The making of humanity

\

THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

THE MAKING
OF HUMANITY

BY

ROBERT BRIFFAULT

LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET W.C. i

First published in

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

PART I

THE MEANS AND TASKS OF HUMAN
EVOLUTION

CHAPTBB

I. PROGRESS AS FACT AND VALUE . . . .11

I. THE DISCOVERY OF MAN . . . . .II

II. CHANGE, EVOLUTION, PROGRESS . . . . V]V

III. PROGRESS AS VALUE . . . . . 28 «*"

II. INTERPRETATIONS OF HISTORY . . . .35

I. ENDOGENOUS THEORIES. MIND, RACE . . • 35

II. EXOGENOUS THEORIES. GEOGRAPHICAL AND ECONOMIC

DETERMINISM . . . . . • 37

III. CAUSATION IN PROGRESSIVE PROCESSES . . .40 v

III. RATIONAL THOUGHT, ITS ORIGIN AND FUNCTION . 45

I. MAN'S ADAPTIVE VARIATION . . . • 45

II. RATIONAL THOUGHT AS MEANS OF PROGRESS . .50

III. ADAPTIVE CHARACTER . . . . .53

IV. PROGRESSIVE CHARACTER . . . . . 56 v/

IV. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HUMAN AND ORGANIC

EVOLUTION 99

I. THE BEARER OF HUMAN HEREDITY . . .59

II. HUMANITY AS ORGANISM . . . . .63

' V. CUSTOM-THOUGHT AND POWER-THOUGHT . . 69

I. CUSTOM-THOUGHT . . . . . .69

II. POWER-THOUGHT . . . . . .78

III. THE CONFLICT .. . . . . . 85

6 . V :. CONTENTS

CHAPTER j J » *•* t «-*» * * 1 < PAGE

VI. ;*ijg:B^EAXIN<^ QF\ CUSTOM-THOUGHT AND POWER-
THOUGHT 88

I. MATERIAL PROGRESS . . . . .88

II. DIFFUSION AND CROSS-FERTILIZATION . . .91

III. SEGREGATED EVOLUTION . . . . .93

PART II

THE GENEALOGY OF EUROPEAN
CIVILIZATION

I. THE SECRET OF THE EAST .... 105

II. THE HELLENIC LIBERATION . . . .117

III. PAX ROMANA . . . . . . . 14!

v IV. BARBARISM AND BYZANTINISM . . . .162

V. DAR AL-HIKMET (THE HOME OF SCIENCE) . . .184

4 VI. THE REBIRTH OF EUROPE 203

VII. THE SOI-DISANT RENAISSANCE . . . .222

VIII. ELEMENTS OF EUROPE . . . 234

PART III

EVOLUTION OF MORAL ORDER

I. MORAL LAW AS 'LAW OF NATURE'

I. MEANING OF THE SUPREMACY OF ETHICS

II. MORAL AND MATERIAL PROGRESS .

III. POWER AND JUSTICE ....

— ~ IV. THE ' INNATE CONSCIENCE ' OF POWER .

II. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY GENESIS OF MORALITY

I. PRIMARY GENESIS OF MORALITY ,

II. SECONDARY GENESIS OF MORALITY

III. NECESSITY OF INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION

IV. EUROPEAN LIBERATIONS .
V. ETHICS AND POLITICS

CONTENTS 7

CHAPTER PAGE

III. MORALS AND CULTURE 298

I. SENTIMENT, SYMPATHY, AND REASON . . . 298
II. MORALITY AND CIVILIZATION '. 3O2
HI. 'CORRUPTION' ...... 309

IV. THE GUILT OF OPINIONS 315

I. DILEMMA OF AMBULATORY MORALITY . . 315

II. CURRENT OPINION ON OPINIONS . . 317
— -* III. THE WICKEDNESS OF THE ' GOOD ' 32O

IV. OUR TRIVIAL ESTIMATE OF UNPARDONABLE SIN . . 325

V. MORALS AND BELIEF . . . . . . 33°

I. MORALS AS COMFORT . . 33»

II. THE MISOLOGICAL FALLACY . . - 337

III. RATIONAL THOUGHT AND NIHILISM . . . 340

— — IV. MORALS ON THE MARCH ..... 346

PART IV

PREFACE TQ UTOPIA

I. MISOLOGY .355

II. THE HOPEFULNESS OF PESSIMISM . . -359

II. THE CONTROL OF HUMAN EVOLUTION . . 363

PART I

THE MEANS AND TASKS OF HUMAN
EVOLUTION

The Making of Humanity

CHAPTER I

PROGRESS AS FACT AND VALUE

I

THE DISCOVERY OF MAN

a ra Seiva Kovley avdpunrov Cety6repoy ire\et.

Antigone.

THE intellectual revolution of the nineteenth century has
transformed our conceptions of human history in much
the same manner as the intellectual revolution of the
seventeenth century changed our view of the cosmic
universe. Like the Ptolemaic world our notions concern-
ing the career of our race were miserably stunted, dingy,
and mean. The date 4004 B.C. was gravely accepted
as the boundary of our retrospect ; and long before
reaching back to it the ' conventional fable ' of history
which, like the primitive epic whence it evolved, was
chiefly concerned with racial, dynastic, and religious
edification, faded into pure legend and mythology. As
when awakening science crashed through the tinsel vaults
of puerile cosmologies, discovering the sun-strewn in-
finities amid which speeds our quivering earth-speck, so
have the mists of legend lifted before her radiant
progress, and it is given us to view the panorama
of man's long and wonderful career in something
of its natural perspective and proportion. Those
ages once peopled with the myths and monsters
of fable now show down the vista of teeming nations
our own culture in the making, Europa that is to be,

borne on forked -prowed Cretan galleys that seam, from

11

12 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

Nile-land and y£gean shores to Italy and Spain, the
midland sea ; jingling donkey- caravans that bear from
the Twin Rivers, through the realm of the pig- tailed
Hittite to the Eiixine and Phrygia, the freight of a
culture that reaches back beyond Archbishop Usher's
date of the creation of the world. Ten thousand years
before it came westering to Sumer we see the Magda-
lenians decking with frescoes and inscriptions their
temple -caves, and weirdly dancing their rites accoutred
in the masks of beasts, prototypes of those which Attic
maidens shall don at the shrine of Artemis Brauroniar
and of those through whose brazen mouths shall be
chanted the lapidary lines of ^Eschylean choruses. Yet
even that savage culture of the last ice-age is but a
mature fruit, the culmination of successive eras of slow;
growth computed by hundreds of thousands of years.
Beyond stretch aeons of time as unseizable to our
imagination as are the distances of sidereal space.

Transferred to the open vastness of those expanses
the entire perspective, the meaning itself of history is
changed . As| in the geocentric theory,, our view was not
merely untrue ; it was an accurate inversion of the truth .
The career of mankind was currently conceived as one
of continuous degeneration. Savages, instead of being
regarded as surviving vestiges representing the condition
of primitive humanity, were held to be the descendants of
once noble and civilized races who had, by an inevitable
law of hurrian nature, lapsed into miserable degradation.
The Past was the repository of virtue and lost wisdom ;
it stood exalted in proportion to its antiquity above the
puny Present ; and the, chief function of historical study
was to hold up the excellences of our distant forbears
as a paradigm to; a (waning age.

It is only a matter of a generation or two since
those quaint views became untenable, and the dust of
the last rear-guard actions is hardly laid. In his great
work on Primitive Culture Sir Edward Tylor devotes
a lengthy chapter to the considerate and painstaking
refutation of the ' theory of degeneration,' and he has
in the course of it occasion to cite long and hot passages
in its defence from distinguished contemporaries, and

DISCOVERY OF MAN 13

indignant onslaughts on the hypothesis of progress.
Tylor's book was published in 1871. One of the noblest '
and most fearless thinkers of 'the last century, Carlyle,
feeling keenly, as do all earnest and generous spirits,
the faults and follies of the world about him, could
perceive no higher aspiration to be set as an ideal before
the Present than the emulation and imitation of the
Past. And the past period which he selected as a
model and exemplar was the thirteenth century ! The
notion of progress, of the "• perfectibility of the species "
was the butt of his most scornful sarcasms.

It is now currently known that the human world has
risen out of barbarism and animality, that its dawn light
shines on no heroic or golden ages, but on nightmares
to make us scream in our sleep. During an incalculable
period of time our ancestors were savages ruder and more
brutal than the primitive races whose fast dying rem-
nants still survive. Man's life was, as Hobbes surmised,
" poor, nasty, brutish, short." The first pathetic totterings
of culture were only attained through a tale of ages com-
pared to which the whole name-and-date period is of neg-
ligible amplitude. Fire, cattle-herding, weaving, pottery,
tillage, the metals, horse-taming, and the going down
to the sea in ships of men with hearts of treble brass,
were world-shaking discoveries and adventures which, at
millenniums of interval, commoved a bewildered humanity
which found itself raised one 'giddy step above the brute.
Those tremendous revolutions were crowded in the last
few hundred thousand years. During the greater part
of its existence the human race has roamed the wild
earth among other animal herds, differing but little from
them in its mode of life, driven by the same exigencies
and pressures, by climate, by cold and drought. Its
mentality was not essentially different ; the first faint
glimmers of thought oppressed almost as much as they
aided it ; man was urged by the self -same impulses as
all other animality which :he was only imperceptibly
transcending.

The notion of human progress, but dimly and fugi-
tively prefigured here and there by the thought
of various ages, that conception which the doctrinaire

S

14 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

enthusiasm of the eighteenth century, the faith* of
a Condorcet under the very knife of the guillotine,
had proclaimed in the same abstract and imaginative
manner as it drew fancy-pictures of * primitive society,'
has from the domain of philosophizing theory and pious
opinion passed to that of scientific description. From
the accumulated results of biology and geology, from the
archeological exhumation of the past, from prehistorical
and anthropological research, the speculative doctrine
emerges — whatever disputes and castigations may gather
round its interpretation — as a witnessed^ concrete fact.
A fact which, instead of l^eing the expression of a faith,
is itself the source of a new faith and inspiration.

For the first shudder of false shame which, as is
usual in such cases, greeted 'the blunt^ disclosure of our
origins, gives place to a feeling of wonder and exulta-
tion, of tenderness and inspiring hope, as in the path
pursued by the human race from its lowly emergence
we perceive the unceasing march of a continuous and
marvellous growth, age-long indeed if measured by our
common standards of time, but in truth more rapid and
mighty in its achievements than the whole foregoing
evolution of animal life. The entire world of human
things as it exists to-day, with its marvels and its powers,
its good — and also its evil, — is the product of that
evolution. Its elements did not .make their appearance at
one bound, they did not come to man from another sphere,
nor were they found by him as an integral part of the
world in which he was born ; but developed by little and
little from the crudest beginnings. ' And since thus all
human things are man-made, since bur world is the out-
growth of the most primitive and rudest human com-
munities, every step of the intervening progress is the
fruit of human effort, of human labour, and human
courage ; every inch of that advance has been wrested by
mari at the cost of suffering and devotion, and against a
mountain-mass of difficulties, the overwhelming nature of
which only a close analysis can reveal, from the dark
chaos of brutality and nescience.

* Man is descended from the monkeys/ That used
to be, and is still in some quarters, the uproariously

DISCOVERY OF MAN 15

droll anticlimax of the law of evolution— apart from being
the one supernatant statement of that fundamental law
of life which had reached the apprehension of the semi-
educated multitude. It was the manifest reductio ad
absurdum, and the most irresistible pelting weapon for
Oxford bishops wherewith to slay the nascent revelation
with ridicule. Even the most ardent protagonists of the
new doctrine felt somewhat embarrassed by a fact in-
susceptible of being stated without a broad grin, or
at least a humorous twinkle of the eye. How could
one speak of monkey ancestors with beseeming gravity?
It behoved us to have recourse to all manner of shame-
faced, apologetic circumlocutions, to devise euphemistic
phrases in order to refer to the fact with some show of
decorum. ' Man, of course, is not descended from
the monkeys— not, at least, from monkeys now living, ob-
viously— but from extinct pithecoid progenitors-; not from
any ape, but from some anthropoid common ancestor of
living primates and living men.' An intractable, un-
couth, grotesque fact. Such are the fruits of material-
istic science, destructive of all poetry and sentiment.

Well ! speaking with strictest accuracy, there is not
in the entire universe of known facts one so purely
venerable, so wholly sublime in its grandeur as that
same grotesque fact. Not the Kantian wonders, not
the starry heavens, not the conscience. The starry
heavens— that other rude blow of Unsentimental science
to human dignity— are merely big. The conscience, in so
far as it is not a convenient name for prejudices, is
but a fragment of the larger portent. The self -creation
of the progeny of the ape, by the sole operation of his
inherent qualities and powers, by the unfolding of what
was in him, the ape, the brute, the beast, the savage,
unaided by any external power, in the face of the buffets
of hostile nature, of the intractabilities of his own con-
stitution, into MAN, the demi-god, the thinker, the de-
viser, the aspirer after truth and justice, greater in his
achievements and his ideals than all the gods he is
capable of conceiving— if there is a fact before which
we may truly bow in solemn reverence and silent wonder^
it is that.

16 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

The marvel of man, the essential transcendency of
the ' thinking reed ' over all the patible qualities of
what he contemplates, is among the cheap common-
places of meditative thought. But that supreme prodigy
is itself removed to an immeasurably loftier plane of
sublimity, when it is perceived no longer as a bestowed
and privileged endowment, as a stolen fire, an illapse from
a transhuman sphere ; but as the achievement, the built -
I up product, the slowly, painfully, and toilsomely wrought
\ creation of his own effort. The transcendency of the
human worlcTHarKT ot human worth is not merely the
privilege of man, it is his work. To the sublimity of
the thing itself is superadded~the far greater sublimity
of its production. Those qualities and powers, those
devotions, those enthusiasms, those heroisms, those aspi-
rations, the sanctities of justice and self-sacrifice, that
mighty creative spirit which has brought forth art, poetry,
eloquence, Parthenons, Odysseys, Giocondas, Hamlets,
that masterful intellect which sits over the world, which
harnesses its forces and transforms it, that sacred flame
which rises above life and defies death, defies wrong,
defies falsehood, wills right, is loyal to truth— all that
man is, has been, and aspires to be, is the accumulated
product of a quality and power inherent in himself, which
has wrought from the lowest and dimmest rudiments,
pursued unresting ly 4i the gradual paths of an aspiring
change," built and created that dignity which sets him
on equal terms with all the sublimities of the universe.
In the pathetic life of that^ ill-favoured Caliban with
the ungainly stooping form, the muzzle of a gorilla, the
melancholy light in his eyes, lacking the force and dignity
of the lion or the grace of the gazelle, there was that
which, even as a rudiment, wrought and brought forth
such fruits. He was a little lower than the beasts, he
made himself a little higher than the angels.

And the same indwelling power that has brought about
that prodigy, that has created man out of the brute,
did not stop there. It has never ceased to be at work,
to pursue the same creative task, to soar upwards on the
same path of transfiguring, exsurgent evolution. It dwells
in man, it is at work in him to-day. The wonder of

CHANGE, EVOLUTION, PROGRESS 17

it is no less great in one part of the creative process
than in any other, in the birth of modern civilization than
in the birth of man. That the brute-ape should b'e
the father of thinking man, that is a prodigy ; that the
gibbering savage should be the father of the Periklean
Greek, that also is a prodigy, ; that the tenth century
should be the father of the twentieth century, that is
no less a prodigy.

We are wont at times to think what a puny, ineffectual
thing is human life, so fretful and achieving so little,
ending in disillusion and disappointment, and shame and
regret, and work left undone, " a tale told by an idiot."
Welll behold the aggregate result, the accumulated
deposit, the net resultant of the lowliest and humblest
human lives 1 That is the actual cash value in the
universe of those fretful, ineffectual careers — the human
world risen out of chaos.

II

CHANGE, EVOLUTION, PROGRESS

Writ large though it be in the story of the race, the
law of human evolution, of progress, has by no means
yet established itself as a truism in current thought.
Far from it. It is still, on the contrary, an acutely
controversial conception ; one, indeed, which the great
bulk of current opinion, of current literature is disposed
to gainsay, to raise innumerable doubts about. The
' theory of degeneration,' in its old fornu at least, can,
it is true, no longer be upheld ; it has perforce tacitly
lapsed into limbo. From Cro-Magnon to modern man
is clearly and beyond all dispute a process of active
evolution, of progress, whatever conception we may

2

18 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

attach to the term. Yet the acceptance of the fact as
a continuous process, as a law operating throughout
historic times, from the age of Greece to the present
day — the old myopic range of our historic vision — is
qualified and hedged with all manner of reluctance,
of doubt, of objection, of downright denial.

The grounds of that scepticism are numerous and
diverse. ; rooted, some of them, deep in our very nature,
some in obscuring circumstances by which the unity
and form of the process is disguised, some in difficulties
of thought inherent in the conception itself.

Are we entitled to pronounce any rjrojcess progressive?
Change we know, evolution, we know — more or less,
but progress? When Heracleitos proclaimed the uni-
versal flux, that all things everlastingly change and
become, that we do not bathe twice in the same river
of experience, he by no means enunciated a law of evo-
lution, still less did he testify to progress . Even when to
the perception of merte change we have added the further
fact that each successive phase of it is determined by
the foregoing, that the forms of life in particular are
thus derived, evolved one from the other in continuous
sequence, we have, to be sure, gone a step beyond
the recognition of mere change and perceived a new
feature of it in the process of evolution ; but we have
not discovered progress.

Clearly is not that a valuation which we~ impose upon
the stream of change, declaring it to be good? " Evolu-
tion," it has been said, " is a fact, progress is a feeling."
What title have we to that dynamic optimism pro-
nouncing that whatsoever becomes, becomes better? Is
not that but a way of saying that our own particular
manner and outlook are the standard of all excellence,
and that what leads thereto is therefore a process of
bettering?

Let us suppose that in its infancy our race had
cherished a profound and unreasonable respect for huonan
life, and that the various changes since that childlike
state had eventually led to this, among other results,—

CHANGE, EVOLUTION, PROGRESS 19

that modern man had come to discover the delicate
flavour and excellent nutritive qualities, of human flesh,
and had become an enthusiastic cannibal. We may
imagine that, under those circumstances, we should look
down with considerable pity upon the benighted
barbarians who remained ignorant of the most excel-
lent and readily available food $ upon our forefathers
who were insufficiently intelligent to appreciate to the
full the advice of that man of genius, Dean Swift,
and to solve in a fundamental manner the problem
of poverty and the Irish question, while throwing open
at the same time new sources of enjoyment and eupepsia j
and we should point with demure pride to. the growth
of refined taste and discrimination as a clear index
of our progress.

That the notion of progress is an aesthetic, an ethical
valuation, that when we pronounce man to be higher
than the hog, the thinker better than the savage, the
just man better than' the cannibal, we are overstepping
the mere transcription of fact and gassing a moral
judgmen^is^hardly to be disputed. " But the further,
question presentlTTtself, "What is Ihe source and sig-'i
nificance of all valuations? what, !£__ any, is their i
criterion?

Imagine that you have before you the first gelatinous,
quivering thing that separated out of the inorganic world
and became living. Hard put to it though you might
be to define wherein its livingness consisted, you would
at once recognize in its behaviour the marks and
symptoms of that state. It eats, increases, multiplies.
In the configuration of its energy there are those dis-
positions, those tendencies or what-not, to do certain
things that all living creatures are busily employed in
doing. Or rather, are not all those acts of life, those
strivings after its maintenance and continuance, varied
in accordance with the conditions against which it con-
tends and of which it takes avail, but manifestations of
one fundamental, though unknown, disposition of living
stuff, which constitutes its very livingness ? The diversity
of the acts, limited enough! in so simple a creature, arises

20 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

partly from trie analytic quality of our perception, partly
from the diversity of stimuli which call them forth.
They are one and all directed to one end, life, which
by their failure would cease. On those and on other
grounds it is more reasonable to regard them as arising
out of a single disposition, than as a bundle of separate
* faculties ' or properties existing alongside one another,
a mosaic of independent characters. But that gelatinous
speck does more than manifest those acts of life which
you observe, or those more recondite and complex bio-
chemical manifestations which go along with them. The
same disposition of energy which does those things in
response to the action upon it of the surrounding medium,
does more. You are in a position to cast your glance
up and down the perspective of ages, and, watching
that spot of slime, what do you see? You see it
! prodigiously budding and changing, and, as in an
| ArabiarT"~fal^ "assuming varied and strange forms,
changing into a hydra and a sea-squirt, into a fish
and into a serpent, into a mole and into a squirrel,
until at last it fantastically changes into you.

There is assuredly more in that strange display of
metamorphosis than a mere orgy of change. It is, as
much as hunger, procreation, and the other phenomena
of life, a function ancl character of its being, a mani-
festation of that disposition wherein life consists. That
behaviour of living stuff suggests indeed that, even as
its constitution impels it to feed and increase, so it
likewise impels it to extend and build up its organi-
zation in view of some intrinsic need no less imperative
than hunger. Against tKaF^view, "however, stands the
\ fact that the amoeba still exists, that not all life has
/ evolved, that after the inconceivable lapse of time since
it began its primitive forms survive unchanged, that,
in its outline at least, the entire series in its various
stages is represented in coexistent forms at the present
time. In order to account for that unchanged survival
we must suppose that only in an infinitesimal proportion
of living things has the process of evolution taken place,
that the majority remained to all intents stationary.
Thus that faculty of development has only come into

CHANGE, EVOLUTION, PROGRESS 21

operation as it was elicited by favouring conditions which
brought into play the intrinsic tendency of life to such
a process.

And such a tendency, such a power we know indeed
to be inherent in all life. To exist at all a living
thing must be adapted to the exigencies of an environ-
ment often difficult and hostile. Its energizing, what
it does, must be done in harmony with conditions im-
posed upon it by the external medium which exacts
conformity from every act of life. Feeding, breathing,
breeding, not only achieve -their end, but do so in relation
to ambient facts with which they must accord ; to adapt
its acts is as much a function of life as to perform
them ; to achieve that adaptation is as much a part
of its essential mechanism as to .oxygenate its tissues,
as much an impulse of it as hunger and love.

The amceba, since it exists, is as much adapted as
man to external conditions^ But with every adaptive
change effected in response to the necessity imposed
or the opportunity offered by those changing conditions,
an increase in life's powers is brought about ; the field'
of its faculties, the freedom of their play is extended.
The fin, the limb and the claw are more widely efficient
than the pseudopod, the eye than the pigment patch
or actinic skin, the neuron than the irritability of
protoplasm. The effect is cumulative. The difference
between you and the amceba on the stage of your
microscope is more than a mere difference in adaptation,
although it is in fact an aspect and a consequence of
that adjustment. Like the amceba, you contrive to exist JV/-
in conformity with imposed conditions ; but you do far j '
more, you control those conditions ; your activities are
immeasurablyemancipated, and their range is extended
out of all knowledge. Most of the difficulties against
which life in the animalcule struggles and contends are
for you transcended. Life in you has conquered a
thousand new environments, proceeded to new spheres
of action ; the scope and form of its primitive needs,
its possibilities and goals have been expanded and trans-
figured. Such has been the constant character of the
process throughout the series of change, throughout

22 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

evolution. Whether it be essentially the outcome of
an innate disposition to development, or the summation
of successive adaptations, the result is in effect the
same. It is not change alone, it is more even than
cumulative change 5. it is change in the direction of a,
constant achievement, the^ increase of the .power of life
to__cjQntipl^he_j^^ and the conse-

quent extension of their scope and of that power.

It is, at a superficial glance, as though from the
first, life had tended to a pre-appointed goal. But that
teleological notion is not in accordance with facts. The
process issues in the vertebrates, in the mammals, in
humanity, but does not make directly and deliberately
towards them. Scores, hundreds of utterly different
types and lines of development have been tried before
evolution hit upon the vertebrate organization or the
mammalian brain. The form of the process is not a
single line, a rising curve, but a thickly congested,
wide -spreading, straggling, branching tree, in which, for
one crowning top of success, there are thousands of
withering boughs, thousands of blind alleys of partial
success and failure. There is no forecast or forethought
in the lower stages or at any stage of the series of
what is to prove its crowning consummation. The
protozoon was not predestined ; the progress of evolution
has not been pre-ordained and planned, but groping
and fumbling.

Human progress is human evolution. Between it and
the development of organic life there are, as we shall
see, differences deep in their nature and momentous in
their import ; but progress is nevertheless the con-
tinuation of the same vital process ; its driving force,
its ultimate tendencies are the same. The disposition
of living energy which is the moving power of life's
reaction to ambient conditions in the protozoon, is like-
wise operative in man, who is, after all, biologically
considered, but an aggregate of protozoa. In their
infinite variety and complexities, subtleties and sublima-
tions, human behaviour, thought, history, achievements,
and endeavours, have had no_ other spring than the

CHANGE, EVOLUTION, PROGRESS 23

original and primordial tendencies which actuate the
amoeba. Throughout evolution no new impulse has been
created ; the particularized form in which impulse is
manifested is alone susceptible of change. For what
in life we call, at a loss for a better word, * tendency,'
4 impulse/ has no, specific form. It only becomes
specified into desire tending to a_concrete goal at
the call of experience of actual relation, through the
development oj_ snnsation, of Cognitive perception
and concepts. It is the motley actuality of that
cognitive experience which, * like a dome of many
coloured glass, stains the white radiance ' of life's im-
mutable eternity. No such particularized form exists
in the impulse itself ; that is why no idea, no concept,
no thought, can ever be innate and physiologically trans-
mitted. The hunger of Tantalus wears the shape of
the overhanging apple to which his desire is drawn,
but there is in the fundamental constitution of life no
desire for apples or for diatoms, no hunger even, or
any of those appetences which psychologists classify as
' primary impulses '--; nothing beyond the unspecified
reaching out of its energy towards its continuance, exer-
cise, and expansion. The desires that move you or any
human being, whether for scientific accuracy or
Beethoven symphonies, for social refortrn or rubber
shares, for Satsuma ware or philosophy, are but the
shape and body which the transformations of cognitive
powers give to the original impulses — or say rather
the original impulse, which actuates the amoeba and
all life.

The direction of human evolution and the measure
of its results are no less identical with those of life/
itself than the force that moves them. For man, as !
for all life, success, development, progress means
increased_jcontrol ovex-Jhe conditions of life. That is
oBvious enough in the case of mechanical progress, in i
the development of his mastery over the forces of nature,
from eolithic flints to Handley-Page planes. But to
the same ultimate object all human activities in what-
soever aspect, whether as art, thought, religion, ethics,
politics, are no less definitely directed. By the im-

24 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

measurable expansion of his cognitive powers, the con-
ditioning environment of life has in man been unfolded
and diversified into infinite complexities. That environ-
ment was for rudimentary life comprised in the physical
and chemical qualities of the fluid it bathed in. To
human life it has come to mean the universe and its
problems, the human world and all the new forces which
it has created, the multiform needs and desires into
which, in man, the impulses of life have been objectified
and broken up. And to the conditions of man's develop-
ment as an individual has been added the most formid-
able of all tasks : the creation of a new type of polyzoic
organism, humanity, involving the most complex adjust-
ments of individual development to that of the larger
unit. Control over the material conditions of existence \
is thus but a small fraction of the task imposed upon
man by the nature of his powers and the condition of
their action. It includes all the conditions of human
life in their infinite and tangled diversity, It is as complex
and subtly various in its aspects as is human life itself.
It includes all that man has ever aspired to or desired,
all that towards which his heart and mind have tended,
every secret of his wistfulness, every form of his dreams,
every ideal and every faith, every loadstar, every flame
of his life. It is towards power of free development,
power of joy, power of action, power of feeling, power
of creation, power of understanding, power of co-ordi-
nation and justice, that human life is perpetually
reaching out.

Thus it is that progress is so varied, so complex, so
elusive a thing, and that it is so commonly obscured
and misunderstood, because we see in it so many mingled
forms, so many clashing, seemingly inconsistent ten-
dencies. It includes the ideals of fifth-century Greece
and those of twentieth -century America, of ages of
dream and of ages of science, of intellectual and of
material power, of hedonism and of self-sacrifice. Those
Protean aspirations and appetences not only contend
with one another, they live under the perpetual strain
of the test of adaptation, of harmony with the actual
facts of the universe and of life. So that there is an

CHANGE, EVOLUTION, PROGRESS 25

evolution, as it were, within an evolution, a struggle h
for existence among principles, ideas, desires, and ''
thoughts .

Hence may we perceive the fallacious futility_pf those
endeavours tpdefine the determinate nature and quality
wherein consists the excellence of any phase in the
process of human progress above the foregoing ; of
those descriptions of it as a growth in knowledge, or
material power, or refinement, or morality, by which the
particular angle of view of the theorist rather than any
character of the process is illustrated. Any such defini-
tion is necessarily quite artificial. Every such form
and character is but a facet of human progress which
includes them all, and proceeds now in one direction,
now in another, developing in one phase according to
one type and ideal, and in another phase according to
a different and even wholly opposite type. Yet those
diverse and contradictory ideals all constitute progress
in so far as they extend in one direction or the other
the power of human life to control its conditions. They
continue embodied in the growing whole, a part of its
living power. It not unfrequently happens in the course
of the process that some quality appears to become
lost ; a deterioration in some particular aspect takes
place, thus offering occasion for misleading comparisons
which regard that one aspect only. But, like the initial
sacrifices incident upon the inception of some great
enterprise, they are only incurred to be repaid a hundred-
fold, to reappear with fuller power upon a higher plane.

Human progress does not, any more than does organic
evolution, lead along a direct line to a teleologically
pre -appointed goal. In the one case as in the other
the path of development has been a halting and groping
one, and any purposive ends have been at most short-
sighted. Failure has been as common as achievement ;
so that the path of progress is strewn with tragic ruins.
It has only been achieved by successive trials and errors,
errors for the most part wedged at the very foundations
of man's successive structures, so that their rectification
has involved wholesale racing and reconstruction. Thus
we see human progress commonly proceeding by the

26

THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

blotting out of civilizations, by the destruction and wreck
of worlds.

The old ' philosophies of history,' whicH were con-
cerned with the ideas of states, of nations, rather than
of humanity, dwelt chiefly upon the rise and1 fall of
successive civilizations, the growth and decay of empires,
the ebb and flow of culture. Contemporary thought
is similarly obsessed with the conception of ' cycles '
of civilization. It is customary, since the days of Vico,
to apply to the phenomenon the analogy of an individual
life, and to describe the rapid expansion as a manifesta-
tion of youthful vitality and the process of decay as
one of exhaustion and senility. But those terms are
in this connection no more than empty and meaningless
' blessed' words.' They signify nothing. There is no
ground or indication for the suggestion of any analogy
between the life of, a ' race l and that of an individual—
unless on the theory that individual ageing consists in
a gradual clogging of the system by the accumulation
of its own waste -products and excretions. But animal
races do not perish through * senility/ but through
failure of their means of adaptation to cope with
changing conditions and the competition of more
efficiently adapted races. Human races and societies
have constantly renewed their evolutionary powers and
taken their place in the van of progress, after their
* senile decay ' had been confidently diagnosed. The
life of a society as such — that is the only point of
the simile of senility — depends upon the free action of
its excretory functions, upon its power of casting off
the obsolete, the false and the effete.

