY OF PROPER NAMES

Acton, Lord, 151.

Aegean civilization, 50, 53 seq.,

266.

Aeschylus, 70, 145.
Africa, and the navigators, 1 5 1-2.

— civilization of, and Hegel,

224.
Alexander the Great, 36, 55, 85,

224.

Alexandria, 64, 71, 85.
Al Magest, 88.
Anaxagoras, 72, 73, 224.
Ancestor-worship, 2, 39.
Anthony, St., 133.
Anthropology, unifies study of

human evolution, 15-16.
Antigone, the, 75, 166.
Antonines, the, no, 115, 121.
Antoninus Pius, 112-13.
Apollonius of Perga, 87, 148, 184,

191.
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 134, 137,

141.
Arabs, the, 64, 88, 134, 140,

185.
Archimedes, 86-7, 107, 177,

186-7.

Aristarchus of Samos, 88.
Aristotle, 80-5, 134, 136, 140-1,

1 68, 242.

Arkwright, 200-1, 204.
Arnold, Matthew, 48.
Aryans, 49, 92.
Athens, 53, 65 seq., 100, 105,

107, 231.
Atlantic Ocean, the, analogy to

the Mediterranean, 203, 262,

266.

Augustine, St., 124, 136.
Augustus, see Caesar.

Babylonians, means of measure-
ment, 43.
— chapter 3 passim, 89.

Bacon, Francis, 156, 165, 168,
170, 1 80 seq., 202.

Bacon, Roger, 135, 141 note.

Balkan States, the, 259.

Bastille, fall of the, 226.

Beethoven, 223 seq.

Belgians, the, 245.

Benedict, St., 133.

Bentham, Jeremy, 246-8.

Bergson, 196.

Bernard, St., 127.

Bichat, 219.

Bismarck, 258, 263.

Black, Joseph, 190, 198.

Boniface, St., 109.

Borromeo, St., 163.

Bosphorus, the Turks on the, 109.

Boucher de Perthes and ante-
diluvian antiquities, n.

Boyle, 1 80, 189.

Brougham, 247.

Bruno, Giordano, 165, 169, 256.

Buddha, 270.

Bunyan, 163.

Burke, 240.

Cabot and Newfoundland, 155.

Caesar, Augustus, 104-5, 109.

Caesar, Julius, 101-5, IO9-

Canada, 200.

Canning, 245.

Carthage, 101-2. 104.

Cartwright, 200.

Caste, 38.

Catholic Church, the, 116,

chapters 6 and 7 passim, 220,

270.

284

Index

Cavendish, 252.

Celts, the, 92, 100.

Chaldaea, 42, 50, 89, 174 ; and see

Babylonians.
Champollion, 34.
Charlemagne, 109, 127, 129.
Charles II of England, 197.
Charles V, Emperor, 156.
China, 31, 39, 199.
Cicero, 107, 144.
City-State, the, 65, 84, 106, 123,

213.
Clyde, first steamer on the,

216.

Code Napoleon, the, 236.
Columbus, 146, 149, 151, 154,

242.
Commercial rivalry as a cause of

war, 259.

Comte, Auguste, 253, 257.
Condorcet, 199, 220 seq., 235-6.

240, 242.
Confucius, 270.
Conon, 87, note.
Constantine, no-n.
Constantinople, in, 140, 145.

— Mohammedan, 148, 152.
Convention, the French, 221,

235 seq.
Copenhagen Museum, collection

of primitive tools, 20.
Copernicus, 65, 146, 148-9, 164,

169, 172, 174 seq., 256.
Corinth, 62, 104.
Cortes, 155, 161.
Cretans, the, 31, 36, 53.
Croesus, 68.
Crompton, 200.
Cromwell, Oliver, 227.
Crotona, scene of work of Pytha-
goras, 63.

Crusades, the, 130-2, 140-1.
Cuneiform writing, 34, 44-5.
Cyprus, 55.
Cyrus, 68.

Dante, 120, 124-5, 127> '33> '34.