Every form of human organization and culture that
has hitherto existed represents but a partial and im-
perfect adaptation to the imposed conditions. It thrives,
develops in spite of inadaptations ; but the further it
proceeds the more heavily does the congenital handicap
tell upon the possibilities of development. Hence a
time comes when either those inadaptations, those errors,
those defects, those ' germs oF~decay ' of our philo-
sophical historians, must be shed, or fhat phase of growth
come to an end . The society must be remodelled either

CHANGE, EVOLUTION, PROGRESS 27

by internal or by external action, and the Penelopean
web is perpetually cast anew.

Those crises are a necessary preparation for renewed
and more effective advance. Progress requires that
things should occasionally be thrown into the 'melting-
pot. Even more than the organic proces3 ffuman
evolution requires the casting off of effete products
and obsolete structures as much as the building up
of new ones ; the one process is as much of the essence
of progress as is the other. Those cataclysms which
seem to have plunged the world back into chaos, the
barbaric invasions, the wars which have put out the
light of the world, threatened to wipe away all, those
set-backs, those disasters, have invariably sferved the
ultimate purpose of progress. The law of the race, which
avails itself of both storm and sunlight, works through
all accidents, turns catastrophes to account, so that
they are so fruitful of good, destroying what needs
destruction, freeing what is imperishable, that some
have even been deluded into calling them desirable
and! necessary medicines.

But — and it is this triat starrtpe the whole process
and makes it possible — nothing of the achieved conquests
of human development is ever lost. Time does not
devour its children. Civilizations, not civilization, are
destroyed. That whicft is unadapted perishes, that
which is adapted is preserved. Trample out Minoan
culture, it shoots up again in thousandfold splendour
in the glory of Greece; crush out Greece, the whole
world is fertilized; give the Roman world up to the
fury of barbariarr hordes, and the outcome is Modern
Europe. We see one race stepping into another's place \ 0 ^
in the van of the march, but nothing of the continuous / ^
inheritance is lost. Every treading down of the seed
results in a harvest richer than the last. Chaldasan,
Egyptian, Greek, Roman, European, bear the torch in
turn ; but the lampadophoria of human progress is
continuous. In the progress of evolution races and
nations count for no more than do individuals. Like
individuals, races, empires, civilizations pass away, but
humanity proceeds onward. The issue is human

28 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

advance as a Whole, and as it moves we see the separate
currents tending more and more to fuse into broader
confluent stream's. For progress is marked not by
forward motion only, but by an ever increasing
expansion, continuously tending towards trie inclusion
of; the entire race within the widening circles of an
organized correlated growth, towards the creation not
of brilliant civilizations and p re -eminent cultures, but of
a greater and higher humanity. i

ni

PROGRESS AS VALUE

To the question, By what title do we dub that evolution
progress? thus assigning an aesthetic, an ethical value
to its procedure, declaring it to be good, to be a
process of betterment, the answer is that such a valuation
is- that of life itself, and that there exists no other
ground or significance for any values. Of all such,
good, bad, high, low, noble, base, life itself, life
alone is the sole criterion and measure. The reali-
zation of life's intrinsic impulses constitutes good,
its failures evil. Whatsoever promotes that realiza-
tion, the efficiency of the expansion of life's control,
I is good, whatsoever frustrates and vitiates it is bad.
That is the only meaning, the only foundation in fact
of those values, of all values. Apart from such
meaning they stand as empty words destitute of all
content.

Life itself, you may say, may be a colossal atrocity,
a deception, a gigantic blunder. When you say so,
kindly observe that you are placing your judgment -
seat at some unknown, undefined, and wholly imaginary
point outside life itself. . And the meaning of the judg-

PROGRESS AS VALUE 29

ment you pass is as utterly vacuous as that of
the one-time thinkers who, crazed with metaphysics,
pretended to sit outside all relations and conditions,
and discoursed of the Absolute and the Unconditioned,
of the thing -in -itself divested of its 'attributes/ You
are; at liberty to repudiate all values, to score the
words good, bad, high, low out of your vocabulary —
though, while you live, you cannot dispense* with using
those values every second of your active existence; but
if you use the words at all you can only validly do
so by reference to the significance which life itself
in its immutable tendencies has assigned to them.
When, as is constantly done, the whole worth and
achievement of human evolution are repudiated, when
a Nordau or a Carpenter denounces civilization as an
artificial disease and advocates a return to ' more
natural conditions,' that attitude Is not so much one of
rebellion against * civilization * as against life .

We are not happy. Modern man is confronted with
difficulties and problems far more distracting and
formidable than ever did or could trouble primitive
man. To us the life-problems of the latter appear
enviably simple; there are for us sources of anguish
and despair, lachrymce re/urn, which to our savage
ancestors were non-existent and would have been quite
incomprehensible. That is precisely because we have
transcended the world of conditions in which they
moved, because the field of our endeavours is transferred
to new and immensely enlarged spheres, where, as all
powers do, they necessarily meet with' new oppositions,
new entangled complexities, obstacles and defeats. That
is the penalty of all progress. Didi we escape it we
should have a certain sign that our growth was arrested,
that in us the forces of life were dying out. .With
the growth and expansion of every capacity is like-
wise developed the capacity ior pain; but in spite
of the price life struggles for the prize. And those
disciples of Rousseau who would persuade us to walk
on all fours would probably be the first hastily to
decline to change places, mentally and materially, with
an idyllic South-Sea cannibal.

30 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

If we take ' happiness ' as the criterion of human
values, why should we stop at the ' natural conditions *
of savage life? On that criterion not only must the
savage be placed above civilized man, but also the
hog above the savage, the amoeba, doubtless, above
the hog. The nonexistent must, to be strictly con-
sistent, be placed above every form of struggling,
aspiring existence. The logical goal of the repudiators
of human progress) is not Tahiti, but Nirvana.

The divine discontent which1 impeaches and condemns
the present, and which is in its rarer creative aspect
the very stimulus of progress, is in its commoner
inveterate form, as| a trait of human lassitude, the la us
temporis acti which tricks out the past in the hues
of its own wistful pessimism, filtering away its unsightli-
ness and preserving only its mellow glamour and
charm. The actual present grips us in every tender
and irritable nerve, has us on edge, is full of care and
annoyance, of tragedy and ugliness. We need at times
all our fortitude to bear with it, to stand up to the
daily strain and pressure; at every step we are ready
to, succumb, to blaspheme life, the world, the present
actual.

3A£as not the Past, the Past that we may with
delightful and refreshing relief contemplate detachedly,
setting and composing our picture of it with tasteful
choice, the Past that leaves us alone, that does not tug
and nag at us, and irritate our susceptible nerves-
was not the Past better? The illusion is embodied in
the very substance of our Promethean clay slaked in
the water of Lethe; it is rooted1 in the deepest nature
of life itself. But even the dimmest critical ray in
the light under which we envisage ptast history should
suffice to dispel it. It is ali very well to imagine
how we should enjoy and appreciate, and be vastly
interested in a Cook's tour through time in a machine
of Mr. H!. G. Wells 'sj invention, provided with all our
present intellectual luggage and knowledge and interests.
But actually to transfer ourselves back, mind and body,
into, any; of those picturesque pleasure resorts of our

PROGRESS AS VALUE 31

historical fancy would be no Cook's tour, but an
experience somewhat fuller of the doubts, uncertainties,
cares and anxieties, and problems, and ignorances of
which we complain than even the troublesome present.
Not, only would the picturesque dirt and squalor of
life put even our tourist's good nature to a severe
strain, but we should find that for us the whole
conditions of life would be positively intolerable.

In what period of the Past shall we seek refuge
from) the harrying present? SAShere betake ourselves
in our search for the world of our choice?

Greece, the Athens of Perikles, the Acropolis, thej
groves of Academe? — As we enter the unpaved' lanes of
the dirty little Levantine town we are blinded with dust.
Our gorge rises as we pick our way through the
scattered refuse, and the smells of frying oil are wafted
to our nostrils from the booths where fly-covered strings
of onions are hanging in the sun. In the square, low
hovels with their dunghill heaped tty the fig!-tree at
the side, we shall find no home, no comfort ^ old
Euripides, who lives like a troglodyte in his cave over
at Salamis, fuming there with disgust at a desolating
worAd, is considerably better housed than most Athenians.
And existence is dreadfully uncertain; we never know
when we may get ourselves into trouble, be exiled or
presented with a cup of hemlock. Those immortal
products of Greece, those ^Eschylean plays, and
Platonic dialogues, that Parthenon, those Pheidian
figures, that thought, that art, that poetry., whose
pacifying serenity seems to breathe into us the
spirit of a divine calm, were all wrought under
conditions differing littlfi from! a Reign of Terror ;
that serenity is the product of Bolshevist condi-
tions. And war is always at the very gates with
its imminent possibilities. 3A£ar was but yesterday at
our own gates, the most horrible war, we have got used
to repeating, in all history. Yes, but we did not con-
template that even Hun schrecklichkeit would go so
far as to •' andrapodize ' London in the event of a
German conquest. That meant putting every man, old
or young, to the sword and selling the women and

32 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

r

children into slavery. That is the Way, in which Melos
and Scione and Histiaea and other Greek towns' were
treated by the Athenians, that is the way in which they
calmly decided under the shadow of the Acropolis to
treat Mytilene. At best all were sold into slavery,
fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters separated and
scattered in the markets of Delos and the brothels of
the Levant. That was the w&y in which those god-
like Greeks of the) Periklean age Were in the habit
of; dealing with a captured Greek town. The Daily
'Mail has not yet suggested that the savage Huns would
behave quite like those fellow-citizens of Euripides and
Plato.

Shall we choose instead for our abode imperial Rome
in the hey-day of that age of the Antonines which has
been pronounced one of the most prosperous and happy,
in the history of mankind? The narrow, winding streets
are not very safe even in broad daylight, thieves and
pickpockets of every type swarm everywhere ; and even
plausible gentlemen with fingers covered with rings
will be filching some trifle while they kiss your hand.
And at night it would be positively foolhardy to venture
out without a goodly train of attendants well armed
with clubs. People disappear spurlo$ ; and bands of
bandits actually take possession of the city whenever
a garrison drives them1 from the Pontine Marshes or
the Vulturnus. Here we have no war, we are enjoying
the great Pax. Romana. But judging from all the
vexatious, inquisitorial regulations and official pryings
into our privacy, from! the taxes on ' luxuries/
andi registrations, from the exorbitant prices of food,
the! downright famines whenever the precarious sea-
transport fails, and the food-cards, it would really seem
as if we had got back again under the regirnen of an
aggravated D.O.R.A. There is no (privacy; and the
secret service, the all-pervading system1 of spies and
informants, of which there are some in every house,
in1 every tavern, even under the best emperors, is a
positive terrorism. It is impossible to speak freely
anywhere. There is a unanimous lamentation on that
score among all authors. "It is impossible tot think

PROGRESS AS VALUE 33

or express oneself freely,0 says Tacitus; " One must
not think of any innovation unless one wishes death,"
says Philostratus. " By showing any confidence to any
one/' says Epictetus, " the unwary fall into the traps
of the soldiery. An officer in mufti sits beside you
and begins to criticize the emperor; you, in order ta
appear quite frank, say what you think, and the result
is that you find yourself cast in prison and in irons. "-

Need we try the Dark Ages? \\te shall have occasion
to see later what to think of them. Or shall we cast
our lot in resurrecting Europe, in the Florence of Dante,
say? Dante does not speak well of it, on the whole
distinctly does not recommend it. The Rome, the Paris
of the Renaissance, of Cellini ; Tudor London when
the shadow of the Tower and of the block lay over
the life of every great one, and that of the gallows
across that of every poor, appear equally to be places
to be avoided.

.We come to the brink of the Modern World, to the
seventeenth century. Let us at once seek out the very
centre of the new lights, the court of the Roi Soleil,
which sets the tone of refinement and' splendour to the
whole world. The drains, you must excuse, are out
of order, and the gentlemen about here suffer from1
extensive attentions from ttyeir apothecaries; the King,
too, and the fine ladies of the Court are troubled with
pyorrhoea, so that their breath is somewhat offensive ;;
and as the ladies do not shave their heads like the
men — well, one gets surprises. People eat with their
fingers ; arid the hat of Monsieur, which he wears at
table, has got somewhat greasy at the brim from much'
saluting. But you are getting impatient : these are
mere paltry details . We are not concerned with them ;
it is freedom, intellectual liberty, good taste, the
stimulus of a beautiful life and of high ideals which
we seek. Then, I think, we have come altogether
to the wrong place. What there is of free intellect is
mostly to be found in the prisons of an omnipotent
Ignorance and Intolerance, or is burning its manuscripts
for fear of it, or is hiding in Holland.

Our choice is getting limited. There is not, I fear,

3

34 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

a single epoch' which* on closer acquaintance will not
jar upon our susceptibilities and fill us with disgust
and indignation, which, in fact, we of to-day could make
shift to endure at all* Nay, how rriany of us would1
consent to step back even into that prim1 mid -Victorian
world that lies almost within our memories?

The cheap scoffs levelled at * progress ' and
* civilization ' — words vulgarized enough, it is true,
and debased by the hawking eloquence of press and
politics, — scorning them as flimsy veneers, external and
superficial accretions obduced over a fixed and unre-
deemable thing termed ' human nature/ would seem
at the present moment to be barbed with hundredfold
irony amid the paroxysm of all the forces of destruction,
and the wreck and jeopardy of a world.

tWherefore was that martyrdom accepted? wherefore
was the fight waged? [Wjas it not precisely in defence
ofj the heirloom of human progress and in the hope
of a better world? Those forces of Bedlam have,
together with a thousand other abuses and diseases,
the cursed relics of the Past, existed, simmered, and
fermented in our imperfectly realized humanity long
before their material eruption. It is in one of the
great climacteric crises of human evolution that we are
living ; a crisis none the less a part of the process of
upward growth because it is in the utmost violence of
its destructive aspect, and with the most distracting
and imperative sternness of its Sphynx riddles that it
confronts us.

And now more urgently than ever does it behove
us to understand to the utmost of our, capacity
the nature of that evolution,. .^hP5je__law|s__ shape . the
destinies of the human worlcL In that awful and

process, amTd tragedies and horrors unspeak-
able, miseries untold, mire, sordidness, squalor, baseness
unavowable, we see man — for all his faults and follies-
making himself out of a brute into a demi-god. The
obvious question thrusts itself upon us — How did he
do it?

CHAPTER II

INTERPRETATIONS OF HISTORY

I

ENDOGENOUS THEORIES. MIND, RACE

THE answer to that question — well-nigh the most
momentous to which thought can apply itself — is exceed-
ingly simple, and so obvious that no profound pene-
tration is needed to discover it. Yet, far from being a
glaring and familiar truism, it has hardly even been
definitely formulated with unequivocal clearness ; the
plain and direct answer appears, on the contrary, to
have been studiously evaded ; and we have, in its stead,
an array of profound, elaborate,, and circuitous explana-
tions, a literature of theories 'and philosophies of history
which have thoroughly succeeded in tangling and be-
fogging the issue. There is probably no inquiry, the
ultimate of metaphysics not excepted, where thought has
shown so pathetically ineffectual and feeble.

The earlier attempts to view the mighty maze
as not without a plan, when not merely identi^
fying it with a pre-established providential scheme,
as in the doctrine of Augustine and its later
versions in Bossuet and Schlegel, were at one in
viewing it as the detached unfolding of the mind of
man, or of some aspect thereof, in segregated inde-
pendence from the encompassing universe. In seeking
a cause whereby a uniform interpretation might be placed
upon events, they did not go beyond the mind itself,
wholly ignoring the other term of the relation, the environ-
ing world of conditions amid which humanity is called
upon to react. Those idealistic conceptions, variously
seasoned with those of the Providential Scheme and of
the Prussian State, have floated down the rarefied
atmosphere of German philosophy from Kant, Lessing,

35

36 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

and Schelling, to the transcendental unfolding of the
Hegelian ' Idea ' in the mistlands of the Unconditioned.
That calm disregard of the conditioning media of
human development has its up-to-date counterpart— like-
wise of Germanic provenance— in the exaltation of the
old barbaric conqueror's pride of ' race,' conceived as
an endowment of immutable stability, as the supreme
determinant in human history. Ostentatiously arrayed
in terminology obtrusively scientific, armed, with cephalic
indices, and cross-sections of hair, with Mendelian
characters, and ' statistics of genius per square mile,'
and supported with heavy artillery by the allied deifica-
tion of ' heredity ' to the exclusion of environment by
Weismannic biology, the apostle of race proceeds to
demonstrate that everything of value and every notable
personality in the world have been the product of the
particular race that claims his allegiance — Teutonic,
Mediterranean, Nordic, as the case may be ; that the
Greeks, that Jesus, that Dante were Gertnans ; or that
the Vikings were Italians-; that civilization has proceeded
from north to south, or from south to north, is the
result of purity of race, or of cross-fertilization of races.
" Race is everything," '* the search is at an end, here
lie the grand causes." l It is the key to the inters
pretation of every historical fact. The '- quarrels between
patrician and plebeian," for instance, obviously '* arose
from the existence in Rome, side by side, of two distinct
and clashing races ",; " The splendid cbnquistadores of
the New Wprld," one is interested to hear, " w*ere of
Nordic type, but their pure stock did not long survive
their new surroundings, and to-day they have vanished
utterly. After considering well these facts we shall not
have to search further for jhe causes of the collapse
of Spain. "a Clearly that would be quite superfluous.
Flattering as it is to patriotic pride, the doctrine
above all recommends itself by its labour-saving economy,
which enables us to account for Greece by ' Greek
genius/ for Rome by ' Roman ditto,' for England by,
' the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race/ for monotheism

1 Taine, Hist, of English Literature.

* Madison Grant, The Passing oj the Great Race, pp. 139 and 174.

GEOGRAPHY 37

by the ' Semitic genius for religion/ in the same funda-
mental manner as Moliere's doctor elucidated the
' dormitive virtue ' of opium.

' Race * or ' Heredity ' is but the summation of
ancestral reactions to past environments, and is only stable
and persistent under altered conditions— as the incon-
venient facts brushed aside by its protagonists indicate
—in proportion to the depth of the original impressions,
to the length of time during which they have operated,
and to the relative force and duration of the new influences
which tend to modify them. As everywhere else in the
organic world, races separated from others in their de-
velopment have become differentiated and have acquired
distinct characters both physical and mental. But, owing
to the peculiar nature of the products of human evolution
and of the manner of their transmission, the effects of a
very partial segregation on the leading stocks of man-
kind are not comparable in magnitudje or stability to
those of segregation in the animal world.

II

EXOGENOUS THEORIES. GEOGRAPHICAL AND
ECONOMIC DETERMINISM

A real sequence of cause and effect first becomes
apprehensible when attention, instead of being centred
on the mind and the race, is directed to the
environment in relation to which' they react and
develop. Buckle pointed out the relation between
a people's history and the geographical conditions of
its homeland. While some of his illustrations were of
Lamarckian crudity, he was, on the other hand, too
moderate in his claims ; for he confined that influence to
the earlier stages of development. The direct and para-
mount relation between the geography of Greece, of

38 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

Egypt, of Holland is obvious Sat a glance ; the like
holds good of every country and is by no means con-
fined to any one period of growth. Not only is the
political development of England and of its free in-
stitutions, as was long ago pointed out by the old Wihig
theorists, the direct effect, not of any racial characteristic,
but of England's insular position, which deprived central-
ized power of the pretext for permanent armaments and
supremacy ; but almost every peculiarity of English
character is likewise traceable to the consequences of
that circumstance. History, as the followers of Ratzel
and Demolins have with pardonable exaggeration de-
clared, is a function of geography.

But the determining action of the environment is much
more intimate, pervasive, and far-reaching than that
exercised on human relations by general geographical
conditions. The life of man depends in the last resort
upon his bread and butter, and is conditioned by the
way he obtains it. The character of a community, and
the course of its development, must needs vary in
like manner, according as it depends for its susten-
ance upon agriculture, or commerce, or war. But not
only is the whole mode of life of a society thus deter-
mined by the source of its sustenance : a new order
of factors is set up by the various divisions of labour
entailed in obtaining it. Wealth and power tend to
accumulate in the hands of certain classes, and conflict-
ing sets of interests are thus established. That new
human environment in turn creates an order of influences
which moulds the entire order of society. And those
very features of the mental world, the types of those
ideas and ideals, fancifully supposed by metaphysical
theorists to rule the whole process, and to soar far
above sordid material conditions, are themselves subject
to the determining influence of those conditions. The
conceptions, the notions, the prejudices, the standards
of judgment and of conduct, the literature, the philosophy,
the morality of the community, are shaped and coloured
by the nature of the established ruling interests which the
material conditions have determined.

ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 39

Those principles, first definitely formulated by Marx
and Engels, by recognizing in the manifold conditions
of the environment the true determinant of differentiation,
mark the advent of a scientific method of historical
interpretation. The materialistic or economic theory of
history has been termed by its admirers one of the
greatest discoveries of the nineteenth century ; and, what
is much more significant, its influence, in spite of its overt
and reckless defiance of the tenderest susceptibilities of
conventional sentiment and of the Iwhole order of thought
dearest to academic decorum, has rapidly made itself
felt in all recent historical studies. It is nearly every- '
where recognized that the first indispensable foundation
to the clear understanding of any given epoch or people,
is not its metaphysical conceptions, or even its political
situation, but its economic conditions. \ '

But in regard to the particular question which we were
asking — By what means has human progress been
effected? or, what comes to the same thing, What have
been the causes of progressive development? the economic ;
theory of history labours under a serious disadvantage :
it is entirely irrelevant . It does not supply any explana-
tion of the fact of progress. There is no perceptible or
intelligible reason why change in the conditions of pro-
duction and distribution should result in continuous
advance. Brilliant as is the light which the principle \
has shed upon the complex facts of history, it affords
no insight into the greatest and most fundamental fact of
all. So far as I know the exponents of the theory
lay no claim to supplying an explanation of continuous
progress. Nay, the various changes which they point
out as being direct effects of altered economic conditions,
the subverting of primitive communistic relations, the
rise of various forms of class power, the development
of private property, the shaping of political, intellectual,
and moral standards and conceptions in accordance with
dominating interests, are in every case changes which they,
deplore. So far as any relation is manifested between
the complex development of economic conditions and
the great fact of human progress, the former would
appear to play the part of an obstacle rather than that

40 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

/

of a means and efficient cause. Progress appears to
have taken place in spite of, rather than as a conse-
quence of them.

Ill
CAUSATION IN PROGRESSIVE PROCESSES

In seeking the cause of that progressive character
of development it is necessary to clear our ground by
a more definite understanding of what, in this connection,
we are to consider as a cause. The question of causation
in human evolution, and in all evolutionary processes,
is beset with the confusion which attaches to that terrible
word ' cause,' to the notion of ' chance,' and to the brain -
whirling abysses which they set yawning before the mind.

Touching the nature of causation in general the upshot
of the matter is that we do not know at all the nexus
between a cause and its effect : we only view the
sequence and its constancy. That there is a nexus,
we have, from that constancy of sequence, good grounds
for surmising ; and if we knew its nature we should be
in possession of the inmost secret of the universe.

There is nothing so very abstruse about the notion
of * chance,' if we take tjie trouble to think clearly.

It is constantly said and accepted as pure wisdom
that when we speak of * chance ' we are merely using1
the term as an expression of our ignorance of the true
cause of a sequence of events. That is absolutely false.
When we speak of a series of events as determined
by chance, in contrast with a more specific determina-
tion, we have a perfectly definite and correct distinction
in our minds. We mean that among the multitude of
circumstances which condition the occurrence of the
chance event, none bears a constant relation to the result.

CAUSATION 41

If we spin a -coin, there is not among the numerous play
of forces which condition the result— head or tail — any one
condition, or set of conditions, so related to the result
' head,1 or to the result * tail,' that it will constantly tend
to bring about the one rather than the other. There is
no constant and necessary nexus, no indissoluble con-
nection of cause and effect between any of the determining
conditions and one result rather than the other; any
one of those conditions may, according to its combination
with other circumstances, turn the scale in favour of heads,
or in favour of tails indifferently. The relation between
each one of the operating causes and the given result
is not direct and indissoluble, but absolutely indifferent.
So much so that if the coin-spinning be repeated long
enough, those indifferent conditions will neutralize and
cancel one another, so that the result ' head ' will come
about as often as the result 'tail.'

But if we toss the coin many times and the result
turns out to be always the same, we at once begin to
have misgivings, and to entertain a suspicion that the
conditions are not purely those of * chance.* If we
go on repeating the experiment a great number of times,
and the coin persists in showing * heads/ our suspicion
gradually becomes converted into a conviction that there
is some cause at work which does not come under our
notion of chance, a cause which is directly related to
the constant result. If on examination we discover the
coin to be loaded, we shall no longer speak of the
effect as due to chance. There is a direct constant con-
nection between the loading of the coin and the result,
whereas there is no such direct connection between any
of the other circumstances and that result. And the
presence of that directly related cause determines the
constant tendency throughout the series. Whenever a
series of phenomena exhibits a constant tendency there
must exist a constant cause directly related to that
tendency, a cause which will always act in the direction
of the particular result, whatever be the influence of other ,
conditions. Indifferent conditions, conditions which are
not constant, and which bear no direct relation to a given
result, which may indifferently bring about that, or any

42 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

other, according to th'e manner in which they are
combined, Cannot give rise to a constant tendency ;
they can only, and must in the long run, neutralize one
another. They condition the result, but cannot constantly
determine it ; they will at one time favour it, at other
times oppose it. The constant and direct factor may
be assisted or checked by those environing conditions,
may avail itself of them, or be pitted against them,
but the determinate and constant tendency depends upon
the determinate and constant factor, not on indifferent
conditions.

Every river tends to the sea ; the nature of the
country will modify the nature of its course ; in one
place it will foam through a narrow, eroded gorge, in
another wind through a low valley, here spread itself
out over a wide plain, there leap hurtling over a granite
ledge ; the manner of its course is conditioned by a
multitude of circumstances, but neither hills, nor plains,
or granitic; outcrops determine the invariable gravita-
tional tendency to the sea.

Every process of evolution is a series of phenomena
in which there is a constant tendency. Like every other
series of phenomena it is conditioned by innumerable
circumstances. They all affect the process. But the
cause of the evolutionary character of the series is
the cause of its constant tendency. All others are but
conditioning causes amid Which the process operates.
Profoundly as they may affect it, they are not causes but
conditions. The persistent confusion of nearly all the
theories of human evolution has been to ignore all
distinction between the two orders of factors.

No possible combination of indeterminate and in-
different circumstances, capable of acting this way or
that way, bearing no constant and direct relation to a
given issue, can determine a continuous series of events
having a constant tendency, a continuous motion, a
growth, an age-long progress, an evolution.

We have, it is true, in the theory of natural selection
a method which is held by an influential school of
biologists to afford a complete explanation of evolution
iri the organic world ; and which claims to explain a pro-

CAUSATION 43

cess of continuous progress by the operation of an ^infinity
of indifferent conditions. But, as is well known^ that
claim is open to grave dispute. Fortunately, it is quite
needless for us to enter upon the thorny ground of
that controversy. Most advocates of the theory are ready
to admit that it may require considerable modification
in its application to the human race. That it does
apply to a certain extent there can be no doubt : the
most progressive races occupy the van of human pro-
gress. But that somewhat tautological verity leaves open
the inquiry as to the sources of that pre-eminence and
progress. Whether we adopt or reject the theory of
natural selection makes, however, not the slightest
difference to the issue under consideration. If we adopt
it we shall be merely called upon to restate that issue
in the terminology of the theory : What are those
characters (variations) of human beings which constitute
an advantage to be selected by its success? It is clear
that the introduction of the formula of natural selection
is here a gratuitous superfluity, for it is precisely to
the nature of those qualities, of those means through which
man has achieved his evolution that our question refers.
The causes of the process of human evolution are
the same as those of all living evolution. Whether
those be an impulse to progressive development, to the
extension of the powers of life, innate in its very con-
stirutiona or the necessarily cumulative effect of successive
adaptations to its conditions, or the selective operation
of those conditions on successive adaptive variations, it
is fortunately immaterial for our purpose to discuss—
if indeed those be anything more than different ways of
viewing and expressing the same fact. The problem
in the present case narrows itself down to a recognition
of the means employed! in human progress to extend
the powers of adaptive control over the conditions
of life. It is in the operation of those means
alone that any conjectural impulse or any favour-
able variation is manifested ; it is thqas means and
methods employed by the organism itself which con-
stitute the cause of the progressive character of the
process,

44 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

As in the idealistic and in the racial theories we
must then seek for the progressive factor in man him-
self. No geographical or economic determination can
supply that constancy of direction. For they are but
conditions of the process, and, whatever fundamental
influence they, may exercise upon its course, they are
from the nature of their action incapable of imparting
to it a progressive character. But, at the same time,
no power in man can operate or develop irrespectively
of those and all other encompassing conditions. Indeed,
those powers are nought else than powers to act upon,
and in relation to them. Like every manifestation of
life, they have no existence but as reactions of which
the reacting organism is but one term ; the other term
is represented by -the infinite complexity of the ambient
medium to which it is life's necessity to adapt itself,
and which it is its ambition to control.

Ill

RATIONAL THOUGHT, ITS ORIGIN AND
FUNCTION

I

MAN'S ADAPTIVE VARIATION

IT is, I think, fairly obvious that we shall obtain an
important cue to the means by which human progress
has been effected, if we turn in the first place to the
antecedent question : By what means did mankind come
into existence at all? By virtue of what qualities did
the incipient and potential human race become differ-
entiated from its animal progenitors, emerge distinctly
above its competitors, establish itself successfully in the
world, and obtain a predominance and mastery over
its environment unparalleled in all previous evolution?
There is, to say the least, a strong presumption that the
same qualities which in the first instance raised man
above other animals, placed himnaporT an incomparable
level, made him man, continued to operate in the same
direction and with the same success ; that the causes
which determined his initial victory were closely related
to his subsequent development.

We are, it is true, referring to an event about which
we possess no direct information. Yet the problem is
a simple one ; for the characters and qualities which'
would confer on the most primitive and emergent human
race such a distinct advantage over its animal com-
petitors, are so manifest as to leave little .room for
doubt or difference of opinion.

Progress in organic evolution has consisted in in-
creased power to deal with the environment by means
of greater efficiency in the organs of sensation and of
action. Sensation serves to direct the operation of the
means of action, and thus extends immensely their

45

46 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

scope and efficiency. The power of claw and fang,
of limb and wing, is dependent upon the keenness of
eye and ear. By the perfecting of those powers of
control over the environment, the means of maintaining
life, of providing for its support, of protecting it
from adverse agencies, of outdistancing rivals in
the competition for existence, have been multiplied.
The means which primitive brute -man developed to that
end proved incomparably the most efficient ever em-
ployed in the animal world. They consisted in a

I/particular extension of the functions of sensation. For
most of the organs of sensation, as a close and detailed
examination would show, depend for their successful
operation upon the power of recalling past impressions,
and of applying past experiences to present situations -j
thus interpreting the significance of the latter in .reference
to the immediate future. Sight, for instance, derives
its utility from the fact that it supplies information as
to what would be the sensations yielded by closer contact
with the remote object perceived by the eye. This
can only be done by the association of an impression
of sight with the memory of a past experience : the
sight of a threatening enemy or of an attractive victual,
informs the seeing animal by recalling past experiences
of danger or of gratification associated with similar
sensations from the eye. The same is true of all sen-
sations at a distance. By an extension of the same
process through more elaborate nervous interconnections,
the procedure can be carried further. Multitudes of
diverse impressions can be gathered together and
variously combined, the record of past experience can
be perfected and generalized ; and this greatly elaborated
past experience can be more efficiently brought to bear
upon the impressions of present circumstances, giving
them an extended significance. Thus the bearing of
the present upon either the immediate or more remote
interests of the individual acquire a vastly wider scope .$
and his efficiency in dealing to his advantage with his
environment is correspondingly raised and extended, his

. powers indefinitely multiplied and increased. That pro-

I cess is that of rational thought . *'

RATIONAL THOUGHT 47

I use the term * rational thought ' in preference to
' reason,' because the latter is too closely associated
in the popular mind with the old fallacious conception
of a ' faculty/ a sort of special organ having an isolated
existence, and endowed with mysterious powers peculiar
to itself. In accordance with that fantastic psychology,
people currently speak of ' using their reason ' or of
not using it, of using their feelings, their will, or their
imagination instead of their reason. Rationality is not-r'
an organ, but a quality, a character of thought. In
the circuit between experience and action, feeling and
reaction, there is always interposed in man a process
of mental digestion in which feeling and experience
are chewed and transformed into the stuff whence action
is made, into the supposition, the belief, the conviction
upon which action proceeds. That intermediary process
is always present to a greater or lesser extent : it
constitutes thought. And that thought is in its mode
of operation, in its method, rational to a greater or
less extent. It is never entirely irrational; because its
very function, the purpose which constitutes the origin
of its existence, is to act rationally. But that function
is commonly performed imperfectly — the thought is not
adequately rational. A man does not use any other
faculty ' instead of ' his reason : he uses his brain -
cells more or less rationally.

The conditions of the efficient operation of that power
are consistency with past and present experience and
with itself. That is, it must possess adequate and
adequately correct experience, be faithful to it, and not
contradict itself in drawing inferences from it. The
reason why such a process is efficient in drawing from
the past and the present conclusions as to the future
(or from the known to the unknown), and in therefore
empowering the individual to adapt his action to those
present and future conditions, is that the course of
nature is uniform, that similar conditions are followed
by corresponding sequels, that all things and appear-
ances in the world are rigidly and accurately inter-
connected, so that there is always' a definite and constant
relation between any one aspect and all others.

48 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

by the way, is but another way of saying that all things
are bound up in one, that the world in its infinite variety
is one great unity. If that were otherwise, if the world
were incongruous, and lawless, if its parts were inde-
pendent entities which could take the bit in their teeth',
and act without reference to one another, this way to-
day, and that way to-morrow, if the unconditioned, the
arbitrary could break through the course of events,
rational thought would be entirely useless. It would
never have received from the external environment any
stimulus to develop at all ; it would never have been
' selected ' ; it would never have come into existence.
Rational thought is an adaptation of the organism to
the most general and fundamental character of man's
external environment .

The tendency towards such an adaptation existed in
the animal world long; before man. It rests, as we
have just noted, upon the same organic principle as
the higher forms of sensation. But its tap-root sinks
much deeper, in the method of all animal behaviour
and reaction from its very dawn, in the reaction of
all life. That method is that of Trial and Error. You
have seen some foraging beetle with its burden come
suddenly upon an unexpected obstacle, repeatedly en-
deavour to surmount it, seek a passage first in one
direction, then in another, explore half the points of
the compass, and after long minutes of persevering and
fruitless attempts, hit at last upon some path through
or round the obstacle. That is the universal tactical
principle of all vital action. Between the method of
trial and error and that of rational thought there is
no line of demarcation ; the one merges into the other.
Trial and error is a perfectly sound rational process •>
it arrives by a somewhat lengthy and laborious pro-
cedure at a result which ' works/ which fits in with1
the facts. The rejection by the amoeba, by the beast,
of a line of action which has proved inefficient, fruitless,
or dangerous, is the exclusion of an exploded opinion,
and is exactly similar to that of critical thought, which
narrows down its choice by the exclusion of a view
which is found to be untenable. Rational thought is

RATIONAL THOUGHT 49

but a labour-saving, perfected method of obtaining the
same correspondence with' facts; just as algebraical or
differential calculation is a labour-saving development
of the process of reasoning. The primitive and universal
method of trial and error passed by slow degrees into
the more perfect one of rational thought, which is quite
commonly used by the higher animals. The entire class
of mammals owes, indeed, its evolutionary success, as
does man, to brain development. That develop-
ment first reached in the anthropoid race a degree
capable of reacting through its effects and activities
upon its own growth, and was thus stimulated to an
expansion advancing in geometrical progression.

The brute -man first bethought himself of using his
brain as a handle to his tools and weapons. It was
that power, that adaptation, it was solely the exercise
of rational thought which gave him his paramount
victory. That and nothing else. He possessed no other
qualification to supremacy over other mammals, no other
advantage commensurate with his achievements. The
one or two distinctive anatomical peculiarities of the
human animal are, by comparison, trifling. Moreover,
though until lately it was an interesting subject pf
anthropological speculation whether the erect attitude
has preceded and assisted brain -development, or vice
versa ; the recent great extensions of our knowledge
of human ancestry have virtually settled that ques-
tion. Brain -development was the first and only pre-
dominant character of differentiation ; and the erect
attitude, and consequent development of the hand,
followed only much later, in correlation with the effects
arising out of the primary character. The very bodily
form of man is an effect of the power of rational
thought .

Exclusively through that power which superseded all
other tools, organic contrivances, and weapons, which
rendered obsolete all other methods of supremacy
hitherto produced by organic evolution, he became man.
The lordship of the earth was his, and what later came
to appear as an impassable gulf between him and all
other creatures was established. Whatever other

4

50 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

characters may be mentioned as peculiar to, and
distinctive of man at the present day, such' as various
developments of feeling, emotion, sentiment, moral sense,
social organization, it is clearly not through any of those
that the differentiation of the human race from its animal
progenitors was effected. The incipient anthropoid race
did not establish itself through a higher morality, or
refinement of feeling, or poetical imagination, or sublime
ideals, or economic arrangements. Those characters
would obviously have been absolutely useless in the
circumstances. And moreover they did not exist ; they
are subsequent developments, they owe the possibility
of their existence to the position established by the
power of rational thought. Without human rational
thought, no human morality, no human religious senti-
ments, no ideals, no high aspirations, no social organi-
zations or obligations. Rational thought had to make
man first, had to open the way for all subsequent
developments and possibilities.

II

RATIONAL THOUGHT AS MEANS OF PROGRESS

That being the means by which the human race has
achieved the first transcendent evolutionary victory .to
which it owes its existence — and the fact is hardly open
to dispute — there is clearly a considerable a priori pre-
sumption that the same power has also been concerned
in its subsequent evolution. That original factor has
in its proved efficiency in the first stages a prior claim
to be regarded, before any other explanation is put
forward, as not inadequate to account also for the
subsequent phases of the same process. There is no

RATIONAL THOUGHT 51

indication that any radical change of method has taken

place at any stage of that process, that the original

instrument of success became later superseded by others.

/ Rational thought was the sole efficient means of human

; emergence out of animality ; may it not also have

been the sole efficient means" of the whole growth which!

it originally rendered possible?

That is the present writer's view. Rationality of
thought has, I believe, been from first to last the means
and efficient cause of the evolution of the human race.
It has not been merely one of several factors, or even
the most important among them, but strictly and without
qualification the sole actual instrument of human pro-
gress in whatever aspect it be considered.

Nothing is more complex than the medium in which
the growth of humanity has taken place ; for it includes
not only the physical universe, the ' material necessities
of life, but also the even vaster and more varied world
of the human mind and of human relations ; passions
and appetites, emotions and interests, prejudices and
aspirations, social systems and institutions, thoughts,
doctrines, traditions, and the interplay, conflicts, and
infinite permutations of all those factors. They have
each and all impressed their influence variously and
deeply upon the form and course of human evolution ;
the process has been shaped, moulded, coloured, given
its form and features by those and a thousand other
elements and factors, physical, physiological, economical,
sentimental. But its actual forward development, its
progressive character is exclusively the effect of that
particular instrument of adaptation by which the human
race has been differentiated.

. All other factors have been, not means or efficient
causes of the process of progress, but conditions. They
have promoted progress or impeded it, sped it or retarded
it, according as they have acted favourably or unfavour-
ably upon the operation and development of rational
thought. In no case is their relation to the fact of
progress continuous and invariable ; their influence may
be at one time favourable and at another time unfavour-
able. Thus political freedom is of all conditions one

52 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

of the most favourable to human development ; yet
without autocracy and despotism civilization could not
have arisen at all ; it has had its birth in absolute
power, has constantly been promoted by autocratic and
aristocratic despotism, and large masses of mankind
by remaining in a state of tribal freedom have been
irremediably condemned to arrested growth. Military

\ power exercises in general a profoundly pernicious influ-

j ence on development, yet wars of pure aggression and

conquest have been among the most potent and

momentous factors which have assisted human progress.

j Division of labour is one of the most fertile sources
of efficiency, but it has also been the means of bringing
about oppression and the most hopeless stagnation.
There are few influences which have been more fatal
to intellectual advance and human development than

I theological dogmatism, yet it has at times exercised
important beneficent influences, has proved a stimulus
through its challenges, has assisted progress by estab-
lishing a common bond and 'medium of thought. Even
intellectual culture itself, though it might loosely be
regarded as coextensive with rational 'development, may,
if disdainful of it, be a check to progress instead of
a means and manifestation of it. Thus it is that the
task of advocacy is so smooth, that the advocatus diaboli
is enabled to make out an excellent case for every
abomination, to exhibit to bewildered publics the in-
valuable benefits of despotism and slavery, the almost
indispensable advantages of murder, the redemption of
the world by lies, the beneficent effects of fraud, and the
incalculable value of disease. Deductions are constantly
drawn from an apparent similarity of conditions^, political,
economic, social, in situations where history, it is
thought, repeats itself, while those conditions may, as
a matter of fact, have totally different results according
to the stage of human evolution in which they operate.
Although no one perhaps will directly demur to the
statement, when put in so many words, that man is
first and foremost homo sapiens, that all his powers
are dependent upon the rationality with which he
employs them, and that he succeeds or fails according

THOUGHT ADAPTIVE 53

as he thinks and acts rationally or irrationally, yet
many are quite prepared to uphold views directly im-
plying an entirely different estimate of the sources of
human power ; and there is a deeply roote'd and wide-
spread disposition to disparage rational thought, and
exalt at its expense other supposed powers and methods
as the talismans of progress arid true human develop-
ment.

Ill
ADAPTIVE CHARACTER

Rational thought is man's means of adaptation. -
The world which he has made is the outthrow of his
mind. The stones of his cities and the steel of his
engines are made of thoughts ; they are moved, like
his battalions of industry and of war, like the pulses
of his life, by his ideas. That life, that world must,
like every form and manifestation of life, be adapted
to the conditions which the unbending nature of things,
the unrepealed facts of the universe impose. That is
the fundamental condition of their existence, as of all
existence, of their development, as of all development.
The extent to which man can exercise his powers,
control life to his will and purpose, depends upon the
measure in which he conforms to existing facts. Hence
it depends in the last resort upon the accuracy of his
perception of them. He will fail in the measure that
that perception is false, succeed in the measure that
it is true. Progress depends upon truth.

That adaptation is the function and utility of rational
thought. Rationality of thought simply means the

54 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

conformity of human ideas and thought to the actual
relation of man to his environment. Greater accuracy
in the operation of that function means greater adapta-
tion. The aim man has in view in using a rational
process is precisely to secure that correspondence between;
his thoughts and the actual relation and' sequence of
events. Rational thought developed by virtue of that
correspondence, and man uses the method because his
experience teaches him that that correspondence can
thus be attained.

It would' be ingenuous to suppose that human
evolution has been effected by the purposive applica-
tion of rational thought to progressive ends. The
actual process is by no means so simlple. To conceive
it thus, as a gradual growth of rational thought engaged
in building the human world, is butj a form of the old
fallacy which saw in human history the beatific vision
of: an unfolding mind proceeding! in unconditioned
independence of the hard exigencies of an, untractable
universe.

Man has only been in an infinitesimal measure
rational. He has ' muddled through ' in all sorts of
haphazard ways. He has often achieved' adaptation and
progress quite irrationally. Casual judgment and
thoughtless conduct may be in harmony with fact;
intentionally rational thought may fail from1 a thousand
sources of error. But even the fortuitous success, in
so far as it is adaptive, must be rationally valid.
Wihether as the fruit of a deliberately rational process
of thought, or because, howsoever arising, a course of
action, a view or idea, does in fact correspond to external
laws and events, it is, in two somewhat different senses,
rational; in the one case with reference to the intention,
in the other with reference to the result.

The primordial biological method of trial and error
has continued to operate in human evolution as through-
out the evolution of life. It is the original horse-sense
of living things. It is the method of experience; you
learn by your mistakes, you fail and try again; your
later attempts profit by the lessons of previous disasters,
until, by a process of exhaustion and by following up

THOUGHT ADAPTIVE 55

the clues afforded by unsuccessful, or partially successful
attempts, success is at last achieved.

The method of trial and error is a perfectly valid
and legitimate one; it works. But it is costly and
wasteful. It is cheaper to be wise, if we can, before the
event than after it. Rational thought is the human im-,
provement on the biological method of trial and error ;
a perfected, economical, immensely more effectual form
of it. If one course of action proves successful and
another fails there is a reason for it. If sufficient
knowledge had been available, if sufficient trouble had
been taken, it would have been possible to know
beforehand which was the rational and which the
irrational course. The successful result is that to which
efficient thought would have led, had it been applied.
With the growth of rationality, the development of
experience, of available data, and of the habit of rational
thought, its powers contribute more and more to the
results of the method of trial and' error, shorten and
facilitate and economize its waste in an increasing
degree. The sphere of that method becomes narrowed,
that of rational thought extended. The more efficient
method of adaptation tends constantly to prevail.

Every idea, every new point of view, every new
procedure arises, recommends itself, proves vital and
gains influence, is ' selected/ by virtue o'f the fact
that it is more rational, that is, better adapted, more
in harmony with facts and experience, more consistent,
more efficient than that which it seeks to supplant.
In a well-known passage Mill impugns the dictum that
truth always triumphs ; but his argument from instances
of successfully suppressed truth is practically nullified
by the qualifying admission that, although what is true
may be put down by opposition and persecution once,
twice or many times, it comes forward again and again
until it ultimately triumphs. It arises again and again
precisely because the process of rational thought is
the only constantly operating factor of growth in human-
affairs, and the positions to which that process leads
must consequently be of necessity reached again, no
matter how often they have been abandoned. In point

56 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

of fact rational development is invariably violently
resisted, and very generally put down and defeated,
for the simpile reason that it is always opposed, to the
established view's and apparent interests of the majority.
But; it is at the same time inevitably predestined' to
prevail. Truth is at once sure of defeat and of ultimate
victory.

IV
PROGRESSIVE CHARACTER

Rational thought is the only progressive element in
the human world. Unlike all other alleged factors of
human evolution, the operation of rational thought
contains the inherent principles of continuous develop-
ment. ;W.hile there is no perceivable reason why change
of any kind, whether of economic, geographical, or
ethnical conditions, 'should result in such' a phenomenon
as constant progress, rational thought necessarily
involves progress. Every advance accomplished lays
down at the same time the basis of a further and greater
advance !by extending the foundations of experience and!
knowledge. The results of rational thought multiply in
geometrical progression.

But every rational process of thought is above all
essentially progressive in its operation because it can
never stop short of its ultirnate logical consequences.
A new 'idea or principle never proceeds at once to
its ultimate conclusion, it is always only in part rational;
it is more rational than its predecessors, but still
imperfectly adapted, timid, inconsistent, only to a small
degree emancipated from those traditional errors and
abuses which it opposes . Yet once it has arisen, nothing

THOUGHT PROGRESSIVE 57

is more inevitable than that it shall proceed to its last
consequences. It is a logical process, and logic cannot
stop halfway. That development may be wholly un-
foreseen at the origin of the process; the most direct
and obvious implications of the new principle may not
only be entirely foreign to the thought of those who
advance it, but wholly abhorrent to them. The stimulus
to which they react proceeds usually from some par-
ticular aspect, or from some grossly prominent excess
of existing irrationality ; and apart from that aspect,
the innovators are as much under the spell and influence
of the traditional order of ideas as are their opponents;
their attitude towards the most obvious logical con-
sequences of the principle Which they champion,- is
exactly the same as that of their opponents towards the
new principle itself. The reformers, the revolutionaries,
the innovators, the heretics, the radicals, the iconoclasts of
former days, would stand aghast before the consequences
of their own work, and would occupy to-day the ranks
of the most determined opponents of the fruits of those
very principles, which they devoted their energies and
their lives to establish. Yet nothing can arrest the
process. As the consequences follow inevitably in the
order of logical thought, so likewise do they follow
inevitably in the order of human development. The?
notions of compromise, moderation, the avoidance of
extremes and excesses, are entirely irrelevant and
meaningless in the rational process. Such a process
can only be at fault through defect, never through
excess of rationality. A qualified and incomplete
application of rational principles can only be provisional ;
from the moment that the principle is recognized the
ultimate recognition of its most remote implications is
assured, even though the deduction may take centuries
to take effect. It is impossible to adopt a rational
principle with the proviso — Thus far shalt thou go
and no further.

.We constantly see a rational principle accepted,
probably after much initial opposition, recognized at
last and embraced, it may be, with sincere enthusiasm
by a large section of those who at first distrusted it;

58 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

but the same opposition with which they greeted it
is now directed with equal fierceness against its
immediate consequences. A party always exists which
thinks to establish a comfortable and permanent resting-
place in the midst of the advancing tide; while they
accept the accomplished fact, and disclaim the resis-
tance which they once offered to its coming, while
they speak much of truth and open-mindedness and
progress, of the evils of bigiotry and blindness, their
attitude towards the position which that idea has reached
by the time that their first opposition is overcome, is
the same as that which they adopted] towards its earlier
form. So that, 'while they take credit for their enlighten-
ment, pr ogres siveness and liberality in accepting what
can no longer be disputed or opposed, they are still
in relation to the march of the idea exactly in the
same position as they were before. Temperance,
moderation are the words constantly on their lips, and
all subsequent advance beyond the milestone where they
happen to be halting is lamented as excess, intemperate
and extreme opinion. From stage to stagte oi the
inevitable growth of one and the same principle we
find the same situation repeated. Such is the experience
which daily meets us ^ yet men appear unable to profit
by its almost tedious repetition.

.We can here trust the law which governs human
evolution as implicitly as any physical law, and foresee
future development as confidently as an astronomer
predicts an eclipse. It is as impossible; to arrest the
course of a rational process or principle before its
uttermost consequences have been exhausted, as it is
foil a falling stone to remain suspended in mid-air.
Logical processes know neither compromise, nor
temperance or moderation. Thus only the extreme view1
is right, is destined to survive.

CHAPTER IV

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HUMAN AND
ORGANIC EVOLUTION

I

THE BEARER OF HUMAN HEREDITY

MAN'S evolutionary victory was won by means which,
while rooted in the deepest forms of vital activity and
arising out of them, were yet, in their power and appli-
cation, novel as paramount instruments of life. They
no longer consisted in gross modifications of physical
structure ; instruments and weapons were not, as in
animal evolution, fashioned out of limbs and organs ;
directive powers more pliant and subtle enabled man
to modify his physical environment itself, to shape his
tools out of it, and spread out the tentacles of his brain.
His means of evolution were mental ; and, so far as
he was concerned, the old animal evolution operating
upon actual bodily structure was at an end.

It is not infrequently inquired by people to whom
our soi-disant system of education permits but a casual
and hearsay acquaintance with evolutionary, science,
whether we may expect the form of man to undergo
startling changes, whether he is likely to put forth wings,
or grow eyes at the back of his head. There is not
the remotest probability of any such interesting develop-
ments. His bodily structure is constantly being modified
by changes in his mode of life, but those modifications
are of a relatively minor, almost negligible importance ;
and, to all intents and purposes, his bodily form is
outside the operation of those causes which brought about
organic change.

The products of human evolution, like its means, take
a different form. They are not physiological organs,

59

60 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

tl [but ideas, methods, thoughts, habits, theories, devices,
social organizations. They are not anatomical but
psychological .

That circumstance is fraught with consequences of
gigantic import. The unprecedented nature of the means
and iproducts of human evolution carries with it an equally
peculiar method for their transmission from one generation
to another.

Those products are not, and cannot be transmitted by
' ' / way of physiological reproduction. Each successive
generation must acquire them de novo during its life-
time. It acquires them solely through the human environ-
ment in which it is born and develops. Its ideas, its
conceptions, its ways of thought, its habits, its aims,
its motives, its morals, are handed down to it by the
human world, by the human circumstances, the social
condition, the literature, the state of society in which its
development takes place. The evolutionary grade of
development of the new generation is determined, not
by physiological processes, toot by its place in the
genealogical tree of the race, but by the nature of the
human world as a whole, by all the human influences
which are brought to bear upon it by the entire race.

Certain aptitudes, capacities of easy acquisition,
* educability,' predispositions towards Certain types of
reaction, are doubtless physiologically transmitted ; but
the actual results of evolution, the actual significant
achievements which constitute its products can only be
acquired through the agency of the whole human environ-
ment. If an English baby were put to nurse with a
Central African tribe in exchange for a nigger baby,
and the latter very carefully brought up in England,
the nigger baby, when he grew up, would be a civilized
man substantially in possession of the fruits of European
evolution, and the English baby would b'e a savage.
Of course the civilized nigger would not be quite
on a level with the equally educated European, and
the English savage would differ in some respects from
his African companions. There would be in both
characteristics due to physiological heredity, not to human
environment. But the effect of those physiologically in-

HUMAN HEREDITY 61

herited characteristics would, even in so extreme an
instance, be as nothing compared to the effects of
education by the environment. So far as the actual
fruits of human progress, and participation in the process
are concerned, their respective situations would be re-
versed. The nigger would be in a position to take a share
in civilized life, and the Englishman would not.

' There is widely current a vague belief," justly re-
marks Dr. W. McDougall,1 "that the national
characteristics of the people of any country are in the
main innate characters. But there can be no serious
question that this popular assumption is erroneous and
that national characteristics . . . are in the main ex-
pressions of different traditions. . . . Relatively to the
national peculiarities acquired by each individual in virtue
of his participation in the traditions of his country, the
innate peculiarities are slight and are almost completely
obscured in each individual by these superimposed
acquired characters. . . . Suppose that throughout a
period of half a century every child born of English
parents was at once exchanged (by the power of a
magician's wand) for an infant of the French nation.
Soon after the close of this period the English nation
would be composed of individuals of French extraction,
and the French nation of individuals of English extraction .
It is, I think, clear that, in spite of this complete exchange
of innate characters between the two nations, there would
be but little immediate change of national characteristics.
The French people would still speak French, and the
English would speak English, with all the local diversities
to which we are accustomed and without perceptible
change of pronunciation. The religion of the French
would still be predominantly Roman Catholic, and the
English people would still present the same diversities
of Protestant creeds. The course of political institutions
would have suffered no profound change, the conditions
and habits of the peoples would exhibit only such changes
as might be attributed to the lapse of time. . . . The
inhabitants of 'France would still be Frenchmen and
the inhabitants of England Englishmen to all outward
1 Social Psychology, p. 329.

62 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

seeming, save that the physical appearances of the two
peoples would be transposed."

What is true of even the minor traits which distinguish
one civilized nation from another is, of course, even
more clearly and momentously true of civilization itself,
of the actual fruits of the process of human development
and progress.

We hear a great deal about the improvement of the
race by scientific breeding. In consonance with the
current pseudo -scientific dogma of ' race/ there is
no humorous imbecility from which the criers of
the panacea of ' breed * can be restrained. ' Through
the selection and regulation of breeding/ as intelligently
applied as in the case of domestic animals, '(man) will
control his own destiny and attain moral heights as
yet unimagined." ' It is more than questionable whether,
except as regards the stamping out of pathological taints
(which are amenable to other remedies), eugenists, if
they were given carte blanche, could achieve anything
desirable. But the evolutionary products which are de-
pendent upon physiological heredity are altogether in-
considerable compared with those which are not dependent
upon that process. There is something tragically pathetic
in the zeal displayed for improving the race by the
control of physiological heredity, while at the same time
the means by which the products of human evolution
are in fact transmitted, and which are directly and easily
amenable to human forethought and management, are
under present conditions, and under a so -termed7 system
of education ' of almost troglodyti^c crudity, abandoned
to the mercy of chance, or rather stultified and perverted
to defeat the ends of evolution.

If we are superior to our woad -painted ancestors, it
is not so much that we are born with higher qualities, but
that we are born in a human environment in which the
achieved results of rational thought have been from
generation to generation handed down. And those very
qualities which are physiological and hereditary are them-
selves correlated with conditions arising from the
accumulated products of rational power and human
\ $[. Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, p. 83,

HUMAN HEREDITY 63

control. So that even if those slight physiological modi-
fications could be cultivated, while non-physiological pro-
gress was arrested through entire neglect, the improve-
ment of those slight products themselves would tend to
cease through the drying up of the source whence flow
the conditions which produced them.

The products of human evolution are not included
in the characters which physiological heredity transmits.
The human world in all its aspects, including every race
and nation which exercises an influence over others, which
exchanges thought, opinions and knowledge, contributes
arts and inventions, including every current estimate and
conception, and every revolutionary thought, the customs,
manners and habits which are in vogue, the social or-
ganization which obtains, all the conditions arising out of
it, the forms of government, the institutions, the beliefs,
and above all the types and systems of ideas, the standards
of honour and of conduct, the point of view, the norms
of judgment, the sanctions, biases and prejudices shaped
in accordance with the relations and interests attaching
to those conditions, that human environment which
supplies all the contents and powers, shapes all the
tendencies of every mind which is born and matures in
its midst— that is the carrier of heredity in human
evolution.

II
HUMANITY AS ORGANISM

The word ' humanity * is habitually received with a
defensive sneer, as if some questionable piece of hollow
rhetoric, savouring of Anacharsis Klootz and eighteenth -
century anthropomorphism, were being foisted upon
one. ' 7s there such a thing as " humanity "? Is the

64 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

similitude of an organism applied to the collection of
human individuals which together make up the human
race anything more than a convenient figure of speech?
What is " humanity " beyond the sum of its component
individuals? '

In regard to the all- important function of transmission
the conception of humanity as an organic whole is no
metaphoric abstraction, no loose verbal expression, but
a sober and accurate scientific fact. Humanity, as a
whole, is the only organism which transmits the products
of human evolution. A man does not derive them from
his parents ; they contribute almost nothing in that
respect. Every man is born a wild little animal
susceptible of developing into a howling savage, a man
of the fifth century, of the fifteenth century, of the
twentieth, or of the twenty-fifth. It is the vast organism,
the human world, which makes him what he is, and
determines to what stage of human evolution he shall
belong.

You cannot actually perceive humanity as a physical
organism? Try, then, to perceive individual man as a
mere physical organism apart from humanity. In order
to do so you must imagine our new-born baby, or
a dozen of them, transferred at birth, not to a
savage tribe this ^time, but to a desert island, and
miraculously enabled to subsist and grow up. What
will become of the products of human evolution in
their case? How will individual man, minus humanity,
compare with the lowest Australian Arunta? Failing
the transmission by humanity of the products of the
evolution of humanity— that metaphorical abstraction—
you have nothing left, but a very pitiable and impossible
physical abstraction — the individual man. 'Our * com-
ponent individual ' — let him be, fpr choice, eugenically
bred ,and furnished with the most superior kind of germ-
plasm — will be at the Caliban stage of human
evolution.

We are wont to recognize in a loose, casual way that
we are indebted for certain material advantages and
conveniences to the human world we live in, to ' society ' ;
that we are supplied with clothes, and food, and houses,

HUMANITY 65

and policemen, and books, if we have a mind for such ;
a debt which it is only fair we should repay by some
little service. But it is not our clothes, or our food,
or the roof over our heads that we owe to humanity,,
it is our being itself. Let that inheritance which
humanity has bestowed on you be, by a magic
stroke, cancelled, and instantaneously you cease to
exist, you shrivel and dissolve like Rider Haggard's
" She " at the lifting of the spell that gave her eternal
youth ; you sink and disappear into a blank, dumb
animal. Nor is it, observe, from any social unit, the
State, your country, which sends you in its bill for house
and policeman, and claims gratitude, that you derive
your existence as a product of evolution ; but from
nothing less than the human race. To say nothing of the
contributions of the remote past, from prehistoric culture,
from Egypt, or Greece, or Rome, at least as much has
been contributed to our English life to-day, to every
external and internal aspect of our being, by France,
by Italy— yes, and by Germany, as by England. It* is
not a question of gratitude, and debts to be paid—
quite detestable as well as admirable items are included
in the heritage — any more than your birth is a
ground of gratitude towards your parents ; it is merely
a question of fact. A man's powers of life are
born out of the loins of humanity.

And the growth and development of those powers
can only proceed in relation to that human medium.
If he carries the process of evolution a step further,
if he breaks away from the circle of ideas in which he
finds himself, and casts aside the standards of judg-
ment which he has inherited, the very impulse which
animates him is derived from his environment, and its
range and direction are themselves determined by the
conditions and spirit of the times.- The reach of his
practical conduct is even more directly limited than that
of his thought. For what he judges to be right in the
relations between man and man cannot be given effect
to by himself alone, he must adapt himself to the world
as he finds it. His ideals and aspirations require for
their realization the co-operation of the whole race. It

5

66 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

is impossible for one man to be wise in a world
of fools.