136-7, 140, 143, 165.
Danton, 231.

Darwin, u, 116, 170, 253 seq.
De Amicis, 268.
Declaration of Independence,

the, 230.
Delos, 52.
Democritus, 73, 77.
Descartes, 63, 87, 170-1, 1 80 seq.,

202, 206.

Diaz, Bartholomew, 153.
Dickens, 246.
Diocletian, no-n.
Dodona, 50.
Dominicans, the, 132.
Dorians, the, 50, 62.
Dutch, the, see Holland.

Egyptian calendar, 32, 49.
Egyptians, the, chapter 3

passim.

Elizabeth, Queen, 158-9, 163.
Encyclopaedists, the, 220.
England, 125-6, 151, 157, 162,

chapter 9 passim, 218-19.
English Revolution, 227-8 seq.,

233 seq., 271.
Epicurus, 73.
Erasmus, 149, 150, 156.
Eratosthenes, 88.
Etruscans, the, 96, 99.
Euclid, 63, 86.
Eudoxus, 86-7.
Euripides, 89.
' Europe ', meaning of the word,

266.

Factory Acts, the, 214, 246.

Feudal system, the, 122, 160,
228.

Fox, George, 163, 235.

France and the French, 130, 143,
T555 *S7-9i'l63>2°3, chapter 10
passim, 245-6, 257, 271.

Index

28

Francis I, 155, 158.

Francis, St., and the Franciscans,

'33-.
Franklin, Benjamin, 203, 230,

256.

Franks, the, 109, 127.
Frauenhofer, 255.
Freeman, comparison of Greece

and Italy at the Renascence,

146.
French Revolution, the, 203, 211.

Gaius, 114, 190.

Galileo, 143, 146, 164, 170, 174
seq., 267, 271.

Gaul, 93, 100-3.

Genoa and discovery, 146, 152.

Germany, 109, 122, 125-6, 129,
143, 162, 164, 203, 221, 225,
227, 234, 238, 258-9, 262-3,
268.

Gibbon, 228.

Gilbert, 165.

Goethe, 225, 238-9, 262-3.

Gothic architecture, 130, 132.

Greece, geography of, 51 ; com-
pared with Italy, 92-3.
— See also Parthenon, &c.

Greek language and ideas at
Renascence, 145 seq.

Greeks, the, chapter 4 passim.

Gregory the Great, 125, 127,133.

Gresham College and the Royal
Society, 171.

Grey, Lord, 245.

Grotefend, 34.

Grotius, 206, 261.

Gutenberg, 148-9, 152.

Hague, the, and arbitration, 261.

Hammurabi, 44.

Hannibal, 102.

Hargreaves, 200.

Harvey, 77, 189.

Hebrews, the, see Jews.

Hegel, 223 seq., 267.
Helmholtz, 215, 263.
Helvetius, 247.
Henry IV, Emperor, 130.
Henry, Prince, of Portugal, 152.
Henry IV of France, 159; his

' Great Design ', 160, 162-3.
Herodotus, 35, 58, 69.
Hieroglyphics, 34-5, 44-5.
Hildebrand, 128, 130.
Hipparchus, 5, 86, 88-9, 113,

.I53> i74> 19°-
Hippocrates, 76, 77.
Hittites, the, 33, 50.
Holland, 157-8, 162, 176, 206,

231,259.
Holy Roman Empire, chapter 4,

and 157, 234.

Homer, 48, 52, 53-5, 120, 145.
Horace, 106.
Humboldt, Alexander von,

262-3.
Huyghens, 180, 189.

Iliad, the, 58 ; and see Homer.

India, its contribution to mathe-
matics, 64, 134, 185.
— and the navigators, 151-2,
200, 204, 224.

Indo-Germanic peoples, see
Aryans.

Innocent III, 129, 130, 133.

lonians, the, 50, 55-8, 62, 67, 71,
73, 76, 266.

Italy, geography of, 92-3 ;
chapter 7 passim, 169, 259.

Japan, 2, 17.