One of the floundering notions of pre- scientific
historical philosophizing was the preposterous theory that
" history is the biography, of great men." It is pre-
posterous because great frien, like all other men, are
the products of their human environment ; and if, by
virtue of the character of that environment, they are
enabled to go a little way beyond it in clearness of sight,
they can only influence their age, modify their human
environment (to retain the biological phrase), by appeal-
ing to qualities and tendencies— much more complex than
any evolution of which the individual is capable — which
are already present and ripe in the medium which pro-
duced them. Nowadays we are coming to realize that a
much more important question than, ' Who was the
originatpr, the inventor of that idea, of that device? ' is
* How came that idea to grow-? What is the history of its
development ? What are the steps by which that discovery,
that invention evolved? ' In the case of the men whose
names are associated with the most revolutionary changes
in human history and ideas, such as Gautama, Muhclm-
mad, Luther, Columbus, Copernicus, Newton, Watt,
Darwin, so long and widespread is the mental genealogy
of precursory ideas, so thoroughly is the influence they
exercised in harmony with the tendencies and ideas ripen-
ing in the mental atmosphere and conditions of their
times, that it is often difficult to say with certainty
which is their individual contribution and which that of
the collective agencies of the age ; and that we may in
many cases doubt whether those' revolutions would not
have taken place in much the same Way and at the same
time had they been absent from the stage. Even those
' supArnen ' whose colossal figures traditionally, loom!
as the very embodiment of overpowering individualism,
violating fate itself, diverting with their strong hand the
course of history, seizing mankind by the hair and curb-
ing the age to their own masterful will, a Caesar, a
Napoleon,1 can on a closer scrutiny be seen to have

1 See Ferrero, Giulio Cesare, and A. Vandal, L'av&nement de
Bonapartei

HUMANITY 67

been called forth, evoked, created by the operation and
natural selection of circumstances, to have been drawn
into and carried away breathlessly by the current of
events in the stream of which they struggled gasping
and fearful, and in their boldest hour to have been driven
by the necessity of an environment whose awful pressure
they were powerless to withstand.

As a consequence of the special nature of the products
of human evolution, and of the fact that the reproductive
system which transmits them is not in man but in
humanity, a situation of peculiar difficulty was created,
and a set of problems and tasks appalling in their
magnitude was imposed upon the race. ^

To individual man the new means of evolution opened
up new horizons of aspiration and new spheres of de-
velopment. The power of expanded and keener vision
ranging over vaster fields of 'relations, while it conquered
the world of organic struggle, simultaneously threw open
an entirely new world. His desires, his interests, his joys
and his cares, his concern in life, his vital needs, 'dilated
to the dimensions of his expanded horizons. The range
of perception determines that of feeling ; though reason
was the sole attribute which made him what he was,
it unlocked a flood of accentuated passions, of trans-
figured interests, desires, emotions. The face of life
was transformed ; the outlook no longer consisted merely
in a day to day, hour to hour care for its preservation,
it embraced larger spans of time, came to include the
whole of existence, birth and death, the succession of
generations, the relation of it all to the great impassive
surroundings. He no longer lived by bread alone. The
range of his desires and wistfulness, the eye of his
ambitions and aspirations knew no bounds.

But those hugely expanded powers and possibilities
of individual development were faced with a new
opposition. Concurrently with their growth a new con-
dition of adaptation was imposed upon them. Not only
were they required to be adapted to physical conditions,
to the ambient universe, to the various exigencies to
which all life is subject ; they were in addition required
to adapt themselves to a new environment, to a new world

68 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

which they had themselves brought into being, to the
environment of humanity. Apart from that strange new
organism those powers are non-existent.

And yet between it and individual man with his vast
aspirations of development there is of necessity a raging
conflict. The human environment imposes its exigencies
and conditions upon the activity and growth of the in-
dividual with a tyranny as ruthless and as unbending as
any other form of environment. The categorical im-
perative of its terms presses upon man no less inexorably
than that of any physical surroundings, wind, flood,
cold, and famine, upon the most gelatinous first-born of
life's broods. He may no less, save at his peril, ignore
them.

That conflict, that imposed process of adaptation and
adjustment is the pervading task of human evolution.
In that process there are in fact two evolutions, the
evolution of man and that of humanity. The task of
the latter is no other than the shaping of a new organism,
of a new form and structure of life. It answers in
many respects to that which, in the course of organic
evolution, life achieved when isolated protozoa drew
gradually together into groups, into polyzoic or-
ganisms, when diffe rent iat ion of function took place
among the individual cells, when a multicellular organism,
such as is man himself, emerged at last from the long
equilibration. But the human task is greatly more com-
plex. Its magnitude and difficulty overshadow all other
problems and all other tasks. Hence the paramount
place of ethics in human life.

We shall see that it is precisely through man's failure
to perceive with clear consciousness the reality of that
relation and the nature, of that task, that by far the
largest proportion of his disasters, of the breakdowns
of his organizations, of his miseries^ and of his perplexities
has arisen.

CHAPTER V

CUSTOM-THOUGHT AND POWER-
THOUGHT

, I

CUSTOM-THOUGHT

WITH the character of man's powers of evolution, the
inevitable cumulative action of rational thought, the
inherently progressive direction of its path, in clear
view, it is their failure to achieve_more. ^rather than
their success, which stands in need of explanation ; and
we seem called upon to look not so much for the
manner in which progress has resulted, as for the causes
that have delayed and obstructed it. And it is, indeed,
the feeling of that contrast between the conception
which rational thought so clearly presents of possible
progress, of ' what ought to be/ and human conditions
as they actually are, which is the chief and deepest
source of scepticism as to the reality of progress.

Man has existed in much the same state of organic
development for fifty thousand years or more ; and
yet during much the greater part of that time he
has remained a miserable savage. During the five
or six thousand years that he has enjoyed some
measure of civilized organization, all his arrangements
have remained to a great extent primitive, his thoughts
have been for the most part delusions,' and he is still
at the present day in every aspect of his existence the
victim of self-imposed conditions which his thought,
wherever it is even in the slightest degree rationally
applied, utterly condemns and repudiates.

That the extent of human progress and the rate at
which it has taken place do not correspond to the
power which rational thought places at the disposal

70 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

of the race, is apparent from the general character of
that progress . We find, in fact, that on a few given
occasions, when a conjunction of circumstances favour-
able to the action of rational thought has existed, a
marked and rapid development has taken place, the
vigour and fertility of which astonish us when we com-
pare them to the general rate of advance. What we
are in the habit of regarding as the beginning of civili-
zation in the Near East makes its appearance with
considerable suddenness and swiftly attains its maximum
of growth. In Egypt, where we can trace continuously
the evolution of human culture from the most primitive
stages to a high pitch of development, the transition
between rude predynastic times and the height of Nilotic
civilization in the IVth and Vth dynasties cannot have
occupied more than a very few centuries. In Babylonia,
where we first meet with a fully developed civilization
and have found no primitive stages at all, we assume
that the first steps in culture have taken place elsewhere,
and that its elements have been transplanted either from
Iran, or, more probably, from the immediate neighbour-
hood in the valleys of Elam. But even on that supposi-
tion the development has been a rapid, a sudden one.
The first Aryan civilization of India presents much the
same feature. When we come to the outburst of Hellenic
culture the rapidity of the gigantic development is one
which has never ceased to excite wonder. The Islamic
Arabs developed in the course of a few years a culture
which has influenced all the subsequent developments
of Europe, and which, even when we allow for the
cultural impulse which it inherited from Persia, was
marvellous in the rapidity of its growth. Our own
modern civilization has risen out of darkest barbarism
in the course of three or four centuries.

The rate of advance of human progress is not uniform.
It is a succession of phases of rapid growth and expan-
sion which gradually die down and cease. That is a
familiar feature. It furnishes the theme of most current
theories, and civilization is said to proceed by cycles.

We shall see that there is a definite reason for both
the rapid growth and the arrest. Whenever there

C USTOM THOUGHT 71

is a rapid development of culture there are special
conditions which favour a new activity and freedom
of action of thought, whenever there is a slowing down
and an arrest there are causes that tend to put an
end to and check the activity.

If, then, rational thought has not achieved more, it
is not owing to any intrinsic defect in the method of
its action, but because its power has only been exercised
in a very limited measure. Man did not suddenly
appear in the world as the possessor of a new talismanic
power with which he forthwith proceeded to conquer
it ; he has only very gradually learned to use his power
and to recognize the might which it conferred upon
him. His growth and progress have proceeded, not
in relation to the formidable possibilities of the instru-
ment at his disposal, but in relation to the progress of
his gradual apprenticeship in its use.

Accustomed though we now are to thinking evolu-
tionally, the taint of the ancient notion of sudden, full-
grown creation still deeply discolours our conceptions
of human origins . We ask, ' When did man first appear
on .the earth? ' as if the creature man ever did thus
suddenly ' appear.' So far as present evidence points,
the stock destined to develop into the human race must
have become separated from all, even the more closely
related, animal stocks so far back as the Miocene period .
If you insist upon trying to attach some definite measure
of time to such a statement, you may say something
like two millions of years ago. But that does not
mean that our progenitors of two million, , or even of
one million years ago, were what we should call men.
Their chief characteristic was a brain somewhat larger
than is to be met with in any non -human animal, and1
somewhat smaller than that of any existing man. The:
answer to the question, ' When did the proto -human
stock become human? ' is a purely arbitrary one. The
brain increased in size, but at what point precisely that
gradual increase was such as to justify the name ' man,'
so that one tnight say ' Here the brute ends and man
begins,' is not at all a matter of objective fact, but
one of arbitrary values. And, as in all organic evolu-

72 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

tion, there were many ' trials and errors/ many
ineffectual evolutions leading nowhere. The Neanderthal
race of Europe, for example — large enough brained, well
skilled in flint -knapping and harbouring some specu-
lative theological notions, though still horribly ape -like
in form—is generally thought to be such a cul-de-sac
of human development which ended in complete extinc-
tion. Even the crudest human brain took hundreds of
thousands of years to grow, with little to show in the
way of outward effects, of created human environ-
ments ; tenatively, haltingly, slowly, painfully, mostly
ineffectually.

As with the biological aspect of man, so it has been
with his distinguishing power. No human ' faculty '
suddenly came into the world, no flashing incarnation
of 'reason.' Proto-man was at the pinnacle of organic
evolution, its most successful type, not because he was
possessed of a ' faculty of reason,' but because he was
just a little, but only a very little, more intelligent
than other animals. By virtue of that infinitesimal
margin of rationality in his dim mental processes his
further evolution was secured and accomplished. But
again that must not be understood to mean that primitive
man was rational, thought to any extent at aU rationally.
Only in an extremely limited sphere, only now and
again, only once perhaps in a generation, did a rational
quality in his thought actually manifest itself and
effectually pierce through to some little achievement,
thenceforth to be a permanent inheritance of the race,
a step in human progress. What progress was achieved1,
was achieved thus, but ihat only happened very seldom.
Generally speaking, in all but a fewi exceptional circum-
stances, and in a few rare 'individuals, thought was not
by any means rational, was not guided by rationality
at all.

Ask primitive man, as you still may in the hinter-
lands of Australia, in the jungle of Ceylon, in the
Nilgirri Hills of Southern India, why he sets about doing
such and such a thing, eat, catch fish, make butter,
in just that uncouth fashion/amid all sorts of fritterings
of energy, of irrelevant procedures ; he will invariably

CUSTOM THOUGHT 73

answer, "It is done thus " ; he will give you to under-
stand that no other procedure can occur to a man
save that which is the custom ; the strange suggestion
of any other way would not only strike him as excentric,
as to you the suggestion that you should walk down
Piccadilly in a poncho, but positively depraved, as some-
thing horribly unavowable, unnatural, revolting.

And in that answer he has told you one of the
inmost secrets of all human history, of the evolution
of the human mind. Its lesson is twofold. Early man
was only infinitesimally rational. All visions of the
primitive hunter sitting at the mouth of his cave after
the day's chase, at the coming out of the stars, and
meditating on the Great Questions : all notions of the
free and noble savage perpetrating * Social Pacts ' ;
all assumptions of deliberation, conscious exercise and
application of thought in primitive man, are the most
fantastic anachronic fancies. Even to-day not a few
eminent anthropologists, misled no doubt by the tangled
accumulation of successive strata in the palimpsest of
custom, are disposed to credit primitive man with a
complex mentality, with processes of ratiocination which
are, I venture to believe, extravagant anachronisms.
During by far the longest period of man's development
the question ' How? ' or * Why? ' simply did not
enter his head. His procedure in life sought no assist-
ance or sanction from any conscious rationality. Of
course now and again, in special crises, by the dim
horse-sense of the mob, or the particular cerebration
of some old wise -head, human action did get rough -
hewn in some vaguely rational way, and even custom
was transgressed and transcended ; else there could
have been no change, no progress. But that action
of rational thought was in the highest measure excep-
tional. Primitive man does not think at all unless
driven by direst need ; he does not think a step beyond
the actual and immediate necessities of the case. No
spark of thought ever issues from his reluctant brain
unless under the insistent hammer -strokes of urgent
realities .

And in the second place we learn that what, from

74 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

the very beginning, stood in the way of the development
of rational thought was no intrinsic impotence, nor con-
fronting complexity of its task, but a monstrous obstacle
which its own rudimentary perception had set up. ,Frorn
the very first man stemmed the growth of his own
thought by absolute surrender to established custom.
The direst despotism ever imposed upon the human Imind
by the dogmatism of a Dominican Inquisition, is mild
and lax compared to the unrelenting grip of that tyranny
to which, throughout its early development, the human
race was bond. In the state of nature all men are
born slaves. No procedure in human life, no act, no
juxtaposition of ideas in man's mind had any other
sanction, any other motive or mental basis, than the
unchallenged authority of precedent. The bare possi-
bility of departure from it did not, as a rule, occur at
all ; but, if it did, it was an unavowable thought, in-
spiring a shudder of horror, as something unspeakably
indecent, a sin against nature.

We are, of course, familiar with the incubus of custom
and herd -thought amongst ourselves. But, salient as
the trait still is in our psychology, it is only dimly
representative of the bondage of the savage mind. Our
conformity has, generally speaking, grown more
conscious and motived, our assent to custom more
voluntary ; we submit to it in things that matter
little, we submit to it through a conscious desire not
to be strange and conspicuous, not to give offence,
or from an intentional wish to hunt with the pack.
With primitive man the bondage was absolute ; it was
an unconscious reaction, an innate inertia, a total absence,
of initiative. It did not govern thought, but stood as
a substitute in its stead. In the beginning all thought
was a revolt and a sacrilege.

In trying to express in our modern language that
tyrannous authority of custom in primitive psychology,
the word * sacred ' naturally occurs to us ; we say
that custom was ' sacred.' And that of course suggests
the idea of religion. As a matter of fact, the imitative-
ness of primitive man has just as much to do with
religion as the imitativeness of a monkey playing tricks,

CUSTOM-THOUGHT 75

or of -sheep jumping through a gap in the hedge. It is
a biological inertia. Religion, and much else besides
religion, did, it is true, ultimately become connected
with the sanctity of custom ; and that sanctity was in
fact the seed from which religion did arise. But that
takes us on to a quite later stage of development, to
an altogether more advanced phase of human evolution.
4 Sanctity,' if we must use the word, was long anterior
to any religious idea. The ritualism of life existed
for untold ages ere ever a thought even remotely re-
sembling religious myths or ideas came into the world ;
ceremony is much older than any meaning attached t©
it, than any dogma or any theology. Custom was
inviolable as custom and nothing else ; that inviolability
was not so much consciously felt, assented to, as un-
questioningly acted upon.

4When conscious explanation, interpretation appears,
we have reached a further distinct stage of evolution.
When that phase comes, custom in some of its aspects
has already begun to appear * strange.' Other and
different customs have been met with in other tribes,
the possibility of an alternative procedure has dawned
on the mind ; adherence to customary procedure has
ceased to be altogether and purely automatic ; the feel-
ing of sanctity attached to it has become conscious ;
the attention has been awakened ; some customs have
even got so far as to strike one as somewhat absurd.
An explanation, an interpretation, a new sanction for
it is required. And so some story, some theory is
woven round the procedure which serves to justify and
restore its authority. In time that explanation will
acquire ,from custom a certain derivative 4 sanctity/
and it will thus become a religious myth or theory.
But the authority of custom purely and simply as such,
unconsciously obeyed, is far older and far greater than
that of any religious idea.

The stability of custom -thought was maintained by
the organization of the society in which it ruled, and,
acting in a vicious circle, it served in turn to maintain
that organization. If all men were born slaves they
were at least born equal ; and no individual dared rise

76 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

above that herd-equality ; ;nor was there any inducement
to do so. We are in the habit of assuming that human
society has always been organized, in all essential
respects, in very much the same manner as it is now.
That is pure illusion. The present order and all those
features which we regard as fundamental of it are
comparatively recent. Primitive society was constituted
on an altogether different basis. We speak of the
family as the foundation of society ; we imagine vaguely
the first human associations as formed by the for-
gathering of family groups of fathers, mothers and
children, such as those still customary among arboreal
apes. All that is erroneous neologistic fancy. Man-
kind did not begin or propagate in families, but, like
all hunting animals, in herds or packs. Man, like his
nearer congeners, was originally a vegetarian. The
hunting and eating of animals was probably one of
the first fruits of his intelligence, and it was the source
of his social organization. He could not advantageously
use his superior cunning without assistance ; he could
not, for all his new-fangled stone weapons and cleverly
contrived pitfalls, conveniently tackle a woolly rhinoceros
or a bison or a wild ass single-handed. And if he did
succeed in killing such game, it was not likely that
the hungry humanity about him would allow him to
eat it by himself. Moreover, he could not count on
continuous luck ; it was his obvious interest to share
and be allowed to partake with others. The human
herd was a necessary consequence, not of any * social
instinct ' or * gregariousness,' and desire for com-
panionship, but of the hard facts of food-quest. The
human society of the bison -men and wild -ass -men was
one of food groups strictly determined by the available
quarry, or totem, and the means of procuring it.

The animal who supplied man with this new delight-
ful and invigorating food was likewise his first god.
The pleasant and beneficial effects of the new diet were
ascribed by man to the assimilation, not of the animal's
proteids, but of his strength, his life, his spirit. For
the * lord of creation ' was totally unconscious of his
sovereignty, and thought, on the contrary, that the huge,

CUSTOM-THOUGHT 77

snorting, robust, swift, wild animal was a 'far finer fellow
than a poor, lanky, weak, naked, semi-monkey like him-
self. And quite rightly too. The native denizen of
the wild was in every obvious respect far better adapted
to his surroundings than the arboreal animal who had
left the jungle to hunt him. Primitive^ .man believed
in evolution from self-conceit ; he wished to believe
that he~was descended Trbm Ihe bison or the ass whose
strength and agility he admired, and he was ambitious
to be like him. The countless pictures of animals which
we meet with in palaeolithic caves are not sporting
pictures, but religious pictures. Eating the god in»
common in order to be like him, to partake of his1
spirit, was the first religious rite, and it was the consecra- \
tion of the tribal bond. Sacrifice was not originally
offered to the god, but the god himself was sacrificed
and gave his life to his people. The first origin of
religion was not animistic, but gastronomic? Animism
belongs to a more advanced stage of development.
Primitive man, we are told by some anthropologists, is,
like the child, spontaneously animistic, ascribes to all
external objects a like personality to his own. That
may be so, but that spontaneous animism does not come
into play unless called forth by circumstances. And
primitive man does not think at all beyond the immediate
suggestion of the matter in hand, does not go out of
his way to spin theories and fairy tales. His first
interest is in his food. And the first thing which he
regards with interest, with love, with reverence — all those
psychological distinctions merge into one vague senti-
ment in rudimentary mentality — the first ' sacred ' thing,
in short, is his food, the animal which he eats ; as later
it will be the corn, the bread he lives by, and also his
weapon, his axe. Later the idea of sanctity attached
to the totem animal leads man to abstain from killing
it or eating it — except ceremoniously on special occa-
sions ; but the ceremonial eating, the communion service,
always survives to mark the original meaning. It is
only when he came to realize that he was really superior
to the animals, when he had tamed and domesticated
them, that any animistic ideas entered into his head,

78 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

that he became anthropomorphic, and began to mak<
gods in his own image.

For some reason that has not yet been satisfactorily
explained — whether to avoid perpetual conflicts, or fron
the fascination of the ' strange woman ' — the custon
obtained in the totemic tribe of marrying out of it
The tribe, the food -group that fed together, was thi
family, its females were sisters and tabu, its member
were brothers and one flesh, the flesh of the totem
Hence the absolute equality, hence the closeness an<
sacredness of the bond of custom -thought ; that sacred
ness was linked with the vital interests of food an<
existence which hung on the observance of tabus an<
conformity of action. Life was a series of observances
like our * superstitions ' — not to walk under a laddei
not to sit thirteen at table, to raise one's ha
to a magpie or to the new moon, not to cut short
bread with a knife, etc. Such was the mode of operatic;
of the mind of primitive man, the iron circle in whicl
he moved. And it is against the crushing weight o
custom irrationalism that the primitive evolution c
humanity has taken place. Can it be wondered tha
it was slow and prolonged?

II

POWER-THOUGHT

Custom -thought has not, however, been the only, no
by any means the chief obstacle to the development o
rational thought.

The most gigantic revolution in human histor)
a revolution surpassing in magnitude ; the wildes

POWER-THOUGHT 79

delirium of reconstructive imagination, took place some
six thousand years ago when in some parts of the world
what we call the civilized state was established. The
immemorial order under which mankind had existed for
hundreds of millenniums was completely broken up and
transformed from its foundation. The tribe was
supplanted as a social unit by the private family,
communism by private ownership and private heritage,
herd-equality by class and individual power.

It is out of that revolution and out of the differentia-
tion of powers and interests which it brought about,
that a new obstacle to rational thought arose even
more formidable than custom- thought.

Power wielded by man over his fellow-men constitutes
a means of control over life, beyond all comparison
more potent than all the forces at the disposal of
individual man and all the instruments he can devise.
To. have your dinner brought to you is hugely more
satisfactory than to go out on to the moors and catch
it. Useful as are flint-axes, bone needles, weapons
and tools, hand and brain, to get other people to use
them for you is an enormous improvement on using
them yourself. Not tools and weapons, but men them-
selves become the instruments of the holder of power.
iWith that discovery, with the possibility of its practical
application, a gigantic new force and new factor, over-
shadowing all others, was introduced in the evolution of
humanity. laldaboth, the god of power, entered the
world and took possession of it. The efficiency and
advantages of human instruments of power over tools
and weapons, are so enormous that the supreme con-
sideration which takes precedence over all others, is to
maintain and increase that invaluable power, that
authority; to use not the original endowments and
instruments of victory of the creature man, not rational
thought, not the control which is by virtue of its adaptive
power to facts exercised over the world man lives in,
but to use men.

How can that be effected, how is power wielded
over men, how can they be used as instruments?
Innumerable are the forms and degrees of such power;

80 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

the natural commanding superiority of the leader, hi
wisdom, his valour, knowledge, rank of birth, th
physical force of the race of conquerors, divine authority
power with the gods, property, wealth, the constitute
authority of the social order, the delegated power c
office. But whatsoever that form, that fact of powe;
an idea, an order of ideas on whi'ch it rests and b
which it is justified, lies at its foundation. Establishe
authority over men is, like every other product of huma
evolution, the embodied manifestation of thought.

A new mechanism is hence introduced in the operatic
of the human mind. In the primitive herd, if thougl:
is unconceivably sluggish, if it is an utter slave to custon
it is uniform and single-eyed. There is, no conflict c
discrepancy in its motives. Its uniformity may be th
uniformity of apathy, but when it is by circumstance
stimulated to action, its motive, the interest at play i
the same for every member of the herd. Individuc
interest and herd-interest are identical. It is my interes
that we should secure a good bag of game in whic
we shall all share. But as soon as primitive equal.it
is broken up and differentiation of power takes plac<
there comes about a corresponding differentiation c
interests. The interests of the power-holders are n
longer identical with those of the herd. And accordingl
a corresponding divergence arises in the motivation, i
the object and function of thought.

The utilitarian function of thought is to enlighte
man as correctly as possible as to his situation and hi
ways and means. It must, in order to discharge tha
function, desire to achieve correspondence with fact;
desire to judge and discover what relation actually doe
obtain between him and his environment. That i
rational thought, that is its purpose and,' function. Bu
from; the moment that differentiation of interests an<
powers is introduced, that function is radicall
disturbed. It is not the facts of the environment whic
it are now man's weapons and tools, which have to b
k discovered and used, but men, men's minds. Not t(
harmonize and correspond with facts as they are is no\
the object of thought, but to harmonize and corresponc

POWER-THOUGHT 81

with the order, of ideas on which power and authority
rest. That fundamental order of ideas becomes the neces-
sary postulate of all thought. Henceforth the criterion of
every mental process is not its intrinsic validity, but
its relation to that idea, to that situation of power and
authority. That is the sole touchstone by which every
judgment, every value, every thought is tested. All
that tends to undermine it is false, bad; all that
tends to consolidate and confirm it is true, good. The
motive, the criterion of thought is changed in its founda-
tion, its function is diverted and transformed. Its
aim and purpose is now not to fulfil its original cog-
nitive function, but to frustrate it. Thought suffers
from a functional disease. It is no longer; rational
thought, it is power -thought.

There is, of course, in every man that contamination
of thought by irrelevant emotion and fathering wish, that
personal equation which insidiously deflects and vitiates
judgment. But those idols of the cave are compara-
tively unimportant. Unimportant and negligible beside
the formidable force which has deformed and distorted
human thought throughout the course of its develop-
ment. The entire world of human ideas, language,
values, has been shaped and moulded by it.

That tragic infirmity is no congenital disease of the
mind, no constitutional weakness ; it is an artifact, a
manufactured product of the human order, of human
society, like its institutions, armies, thrones and temples.
It is like those a product arising out of the crystalliza-
tion of power and interest around dominant sections of
the social organism.

The disease is absolutely inevitable and incurable.
No amount of good intentions can save the holder of
any form of power from its fatal ravages. It is not
a question of wickedness or unscrupulousness, it is a
question of rigid psychological mechanics. The power-
holder can no more divest himself of power -thought
than the rich man can enter the kingdom of heaven.

The question in what measure the falsification is
deliberate and conscious, though interesting, is not
essential. An enormous amount of falsified power -

6

82 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

thought, by far the largest proportion, is sincere, subcon-
scious, well-intentioned self-deception, an hypertrophied
personal equation. But we are too prone, I think,
in our tolerant, euphemistic way — euphemism and
historical tolerance are themselves forms of self-defensive
power-thought in ages of criticism — to minimize in that
process the part of deliberate fraud. Wherever we
have access to detailed historical evidence we come
upon deliberate fraud. And opportunity abounds of
observing the process in our own midst. There is very
little of the ' sub -conscious/ for instance', in the
directions of a Prussian government to its university
professors, or of a Fleet Street editor to his leader-
writer, or in all the ' education of public opinion ' by
vested interests. There is, from the witch-doctor and
the Pompeian priest's speaking trumpet, down to our
own day, a vast amount of intellectual fraud which'
is not to be wholly emphemized away. The old
' imposture ' theory has perhaps been unduly dis-
credited. But it is, in general, impossible to draw any
shar'p line of demarcation between conscious and
unconscious falsification of thought. * Imposture ' may
mean no more than that ingenious opinions have a
tendency to flow in the channel of interest. The priestly
class is favourably inclined to mythology, in the same
way as kings are usually royalists, and stock-jobbers
are not commonly social reformers. Daily we may
see everywhere about us laldaboth „ engaged in his
Procrustean task ; facts, arguments, valuations are
adjusted, lopped or stretched, suppressed or suggested
on the iron bed of his interests. Older and immemorial
falsifications have arisen in much the same manner,
and have long become * immutable principles,'
'truths,' 'ideals,' for which men are willing to lay
down their lives.

Power-thought is fully justified to itself, is a duty,
a virtue. The sanctity of sound principles, the prin-
ciples upon which the existing order rests, is manifest.
It would be clearly culpable to abet dangerous
tendencies of thought, to dwell on facts which might
impress mislea<Jingly, which people in their weakness

POWER-THOUGHT 83

and ignorance would fail to interpret soundly. It would
be a betrayal of their welfare, of our human duty, to
countenance the dissemination of poison. Nay, it is
culpable in ourselves to allow the mind to dwell on
facts, views, which would tend to sap our principles,
it is our honest duty to exclude them. And if a slight
modification in the complexion of facts conduces to
the general soundness, the healthy, wholesome dispo-
sition of opinion, so much the better. Do not our
most reputed philosophers at the present day present
to us, as the modest conclusion of their straining
meditation, the cogent argument that, since we have to
live under existing conditions, we should believe
anything that will help us to do so? That is the
' Practical Reason,' Pragmatism.

Like many biological processes, the falsifying* opera-
tion of power-thought, beginning perhaps as deliberate
action, rapidly becomes spontaneous, automatic. All of
the nature of deliberate intellectual dishonesty, even if
at first dimly present, very soon wholly disappears ; and
without any consciousness of prejudice, with the
fullest conviction and purpose of moral and intellectual
rectitude, power-thought operates with vulpine astuteness
in a medium of stainless integrity and candour. Fraud,
indeed, more or less deliberate, is not at all the
essential or essentially significant and afflicting feature
of the process. The mechanism of thought itself is
invalidated, thought is poisoned in its vitals. Every
fact is seen through a refracting medium ; every judg-
ment is coloured, every conclusion deflected, every point
of view falsified, every issue prejudiced in a given
sense. The workings of the mind are distorted; all
intellectual counters are counterfeit ; men think by means
of ideas stamped with spurious values ; their vocabulary,
the import of words is a part of the falsified mental
worlds in which they move. About every sphere of
authority, of power, of interest, there grows up an
atmosphere of constituted opinions and mental attitudes,
whose nature is determined not by rational thought,
but by power- thought. Whole generations of views
and values are engendered, complete mental worlds are

84 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

evolved which extend their influence not only where
the original interests are involved, but over multitudes
whose mental growth has taken place within that
environment.

There is one quarter at least where power-thought
is always and absolutely sincere, with those namely on
whom the power is exercised. It is, of course, chiefly in
view of them that power -thought operates ; although
the -power-holder himself desires and requires the
countenance of power-thought. Its primary object is
to influence the minds of ,those who are used as the
instruments of power, they must be made to see
the advantages, the justness, the reasonableness, the
necessity of the arrangements by virtue of which
authority is held, the harmony of thenl with the order
of the universe, the falsity, the wickedness of any view
out of harmony with that authority. And power-thought
is brilliantly justified by the sincerity, the conviction,
the enthusiasm, with which it is accepted and honoured
by the servants of power, by the devotion and loyalty
with which they are prepared to die in its defence.
So complete is the success that even the very opponents
and critics of power-thought, when such arise, are
themselves so steeped in it that it is quite impossible
for them to shake themselves free of its influence; the
whole formation of their mind is found to be the
product of power -thought, and the very weapons which
they would direct against the holders of power recoil
upon themselves.

The sphere of power-thought is ' the choir of heaven
and furniture of the earth,' the entire edifice of human
thought, knowledge, and valuation. The holders of
power have been the civilizers of mankind, its teachers,
its educators ; its conceptions, language, ideas, are in
an enormous measure their creation . From our mothers'
lips we have learned power -thought, and our youth
has been thrilled with its echoes from the mouths of
our heroes.

THE CONFLICT 85

III

THE CONFLICT

The evolution of rational thought, then, has not been a
process of gradual growth and unfolding of its power of
dealing with the natural1 problems of its task, but a
contest against non-rational thought, against the accumu-
lated force of custom-thought and power -thought.

The natural difficulties of rational thought were in
themselves sufficiently great . The instrument which had
evolved from such humble beginning's, as an elabora-
tion of the organs of sense, as a tactical method of
fencing with the simple material contingencies of
animal existence, became confronted with problems of
far other complexity and vastness, problems seemingly
pertaining to another order. It was called upon to deal
with the problems of life, not the mere organic life
of the wild, but life transmuted by virtue of that very
vision which looked before and after, darted beyond
the ' here ' and * now ' to infinity and eternity, brought
tears and laughter into the world, tinging it with the
hues of new emotions; life expanded out of all recog-
nition, ravelled beyond all calculation by a thousand
new relations. Problems that grew ever more complex,
problems of new adjustments and co-ordinations, of
a new polyzoic organism which out of man was being
fashioned into hum'anity, problems implicating in their
widening circle ever further problems, positing at last as
a postulate to their interpretation, life, the universe, their
nature and meaning.

Was that poor, pedestrian quality of thought at all
competent to deal with that new, amazing world it had
called up? Strictly speaking, yes. The situation does
not exist in which rational thought is not possible j
not by omnipotently answering all questions, but by
severely assessing the legitimacy and validity of its
answer — even though that answer be, as in many cases
it needs must be, ' I do not know ' — and resolutely
repudiating the validity of all other answers. In that
sense is a rational answer possible to every rational

86 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

question ; the estimate of the order of certainty,
probability, greater or less consistency of the hypothesis
•with larger or smaller arrays of ascertained facts, being
a (part integral of every rational judgment. And the
method of reason, having evolved and approved itself
by unbroken correspondence with relations, not with
entities, applies with equal validity whatsoever the sphere
of its action.

To such judicial rectitude of purpose the original
rudimentary rationality of man could, of course, only
attain through a long and laborious evolution. There
needed the slow* garnering4 of empirical data, agelong
experience, the gradual perfecting of methods, the costly
unmasking of countless pitfalls besetting the path of
thought, and foredooming it to fallacies only to be
refined away by successive lustral Waves of critical
discipline. To cope at all effectually with the complex
task imposed upon it, thought has had to battle
against formidable difficulties, to wrestle grimly with
its own intractabilities, to gain strengith and confidence
by a prolonged process of growth.

But in human evolution the essential feature that
actually presents itself to us is not that process! of
growth. It is not that battle of rational thought witht
the natural difficulties of its task. Seldom indeed has
such good fortune befallen man as to be permitted to
wage that straightforward fight ; whenever it has been
granted him, he has acquitted himself with singular
ease, and the issue has been for him a triumphant
victory. Human evolution has indeed been a long
and arduous battle, but against quite other forces. It
is against obstacles which it has itself erected that
the mind of man has been fated to war and struggle.
Not the" difficulties of the problems set before it, not
the infirmities of reason have resisted and crippled its
action, but man-made, artificial obstacles, deformities
forcibly, traumatically inflicted upon it in a constant
and determined effort to paralyse it. In the conflict
which constitutes the evolution of humanity, the
antagonist of rational1 thought 'has been thought falsified
by custom and by the interests of power.

THE CONFLICT 87

That conflict is the theme of history. From the
dawn of civilization to this day, under innumerable
aspects and names, and in every field, the wavering,
age-long battle has raged. Politics and religion, industry
and commerce, science, art, philosophy, literature, life,
love, have been convulsed in the throes and vicissitudes
of the ceaseless contest. Against the sole power and
means which man possesses of gauging his position,
of directing his action, have been arrayed all the ideas,
all the conceptions, all the traditional judgments and
valuations, shaped by the desire and interests of those
to whom those interests and desires, not the laws that
constitute its validity" and ^efficiency, were the tests of
thought.

It is not between Error and Truth that the secular
contest is waged — what is Truth? .Who so imbued with
error as to deem himself pure therefrom? It is not
those figmentally abstracted entities which through the
ages face one another in the world of mind; but two
ethics of the mind, two methods of conduct, two ways
of putting to human use man's instrument of thought
—the one concerned with the discharge of its function,
the other with turning its edge, and deflecting it from
that function, in order to place it in the service of
another purpose.

Man has had much to learn, but he has had even
more to unlearn. It is not so much with the riddles
posited by the Sphinx of life that thought has had to
deal, as with answers and solutions already established
in possession and strenuously proclaiming their validity.
Hence the function of rational thought has been critical
rather than constructive. Man's chief task has not
been to build, but to destroy. But such have
been the conditions of human evolution that to tear
down is to discover, to destroy is to liberate. Human
thought has shown itself competent enough to fulfil
its function whenever it has been set free. Freedom
is not, as it has become the fashion to consider,
an empty shibboleth, but the condition of human
development.

CHAPTER VI

THE BREAKING OF CUSTOM-THOUGHT
AND POWER-THOUGHT

I

MATERIAL PROGRESS

IN two ways, and, so Jar as I know, in two ways only,
has any process ever been initiated by which the walls
and fetters of custom!- and power-thought have come to
be broken : by the material products of discovery and
) | invention, and by the cross-fertilization of cultures.

Inventions and discoveries are the one form of attack
before which the yielding of conservative forces is swift
and their struggle feeble. We know how modern science
has been throughout its career persistently cried down,
first as unclean magic and black art, later as impiety
and pride of intellect, at best despised as vain, irrelevant
speculation. Nothing is more certain than that natural
science, had its function been confined to inquiry and
interpretation, to increase of knowledge, to perfecting
man's means of thought and understanding of his position
in this universe, would never have survived the opposition
which confronted it. It was saved, from the first by its
utilitarian bearing and material fruits. The develop-
ment of mathematic's and' astronomy, 'which at first sub-
served the uses of agriculture, rendered commercial and
imperialistic expansion possible. Experimental science
in the form of alchemy was universally thought to hold
out the promise of no less wealth. The ultimate triumph
of science was achieved when its powers revolutionized
the material and economic world 'and created everywhere
new physical and wealth-producing faculties. As thought,
as a contribution to the interpretation of the world, as
a weapon of the intellect, no order of ideas could have

MATERIAL PROGRESS 89

aroused more rancorous detestation ; no abomination
could call more clearly for vigorous and ruthless stamp-
ing out. But its material gifts could not be rejected.
It laid golden eggs. Even that most detestable and
pernicious of all offences to custom-thought and power-
thought had perforce to be tolerated, to be to some
extent respected,: to be in some excruciating manner 're-
conciled ' with, and reluctantly and painfully accepted.

As with modern science as a means of utilitarian
discovery and invention, so it has been from the very
first with every step of material progress. Whatever
the sanctity of custom, whatever the shuddering horror
with which any departure from its hard and fast estab-
lished precedent is regarded, the sacrilege is excused, the
horror is silently overcome whenever a clear material ad-
vantage presents itself. The tale is told how the Dyaks of
Borneo, whose cross-grain method of felling trees was held
as ritually sacred and not to be departed from save under
dire penalty, adopted the European way of cutting out
wedges when no one was looking. In the same manner
has every utilitarian inventive sacrilege prevailed. The
discovery of the means of producing fire was adopted,
though silent disapproval was signified by colleges of
priests and vestals continuing to tend the sacred hearth.
Metals were adopted, though a protest was lodged by con-
tinuing to use stone tools for all ritual purposes, sacrifices,
circumcision, embalming. The invention of the bow and
arrow was adopted, though it* was denounced as a weapon
only fit for treacherous cowards like the ' insulting
archer * Paris, just as firearms were adopted though
' an invention of the devil,' destructive of all nobility
and chivalry.

Nor is the disruptive action of material inventions
by any means confined to the mere fact of their accept-
ance ; its effect extends in far-reaching and undreamed-
of consequences. As the industrial revolution brought
about by modern science has transformed not only the
material, but every aspect of the social and mental world,
redistributing all powers and authorities, and hurling
successive tides of destructive criticism against all estab-
lished values and systems of thought, so almost every

90 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

new invention has in all ages been the cause of a similar
world-shaking revolution. The domestication of animals
dealt the death-blow to totemic society, and probably
led the way to animistic anthropomorphism. The bow
and arrow, the metals, upset every balance of power,
changed the laws of human distribution on the planet,
and raised the issues between war-lord and priest that
shall lead to:Canossa' and Kulturkampf. The perfecting
of writing made large empires possible. Navigation made
and unmade them, created and transformed cultures.
Agriculture changed the fajce of the earth and of human
relations more completely than did steam and electricity.

Material progress is the product of rational thought,
and of it alone.

Of all fields of human activity, that of mechanical
advance is the only one where rationality does not admit
of being trifled with. You cannot introduce the gentle
arts of sophistry and self-deception into a mechanical
device. Your machine is absolutely impervious to the
influence of fine theories, sacrosanct conventions, high,
consecrated sentiments. All the subtle misrepresentations,
the conspiracies of silence, the eloquent appeals to pre-
judice, the plausible phrases, the bland casuistries, which
have such fine scope in every other field of human thought,
are here rudely and inexorably debarred. A machine
is an irreclaimable rationalist. It is obdurately and
shockingly indifferent to the obvious distinctions between
respectable and vulgar, moral and immoral opinions.
It refuses to be bamboozled. There is no orthodoxy or
heterodoxy in mechanics ; there is no conscience clause ;
there is utter disregard of the sacred rights of opinions
entitled to respect, of the susceptibilities of tender feel-
ings. Hence the horror of certain minds for machinery ;
hence are the words ' mechanical ' and ' mechanism '
the worst terms of obloquy in the language. If you
wish to obtain a certain mechanical result, you must
strictly and absolutely, and with no saving phrases or
reservations, conform to facts as they are. If you do
not it is your own loss : your machine will not work.

DISSEMINATION 91

II

DIFFUSION AND CROSS-FERTILIZATION

All those conditions by which progress has been pro-
moted have either been opportunities of leisure for the
development of thought, and of power for its embodiment
in action, or have brought about its diffusion and the
interaction of its products. Of the action of the former
class of conditions we shall presently have occasion to
note examples ; the latter constitute by far the most
important and potent agency by which human 'advance has
been aided.

The development of the means by which thought is
communicated, recorded4 transmitted, and disseminated,
marks the broad outlines of the course of human evolu-
tion. Articulate language, writing, and printing, are
the three cardinal milestones in the growth of the means
of progress. The effect has in each case been precisely
comparable, relatively to the collective organism of the
race, to that of the growth of more extensive fibrillar
connections between the nervous elements of the brain,
which constituted the physiological aspect of man's
emergence. There is good ground for believing
that speech was a comparatively late development in
the evolution of primitive man, and it doubtless brought
about an unrecorded revolution in the far-off ages of
prehistory as momentous as did the development of writ-
ing in Egypt and Babylonia, its simplification in Crete
and Greece, the introduction of paper by the Arabs,
and the invention of the printing press in modern Europe.
Each was a further stage in the establishment of a
nervous system bringing thought into contact with thought,
linking up the operations of individual minds, opening
up innumerable circuits of mental reaction, laying human
thought and opinion bare to the fertilizing sun and
weather of criticism, discussion, opposition, and public
judgment ; diffusing over wider spheres and building up
the common consciousness of humanity.

In like manner has every development of the means
of travel been marked by a leap in the rate of

92 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

advance. First the great land migrations, the advent
of Neolithic races, the invasions of the bearers of brass
and of iron ; then the rise of seafaring with the Minoans,
its inheritance and development by Phoenicians and
Greeks, its further momentous extension at the time
of the rebirth of Europe by the Arabs, which", as
Minoan seamanship had led to Greek culture -contacts
and growth, brought about the new era of Portuguese,
Spanish, and Italian navigation, and the expansion of
Europe to the four continents. Finally the abolition of
distance in the modern age.

Even the great wars of conquest which we have grown
to regard as the supreme scourge of a martyred world,
which, for us, are no longer enhaloed in the splendour
of apotheosis and glory, and emblazoned with the pomp
of pageantry, but appear, on the contrary, as apocalyptic
visions of devastation and death, riding amid conflagration
and ruin, famine and pestilence, over the mown corpses
of a slaughtered humanity — have, as a matter of fact,
been factors of progress of the first moment, tearing
down the barriers of fatal isolation, forcibly bringing
together the scattered members of humanity, and diffusing
the heritage of thought. The Persian empire welded the
Asiatic cultures, the Alexandrian empire created the Hel-
lenistic world and fertilized it for ever ; the Roman empire
furnished the indispensable condition of all subsequent
progress and made the modern world passible ; the
Napoleonic wars awakened Europe from its feudal and
dynastic slumbers, gave it new life and a new conscious-
ness, and initiated a new phase of its growth.

Everywhere we see progress born of the conjunction and
cross-fertilization of cultures, from the clash of outlooks
and ideas. Under the dominant obsession of the racial
view of history the doctrine has been put forth that
success in civilization is the result of the intermixture oi
races. iWhat ground or logical pretext there is for such
a hypothesis Heaven and Professor Petrie only know 1 It
is suggested, I suppose, by some remote reminiscence
of the process of reproduction in certain flowering plants,
The facts belie it at every turn ; for, while there is
no such thing as a ' pure ' race, we find races of re-

DISSEMINATION 93

latively conspicuous * purity ' as foremost contributors
to progress alongside of the most obviously ' mixed '
races, and vice versa. The ancient Greeks, the greatest
builders of civilization, were, in spite of views to the
contrary arising out of the multitude of tribal names,
of no more significance than the term ^olians, a com-
paratively pure race ; while the mediaeval and modern
Greeks, perhaps the most striking example of falling
off from ancestral excellence, are profoundly hetero-
geneous. The Egyptians, the Chaldasans, the
Romans, the Japanese, are all comparatively * pure '
races. The Sicilians, the Spaniards, the Balkan peoples,
none of whom appear, as races, as prominent contributors
to civilization, are extreme examples of ' mixed ' races .
For most of those, on the other hand, to whom ' purity '
of race is the ' open sesame ' of human evolution, the
tall, long-skulled, fair-haired, blue -eyed northerner is the
ideal bearer of all the world's achievements and values ;
and it is rightly agreed that this incomparable human
stock is to-day, and has for ages been found in its
greatest purity in the Scandinavian peninsula, an ex-
tremely estimable country which, however, there appears
no reason for numbering among the leading lights
of human progress. It is not from the intermixture
of races that, in some recondite, unintelligible manner,
cultural development and human achievement arise, but,
for very obvious and apprehensible reasons, from the
intermixture and cross-fertilization of cultures, of civili-
zations, of ideas.

Ill
SEGREGATE* EVOLUTION

It is a direct consequence, the most momentous conse-
quence, of the peculiar mode of transmission of the

94 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

products of human evolution, that that evolution cannot
proceed in a sporadic, isolated, segregated form, by way
of individuals, of races, of states or nations, of civili-
zations, of esoteric and class cultures. Nothing short
of the co-ordinated growth of humanity as a whole can
satisfy the conditions of the process.

In every form of evolution active progress is at work
in a limited minority only ; there is somewhere a grow-
ing-point which is but an infinitesimal fraction of the
whole. So that, as Sir Henry Maine puts it, " progress is
the exception, stagnation is the rule." But that exception
is itself a rule in this sense, that it is always there. All
evolution from the amoeba, from the nebula onward, is
the outcome of exceptions, of minorities ; the whole
world is the product of the millionth seed. It is that
exception, that minority which is the determining fact
of the universal process.

The same is, in a sense, true of human, as of all
evolution. It is the direct work of a few races, of a
few individuals in those races. But here the peculiar
character of human evolution and of its means comes
into play. The reproductive bearer of its products is
the whole human world, and, as a consequence, with
every limitation which that reproductive function suffers,
a corresponding fatal injury and disability is inflicted
upon the process of development itself.

The operation of that law is inexorable. It is no
exaggeration to say that to neglect and defiance of it
every failure whatsoever in the process of human de-
velopment, every disability and every disaster, every mis-
birth of history, and the bulk of human suffering, in-
capacity and folly, are primarily and directly due. The
law is manifested under two forms which, although aspects
of the same necessity, differ conspicuously in their
historical appearance, according as the sporadic and
isolated evolution is that of (i) a social group, a state,
a nation, or (2) of a section or class.

The evolution of tribal communities is rigidly limited ;
it can only take place up to a certain sharply defined
level which constitutes an impassable boundary. Unless

SEGREGATION 95

a complete change of social organization comes to be
effected, unless nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes sub-
sisting by the chase, by pastoral pursuits, and rudimentary
forms of agriculture, outgrow those conditions, become
transformed into settled communities and fused into
larger groups, their development is strictly confined to
a definite level of culture, presenting strikingly similar
features and characterized by exactly similar achieve-
ments wherever met with, and which is never over-
stepped. If they continue in that state, if no circumstance
take place to change it, if they remain isolated from
contact with organized nations, they remain savages,
doomed for ever to arrested growth in that condition,
like the tribes which European expansion has met with all
over the world, who at an early stage became cut off
from those regions where civilization has developed. It
has been shown by Mr. Sutherland l that to the numerical
size of such tribal groups there corresponds a definite
grade of primitive culture, that, other things being equal,
the degree of development of a human group, its control
over the conditions of life, is a function of its numbers.

But the intrinsic development of a society, however
civilized, apart from the interaction between it and other
civilized societies, is no less strictly limited. No isolated
human civilization has ever proceeded through its
own unaided forces beyond a given limit. The time
comes very speedily when that limit is reached, and
complete arrest and stagnation take place.

Of such secluded growth the civilization of China is,
of course, the flagrant instance. Nor, certainly, is it
one towards which we can afford to be merely con-
temptuous. Its isolation, however, was never so com-
plete as from our own exclusive western standpoint we are
prone to conceive . Wrapped in dense obscurity as are its
origins, they derived, we may well suppose, from more than
one focus, even if we look no farther than the vast East-
Asian expanses that were first in the third century B.C.
brought under the sway of the Ts'in and Hang dynasties ;
two such distinct cradles at least we discern on the upper
reaches of the Hoang-ho and Yang-tse respectively.
1 Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct.

96 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

It has been sought to connect those beginnings with
those of Western Asia, of Babylon, for instance ; there
is no solid evidence in support and none absolutely ex-
clusive of such conjectures. But from the West, China
was never in earliest times cut off. Schliemann found'
in the Second City of Troy an axe of white jade that
could only have come from China. Chinese wares, silk,
iron, furs, figured in the marts of Babylon. From the
Greek kingdom of Bactria, much, we know, passed into
China, music, mathematical instruments, water -clocks,
viticulture ; and much else doubtless of which we have no
record. As far back as we can look a brisk trade is plied
between the China coast and India, and through the
latter with Arabia, Syria, Egypt. In the second century
we hear in Chinese annals of Syrian traders, and of a
certain King An-Tun who sent some kind of mission
there in A.D. 166, whose name it is not difficult to
re-translate 'Antoninus/ Intercourse with Rome fol-
lowed at first chiefly the immemorial land -route through
Parthia, which had been that of Persian commerce ; later
the sea-route prevailed and Alexandria was the emporium.
The development and productiveness of China appear
closely to follow those periods of widest contact with
Bactria, Parthia, India, and the Roman West ; and it
reached its cultural apogee under the Sz-ma rulers of
the third century ; from which time dates also, as a
political doctrine, its purposive isolation and the cessation
of its growth. There remains the broad fact that oun
most conspicuous example of segregated development
furnishes likewise our by -word for cultural arrest and'
doddering stagnation.

No society can continue in a state of progressive civi-
lization in the midst of savage, uncivilized races, unless
it can put an end to that situation by conquering them
and imparting to them its own civilization. A mere
island of culture in the midst of a sea of barbarism
is a physical impossibility. It must either destroy its
barbarian neighbours or absorb them and raise them to
its own level, or else be overwhelmed and absorbed
by them.

But the power of a civilized community to overcome,

SEGREGATION 97

or even successfully hold its own against barbarian
neighbours necessitates and constitutes an intolerable
drain upon its power of culture and development. War-
like spirit, military virtues, discipline, the qualities which
make for success and efficiency in the employment of
force, are directly opposed to those which make for
civilization and rational development. They are part
of the organic struggle, of animal competition. Civi-
lization requires the elevation of the race above the
level of that struggle ; truly human evolution pre-
supposes the setting aside of mere animal evolutionary
strife. In proportion as a community is qualified for
success in the one sphere, it is by so much disqualified
in the other. Civilization, it is true, m&y furnish
more effective weapons of warfare and more efficient
organization ; but even the possession of those ad-
vantages cannot free a community from the necessity of
directing its developmental energies and resources into
the channel of military, efficiency instead of that of
rational growth. It is a current commonplace that
civilization saps the ' manly ' qualities upon which
military success and expansion depend. Of course it
does ; it ' saps ' all the barbaric characters in human
nature. The military spirit is no part of civilization,
is not compatible, is in direct conflict with it. We
constantly read in ancient history of communities
succumbing "owing to growing corruption." But that
' corruption ' means exactly the same thing as what
we call civilization. We are a thousand times more
'corrupt ' than Sibaris, or Rome at any stage. Ancient
writers called civilization ' corruption ' because it did
corrupt the martial qualities of a people. All civilization
when menaced by barbarism is in that sense * corrupt /
Civilizations fall before barbarism because they are too
civilized. And, on the other hand, barbarism falls too
in the end, because it gets more and more barbarous.
Babylon fell because it was too civilized to fight ; Nineveh
fell because it ate up all its industries and agriculture
to feed its militarism.

In that fact lies one cause of the ' decay and fall
of empires.' The empires and kingdoms of

7

98 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

ancient East were constantly seized and subjugated
by more barbaric and warlike neighbours. But
the invader was generally in a position to absorb the
civilization of the conquered, a civilization which, as
we shall see, had already come to a standstill from
other causes. The whole Gra^co-Roman world was
destroyed because, large as it seemed, it was but an
island of civilization in the midst of a barbaric humanity.
Europe was once within an ace of becoming a province
of China, and is still thought by some to be menaced
by a 4 yellow peril ' — a phrase, by the way, coined by
William Hohenzollern. That, however, is an illusion,
because, in absorbing Western ideas, Eastern races in-
variably adopt them in their higher and more advanced
form, disdaining the effete ones whose influence survives
in the lands of their origin ; and they are therefore too
wise not to perceive very clearly the futility of mere
war-made empires. The whole of Western civilization
is at the present moment reeling under the effects of
the most titanic struggle of forces in all history, because
one community in its midst retained in its ruling classes
the barbaric conceptions of the Middle Ages, and its
robber -barons have held in their grip, and trained a
people eminently capable of high culture, to the ideals
of the age of Barbarossa.

In proportion as a community is under the necessity
of cultivating those ideals does it remain barbaric at
heart. And not only is it doomed sooner or later in
the course of human evolution to suffer humiliation
and perish by the sword, but whatever civilization il
may attain to is inevitably warped and falsified by the
all-pervading lie of its patriotic glorification of sell
and of might.

In proportion as a civilization shuts itself off behind a
wall of national pride and isolation is its growth stunted
and condemned ; in proportion as it lives in free and
constant intercourse with its neighbours and with all
the world does it progress and thrive.

Human evolution requires not only advance but ex-
pansion. That civilization is almost invariably the
highest which covers the widest area on the map

SEGREGATION 99

Every great civilization, the Greek, the Roman, the Arab,
the European, has developed simultaneously in value
and extension. By virtue of the ineluctable necessities
inherent in the nature, character and methods of human
evolution, the ideal of an independent and segregated
human group, of a society developing by itself and for
itself, of a national civilization, of an empire, of a state,
is not only factitious, an artificial * cold monster/ it
is, whether we like it or no, an unrealizable impossibility.
It is a contravention of the laws of human development,
which repudiate, ignore, and foredoom it, and operate
by way of humanity as a whole as the heir and trans-
mitter of its evolutionary products, ignoring all other
groups and units.

The second form of sporadic evolution, that confined
to a class within the social aggregate, is of even deeper
import in the history of human development. It is a
feature common in a greater or lesser degree to all
societies which have hitherto existed, and constitutes
to a large extent those ' germs of decay ' which give
countenance to the fallacy that all societies necessarily
run through a cycle of growth, maturity, and decadence .
We shall have to consider the effects of that condition
under various aspects in the following pages ; the pro-
cesses to which it gives rise constitute the fundamental
feature of human development in its most essential
aspect, in what is known as the ethical aspect, and
will form the subject of the third part of the present
work .

The inevitable result of that sporadic class -evolution
is what I have already referred to as powe r -thought .

Whatever the convention upon which the power of
a ruling class is founded, be it religious, political, social,
intellectual, racial, or economic, it exercises its inevit-
able limiting influence upon the entire culture associated
with it. But power -thought, by its falsification of and
opposition to rational thought, not only fetters the
general growth of the social organism, it no less fatally
sterilizes the development of the very class whose power

100 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

it is its object to promote. No culture which is th
product and privilege of a class can continue in tha
form. The ideal of an exalted ruling class achievinj
human progress by means of, and at the expense o
an excluded slave class, that ideal so brilliantly revive<
in our own day by Nietzsche, is an impossibility, ;
conception which runs counter to the ineludible law
which govern human evolution. If a master clas
achieves complete control over a slave class, it mus
end in stagnation, because the conditions of that contro
require an ever-increasing subservience of the moment:
of progress to their maintenance ; the development i:
from the first deflected and distorted by the necessity
of maintaining existing conditions ; the entire fabric o
the human world is shaped and coloured, not by rationa
thought, not by pure desire for truth and for tnu
progress, but by the artificial interests, the inviolable
foundations of the privileges of the ruling class. Anc
the domination of those motives, like a parasite on 2
noble tree, entirely stifles and supplants the progressive
impulse. The entire culture of the ruling class, what-
ever force and noble qualities it may once have
possessed, swiftly degenerates into a dead world of mere
formulas and shams ; all sincerity, all sense of truth and
justice, every element of vitality departs from it. li
it continues to exist, if no force comes to sweep it
away entirely from the world, it lives only a mummified
life. If, on the other hand, the control, the subjection
of the servile class is not complete, if that class is not
rigorously excluded from the mental -world of the master
class, the progressive impulse sets to work in the sub-
jected class also. Its operation acts against the existing
order of things. The falsification of the cultural
elements of the threatened master class becomes even
more pronounced ; the intensity of the bias produced
by its interests is proportionate to the forces which
menace them. It is determined to see things as they
are not, and consequently becomes totally unadapted
to things as they are. And the conflict which is set up
can only end in the subversion of the existing order.
Those are the ' seeds of decay * which many suppose

SEGREGATION 101

to reside in every culture. They are presen; v^e/ever
that culture and its advantages are not diffused through
the entire social body, but are correlated to the interests
of a group of individuals to whose development the
lives of the majority are rendered subservient. That
injury to one portion of the social body reacts upon
the whole ; the collective organism cannot be healthy
when one part seeks to thrive to the detriment of another .
Both suffer equally ; the dominance of the one is bought
at the expense of its own deterioration. Such an
organism violates the conditions of organic existence,
and the nemesis is that it must also violate the conditions
of human adaptation and development. It cannot de-
velop by the force of rational thought, but strives to
live by stifling the operation of that force. It is in the
nature of things foredoomed.

That ' honesty is the best policy ' is an adage*
repeated with uncertain conviction. That truth is the
best policy is a law of human development, the necessary
consequence of man's situation in the world. Everything
which makes for that truth will promote his successful
adaptation, everything which tends to vitiate his judg-
ment and deflect his mind from its function will inevit-
ably result in inadaptation to the facts amongst which
he lives, and check his power of evolution . Throughout
the entire course of 'human culture, the vitality, the
power, the energy, the worth, the success of a civiliza-
tion, mean its sincerity, its honesty of thought ; senility,
decay, corruption, the doomed and downward path,
mean mendacity and dishonesty.

PART II

THE GENEALOGY OF EUROPEAN
CIVILIZATION

CHAPTER I

THE SECRET OF THE EAST

WHEN nomadic humanity in search for pastures came
upon the alluvial plains of the great Asiatic water-
courses, and discovered that, with but little labour,
bounteous nature yielded abundant winter food for cattle
—and, it soon occurred, for men also — it ceased to
wander, became agricultural and settled into permanent
abodes. From the slime of the Jaxartes, the Ganges,
the Yang-tse, the Euphrates, and the Nile, civilization
was born. Nature afforded leisure, relieved man from
the hand-to-mouth struggle for food ; leisure gave
opportunity for thought and device.

But the same conditions which gave permanent abode
and secure sustenance, furnished likewise the occasion
of new struggles. In a community that lives on fish
or game no decided advantage can accrue to any indi-
vidual or group from domination over the rest ; under
purely pastoral conditions the cattle is the common
property of the tribe, and, while one tribe may steal
another's herds, there is neither inducement nor facility
for individual appropriation from the common flock.
But where the land itself, permanently occupied, is the
source of sustenance and wealth, where the needful
work can be performed as well by the labourer working
for another as for himself, where leisure renders surplus
production possible, the advantages to be derived from
power wielded over man, and from individual possession,
are obvious and substantial. The claim to ownership
of the soil, if it can be made good, places the owner
in possession of men also and their labour.

105

106 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

The influence of the medicine -man, the magician, the
priest, the relatives and representatives of the god, on
whose incantations and rituals, more even than on human
care, the fertility of the soil is believed to depend-
that influence assumes with the agricultural people
enormous proportions. And it is thus — not through any
racial ' genius for religion ' — that the Asiatic and
Nilotic lands of rivers have ever been the great b re wing -
vats of religious fermentation ; and that the map of
the alluvial plains of Asia and North Africa is also that
of the cradle of every religion, save one,^that has counted
in the world. Is man naturally and incurably pre-
disposed to put his trust in mummeries and magic rites
to make corn and cabbages grow, rather than in hoeing,
and ploughing, and sowing, as our anthropologists labour
to impress on us? It appears somewhat incredible.
But any disposition towards such a notion would, we
may be sure, not be unduly discouraged by the repre-
sentatives of the corn -god ; and they would with greater
authority and nimbler fancy than the simple boor, pre-
scribe and develop rituals and mythologies.

The fact that has most impressed the diggers and
decipherers of that early civilization, the form of which
has but lately been emerging from the mounds of
Mesopotamia, is the magnitude and all-pervasiveness of
its piety. Accustomed as we are to the unity of religion
and of life in all primitive cultures, early Babylon
transcends all examples. It cannot for a moment escape
from the orbit of religious thought. You cannot take
a step in that magic circle, move a shovelful of earth,
make a brick, eat a mouthful, take a breath, give a
sneeze, without being brought into direct contact with
the supernatural. That is the f atmosphere in which
the oriental mind has been formed.

The fertile alluvial soil is a gift of the god ; ' the
earth is the Lord's," the Lord is the landlord ; and rent
accordingly, first-fruits and tithes, must be paid to him.
Payment of rent is one of the most essential and efficient
propitiatory rituals. The priest, the family of the god,
pay rent to themselves. Hence one inevitable genesis
of landed ownership.

SECRET OF THE EAST 107

The representative of the god was not backward in
using his advantage : he bled the people white. Here is,
for instance, a little memorandum which we happen to
have picked up of fees due to a Sumerian priest for
reading the burial service over one of his flock and con-
signing him to mother-earth — " Seven urns of wine, four
hundred and twenty loaves of bread, one hundred and
twenty measures of corn, a garment, a kid, a bed, and
a seat."