Jews, the, and Judaea, 32, 45,

48-50, 124, 266.
Jus Civile, 114, 115. See Roman

Law.
Jus Gentium, 114, 115. See

Roman Law.
Justinian, 114.

28*

Index

Kant, 221-4, 259.
Kepler, 164, 174 seq.
Kirchhoff, 255.

Lafayette, 230.

Lamarck, 219, 252-3.

Lancashire, 201, 206.

Latin language, words character-
istic of Roman culture, 93, 94,
117.

— at the revival of learning,
144.

La Vendee, 232.

Lavoisier, 219, 252.

Leeds, 205, 212.

Leibnitz, 63, 170, 174, 203.

Leonardo da Vinci, 169.

Lessing, 225.

Liverpool, 246.

London, markets and finance,

260.

Louis, St., 141.
Louis XI, 161.
Louis XVI, 226, 229, 232.
Lucretius, on stages in culture,

IO-I2, 73.

Luther, 129, 143, 156, 161.
Lydians, 55-6, 67.
Lyell, Principles of Geology, 10.

Macedon, 81.

Machiavelli, 146.

Magellan, 156.

Manchester, 201, 214.

Mangu Cham, Emperor of Tar-

tary, 141, note.
Marathon, 69, 70.
Marcus Aurelius, 109, 113.
Mariotte, 189.
Mayow, John, 189, 198.
Mediterranean, culture, 31.

— as centre of Roman world,
105, 108, 266.

Memphis, 33.
Mesopotamia, 33.

Michelangelo, 145.

Middle Ages, the, 82, 108, and

chapters 6 and 7 passim.
Miletus, 56, 58, 69, 86.
Mill, James, 247.
Mill, John Stuart, 248, 250.
Miltiades, 69, 70.
Milton, 176.
Minoan Empire and culture,

33, 96 ; and see Cretan and

Aegean.

More's Utopia, 155.
Miiller, Johann, 148.
Mycenae, 54.
Mycenaean Greece, see Minoan

Empire.

Napoleon I, 222, 224, 232-3, 238,

245.

Napoleon III, 258-9.
Negroes and slavery, 152, 235.
New World, the, 143 seq., 230,

262.
Newton, 5, 63, 170-2, 174 seq.,

198, 228, 253, 255-6, 267.
Nile basin as affecting Egyptian

culture, 5, 32-3.
Nuremberg, observatory at, 148.

Olympus, 50, 124.
Oxford and the Royal Society,
171.

Panaetius, 107.

Papacy, the, and the Pope, 125-

6 seq. and chapters 6 and 7.
Papin, Denis, 199.
Pappus, 184.

Parthenon, the, 71, 74, 76, 132.
Peel, Sir Robert, 214.
Peisistratus, 67.
Peloponnesian War, the, 80.
Pericles, 72-3.
' Persae ', the, 71.
Persepolis, inscriptions at, 44.

Index

287

Persians, the, 52, 54, 68, 71-2, 101.

Petrarch, 144.

Pharaoh, the deification of, 38.

Pheidias, 72.

Philip II of Spain, 158.

Phoenicians, 53, 55-6, 101.

Pindar, 70.

Place, Francis, 247.

Plato, 56, 63, 77, 80-5, 136, 141,

145, 182.

— his Republic, 83-4.
Pliny the younger, 1 12, 121, 254.
Poincare, Henri, 188.
Polycrates, 63.
Pompey, 103.
Portugal and discovery, 152,

154-5-

Praetors' Edict, the, 114.

Priestley, 247, 252.

Protestantism, see Reformation.

Prussia, 238-9.

Ptolemy, 88, 148, 153, 174.

Punic wars, the, 102.

Pyramids, the, 39, 40, 132.

Pyrrhus, 100.

Pythagoras and the Pytha-
goreans, 57, 61-5, 73, 76, 86,
148, 169.

Quakers, the, 235. See also Fox.

Raphael, 145.
Reform Bill, the, 237, 246.
Reformation, the, 162-6.
Renan, 48.