Between agricultural communities scattered along the
banks of the great rivers disputes inevitably arise, chiefly
in regard to grazing grounds, which remain communal,
and, as more land is brought under tillage, extend further
and further afield. Provision must be made for protec-
tion and refuge ; that afforded by the sanctuary of the
god is wisely supplemented by an enclosure of strong
walls. The home of the community becomes a walled
city.

Of such kind are the settlements we meet with every-
where at the dawn of civilization in eastern lands, dotted
over the plains of Mesopotamia, for instance. In the
course of tribal warfare adjoining city-states tend to
fuse under the sway of the strongest, paying tribute to
the dominant chief, the steward of the god, the patesi,
as he is called ; and little kingdoms arise with varying
fortunes around Kish and Lagash, Eridu and Ur of
the Chaldees. Ultimately the inevitable fate of the cities
of the plain, undelimitated by natural frontiers, is to
form mighty empires stretching from the rising to the
going down of the sun, witnessing to the glory of a
priest -king, the offspring of the high gods. Thus
did Eannatum of Lagash and Sargon of Agade " pour
forth their glory over the world," and Sumu-abu and
Khammurabi weld Sumer and Akkad into the first
Babylonian Empire. So in Egypt the Horus-Lords of
Abydos absorb adjoining tribes and extend their king-
dom to the Fayum, till Narmer, subduing the Delta
people, whose culture owing to proximity of Babylonian
influences is more advanced, unites the Nile Valley under
his sway. The cupidity of warlike hill and desert tribes
is also necessarily excited by riparian prosperity ; high-

108 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

landers from Elam, periodic waves of wild Beddwin from
the desert, Akkadian, Canaanite, Aramaean Semitic
swarms, Kassite horsemen, and the terrible Hittite from
Cappadocia, come sweeping down over the promised land,
the mother of civilization. But all those inroads have
little other effect than to extend and spread her beneficent
influence. The conditions remain unchanged. In vain
the gods of Babylon are carried away to the hills, their
power remains with the rivers and their priests. Semite
may supplant Sumerian, but the priest and his civiliza-
tion remains and absorbs the wild conqueror. When the
warrior attempts to throw off the spell, to take power
into his own strong hand, when the Shalmanesers and
Asshurnasirpals, and Sennacheribs, the lords of Calah
and Nineveh try, like mediaeval emperors, to shake off
the dominance of the arrogant priests of Asshur and
Babylon, to oppose their privileges, to question their
immemorial claim to exemption from taxation, to lay
hand on the tenfple lands, they find themselves in the
end worsted ; till the Assyrian empire, excommunicated
and abandoned by all, goes down before the Mede amid
the curse of the nations. And When, in another age,
the Greek Xenophcxn marches astonished through the
ruins of Nineveh, his guides are unable to tell him?
the name which they once bore.

•With territorial extension goes a corresponding
increase in the character of despotic power. The
original theocratic rule of the patesi, the vicar of god,
great as it was, holding the awed and helpless multitude
as its mercy, becomes even more superhuman as it
stretches over vast regions. The kings of Babylon
and those of Memphis gathered millions of men from
every part of their dominions to build a temple-palace
or a pyramid. t

A somewhat unpleasant admission has to be made.
That inevitable sequence of events, that absolutism of
the great empires of the morning- land's, that wholesale
subjugation of human herds, that unresisted tyranny
which was founded in the very heart of the slave,
in mental prostration before divine power, that fearful,
willing, loyal abjection, that kismet of the river-lands,

SECRET OF THE EAST 109

that terrible secret of the East — was the foundation,
the indispensable foundation of civilization. Without
it Greece, Europe would have been impossible. I call
it an " unpleasant admission " because it would be fine
to be able to say that human civilization is the child
of freedom, that it is incompatible with tyranny
and slavery. As a matter of fact men never bethought
themselves of building decent homes for themselves until
they had seen gorgeous palaces and temples built with
the tears and blood of thousands; they never bethought
themselves of living in reasonable comfort until they
had witnessed the opulence and luxurious orgies of
satraps and kings; they never bethought themselves
of controlling the forces of nature till herds of human
chattels under the kurbash of their slave-drivers had
dug canals and artificial lakes, embanked rivers, and
quarried mountains ; they never knew scientific curiosity,
the powers of the mind, the greatness and might of
knowledge, the glories of intellect before leisured
parasite-priests created culture. Totally emancipated
for the first time from the material organic struggle,
commanding the resources of the land, commanding
inexhaustible supplies of forced labour ready at hand
to carry out their will, the priests of Sumer and Babylon
and Egypt devised, contemplated, thought, discovered;
they brought forth architectural and pictorial arts, crafts,
industries, taught men to chisel stone, hammer and
inlay metals, glaze pottery and tiles, blow glass, weave
rich fabrics and impart to them gorgeous dyes; they
laid the foundations of mathematical and mechanical
knowledge, measured the land, divided the year, mapped
out the heavens, traced the course of the sun and
planets through the zodiacal belt ; they invented writing,
committed vast stores of knowledge and experience to
innumerable clay tablets and papyrus rolls, formulated
laws, established the foundations of all culture and
civilization.

Ever glorious and venerable to every lover of
man must be those first outbursts of civilization and
culture. But behold a stranger thing than even their
swift emergence out of savagery. From their very

110 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

infancy they are smitten with a hidden malady. They
shoot up with astonishing rapidity in a dim distant age,
a revelation full of light and promise; and forthwith
a spell is cast upon them, their growth is arrested,
their creative impulses numbed, a palsy creeps over them,
they stand still, petrified. They do not die; they live
on and on, century after century, from one millen-
nium to another, a charmed, weird, sepulchral life,
in a trance, unchanging, as if under some awful
curse .

In Babylonia all native culture has produced its best,
its all — save for what the fastuous power of an Asshur-
banipal can impart to it of opulence — before the early
days of the first Babylonian em'pire of Khammurabi.
" For the finest period of Babylonian art we must
go back to a time some centuries before the founding
of the Babylonian monarchy." l Nothing essential is
added. Babylonian science, which has supplied the
germ of all science to the world, was exactly as far
advanced in the nebulous dawn days of the Sumerian
city-states as nearly four thousand years later when
Greeks came to gather its crumbs. As the legend
which Berossus transmits to us expresses it, " Oamres,"
the fish-god that came out of the Arabian sea,
" taught people all the things that make up civili-
zation, and nothing new was invented afoer that
any more."

In the isolation of Egypt the spectacle is no less strik-
ing. Culture is actually more advanced under the pyra-
mid-builders of the IVth dynasty than at any time during
the three-and-a-half millenniums during which twenty -
five dynasties succeeded them. Not even the brief
freedom of development under the heretic pharaoh
Akhenaten, or the cultural contacts which under the
Xllth dynasty produced Beni- Hassan and the jewellery
and scarabs of the period, can recapture the, first
fine rapture of the art of the Old Etnpire. The
civilization of the Theban Ernpire at its height,
though immeasurably more wealthy and commanding
vastly greater resources, falls conspicuously below that
1 L. W. King, Sumer and Akkad, p. 83.

SECKET OF THE EAST 111

of the Memphitic Empire, two thousand years older-
Compare, for instance, the statue of Princess Nefert or
the Sheikh al-Balad with, say, the Ramses statues of
Luxor. Compare the king's chamber of the Great
Pyramid, the huge cementless ashlars between the joints
of which it is impossible to introduce the blade of a
penknife, masonry, as Flinders Petrie says, " only
comparable to watchmakers' work," with the jerry-
building of Karnak and its patchwork pillars held
together by stucco., If the artists of Thebes cannot
match the realism of those of Memphis, and still draw
their figures in that curious way, trunk and eyes front
view, limbs and head in profile, it is not that they know
no better and are clumsy — the artist who decorated
Seti's temple at Abydos and his tomb at Thebes, is,
one can see, a fine draughtsman— but the convention is
too sacred to be broken.

Our engineering and mechanical skill is the lineal
successor of that of Egypt ; and yet to this day the
fellah and Kurdish peasant plough with the same
woo/den share as their forefathers at the dawn of time;
the Nile air reverberates to the sounds of creaking
shadoofs and sakyahs as it did five thousand years ago,
and the snap-shot of the modern tourist reproduces
the same scene as the mastabas of Sakkara; the
peasants of the Tigris Valley sail down-stream in those
funny round leather tubs which carry two men and a
donkey, and return home with the leather boat packed
on the donkey's back, just as Herodotos saw them, and
as they had done long before the official ' creation of
the world.'

The ' unchanging East,' the ' oriental mind ' ! It is
no racial disease. Sumerian, Semite, Egyptian, Iranian,
Indian Aryan, Mongol, Tartar, all have in like manner
succumbed to it. It is the doom attaching to all the
civilizations which have "been bred from the silt of the
Asiatic streams, the fatal gift of the corn and river
gods. Culture and civilization is in all of them the
outcome of the ascendancy which the spontaneous,
seemingly miraculous bounty of nature gave to the
sacerdotal dispensers and controllers of those gifts, and
to the absolute intellectual domination of the conse-

112 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

quent systems of thought. The East has been
' unchanging ' for the simple reason that everything
that exists in it is sacred, and to touch it is, therefore,
sacrilege .

Chaldasan civilization is the oldest that we know.
It is not only the type of the development of all
eastern phases of culture, but the focus whence that
type has imposed itself on the oriental world. The
culture of the Sumerian city-states became that of
Babylon and Asshur. In what measure it influenced
that of Egypt is still a discussed point. The military
empire of Assyria diffused it far and wide among the
motley populations of Syria and Asia Minor, and through
Philistine and; Phoenician to Cypirus and Crete, through
Babylonian traders to the uplands of Cappadocia and
to Iran. And, when Cyrus, king4 of Anshan, created the
Persian Empire, the successor of Nineveh, the culture
of that first World-empire, which extended from the
confines of China and India to Greece, and was
the great political fact of the ancient world, Was the
civilization of Babylon writ large. The Persian satrapies
of India which supplied in gold-dust one -third of the
revenue of the treasury of Ecbatana, and whose archers
fought at Plataea, planted the Babylonian civilization
of Persia in the Magadhan kingdom of the Upper
Ganges ; and when, after Alexander's raid, Chandra-
gupta overthrew the Nandas, the first great Indian
Empire of Maurya, which rose to its height under King
Asoka, was modelled' upon that of Persia, and its capital
Pataliputra (the modern Patna) was a copy of
Persepolis.

Among the offthrows of Chaldaean culture was; the
great Jew Bible, whose poetry and myths, captives
repatriated by Cyrus brought with them from Babylon
together with the deep Chaldsean religious fervour. To
the elevating influence of Persian conceptions were,
we like to believe, partly due those high developments
which the ancient thought of the venerable mother-
culture of the land of Shinar underwent at the hands
of the tribesmen of Beni-Israel. Not to any such
causes as Professor Falta de Gracia would invoke, who

SECRET OF THE EAST 113

so absurdly conceives that, " While among the gentle
Chaldaeans each tribal god was in the habit of paying
courtesies to the gods of neighbouring tribes, inviting
them to the inauguration of any new temple, providing
them with side -chapels, the Israelitish Bedawin were,
after the collapse of the trumpery little kingdom they
had set up, so maddened with impotent rage and
bruised pride, that their nebi were moved to declare
that no other god but Yaveh should be worshipped;
and, in order to ensure against his being carried off
by indignant neighbours, they abolished his seven-horned
images and fetish stones, and decreed the suppression
of all pictorial arts. Thus, amid the lyric hate of the
prophet -bards of Judah, soaring to quite sublime heights
of vituperation, was Intolerance ushered into this stricken
world." The learned Professor has here, we think,
allowed himself to be carried off his feet to quite
uncalled-for 'sublime heights.'

Early Babylon fixed for ever the mould of the
eastern mind, of the Eastern World. And that mould
was that of theocracy, the absolute intellectual
supremacy of the priest, the representative of the
god, the magician, the mystic ; the identification
of all forms of rule and power with that original
type.

Theocracy in the East has not been intellectually
tyrannical or coercive. We do not find there the
obscurantism, the holding down of thought, the perpetual
warfare against intellectual revolt, which is such a
familiar feature of the European world, with Greece and
Rome at its back. And that for a simple reason :
there has been no intellectual revolt. The true
intellectual impulse never arose at all. The age-long
habit of religious power-thought has sunk too deep
in the constitution. The only changes, the only mental
contests known to the East are religious changes;
religious thought can only be supplanted there by
religious thought. Whereas in Greece intellectual
awakening and criticism of existing religious ideas took
the form of ' philosophies,' of thought purely secular
and intellectual; in the East, on the contrary, criticism

8

114 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

of existing religious thought, however intellectual in
its inception, has invariably taken the form of ' new.
religions.' Thus, criticism of primitive Magian religion
by Zarathustra became Zoroastrianism, criticism of
Brahmism by Gautama and by Mahavira became
Buddhism and Jainism; the purely secular thoughts
of Lao-Tsu became Taoism ; and even the explicitly
unmetaphysical moralizing of Kong-fu-tse became
Confucianism .

Of purely secular, clear-cut, sharply focussed thought,
the oriental mind is incapable. Its very languages are
unfitted for the expression of precision and accuracy
of thought; they have no terms for mental facts, they
can only be expressed by material images. To the
oriental, Greek poetry is unintelligibly friglid because
the motions and states of the mind are expressed by
words, not by a string of metaphors; they do not know
the use of inversion, they mark emphasis by repeating
a thing three times over; they have no syntax, no
means of expressing the varying! relations and connec-
tions between thoughts ; propositions are strung together
like beads, and the only conjunction is ' and . . . and
. . . and ' reiterated to infinity. The human mind
had to break through the gyves of such a mental
conformation ere it could apply rational thought to
the higher problems of its situation and destiny. And
that mental constitution, that incapacity which is the
central fact of eastern culture, is the inevitable product
of the mode of birth of that culture. It is the fruit
of the lordly leisure and boundless domination of a
small class holding multitudes in mental submission by
virtue of the religious sanction of their power. Raised
above all material struggles, the priestly ruling class
built itself an intellectual mansion exalted above the
herd. But their minds were satisfied as soon as they
were housed; they consecrated their home, lay down
and went to sleep. The mental world which they
created was itself inexorably dominated by their
position. Their power, their wealth, their leisure,
their opportunity of intellectual achievement, their
very life and being, depended upon the sanctity

SECRET OF THE EAST 115

attaching to that mental world, to established conven-
tion and tradition, upon the mystic prestige of its divine
and consecrated character. They were neither wicked
not unintelligent men, those genial priests. On the
contrary they were quite the most admirable and
charming men of their day. They were filled with a
profound sense of the sacredness and worth of their
mission; they were conscious of being, what in fact
they were, the civilizers and teachers of mankind. It
was with a genuine zest and love, and, as would be said
nowadays, in a reverent spirit, that they followed their
intellectual pursuits, studied the heavens from the top
of their ziggurat* or temple -towers, sought to assist the
practical operations of agriculture, of land reclamation,
of irrigation. And what is more, they were uplifted by
a strong feeling; of responsibility, of moral duty. They
desired the welfare of the people. It is quite evident
from the elaborate codes of laws they devised, that
they were zealously anxious that righteousness should
prevail. No Christian priest, no missionary to-day is
filled with a more exalted ideal of his functions, with
a loftier moral endeavour, than were the priests, the
patesi of Babylonia.

Yet all those endeavours and aspirations were fatally,
involuntarily perverted and paralysed. The whole
momentum of thought, the whole interests of the thinker
were enlisted in the cause of a tradition; and all the
knowledge and wisdom they acquired was assimilated
with, and pressed in the service of that convention.
Their most intimate thought was hemmed and deformed
under the pressure of those conditions : was crumpled and
distorted and withered. Their science was magic, their
astronomy, astrology. Their art was stifled by tradi-
tionalism. All , the products of their mind were
inextricably entangled in fantastic oriental metaphor,
in uncouth, misshapen dreams, swayed in grotesque
mythological chimeras. Their moral aspirations resulted
in a world which presented but one relation, that of
lord and slave ; their superhuman world reflected the
same relation. We look in vain in all their achieve-
ments for a ray of clear thought that can strike a

116 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

responsive note in us, and make us forget for a moment
the interval of time, and the difference between East
and West. And that desiccated, aborted world has
lived on its mummified life through the ages, in senile
infancy, for ever incapable of growth.

CHAPTER II

THE HELLENIC LIBERATION

A TIME came when the quaint, archaic fruits of oriental
culture, disseminated and transplanted among many
various populations, reached certain very active and in-
telligent tribes of pirates. These were not organized
into large empires of slaves and theocratic despots, bait
in small clans scattered over islands and sinuous cliff-
shores ; and every individual had to bear to a smaller
or larger extent a share of the cares, fortunes, and
perils of the tribe. Hence they were not under any
necessity of preserving the sanctity of traditional ways.
Thus arose Greek thought, thus was laid the foundation
of the modern world.

In the midst of that day-dreaming, cataleptic Orient,
at once infantile and senile, which must needs remain
alien and exotic to the western mind, Greece, like her
goddess Athene, appears to rise panoplied and full grown,
and almost without a transition we find ourselves trans-
ported, as if by the stroke of her magic spear, into a
modern atmosphere. Between an age of dim fable and
i the height of Athenian intellectual splendour scarcely
two hundred years have elapsed ; ' though in reality the
development of Hellas has been silently proceeding for
some eight centuries.

In passing from Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia,
Judtea, into Greece, we step into a world which is actually
closer to us than are the ten centuries intervening between
the passing of Hellenism and the rebirth of Europe,
a world which is western and modern, in which we
move among the topics, problems, tendencies discussions,
criticisms, which occupy our own thought. It is not
merely because our intellectual heritage is Grecian that

117

118 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

we feel at home there, it is not merely that the structure
of our ideas, of our conceptions, our modes of expression,
the forms of our literature, are the progeny of Greek
thought ; it is because Greece owed its own life, as
we ours, to the liberation of the human mind from
the gyves and shackles which weighed it down in the
theocratic East. Greece made the European world. It
is inaccurate to say that she saved it from the encroaching
East. There was no European world. There was only
one form of civilization, that of the Orient, and Greece
was not separated by any geographical convention from
the Orient, but was as much part of it as is Constanti-
nople. Greece did not save Europe, she created it.
Before Greece there was no Europe ; Greece brought it
into being by breaking the spell, exorcizing the fatal
charm which had fallen upon all human evolution.

When we turn our attention to Greek history we are
not merely curiously inquiring into the annals of certain
very small city-states in the Levant. That history con-
stitutes by far the most momentous grand-climacteric
in the evolution of humanity. ' The history of Greece
is not a chapter in historical annals, it is a turning-
point in evolution. Speaking purely as a scientific
anthropologist Dr. Marett says, ' To break through
custom by the sheer force of reflection, and to make
rational progress possible, was the intellectual feat
of one people, the ancient Greeks ; and it is at least
highly doubtful if, without their leadership, a progressive
civilization would have existed to-day." '

The phenomenon of Greece, the ' miracle of Greece '
as it is often called, has appeared so marvellous that it
is one of the standing puzzles of criticism to account
for it. In the two or three centuries of Greek activity
the course of human evolution seems rather to have
taken a sudden leap than followed the slow path of
a process of growth. Within that short space of time
the intellectual power of Greece has blazed the tracks
which all human thought and creation has subsequently
followed in literature, in art, in philosophy, in criticism,
logic, politics ; so that every path which the human
* Anthropology, p. 185.

HELLENIC LIBERATION 119

mind has trod leads us, traced backwards, to Greek
thought.

We have in general been satisfied to fall back on
the old Gordian knot method of saying that the Greeks
were endowed with a wonderfully gifted disposition. Pro-
fessor Bury says that " we have to take that character
for granted." And it is now the fashion to hint at a
profound explanation by laying stress upon the mystic
words 'Aryan' and 'northern races.* That the
* character ' of the Greeks, or to speak more accurately,
the conditions of their development in those ages which
preceded their emergence into the light of history, con-
tributed to their subsequent evolution, may readily be
granted. But that evolution was a definite effect of the
circumstances in which it took place.

When the Greek tribes appeared in the ^Egean region
their way had already been made straight for the utili-
zation and transformation of eastern culture. Although
there was no European civilization, Europe was not a
world of sheer howling savagery. It had attained, as
we realize more and more with the progress of archeo-
logical research, as high a state of material culture as
it is possible for scattered tribes and small primitive
communities to attain. In France, in Spain, in Italy
skilful bronze-smiths and potters had long been present.
The great river trade-routes which were to last down
till modern times were already opened up ; the copper,
manufactured bronze, earthenware, of Mediterranean lands
were being exchanged for British tin and Baltic amber.
In the yEgean itself had arisen the most highly developed
of those cultures. Born of seafaring enterprise, of the
contacts of the strong Cretan despot's far-flung fleets
with every Mediterranean shore, that brilliant material
culture whose labyrinthine palaces, with their monumental
thro ne- rooms, and staircases, and bull- rings, their stuccos,
and cameos, and frescoes, whose flounce -kir ted ladies, and
feathered page-boys, astonish us, served the momentous
purpose of a half-way house for the exsurgent destinies
of the Greek tribes, fitting them for the assimilation of
more important elements. For in the first wonder of dis-
covery, the importance of that Minoan culture's influence

120 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

may easily be exaggerated. It was a courtly culture
which exploited the resources of eastern civilization
and of Mediterranean local Industries for the pleasure
and gratification of powerful autocrats ; and, while it
transmitted to Greece the all- important factor of sea-
power, many material and artistic suggestions, and
perhaps something of its pleasure-loving, hedonistic reck-
lessness and insouciance, it contained, like the similar
and similarly formed Tyrrhenian culture, whose last
remnants died out with Etruscan power, no great intrinsic
element of new progress, nor aught of what makes up
the distinctive qualities of Greece. Greece does not
hold the place it does in the history of humanity by
virtue of its pottery or of the type of its decorative
designs. Minoan civilization could not transmit what
it did not possess.

The most important dowry of Minoan civilization to
Greece was its ships. Drawn over a sea-way made easy
by countless stepping-stones, and which brought them
at the end of every radius of their course in touch with
an existing civilization, the Greek became a sea-rover,
and, like his national hero, Odysseus, "many men's cities
he saw and learned their mind." He mixed and com-
peted with the merchants of Tyre and Sidon ; he met
Babylonian caravans in the bazaars of Lydia and Synope ;
he went as merchant or mercenary to Syria and to
Egypt, fought in the armies of Nebuchadnezzar and
sacked Jerusalem, in the armies Tjf the Pharaohs and
scratched his name on the colossi of Abu-Simbel ; met
Phrygian, Lydian and Assyrian. And when Persian
power gathered up all the old civilizations of the Orient,
the Greek was in daily, close, and by no means always
unfriendly relation with the great cosmopolitan empire.
He absorbed every culture of the Eastern world. The
first book of history published in Greece was not a
history of Greece, but of all the * barbarians ' whom
the Greek found so very interesting ; and, in a later
age, Plutarch wrote a pamphlet to vent his patriotic
indignation against Herodotos, who was a shameless
* pro -barbarian ' to an extent quite inconsistent with
respectable patriotism.

HELLENIC LIBERATION 121

But all those varied culture-contacts would have availed
little — they were little more than Phoenician and Minoan
had enjoyed — had they not worked upon a material of
new quality. The Greeks were, as none of those people
had been, almost completely protected from the influence
of tradition and from every form of power-thought.
Therein lies the differentiating character of the reaction.
No sacredness attached in their eyes to the culture which
they took over from Cretan and Mycenean. And those
with which they came into relation through their inter-
course with Persian, Phoenician, Egyptian, Babylonian,
were approached with curiosity, interest, acquisitiveness,
but with no superstitious reverence.

When the Greeks came under those influences they
were in that primitive tribal phase of society which,
in culture and organization, is very much the same
wherever it is met wiih, whether among Germanic tribes,
or American Indians, or Central African, or Polynesian
tribal communities. It has, of course, nothing to do
with race, but is a culture phase necessarily common to
all races before the establishment of large fixed com-
munities and agriculture. The older writers like
Robertson and Guizot were deeply struck with the re-
semblance between the social condition and character
of the ancient Germans and those of the Red Indians,
the only surviving tribal communities then at all well
known ; and someone even wrote a book to prove that
the Redskins were Germans. Only the blinding tradition
of elegant pseudo-classicism has prevented the same like-
ness from being perceived sooner 'in the Homeric Greek,
and the pictures of the Iliad from being at once recognized
as obviously taken from Fenimore Cooper's novels.

Their clans, genoi, phrateries, were not, as Grote and
Maine have imagined, groups of families, but family
groups, in a state of transition from matriarchal kin-
ship, group-marriage, exogamy, and tribal 'communism,
to the patriarchal state. Large constituted interests,
class privilege and government, traditions of absolutism,
were then wholly unknown to them. Their ' basileis '
were never, either then or later, ' kings ' at all in the
sense which the title has acquired, but war-chiefs, subject

122 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

to the natural authority of the whole tribe convened
in councils, in which the people were influenced in their
decisions not by the power or prestige of authority,
but by the tongue of their orators or demagogues ; and
where they signified their approval or dissent by murmurs
or shouts and the rattling of their spears on their shields.
All our ' histories of Greece ' are rendered thoroughly
unintelligible by the notion that Greece began with
' monarchies.' At most the measure of authority
acquired by their chiefs, was that exercised by the leader
oif a band of pirates who holds his power at the discretion
of his men. In Homer the word * basileus ' does not mean
* king/ but * prince ' ; there are families of basileis in
every tribe. That power tended continuously to dwindle ;
the basileus became the archon, at first elected for life,
then decennially, finally annually. And it is strikingly
characteristic that, while in the riparian civilizations of
the East the priestly function developed into the para-
mount autocracy of kingly despotism, among the Greek
tribes the kingly war-leader sank into the insignificant
office of the priest, the second archon, as in Rome he
became the rex sacrificulus.

The spirit of tribal democracy was never supplanted
by the spirit of monarchy, by courtly abasements,
reverential awe, divine right, * loyalty.' The Greeks did
not invent democracy, as our school histories supposed ;
they never had occasion to abandon their original con-
dition of tribal democracy. What they did was to en-
deavour to maintain that original democratic state under
civilized conditions, in spite of all the factors which,
amid wealth and culture, make for class privileges and
usurpation.

There were plenty of attempts to establish privilege
and oppression in Greece : Eupatrid claims, ' tyrannoi.'
The earlier — and much of the later — history of Greek
cities is entirely taken up with struggles against desperate
efforts of various powers to establish themselves, with
the checkmating of attempts at usurpation. But those
TVvery struggles testify to the untamed force of the primitive
*^equalitarian spirit. The constitution of Solon was necessi-
tated by the most terrible condition of plutocratic

HELLENIC LIBERATION 123

ascendancy. The Athenian merchants, enriched by the
eastern trade, held the whole agricultural land and the
farmers themselves in the grip of their mortgages. But
the force of old-established democracy was too strong :
all debts had to be cancelled. (Imagine Capital and
Labour to-day agreeing to submit to the decision of a
Professor Solon, and capitalists tamely submitting to
expropriation !) The conditions under which the Greek
people had developed did not permit of any attempt at
usurpation achieving lasting success : usurpation had no
power of tradition at its back ; it was not ' divine '
and sacred, it never had the means of getting itself
sanctified and venerated : it had to play its game under
its own undisguised banner. The Greek tribesmen had
never occasion to prostrate themselves before a vice-
gerent of the corn -god. The * tyrannoi ' were no more
tyrants than the basileis and archons were kings ; they
usurped the administrative and executive power by popular
support and armed force, but none dared or had the power
to alter the actual constitution, to claim to be ' legiti-
mate ' rulers. Peisistratos enforced the laws of Solon, and
even made them more liberal ; the only means of power
which those usurpers had, was to please the people. In
passing from barbaric communism to civilization, the
Greeks never lost the spirit of their equalitarian condition.
And the height of the intellectual growth of Athens
coincides with a form of absolute democracy, which is,
and will probably remain without parallel. The * demo-
cratic jealousy * with which the Kleisthenean constitution
is almost fanatically obsessed, was bent upon preinsurance
against the remotest opportunity of individual or class
predominance .

It is true that this superlative democracy rested on
slavery, that when Attic imperialism was at its height
a hundred thousand citizens were surrounded by three
hundred and sixty-five thousand slaves. But at
a time when slavery was a universally recognized
institution the condition of Attic slaves was so mild,
except in the silver mines (the lot of miners is bad '.
under all circumstances), that they never once revolted. '
The agricultural slave was rather a farmer than a slave,

i

124 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

and having paid a certain fixed proportion of produce
to the landlord, could do what he liked with the rest ;
the industrial slave assisted his master, who worked as
hard as himself ; and Demosthenes could claim that slaves
in Attica enjoyed greater freedom than citizens in many
another land. Hence slavery in Athens never affected
her intellectual development through any anxiety about
the maintenance of power. That it did not affect it
by producing idleness is attested by the fact that in the
time of Perikles the number of citizens who could not
afford to lose a day's work to serve on the juries was
so great, that he introduced the payment of jurymen.
As a matter of fact most of the crafts and industries of
Athens were carried on by free labour, not by slaves, the
former being cheaper and better. No slave labour was
employed in the building of the temples of the Acropolis.
Slavery did exercise a profoundly pernicious effect upon
Greek culture, and ultimately contributed to its down-
fall. But neither in Greece nor in Rome did it
ever seriously affect the complexion of social and
political thought, compel it, as in the East, to adapt
itself to the interests of oppression ; because the slaves
were imported foreigners, a fluctuating population lying
outside the social community, not oppressed citizens, not
the people themselves reduced to subjection. The social
and intellectual questions developed in Greece between
citizens and citizens, not between masters and slaves.