Renascence, the, 82, 135, chap-
ter 7 passim,
Roman building, 112, 132.

— eagle, in Dante, 124.

— law, chapter 5 and 236.
Roman Empire, 106.

— Division of, 1 10.

— Geography of, 108.

— Provinces of, chapter 5 and

Roman Empire, Eastern, 95,
no, 125, 140; theology of,
147.

— Western, 95, iio-n.
Rome, chapter 5 and passim.
Romilly, 247.

Rousseau, 220-1, 225, 230.
Royal Society, the, n, 171-2,252.

Salamis, 69, 70-2, 101, 231.

Samos, 62.

Sardes, 69.

Saxons, the, 109.

Scholastic philosophy, 130, 134.

Senate, the Roman, 98, 102, 103,

105.

Seven Sages, the, 58, 67, 169.
Shakespeare, 75, 79, 165, 168.
Shelley, 6, 75.
Sicily, 10 1, 107.
Slavs, the, 92.
Smith, Adam, 210-11.
Socrates, 73, 77-9, 82-3, 123,

182.

Solon, 66-7, 100, 1 14.
Sophists, the, 77-8.
Sophocles, 72, 74-7, 80.
Sophos, 57, 67.
South American Republics, the,

236, 245.
Spain, 93, 101 ; Moors in, 131,

140, 154,259.

— andthe New World, 156, 162.

— and monarchy, 161.
Sparta, 62, 70.
Spencer, Herbert, 257.
Spinoza, 206.
Stephenson, George, 204.
Stern, work of, 239, 263.
Stoics, the, and Stoicism, 62, 85,

107,113,115,123,137,219,220.
'Strategos', the, 72.
Sumerians, the, 32.
Sweden, 162.
Switzerland, 232, 259.

288

Index

Syracuse, home of Archimedes,
87, 107.

Tarquins, the, 96.

Teutons, the, 92.

Thales, 41, 56-9, 61, 89, 113, 190.

Themistocles, 69, 70, 72.

Theocracies, 36, 146.

Thomas Aquinas, St., 1 34, 1 37, 141 .

Thucydides — the funeral oration

of Pericles, 72, 145.
Toscanelli, his chart, compared

with mediaeval, 153.
Trajan, 109, 112, 121.
Treviranus, 252-3.
Troy, 54.
Tudors, the, 151, 161. See also

Elizabeth.
Turgot, 234.

Turks, the, 131, 152, 245.
Turner, J. M. W., 223.
Tuscany, see Etruscans.
Twelve Tables, the, 99, 114, 190.
Tycho Brahe, 165, 174 seq.

United States, the, 157, 200, 203,

227, 23?-1-
Universities, mediaeval, 130,

140 ; and ' academies ', 148.

Valmy, 231, 233.

Vasco da Gama, 155.

Venetian printing, 146.

Vespasian, 109.

Vespucci, 156.

Vico, 116, 253.

Virgil, 106, 120, 140, 144.

Vittorino da Feltre, 147-8.
Voltaire, 228.

Wallace, Alfred Russel, 253.

Wallis, 171.

Wars, Peloponnesian, 80.

Punic, 102.

Hundred Years', 143, 161.

of Roses, 161.

Thirty Years', 163-4.

English Civil War, 227.

Seven Years', 200.

American War of Independ-
ence, 200, 230.

England and France (Revolu-
tionary and Napoleonic),
205, 209, 239.

War of Liberation, 239.

Franco-Prussian, 263.
Waterloo, 239.

Watt, James, 190, 198, 200-1,204.
Wellington, the Duke of, 245.
Wiclif, 143.
Wilberforce, 235.
William, Friar, Rubruquis, 141.
William of Orange, 158-9, 163.
William III of England, 227.
Williams, Roger, 230.
Worcester, the Marquis of, 199.
Wordsworth, 223 seq.
Writing, the art of, 36, 43-4.

Xavier, 163.
Yorkshire, 157, 201.
Zeno, 85.

Oxford: Horace Hart M.A., Printer to the University

A 000 1 1 1 303 4