The primitive Greeks had, like every other race, their
religious traditions and customs, their rituals and their
mythology ; and many eastern cults became inevitably
acclimatized among them. But religion with the Greek
tribes, as with the Norse, the Germanic, the Latin popu-
lations, stands for something altogether different as
regards its character and the place it occupies in human
life, from the religions of the eastern river-lands. And
the difference depends upon the circumstance that the
whole sphere of religious thought in the East was from
the first indissolubly bound up with the chief source
of class power and privilege ; it was the religion of a
theocracy whose power and authority rested wholly upon
religious ideas, and whose culture accordingly moved

HELLENIC LIBERATION 125

exclusively within the orbit of religion. Nothing of
the kind occurred elsewhere. Religion as the all in all
of human life, engrossing the whole of man's thought
and activities, dominating supreme in every sphere, ex-
cluding every other point of view, religion in the sense in
which it is still understood, is a product of the East.
It assumed that hypertrophic development only where
the life of the people depended upon the supernatural
fertility of the land, and where the priest, the representa-
tive of the supernatural power, consequently controlled
every source of human existence. The religious rites
and beliefs of the Greeks were, like those of other
people, chiefly associated with the fertility of the soil,
with the operations of agriculture, with seed-time and
harvest. But then the Greeks were not an agricultural
people. Except in Thessaly, Bceotia, and Messenia, there
was no good agricultural land in Greece. And those
districts, Thessaly the mother of witches, and Bceotia
the home of oracles, always remained the most backward
in Greek civilization. ' The goodness of the land,"
Thucydides significantly observes, " favoured the
aggrandizement of particular individuals and thus
created faction, which proved a prolific source of ruin."
Attica, on the contrary, " from the poverty of its soil,"
enjoyed a continuous development. With the Greeks
the supernatural was merely an attempt at explanation,
a form of speculation issued from the popular mind.
It was democratic ; it had no vested interest at its
back, no consecrated guardians watchful, with all the
force of self-preservative instincts, for the inviolate pro-
tection of its sanctity. The poets were at liberty and
welcome to remodel traditional fables, to play with
popular mythology as their fancy dictated. No inevit-
able connection was even recognized between morality
and religion ; there were rites due to the gods and to
the dead, but relations with the living were a matter of
natural justice. Clearly it would have been impossible
for the sacerdotal Chaldsean or Egyptian thinker to look
upon the problems of nature and of life from a purely
secular point of view, to ask what the world was made of,
whether of one kind of substance assuming many forms,

126 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

or of the combination of a few elementary substances,
or of atoms, and what really was the nature of the
changes continually taking place in the world, whether
they were real or only apparent. Such speculations
entirely divorced from any reference to the authority
of the gods could not occur to the theocrat ; far less
could they be put forth by him as hypotheses inviting
discussion. Compare the mythopoetic attitude of the
oriental priest, of the Egyptian before the fact of death,
with the sublime agnosticism of the dying Socrates :
44 Whether life or death is better is known to God, and
God only." From such an attitude of thought the eastern
theocrat was absolutely debarred. It is not, observe, that
the Greek was more ingenious, cleverer, but simply that
he was able to look at things secularly, that is, with
his mind dissociated from the obsession of religious
traditions and views. For the religious oriental that was
impossible. The oriental priests laid the foundations
of science by their patience of observation and attention
to details, and the Greeks had not patience enough for
the mere observation and collection of facts and noting
of details ; but when it came to use and interpret facts,
it was the Greek who was scientific and the oriental who
could not be so. When some one brought .to Perikles a
ram's head with a curious single horn growing in the
middle of its brow, a soothsayer was prompt with his
interpretation, drawing omens and prophecies from the
circumstance. But Anaxagoras, xvho happened to be
present, split the skull in two and showed how the
monstrosity was the natural effect of a mal-development
in the bones of the skull. It was in Greece for the first
time that the mind could move freely outside the charmed
circle of authoritative tabus and rnysticisms.

Thus it was that when the Greek tribes came in contact
with, and culled the fruits of the old civilizations, the
civilizations of the Orient, they transformed them into
a new power, a new phase of human evolution.

It was not in Greece that the Hellenic mind was
formed. The ' miracle of Greece ' took place in Asia.

HELLENIC LIBERATION 127

There already the sagas and ' chansons de gestes ' of
the Achaean tribes' heroes, and their battles in Thessaly
and round Cadmean Thebes, had collected about the
story of the fight for Troy which, in a later age, came
to be symbolic of the opposition between Europe and
Asia — a name given in Homer to a meadowland in Lydia.
There Greek tribes had settled on the Anatolian sea-
board and the adjoining islands as far down as Rhodes
and the headlands of Knidos and Halicarnassos, and
been held up in Cilicia by the Assyrian troops of
Sennacherib. It was among migrants from Attica
driven by a Dorian wave that the Greek spirit actually
came to birth and full power. On the fringe of that rich,
oriental Lydian kingdom, whence the youth of Colophon
came back, Xenophanes complained, flaunting eastern
dresses in the agora and reeking with perfumes ; where,
at the court of Sardis, the Athenian Solon, like a country
yokel, mistook each gorgeously clad courtier with his
train of attendants for the king ; and when the king took
him round Ms treasure-houses and sought to dazzle him
with the wealth of vases, and tripods of gold and electron,
and the jewels, golden clasps and chains, and pectorals,
and golden sand from Tmolos, and the new device of
coined money beautifully designed to his order by Ionian
artists, and Babylonian carpets, and carved cedar trunks
full of rich embroidered garments, the Greek refused
to be impressed, to the annoyance of the king1, who
expected the usual hyperbolic, oriental compliments— how
characteristic the whole anecdote is of the Greek attitude 1
—it was that semi-Asiatic Ionia which was the cradle
of Greek culture, whence it harked back with trade to
the Attic mainland, as also did sea-love and sea-power.
While Anacreon of Teos, and Alcaeos, and " burning
Sappho " of Lesbos " loved and sang," Greek intellect
rose in the harbour-cities and islands of Ionia to the
first splendour — and was it not also the best and soundest?
—of its creative power. From Miletos the sea -queen
at the mouth of the Menander, whose fleets plied regu-
larly to Egyptian Naukratis, and Abydos, and Byzantium,
and the Crimea, and the rest of her sixty daughter
colonies, and where the caravans from Susa and Babylon

128 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

ended their journey, came Thales fully equipped with
the lore of Egypt and Chaldaea, and first introduced
mathematics and astronomy and philosophical speculation
to Greek lands ; and Anaximenes who thought all land
animals, including man, were descended from fishes ; and
Hecataios who travelled oriental lands and wrote a
description of the world half a century before Herodotos
of Halicarnassos followed in his footsteps ; and Anaxi-
mander who first drew maps, such as that * brass table '
with which his countryman Aristagoras astonished the
Spartans when he sought to induce them to attack Lydia,
" with all the seas and all the rivers set down
upon it." He was said too to have " invented the
gnomon," but that had been in use for ages at Babylon,
and it was customary to credit the first Greek who
introduced an Egyptian or Babylonian invention with
its discovery, just as in the Middle Ages every Arabian
invention was credited to whomsoever in Europe first
happened to mention or use it. From ' piney ' Colophon
came Xenophanes railing at the gods whom Homer and
Hesiod had pictured immoral, and whom oxes and horses
would have pictured bovine or equine, and taught
Parmenides of Elea from whom Plato learned. From
Clazomena} came the great Anaxagoras who " brought
Ionian science to Athens," and taught his friend Euripides
4 atheism.' From Ephesos came Heracleitos, that Ionian
Nietzsche who in proud scorn denounced the vulgar in-
stincts of the herd, who, like asses, preferred chaff to
gold, and the man-made values which it mistook for
eternal realities, while Nature and her unswerving forces
of perpetual change and becoming were beyond good
and evil ; and from the Milesian colony of Abdera came
Democritos who conceived matter as composed of atoms ;
and (from Samos Pythagoras, half scientific genius, half
crank, whom tradition, perhaps too lightly dismissed,
made the pupil, not only of Chaldaean and Egyptian
priests, but of Persian and Indian teachers.

Thus was the old wine of the Orient put into the new
bottles of Greek- Criticism and rationalism.

It was that concourse of exceptionally favourable con-
ditions which moulded those qualities of the Greek mind

HELLENIC LIBERATION 129

by virtue of which all the evolutionary forces of the
race were liberated and the world transformed. The
agency which brought about that leap forward of human
evolution in Hellas, was the self-same agency which
produced that other forward bound in the last three
centuries of the modern world — unfettered criticism and
rational thought.

Greece built the European world ; but her task was
destructive as well as constructive. It was not so
much at Marathon, at Salamis, at Plataea, at Mycale,
that Greece overcame the Orient ; her chief victory over
it took place in the process of her mental growth. The
East was beaten ere a single soldier-slave of the Great
King had set foot across the Hellespont.

The many-nationed hosts of Persia and her Tynan
fleets were by no means the sole, nor the chief menace
which Greece had to encounter. At one time the
fate of Europe, the fate of human evolution had been
in even more grievous peril than when Xerxes stood,
with the blazing and smoking ruins of the old Acropolis
behind him, " on the rocky brow that frowns o'er sea-
born Salamis." A century earlier the destinies of the
world had, for a moment, even more fearfully and
momentously trembled in the balance. And it was not
the hoplites and seamen of Greece that saved them
then, but a handful of gruff old men in Ionia solitarily
thinking and revolving in their minds unpractical
things .

As the barbaric Achaean tribes grew under fertilizing
contacts into the Hellenes, their myths and gods had
concurrently been shedding all trace of supernatural
solemnity and sinking to the level of good-humoured
rustic tales. Old Hesiod had only made matters worse
by his endeavour to shape into a nai've theology under
Babylonian inspiration the tangle of popular folk-lore ;
and to the Homeric bards the court of Olympus was
but the feudal court of a joyous Achaean chieftain and
his boon -companions. The native ^Egean deities ad-
mitted on sufferance into the conqueror's pantheon helped

9

130 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

to bring discredit upon it by being allotted the parts of
mere hangers-on and buffoons ; the honest blacksmith
Hephaistos got nothing but kicks from Zeus and a
pretty wife who made him a laughingstock, the great
god Pan had to take his place in the train of the young
Dionysos, Hermes became a signpost to set travellers
on their way. To the new mind of Hellas the old
tribal mythology which it had outgrown became, as a
religion, utterly unadapted and unadaptable.

In the world before Greece was, in the oriental world,
only one thing could, under those circumstances, have
happened. A new, a * higher,' more ' spiritual '
religion would have evolved and taken her place at
the helm of the mind of the race. Had that come about
there would have been no Hellenic mind as we know
it, no western civilization built upon the foundation of
that extra -religious development. And it was in fact
only by the narrowest margin that that catastrophe was
averted and Europe made possible. On all sides the
religious ideas of the East lay, as it were, on the
watch for the opportunity that offered. From the dark
bosom of Mother -earth, that invisible nether-world that
holds the supreme mystery of fructification and genera-
tion, of the eternal recurrence of life, and death, and
rebirth, arose the veiled, phantasmal shapes of the
' chthonic ' deities, Demeter, and Persephone, Hades,
and Hecate, and Hermes psychopompos, the lords of
the resurrection and the life everlasting. At Eleusis,
returned merchants had brought new light out of the
land of Osiris, and the elect, cleansed of all impurities
by ritual waters, was initiated in the Egyptian hypostyle
hall of the Telesterion to the mysteries of religion, and
admitted to partake of the mystic meal at which the
high priest, successor and representative of Tryptolemos,
raised the holy symbol of the wheat-ear, the bread of
life, the body of the ever-dying and resurrecting god.
Eleusinian religion established itself, as we know, pretty
firmly in Greek life, and all Athens set forth by torch-
light on the night of the winter solstice to celebrate
the feast of the Nativity.

In the ruder North another god of the nether-world,

HELLENIC LIBERATION 131

Orpheus, was in the sixth century received with ecstatic
religious transports, and with him was blended the
ancient Thracian Dionysos ; not the Hellenized joyous
Dionysos of Athens, but a transformed, mystic Dionysos,
said to be connected with India, tonsured and mitred,
robed in magic vestments, and bearing a staff, or cross,
twined with symbolic vine, who had given his blood for
the world. With him again were identified, in the
commingling of myths, other dying Phrygian and Syrian
gods, Zagreos, ' Attis, Adonis, and the Eleusinian
lacchos. The rustic population became possessed with
a wild religious frenzy which led to ecstatic visions,
and the dancing madness spread like an epidemic
through the Greek world.

In the enthusiasm of that revival the temple priests
came forth out of their obscurity and neglect, and began
to speak with authority. New elaborate systems of
theology were promulgated, the proper organization of
religion, the union of cults, were much spoken of ; the
old cults were anxious to conform and harmonize ; the
Delphic oracles began to be given out by a woman in
a state of orgiastic ecstasis. Proselytizing missionaries
and preachers, metragyrtes, orpheotelestes, theopho-
rites, went abroad teaching and preaching in the market-
places, announcing the god, healing the sick, claiming
" a power derived from Heaven that enables them by
incantations, ceremonies, and the partaking of meals,
to atone for any crime committed by the individual or
his forefathers. They produce many books from which
their rituals are drawn, and persuade not only single
persons, but entire states, that they may be purified
and absolved from sin, both in this life and after death,
by the performance of certain ceremonies which they
call * Mysteries,' and which are supposed to save us
from the torments of Hades, while neglect of them
is punished by an awful doom." l One of those
prophets, Onomacritos, gained considerable influence
and favour at the Athenian court of Peisistratos,
and was employed in the preparation of the new edition
of the Homeric poems into which he managed to slip
* Plato, Resp. II. 364, 365.

132 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

some ' Orphic ' passages. He had, however, the
misfortune to be caught red-handed at the old game
of forging documents — some poems which he sought to
father on Musaeos. And instead of regarding the pious
fraud in a broad-minded, sympathetic w,ay, as some
quite respectable * variety of religious experience/ the
Athenians had the bad taste to pronounce him! a liar
and a scamp, and Onomacritos was discredited and
disgraced.

So indeed was, after a brief suspense, the whole Orphic
religious movement. Jt had seemed, indeed, as if Greece
were on the point of being submerged, as if inevitably
the dead hand of a theocracy were about to be laid
upon the cradle of human thought, and the liberation
of the world be for ever stifled or indefinitely prorogued.
Fortunately Greek thought was already awake. The
names of the heroes who then saved the world were
not Miltiades, Themistocles, Pausanias, but Thales,
Xenophanes, Heracleitos. The thinkers of Ionia had
not thought and spoken in vain ; they had revealed to
man a new dignity and a new power in himself. Against
the new madness in particular, against those ignorant
exploiters of ignorance, the preaching god -bearers, " the
most pestilent brood I wot of,"' as Athenasus, a gleaner
of old texts, calls them, " save, perhaps, those who go
round collecting subscriptions for the Demeter " ; against
all the hosts of unreason, their voice was raised in hot
and indignant protest.

And Greece, the better instinct of Greece, heard the
summons and rallied round its thinkers. Even before
the people of Croton summarily put an end to the
Pythagorean mystic brotherhood, Orpheus had slunk
away out of sight, and Greece had peremptorily
given to all mystagogues notice to quit and cease
from fooling. ' Of uncertainty and mystery there
is, by Zeus, enough in this strange, rich life, and
to spare. But how shall the myths and mum-
meries of a barbarian priest help it, or make it less,
or otherwise? What can be known we shall seek to
know with all the might of the honest means of know-
ledge whereof we dispose ; and what we cannot know

HELLENIC LIBERATION 133

we shall face fearlessly with no less honest ignorance.
But while power remains to the mind of Hellas, the
thought of man shall at least be free, and to the gene-
rations to come, so long as they can hear her voice,
Hellas shall bequeath that heritage of freedom.'

When with languid, half -condescending curiosity we
seek to gather from the surviving fragments and muti-
lated relics collected in Diels's book some notion of the
ideas and conceptions, often to us somewhat naive and
crude, of the early thinkers of Ionia, how many of us
realize clearly, or at all, that if it is given to us to-day
to face the world and its problems with open eyes,
with some small measure of adequate power of clear
judgment, and some armoury of accumulated knowledge
and understanding, it is to those men, who to most
are little more than empty names, to them in the first
place and beyond all others who have subsequently
utilized the freedom they won, that we owe it?

The Greeks were the most purely rationalistic people
that ever lived. They were so to a far greater extent
than we are, because our modern thought has operated
only by throwing off laboriously and with only partial
success the superincumbent weight of accumulated
tradition and prejudice ; whereas with the Greeks
there was virtually no such weight to be thrown off.
Therein lies the unique, perennial charm which pervades
all Greek thought and literature. In perusing it we
meet with much that is crude, with some ideas that are
absurd, with others which from the vantage point of
our present knowledge are hopelessly erroneous and
puerile ; but we never come across obdurate, inveterate
prejudice. We always feel that we are in the presence
of open minds, in which the growth of thought, the
inquiring spirit, is never choked, supplanted by dead,
hardened formulas, by immovable, blinding, dogmatic
preconceptions. Compare old Herodotos, who is by
no means a Xenophanic sceptic, but on the contrary
a rather pious person, with the turgid, bombastic, loyal
annalists of India, Assyria, Egypt, or Judaea, who

134 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

invariably wrote thousands for hundreds, and millions
for thousands, and in whom we have to exc-a-
vate every fact from under an impenetrable mound
of miracle -mongering and nauseating panegyric! When-
ever Herodotos meets with the miraculous and super-
natural, or even with patriotic exaggeration, he is filled
with distrust and determined scepticism. " How could
a dove speak with human voice? " he asks when told
the legend of the priestess of Dodona ; the ravine
Peneios was caused by Poseidon striking the earth with
his trident, he was told, " but it appears evident to me
that it is the effect of an earthquake " ; the Persian
fleet was tossed about for three days until the Magi
quelled the storm by offering prayers and sacrifices,
"or else it slackened of its own accord." Even when
he recounts the most glowing moments in the glories of
his own people he jibs at any improbability. When,
for instance, he relates the story of Scyllias of Scione,
the famous diver, who was said to have swum eighty
stadia to give the Athenian fleet at Artemisium warn-
ing of the coming Persians, he adds simply, "If, how-
ever, I may offer an opinion in the matter, it is, that
he came in a boat." It is not that his intelligence-
was abnormally acute — was it really more acute than
that of those genial and learned Egyptian and Baby-
lonian priests with whom he conversed? — but because
there were no influences in the Greek world which
branded disbelief in the miraculous or in adulatory
exaggerations as 'wicked.' The Greek mind developed
not because it had essentially more power, but because
that power was not crippled.

A passion for rationalism became its supreme charac-
teristic. To reason, to argue, to discuss, was their
delight. Politics, government had with them always
meant discussion, conflicts of arguments, not ukases ;
and they extended the habit to every phase of life.
They were the first to rationalize (in the theological
sense), to criticize, and to reject their own religious
traditions. They constructed formal logic ; they re-
duced dialectics to a science ; eloquence with them
meant argument, and they worshipped eloquence above

HELLENIC LIBERATION 135

all things ; their drama ever tended towards a pendulum
swing of pros and cons. Art itself, the art which
produced the Parthenon— that ' syllogism in marble,'
as Boutmy calls it— and Greek sculpture, was obsessed
with ' canons,' modules, standards, with a desire to
penetrate to the rationale of the artistic effect. Ictinos,
who raised on the Attic rock the beauty pure and
perennial of the ' Maiden's Chamber,' wrote a treatise
expounding the logical principles upon which he
wrought. And the spirit of their art manifested itself
in ordered regularity and symmetry, corresponding as
it were to the balanced and orderly disposition of
logical thought ; in Olympian calm expressive of the
composed serenity of detached judgment.

They carried the passion for conscious, deliberate
ratiocination — paradoxical as it may seem — to excess.
To the Greek the very form of ratiocination had a
captivating and irresistible fascination. No entertain-
ment held the populace like a display of argumentative
acuteness. They came to delight in dialectics for their
own sake. A favourite exercise of their orators, was
to establish a position by argument one day, and to
demolish it the next. They were ratiocinative even
to the neglect of the foundations of rational thought, of
investigation and experience, of the practical methods
of trial and error. And thus, as we shall see more
fully, they missed science and remained pre -scientific.
It is worth while noticing that the Greeks had not in
any very high degree what we call the passion for truth ;
the frenzy for getting to the very root of facts, to explain,
the ideal of the supreme sanctity of truth. They were
rather impatient of nonsense, of pseudo -explanations
which are an insult to intelligence, than possessed with
any high passion for truth for its own sake. Cleverness,
beauty, and moral beauty, they admired rather than
truth ; a clever plausibility would satisfy them without
any too severe inquiry as to whether it was true.

It is no disparagement to say that under the conditions
then available, Greek thought did not at once attain to
complete perfection of method and results. Such as
it was, it was the most marvellous efflorescence in the

136 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

evolution of the human race. It was Greece who
unfolded the wings of the human mind, created man
homo sapiens anew, initiated and made possible all sub-
sequent evolution of the race.

It need cause no wonder that the career of Greece
was so brief ; the wonder is not that the greatness of
Greece failed to maintain itself longer, but that it
succeeded in maintaining itself at all. It was a
premature birth, only rendered possible by an excep-
tionally propitious concourse of circumstances. The
world was not in a condition to allow of any rational
society ; human experience was utterly insufficient to
serve as an adequate basis for such an uncompromisingly
rational attitude as that of the Greeks. Politically
they had managed to preserve the essential spirit of
primitive tribal democracy throughout all the altered
conditions of advanced civilization, in spite of the
numberless agencies which in the ordinary course of
human circumstances necessarily put an end to it. They
had withstood and overcome the encroachments of war-
chiefs, the pretensions of nobles, the almost irresistible
despotism of money -power, the corruption of foreign
gold, the armed power of the Persian. They had by
radical and elaborate contrivances endeavoured to adapt
democracy to the changed conditions. But that achieve-
ment was almost a paradox, a state of unstable equili-
brium which could not in the nature of things be kept
up indefinitely.

With some peoples decadence sets in insidiously
through the operation of inherent faults which slowly
creep and extend and eat them up ; others lose their
balance at the very height of their success, and through
those very virtues and qualities that made it. The
latter was the case with Greece, or what is for us the
same thing, Athens. After the repulse of the Persians
the Athenians grew intensely self-conscious of their great-
ness and glory and became infested with the toxaemia
of jingo -patriotism. Patriotism is an altruistic virtue ;
it means the subordination of individual self-interest
to that of the community. But then it all depends upon
what precisely is understood by 'the community.' To

HELLENIC LIBERATION 137

be patriotic towards, say, Manchester may conceivably
mean to be unpatriotic towards England. Athens was
patriotic towards Athens and unpatriotic towards Greece.
That incurable separatism, those wanton, fatal bickering's
of half a dozen trumpery villages, appear to us unspeak-
ably foolish and absurd, and only to be explained by
some peculiar ' individualistic ' twist of the Greek
character. But that separatism and interstate anarchy
were as wanton and foolish as European separatism and
anarchy, no more and no less. Size is merely relative
and has nothing to do with the matter ; the city-
state was the political unit of the Greek world as the
nation-state is of the European, and even in his Utopia
Plato could not conceive of any other political unit.
A league of Greek nations, such as the Cynic and
Cyrenaic philosophers advocated, was all very well before
the instant menace of Persian aggression, but as a
permanent order it was an unpractical dream outside
the sphere of political realities. It would, for one thing,
mean the giving up of the command of the sea, and
that, of course, was not even to be thought of. So
Athenians stuck to ' the empire/ and stood up for
Athens first, Athens right or wrong. The nemesis came
sharp and swift in the quarries of Syracuse and on
the sands of ^Egospotami ; and when the traitor Alki-
biades brazenly asked the Athenians whether it would
pay them better to accept Persian gold as the price
of democracy, or perish utterly, they hung their heads
in silence. And when the Spartan Agesilaos actually
went forth in one last attack against Persia, he was driven
back, he said, " by thirty thousand bowmen," meaning
the golden darics stamped with the figure of the Great
King as an archer, with which the Greeks at home had
been bribed and bought, and his recall secured.

Hellas, torn and , exhausted by incurable petty
patriotisms and jealousies and strifes, and all the name-
less corruption and ignoble selfishness and lying which
such contests breed, was, it was clear to every one,
fast sinking lower and lower ; and the ' Peace of
Antalkidas ' made her virtually a subject -state of the
Great King, from whom the Greek states abjectly took

138 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

their orders. The blossom was drooping and withering
on its stem. How long would it be before the closing
tides of barbarism, which were already strangling the
Greek colonies in Italy, and the irresistible power of
Persia, before which, like a shivering bird hypnotized
by a serpent, Hellas lay a doomed and helpless prey,
would make an end of Hellenic civilization? How much
of it, if anything at all, would survive? Those were
obviously the only questions. When, behold, a strange
thing suddenly happened : instead of dying, Hellenic
civilization conquered the world.

There were some Greek tribes — probably as purely
Greek, notwithstanding Peonian and Illyrian admixtures,
as the Athenians and Milesians, — who had remained in
the backwaters of the Southern Balkans, cut off from
the operation of the influences which produced Ionia
and Hellas. Note once more the true relative values
of race and environment : they remained insignificant
barbarians in exactly the same condition as the early
Greek tribes. Their mediocre little barbaric kingdom
was of no account until one of their kings sought to
introduce Greek culture and Grew to his court artists
and poets from the south, Zeuxis the famous painter,
Hippocrates the physician, possibly Thucydides the
historian, Timotheos of Miletos the poet and musician,
Agathon the tragic poet, and another far greater and
more tragic poet also, Euripides by name, a very sad
and very weary old man, with his faith in humanity
sorely bruised and shaken, who went thither to die,
and, before dying, wrote there his swan -song, the
Bacchce. The successor of King Archelaos who was
brought up at Thebes perceived the possibilities pre-
sented by the disintegration of the Greek city-states,
systematically trained an army and, after defeating
Athens and Thebes at Chasronea, established a kind
of ' sphere of influence ' over all Greece, getting himself
appointed archistrategos, or, as one might say in Latin,
imperator of the Hellenes. His son even more carefully
educated — his chief tutor was Aristotle — landed a very
efficiently trained and equipped little army, the equivalent
of some four modern divisions, on the plain of Troy,

HELLENIC LIBERATION 139

by the heroon of Achilles, scattering the satrapic armies
before him at the Granicos, liberated both the willing
and unwilling cities of Ionia, and after a couple of
pitched battles the whole ' ramshackle empire ' of
Persia, the whole known world of the Near East, Asia
Minor, Phoenicia, Babylon, Palestine, Egypt, lay at his
feet. He pushed on beyond the limits of the known
world, meeting with Chinese in Baktria, founding
Kandahar l in the Afghan tableland, and did not
stop till he had entered Lahore and Hyderabad.
When he returned to rest awhile and prepare for
the conquest of the West in Babylon, the old
first metropolis of all civilization, submissive embassies
came to the young new Dionysos to offer him the
homage of the whole world, Arabs, Ethiopians, Scythians,
Carthaginians, Iberians, Gauls, Etruscans, Italians from
Brutium, Samnites — whether also from a little village
called Rome, history does not mention. The whole
world was Hellenized.

The fertilizing spirit of Hellas was spread over the
whole earth for all peoples and for all times. But not
in its purity. The Orient, after all, had its revenge,
its terrible and fatal revenge. The conquering young
Greek hero had offered sacrifice to Artemis at Ephesos,
to Melkarth at Tyre, to Ahura Mazda at Ecbatana,
to Ptah at Memphis, to Ammon at Siwa, to Yaveh at
Jerusalem. And the Gods of the East smiled.

As in the political aspect so also in the intellectual,
Greece had, before Alexander, been slowly succumbing
to Persia and to pride.

She had been an eager pupil of every one who had
anything to teach, she had grown to glorious intellectual
power by absorbing all available knowledge from all
sources. But she grew too deeply conscious of her pre-
eminence and glory and came to think in her pride that
she had nothing to learn from the barbarian. " So far
behind has our city left all others in thought and
language, that her pupils are the teachers of the world,
1 Iskandar = Alexander.

140 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

and she has made the name of Greek seem no longer
a badge of blood but of mind, and men are called
Greeks more because they have part in our culture
than because they come of a common stock."

She succumbed to the very power which she despised.
The early giants had attempted the sublime task of
casting off all assumption and convention, of founding
the mind of man upon no other foundation than rational
thought. That quixotic attempt in an age hardly
emerged from barbaric nescience, was not in vain, but
it was, of course, hopeless in its audacity. They had
no basis, no facts, no systematized experience whereon
to build. And their successors in the pride of pure
reason came more and more to reject and despise mere
observation and inquiry, to cast aside the germs of the
scientific spirit upon whose foundations, scanty as they
were, the early thinkers had built. All the forces of
mysticism, will-to-believe, and fine sentiments, were
battering at the door like Persian hosts round
Thermopylae. Thought lacking the armoury of exact
data, was incapable of offering resistance to the oriental
hordes of nebulous visions and opium dreams which
steadily crept over the ground reclaimed by rational
thought. Plato shines with a splendour which is already
in large measure phosphoric. From Platonism to Neo-
Platonism is but a step. As Greece had transmuted
the barbaric tinsels of the Orient into rich gold, so
the East once more seized upon the jewels of Greece
and wove them into mystic, cabalistic webs, into its
gnosticisms and theologies.

CHAPTER III

PAX ROMANA

SUPERFICIALLY the origin of Rome somewhat resembles
that of Greece— small tribes (gentes) in whom a jealous
spirit of independence is inveterate. Here the patres
jamilias, not the tribal war -chiefs, are the natural rulers
wielding stern familial authority, and will become the
patres conscripti and the ruling patrician aristocracy.
As in Greece, phases of ' kingship ' were swept away
by the insubordinate forces of tribal democracy. As
in Greece, violent struggles and conflicts took place
between patrician and plebeian, and here again the forces
of self-defence proved too powerful to allow of any
complete triumph on the part of encroaching privilege.
As Athens had its Solonian and Kleisthenean revolutions,
so Rome had its Secessions to the Sacred Hill, and its
Licinian laws .

But under that superficial similarity lay differences
which could scarcely be more profound. While the
Greek of poverty-stricken Hellas was perforce a sea-
rover, a pirate, an adventurer, tasting of all the rich
fruits of the eastern world, the Romans were a tribe
of stay-at-home farmers, with all the peasant's limita-
tion of outlook, conservatism, stolid abstemiousness, plod-
ding stubbornness, his close -fistedness and keen eye for
the main chance. The necessity of defending their crops
and of settling boundary disputes with neighbouring
tribes, made it a routine of their lives to be periodically
called out on commando. But they were not tempera-
mentally bellicose nor particularly liked war for its own
sake. They waged it with cool business-like method
and calculation, and early learnt to attain their ends
by negotiation, alliances and hard -driven bargains. They
intensely distrusted and disliked adventure.

141

142 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

It was a freakish paradox of fate which thrust upon
those cautious, unimaginative Italian Boers the part of
world-conquerors. When first drawn into wide foreign
embroilments after the first Punic War, they proclaimed
a policy of no annexations (and large indemnities).
Scipio expressed the general and deep traditional feeling
when he advocated a Monroe doctrine deprecating all
expansion beyond the Tuscan Apennine and the
peninsula ; and we find the same caution recurring
even so late as the political testament of Augustus, and
in Hadrian's renouncement of the conquests of Trajan.
Only when their peasants' eyes were set agape at the
sight of the undreamed-of wealth brought from Pontus
and Syria by Lucullus and Pompey, did they lose their
heads and become infected with the get-rich-quick fever.

What drove them to go empire -building was not any
romantic ambition or love of glory, or vanity, such as
might actuate an oriental despot, or any hollow ideal
of empire and passion for ruling, but purely and simply
the desire to make money, to make money quickly.
The conquests, as they soon saw, offered plenty of
opportunities ; the farming of taxes, army contracts, the
financing of political aspirants, money-lending at ex-
orbitant rates, and, richest prize of all, the government
of a province, when the raising of the tribute was left
to the proconsul, and no questions asked. Those were
the chief ways of making large fortunes ; there were
no great industrial enterprises then, no railways or oil-
wells, no great commercial organizations. The money
had to be invested and, as there were no industrial
and commercial shares, or gilt -edged securities, the
only possible form of permanent investment was land.
They invested their money in land. The original small
farmer being more and more frequently absent on active
service, his farm, left to the care of some elderly relatives
and a few slaves, went to rack and ruin. He was
easily mortgaged or bought out. Italy was thus soon
divided into vast estates which were productively and
economically worked by means of slave -labour which
the wars supplied in abundance. After Italy the foreign
provinces soon followed. In the famous impeachment

PAX ROM AN A 143

of Verres, Cicero brought out the fact that in one
district of Sicily there were, when Verres went there as
propraetor, 773 landed proprietors, and three years later
only 318. Half the province of Africa was at the time
of the early Caesars owned by six landlords.

There is no harm in making money and investing
it. But what was to become of the dispossessed farmer?
There were no factories or other employment for him
to go to, he had perforce to go back to the army
or to lounge in Rome at the expense of the state.
He had nothing left. "Your generals," said Tiberius
Gracchus, " urge their men in battle, telling them
to fight for their hearths and homes and the graves of
their dear ones. They lie ; not one of all those Romans
possesses a hearth or a home, or even a family grave.
That others may enjoy riches and pleasures, that is
what they are fighting and dying for, those Romans who
are called ' masters of the world,' while they have not
so much as a sod of earth that they can call their
own." The wars of Lucullus, of Pompey, of Caesar
had brought in hundreds of thousands of slaves who
worked on the large estates. 'But thereafter the supply
abruptly dwindled. Slaves did not breed, they had no
families, there were few; women. Instead of .being cheap,
they became expensive ; the labour supply failed. The
freemen had to be employed ; they were employed as
coloni ; they became bound more and more to the
soil ; at first they paid rent, then a proportion of the
produce, besides sundry customary ' gifts,' or xenia,
then had to contribute a certain amount of labour to
the working of the villa, to supply transport, etc., and
finally, under Diocletian, they were completely bound
to the soil, forbidden to move. They too became 'slaves,
predial serfs in all but in name. And they too dwindled.
The whole population decreased until it became an ever
more serious problem how to keep up the strength of
the armies, even for purely defensive purposes. In
the early empire those vast frontiers, far more extensive
than our battle -line on all fronts in the late war, were
defended by garrisons amounting to the absurd number
of about 300,000 men.

144 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

Greek culture, which they at first fiercely resisted,
did not sufficiently transform the enriched peasants to
enable them to continue it, or use it as the starting-
point of original development. The influx of civilization
tended with them in general to coarseness, to the
vulgarity and megalomania of the nouveau riche . In
the pictorial arts they remained sterile, save for the
production of the realistic portrait -bust — the idealizing
Greek never carved a real portrait. In architecture,
while carrying to high development the engineering
aspect o'f construction, as in the arch and the dome,
they perpetrated — and unfortunately perpetuated — as
regards the purely artistic and decorative aspect, the
most appalling horrors of bad taste, such as the pilaster
and the use of mixed orders. Greek drama bored them,
they preferred mimes, buffoons and acrobats.

To the end a stodgy pedestrianism remained the mark
of their mentality. The sacred fire, the divine folly
was never theirs. The very brief and evanescent grand
siecle of their literature did not contribute a single
creator to the Olympus of world inspirers, scarcely a
work of genuine original inspiration — Lucretius, the ex-
ponent of Epicurus, and Catullus, the lover of Claudia
Metella, are the nearest approach to exceptions. The
first brief outgush of imitative production was followed
by an almost unbroken sterility. Roman intellect tended
forthwith to settle into a rut of cultural traditionalism ;
it lived under the oppressive weight of * the great
models,' who had set the standard of attainable excel-
lence. The goal of literature was to approximate as
closely as possible to the form and language of those
consecrated great ones who had fixed the ideal for all
time. In what is called the ' silver age/ the rococo
Renaissance of Quintillian and Pliny, literary art consisted
in imitating Cicero, whose language was as ' dead '
then as during the Italian Renaissance. Other writers,
like Fronto and Apuleius, harked back to still older
archaisms. " Multi ex alieno sceculo petunt verba:
duodecim tabulas loquuntur " (Seneca, Ep. 114, 13).
In the last stages of the empire the surviving cultural
elements exhibit exactly the1 same spirit and attitude

PAX ROMANA 145

which centuries later we find in the grammar ian-
humanist, the antiquity -worshipper of the Renaissance.
Like him they lived upon the past. Symmachus,
Ausonius, and their contemporary belles -lettrists might
be transferred without a single mental change from
the fourth to the fifteenth century ; the ideal of refined
culture was exactly the same in the two periods, the
same which still lingers on to our own day in the
academic tradition of classical scholarship — to indite
correctly Ciceronian periods, to compose a sweet thing
in the way of well-turned Virgilian hexameters, or
Horatian verses clothed in frowzy mythological language,
to elaborate the obvious in elegant conversation on
'polit* literature,' to take a childish delight in parading
one's familiarity with the authors by a plentiful be-
sprinkling of quotations, to rehearse with beatific mental
vacuity the consecrated phrases, to * look down from
the heights of scholarship upon the common herd.'
Literature, thought, life itself, became a kind of ritual,
a round of prescribed formulas and duties, serenely
detached from the throbbing actualities of the world,
a breviary of * correct things ' to be said, thought,
and done correctly.

But side by side with the fossilization of an imitative
intellectual culture, there went on a process of genuine
growth, one which, apart from the political legacy of
Rome, and not altogether distinct even from that, con-
stitutes her most momentous contribution to the world,
and the most fundamental and distinctive feature of
her mental development. That continuous process whose
course runs unbroken from the first naturalization of
culture down to the final submersion of its last lingering
remnants, is one of moral development. In Greece with
the first onset of symptoms of weariness in the
metaphysical effort, philosophical thought had shown
a tendency to concentrate upon the purely human
problems of life and conduct. But it was chiefly in
Rome that the tendency developed and matured. That
ethical aspect was the only one which appealed to

10

146 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

the Romans ; of metaphysics they took no account.
A love of solemn moralizing, a Polonius-like senten-
tiousness was always a trait of their peasant psychology.
The creed of Stoicism, so congenial in its affinity tp
the old austere Latin spirit, became their lay religion,
the dominant vein of Roman thought. Its identification
with the chief intellectual occupation of the cultivated
classes, the sphere of law, the development of juris-
prudence, led to the greatest and most permanent
concrete achievement of Rome. All Roman thinkers
were lawyers ; the ultimate goal and practical applica-
tion of their education, their literary, their rhetorical,
their philosophic training, was the law-courts. This
was a natural consequence of the administrative tasks
and problems thrust upon them by the expanding empire.
It was the great discovery of their cautious, matter-
of-fact minds — " omnium virtutum et utilitalum rapa-
cissimi " * — that the only really effective way to manage
and rule men, is by a certain amount of fairness and
justice, that honesty is an asset in business, even if
that business be the most atrociously immoral exploita-
tion. They had long recognized that the principle of
freedom and justice to conquered populations was the
most practically efficient, as well as fiscally the most
profitable. In those circumstances the old code of
the Twelve Tables required constant adaptation and
supplementing by means of case law; heterogeneous
populations had to be dealt with under the principles of
the jus gentium, that is, legal norms common to all
nations; and this in time gave rise and place to the
conception of a jus natnrale, natural principles of equity,
a notion which, although vaguely supposed to refer
to some ideal * state of nature,' simply amounted to
this, that all privilege and social distinctions, all
arbitrary traditional usages, must be regarded as
artificial conventions, and that justice rests therefore
upon the necessary postulate of unsophisticated equality.
Fifteen centuries before Rousseau and the Droits da
I'homme, Ulpian laid down the principle that " All
men are born free and equal." From that great and
« Plin; Hist. Nat. 25, 3, 4.

PAX ROMANA 147

noble growth of Roman law which went on broadening
out continuously in its spirit of humanity and justice
almost down to the last breath of Roman power,
abolishing the fierce patriarchal tradition of parental
tyranny, protecting the widow and the orphan, ex-
tenuating slavery almost to the verge of abolition —
from that highest achievement of the Roman mind,
philosophic thought, the rational theory of life, was
from the first recognized to be inseparable. The
philosophers of Rome were her lawyers and legislators;
the juridic and philosophic thought were one.

The growth of Roman law was, indeed, but an
expression of an ethical evolution, of the development
of a particular ethical ideal, which went on throughout
the career of the Roman mind, and which — though I
shall not stop just now to judge of its absolute validity —
represented, and is still commonly held to represent, the
supreme standard of moral excellence. Of that stream
of ethical development the literature of Tacitean diatribes
and homiletical tracts on ideal Germans and Agricolas,
the fierce denunciations of satirists, which furnish the
materials for the dear old conventional myth of
' growing moral corruption,' are manifestations. So
in a more direct way is the long series of moral and,
devotional manuals, and ' consolations,' from Cicero
to Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Plutarch.
A whole set of informal institutions attended the estab-
lishment of that lay religion of morality. The moral
sermon became part of the regular routine of life, and
large congregations crowded under the pulpits of the
fashionable preachers. From the days of Paulus
^milius it became customary in the homes of the
aristocracy to keep a household chaplain, or philosopher;
the exhortations and consolations of the most reputed
spiritual directors were eagerly sought after at all times
of affliction and distress; and auricular confession was
constantly enjoined and practised. Nor was the
movement confined to the cultured and aristocratic. The
capital and the countryside swarmed with itinerant
preachers, and the populace were exhorted in their own
rough speech to the higher life by the mendicant brothers

148 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

whose rules and tenets have been described to us by
Epictetus. They were vowed to poverty and celibacy,
they were fathers to all, men being their spiritual sons
and women their daughters in God, they preached as
messengers from God the gospel of renunciation and
repentance, they were to suffer calmly scoffs, insults
and blows, and to love them that did them wrong and
persecuted them.

In the closing centuries of the Western Empire the
moralizing spirit tended, like the literary, to settle into
an established vein of consecrated sentiment, growing
somewhat frowzy and conventional. The typical Roman
gentleman of the decadence, especially in the provinces —
the life of all large and wealthy, cities is always
* immoral ' — was a confirmed puritan, the model of
staid bourgeois virtues, and as morally correct in his
sentiments as in his literary tastes. He and his women-
folk were quite early-Victorian in their stodgy beseem-
ingness, strait-laced propriety, and serious earnestness
on the subject of moral platitudes. He subscribed
to charities, and read family ptrayers to the servants.
If he did not adopt Christianity, it was because his
settled toryism was somewhat shy of new-fangled labels ;
he 'was not quite sure that the chapel people Were
quite ' the thing/ and he disapproved of the undignified
excesses of his friends who took to monasticism and
hair-shirts. But in moral sentiment he was quint -
essentially Christian, or rather his Christian neighbour's
moral sentiments were nought else than his own pagan
righteousness associated with extraneous mystic and
dogmatic elements.

The intellectual culture of the ancient world, even
at its best, suffered from a fundamental disability and
weakness. It lacked a solid anchor-hold in concrete
knowledge. It was pre- scientific.

The power of rational thought depends upon two
elements, its method and its data. Without adequate

PAX ROM AN A 149

data, without experience, consistency and rationality are
of small avail. The patient investigation of details,
toilsome inquiry and research, the slow accumulation
of facts, on the one hand, and the broad judgments of
generalizing thought, on the other, are unfortunately
the attributes of two different types of mind. The
specialist who dwells in a little world of little details
grows to be satisfied and to take pleasure in those
minutiae ; one little fact exactly ascertained is the
prize towards which his mental activities tend ; it
suffices him, he is not drawn towards broad and new
horizons, he is not at home in the thinner atmosphere
of generalizations. The thinker, on the cxther hand,
chafes at trifles and details ; he who is accustomed to
fly on the pinions of thought, cannot suffer to be confined
and crawl among the dust of isolated facts. To number
the hairs on the appendages of a new species of shrimp,
is a task belonging to an order of mind distinct from that
which is drawn towards the great problems of life and
of the universe ; an inferior, if you will, humdrum,
myopic, round-shouldered, order of mind. Only when
the multiplicity of facts and details becomes illuminated
by a generalizing theory, when each small fact and each
small detail is transformed into a witness to a great
and universal significance, do, they acquire value and
interest to the higher type of intellect.

In the exultant confidence of its dialectic freedom
and suppleness, the Greek mind never developed any
consciousness of the sacredness of observed fact. It
was abstract. Accuracy of thought meant for it
accuracy in the operation of discursive reason, logic;
but it never formed any conception of accuracy in
the basis of the reasoning process, in the materials
and data of thought, in ascertained experience. It was
ready to disport itself in the dialectical1 game on any
given theme, on any given premises; but so long as
those premises were logically defined it did not trouble
very much as to their intrinsic validity. It had curiosity,
but not the thirst for hoarding up the coins of knowledge,
not the preoccupation for submitting their value to
crucial test. The whole intellect of the Greeks was

150 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

concentrated upon the intellectual process itself, to the
almost entire neglect of the materials upon which that
process operates. It navigated adventurously the seas
of speculation, but with neither com'pass nor loadstar;
it set out in search of strange lands, but without any
means of taking its bearings.

In the whole of classical literature we cannot find
above two doubtful mentions of anything like a scientific
experiment; that of Pythagoras on the vibration of
a cord, and that of Ptolemy on refraction. In his
encyclopedia on the natural knowledge of his day, Pliny,
among a host of grotesque hearsays, does not once use
the word ' experiment * in our sense. In the most
methodical thinkers of Greece, in Aristotle for instance,
we meet with the most astounding carelessness in
matters of easiest verification. He states, for instance,
that there is only one bone in a lion's neck, that
man has eight ribs, that men have more teeth than
women, that men only have a beating heart, that female
skulls, unlike those of males, have a circular suture,
that eggs float on sea-water, that if sea-water be
collected in a wax vessel it becomes drinkable. The
Greeks, in short, had no science, and no scientific spirit.
It is science and the scientific spirit which constitutes
the distinction between the ancient and the modern
world.

It was, indeed, on the foundation of the few facts
and methods gathered by Chaldaean and Egyptian
science that Greek thought first arose; and the early
Ionian thinkers came nearer to the scientific' spirit than
almost any Greek in subsequent times. But even with
them the chief interest lay with the final synthesis,
the generalization; and, with brilliant divination, they
used that faculty of inspired guess-work which is one
of the most valuable instruments of science and its
crowning triumph, but which has little place in its
beginnings. Thereafter, the only form1 of science which
was at all cultivated by the Greeks' was mathematics,
which is a form of logic, and in which they were
interested as logic and * music,' not as an instrument
of research. Plato would have none but ' mathema-

PAX ROMANA 151

ticians ' among his pupils, but the meaning he attached
to the word may be gauged from his attitude towards
Archytas and Menacchmus who had devised some sliding-
rules and compasses as aids to mathematical study.
' Plato," says Plutarch, " inveighed against them with
great indignation and persistence as destroying' and
perverting all the good there is in geometry; for the
method absconds from incorporeal and intellectual to
sensible things, and besides employs again such bodies
as require much vulgar handicraft : in this way
mechanics was dissimilated and expelled from geometry,
and, being for a long time looked down upon by
philosophy, became one of the arts of war." The
man whom, by the influence which his surviving works
have exercised, we are accustomed to regard as the
most scientific genius of the ancient world, Archimedes,
was of exactly the same opinion asi Plato ; and it was
only under loud protest that he consented to degrade
mathematics by putting his knowledge to practical
application. The Greeks not only ignored the actual
groundwork of science, experimental research, observa-
tion, they persistently decried, depreciated it, and
despised it. Aristophanes ridiculed astronomy and
geometry. The Athenian Nicias at Syracuse was, when
there was an eclipse of the moon, as helplessly a prey
to the soothsayers as the merest savage, although
Thales and Anaxagoras were acquainted with the
Babylonian method of predicting eclipses.

Socrates " brought down philosophy from heaven to
earth," as the fact was usually expressed. * Why,'
asked he — how constantly do we hear around us the
argum;ent ! — 'Why spend our time and thought in study-
ing the heavens, in measuring the distances of the
stars, in fretting; about the constitution of matter, of
the universe, in studying birds and beasts and trees?
The thing which it is of importance to us to study is
life, this human life wherein our business lies; not
the distant stars, but the human world We live in; not
animals and insects and plants, but men. Before seeking
to know about the star's, and shells, and trees, it behoves
us to seek to know something which lies much closer at

152 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

hand — ourselves. The proper study of mankind is
man.' How wise and sensible that all sounds! And
how that straightforward common sense has always
captured the approval of the plain man. And yet it
is an utter and pernicious fallacy. It is through that
star-gazing that man has first been placed in a position
to measure at all his own stature, the proportion and
significance of his life in the universe. That ' natural
history/ as it used to be called, that harmless, somewhat
childish hobby of collecting moth's, of studying* birds
and trees, of botanizing and bird-nesting1, that somewhat
absurd, trifling pastime has, lo and behold ! developed
into a science of biology ; and the whole conception, the
whole significance of man, of his life, of his being,
of his world has been utterly transfigured. Man went
about for centuries with TvuOi cravrov on his signet-ring,
studying himself, studying humanity, pleasantly talking
and talking round and round in old circles, to no
purpose. And, behold, the only real knowledge, the
only illumination, the only revelation which has come
about himself, has come from that unpractical star-
gazing and studying of beasts and plants. He thought
to begin at the beginning by attending to what lay
closest at hand, his own self ; and he was in reality
in vain and futile effort trying to begin at the top. He
could not rightly understand himself at all without first
trying to understand the world he lived in. Through
that remote, irrelevant inquiry lay in fact the main
road to self-knowledge.

As all their scientific notions had by the roaming
lonians been derived from1 Egypt and Chald'sea, so the
only organized scientific movement in the whole of
classical antiquity, that of the Ptolemaic University of
Alexandria, took place on the foundations, under the
influence, on the very soil of Egypt. .With only one or
two notable exceptions Alexandrian science occupied
itself with systematization and compilation rather than
with original discovery and development of method.
The first occupant of the chair of mathematics, Euclid,
did little more than order and gather together the

PAX ROMANA 153

scattered geometrical theorems of his Ionian pre-
decessors, Hipfpocrates of Chios in particular and
Eudoxos of Cnidos, the friend of the priests of Heliopolis,
whose mantle the Apis bull had licked. The only
mechanical device which we actually know to have been
used by Archimedes, the pupil of Euclid's successor,
Conon, the Archimedean screw1, had been in use on the
Nile before Greece existed. The greatest systematizer
of astronomical knowledge was Hipparchos, whose work
we only know through the clumsy compilation of
Claudius Ptolemasus, a work full of astrological fancies,
which perpetuated for centuries the unwieldy methods
and doctrines of epicycles. Aristarchos of Samos, who
first suggested the simplification of all astronomy on
the theory of a central sun and moving earth, could
not get a hearing.

It is a notable and striking fact, that Greece and
Rome, who so completely transformed the world and
opened up a new universe of civilization, did not produce
a single practical invention or industrial discovery of
any importance. Almost all the crafts and industries
of the ancient world, textile fabrics, dyes, papyrus,
glass, glazed porcelain, were oriental discoveries and
remained essentially oriental products. From the early
days of Babylon and Egypt there is no new material
discovery of importance to record until the introduction
of paper, gunpowder, and the mariner's compass into
Europe by the Arabs. The genius which could create
a new world of intellect, differing from' that of the
Orient as noonday from midnight, appeared incapable
of extending in any way the material powers and
resources of life. So far as material processes are
concerned, the Romans excelled the Greeks : they did
excel in engineering and the building arts, in road-
making, drainage, mining : the Greeks never got so
far as making a road or building an aqueduct. The
practical and realistic Rom'an mind was really more
disposed towards observation and research than the
Greek, but it was entirely governed by the influence
of Greek tradition; and when Csesar wished to reform
the calendar, mathematicians and astronomers had, to

154 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

be fetched from Egypt. The Grseco-Roman civiliza-
tion remained pre-scientific.

Failing that necessary ingredient no real progress
in the powers of the human intellect beyond a set
limit was possible .\ A dozen successive Athens could
not have carried it any further. It could wander this
way and that way, circle round to its starting-point,
but it could never establish its advance by any permanent
occupation of the conquered territory. And it remained,,
in spite of all the splendid rationalism! of Greece and
Rome, essentially destitute of any solid protection or
security against the impinging currents and tides of
irrationalism. Modern experience has shown time and
again the insecurity and powerlessness of the most
brilliant abstract intellectual achievement, until it is
grounded in the solid basis of demonstration and un-
shakable evidence. It has become a commonplace of
science that the true discoverer is not the man who
formulates but he who substantiates, not the brilliant
thinker who first glimpses the vision of truth, but the
humdrum plodder who accumulates such a foundation
of facts that all the world cannot shake it.

Besides that fundamental limitation ancient culture was
inadequately diffused. Although it had no esoteric spirit
—the ruling class did not owe their power to tradition,
but. to wealth— although its circulation was free, the circle
of men in the Roman Empire who were at all abreast
of the mental resources of the age, was in reality ex-
tremely restricted. Even among the wealthy a large
proportion were new and vulgar rich, idlers, ingcnui,
self-made men, who cared for none of these things.
There was no organized provision for general education,
and no agency, like the printing-press, to make up for
the deficiency. In a tiny, compact community like
Athens, every citizen came more or less under the in-
fluence of existing culture. In the teeming, hetero-
geneous, shifting population of a vast empire, the case
was very different. Those swarming masses of humanity
were not mere herds of crushed oriental slaves, with
child-like mind patiently slumbering in a twilight of
tradition ; but, as so many are in our own civilization

PAX ROMANA 155

with its infinitely greater opportunities, restless barbarians
outwardly clothed in a thin veneer of cultural contacts,
just sufficient to conceal their own ignorance and .bar-
barism from themselves. Their undisciplined mentality
weltered in a flood of superstitions and mysticisms, the
usual disease of minds stimulated by the external in-
fluences of civilization, yet entirely unequipped and
defenceless.

Life was complex, accelerated, restless, full of sudden
changes, full of sorrows, of struggles, of desires stimu-
lated and thwarted, of disappointments and di illusions.
To that troubled humanity the religions of the dreaming
East, offering their substitutes for thought, came as a
light and a revelation, supplying exactly that for which
they yearned. The Orient came to their rescue as a
saviour.

Rome had fought for her existence in a death struggle
with the East, and, like Greece, had finally subdued
it. But the Orient had its revenge ; and it was far more
glaring and complete than in the case of Greece. The
same year which was signalized by the definite triumph
of Rome over Hannibal, saw the advanced guard of
eastern theocracy established within the walls of Rome,
called there by the senate itself in compliance with some
oracle which associated the step with certain vague
promises of world empire. As the triumphal procession
of Scipio, the most magnificent hitherto witnessed, with
its caparisoned elephants and quaint figures of Semitic
captives, wound its way to the Capitol amid the acclama-
tions of a people who were henceforth marked as the
masters of the world, the strange monotonous strains
of an exotic psalmody might have been heard from a
chapel on the Palatine, on the site of the old, humble
Roma Quadrata. The oriental priests who were chant-
ing those psalms were also members of an army which,
like that of Rome, was to march from that spot to the
conquest of the world.

From that day, amid swarms of Asiatics, astrologers

156 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

from Chaldsea, wonder-workers from Egypt, Hebrew
cabalists, Persian magicians, Syrian sorcerers, Indian
fakirs, the Orient poured legion after legion of grave,
stealthy, tonsured and mitred priests, sent religion after
religion to take possession of the world-city.

To the philosophic moralists of Rome, who eschewed
metaphysics, their ethical convictions, aspirations and
endeavours needed no external dogmatic or emotional
support, sought no other religion than ' the divinity
within their own breast.' The kingdom of God was
within them. They looked with disgust and abhorrence
on those barbaric and effeminate superstitions, and strove
long to put them down and exclude them. But the minds
of the ignorant and troubled masses, and above all the
women, found exactly what they thirsted for in the
mystery of those eastern cults. A marvellous peace
fell upon them in the extra-mundane atmosphere of the
dim sanctuaries, sounding with solemn music, now wafted
as from a distant sphere, now weeping with the tender-
ness of human sorrow, presently bursting forth into trans-
figured ecstasis of triumphant hope. The grave rituals,
the chanted hymns and litanies, the solemn intonation
of the Mithraic clergy as they called upon the " Lamb
of God that taketh away the sins of the world," soothed
their troubled passions as with a delightful balm ; and
they were thrilled with a strange excitement as the
tinkling bell of the acolytes announced the culminating
mystery of the service, and amid clouds of incense, the
officiating priest turned to the kneeling crowd and raised
breast-high the sacred chalice filled with the wine of
life. They were born again to a new life as the cleans-
ing baptismal waters washed away the stains of misery
and sin ; and what emotion overwhelmed them when,
after a stern preparation of fast and penance, they were
admitted to partake of the sacramental communion, of
the consecrated bread which was the very body of the
God ! The women found ineffable comfort in unburden-
ing their sorrows before the Queen of Heaven who bore
in her arms her Divine Son, and who seemed to mingle her
tears with theirs as she mourned over the Dead God.
The thought of death itself lost its sting for the

PAX ROMANA 157

votaries who received the assurance of eternal life from
the Saviour and Mediator who had triumphed over the
grave.

East and West have not only met again and again,
they have indissolubly commingled. In the Hellenistic
Orient of the Macedonian Empire the dawn-myths and
hieratic rituals of the East and the dialectics and meta-
physics of Greece had come together,, and brought forth
strange hybrid chimeras; new religions innumerable,
countless illuminated and ascetic sects, Essenic and
Ebionitic, Nazarene and Therapeutrid, swarmed from the
ancient brewing -vat. And in Antioch and Alexandria all
the mysticism, occultism, trismegistal philosophumena,
and abracadabras of Jewry, magic Egypt, and Orphic
pseudo- Hellas, held their Sabbath of Unreason. Platonism
had become Plotinism, philosophy theosophy, metaphysics
gnosis. The Word had become God.

The Isiac and Serapic cults of Rome were no more
the religion of ancient Egypt, Mithraism was no more
the Mazdaeanism of Persia, than Christianity was Judaism.
Religions interchanged their symbols and rituals, became
transformed into a new syncretic uniformity more homo-
geneous than the primitive seasonal rites whence they
had sprung, and the worshipper passed from shrine to
shrine as he might from one saint's chapel to the
adjoining one.

As once the corrupted fragments of Hellenic thought,
so likewise the ethical spirit of Rome was absorbed in
the popular ferments of mysticism, and blended with
the ascetic fervour of the East. The guilds and brother-
hoods which were attached to each cult fostered the
feelings of human fellowship and mutual help. Mithraism
in particular, owing to its Avestic origin, the simplest
and therefore the purest of popular cults, addressed
itself to the poor, the lowly, and disinherited ; the master
knelt beside his slave in the mysteries, and was not
infrequently called upon to regard him as his spiritual
superior. That cult seemed about to absorb and super-
sede all others, and to become under the imperial
patronage of Aurelian the official religion of the Roman
world.

158 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

That position was, however, ultimately assumed by a
cult that became the most luxuriant syncretic product
of the Hellenistic East, sheltering within the mystic
shadows of its dense vegetation of rich allusiveness, every
religious idea and every theosophic thought that the world
had ever brought forth. It came, like Mithraism, from
Antioch, but from the Jewish instead of from the Persian
elements of the eastern metropolis, or, as some think,
originally from Judaea itself, where the nucleus of its
ideals had indeed long developed in the monastic com-
munities of the Essenes and Nazarenes. Hence, as
formerly the Jews had violently repudiated their spiritual
debts to Babylon and Persia, it insisted on its exclusive-
ness, refused to recognize in any way, and even denounced
its creditors. While, in an even higher degree than
other cults, it gave voice and emphasis to the reigning
ethical spirit, and was like them an agape, a religion of
love, it was unfortunately distinguished from them by
the darkling taint, the old delirium hebraicum, of uncom-
promising intolerance. Professor Falta de Gracia goes
certainly too far when he says that it was " the religion of
hate " ; but it gave expression to the seething discon-
tent of human suffering, to the detestation of the intoler-
able order of the established world, to all the inarticu-
late forces of hostility against the Roman government ;
and it was that odium generis humani which gave it
an immeasurable significance and advantage over all
competitors.

The fall of the Roman Empire has ever been the
grand theme of historical philosophizing. The event
is generally held to be accounted for by utter-
ing the word * corruption.' So far as political cor-
ruption goes, Roman administration was as corrupt in
the days of Marius, when a petty African chief, Jugurtha,
bought with gold every envoy and every general that
was sent to put him down, as at any subsequent time,
not excepting the fourth and fifth centuries. And as
for moral corruption, since the primitive, dour austerity
disappeared in large measure after the second Punic

PAX ROMANA 159

War, the society of the Roman Empire was marked, as
we have just noted, by a continuous development in
austere morality. The gross, obvious reason why the
Roman Empire fell is not, as usually stated, that it was
too big, but that it was too small. It fell because there
were too many barbarians outside it. Had there
been no German hordes wanting ' a place in the sun,'
the Roman Empire, in spite of its many deficiencies
and inefficiencies, might have continued indefinitely —
which would have been a great calamity. Of course if
it had remained a huge military organization, stiff with
swords and military discipline, instead of being a very
liberal conglomeration of free and self-ruling municipia,
it might have held off the barbarians ; and its survival
would have been a still greater calamity.

The intrinsic cause that doomed and condemned the
Roman Empire was not any growing corruption, but
the corruption, the evil, the inadaptation to fact, in
its very origin and being. No system of human organi-
zation that is false in its very principle, in its very
foundation, can save itself by any amount of cleverness
and efficiency in the means by which that falsehood is
carried out and maintained, by any amount of super-
ficial adjustment and tinkering. It is doomed root and
branch as long as the root remains what it is. The
Roman Empire was, as we have seen, a device for the
enrichment of a small class of people by the exploitation
of mankind. That business enterprise was carried out
with all the honesty, all the fairness and justice com-
patible with its very nature, and with admirable judg-
ment and ability. But all those virtues could not save
the fundamental falsehood, the fundamental wrong from
its consequences. Their effects worked inexorably. The
supply of slaves failed, the supply of soldiers failed,
the supply of labour failed. And — essential fact — the
exploited populations came to feel more and more as
time went on that the carrying on, the maintenance of
the whole thing was no business of theirs. They came
to see, or be vaguely conscious, that they were not in
the least concerned with that social machine which was
run not for them, but for the benefit of a small master

160 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

class. In vain official voices were raised to appeal to
their ' patriotism/ to their duty of helping, and defend-
ing, and saving ' the State.' Those appeals left them
perfectly cold and indifferent ; they answered bluntly
that they felt no patriotism whatever;, that the ' oold
monster,' the State might look after, itself. They became
Christians. They made up their own little organizations
for mutual help and protection, and resistance against
'the State.' They utterly disowned it and denounced
it, they refused to serve it; it might go to perdition
for all they cared, it was no country, no ' patria ' of
theirs, their kingdom was not of this world. In Gaul in
the third century the peasants, the colonl, broke out
into open revolt, into anarchy and plunder, just as they;
did later at the time of the Jacqueries and of the
French Revolution. Though partially put down for a
time by Maximian, the Bagaudce insurrection continued
till the end.

When things got most desperate the Roman govern-
ment had the good fortune to find a strong man of
extraordinary ability and energy, Diocletian. He set
to consolidating everything in the most vigorous manner,
raised the army to four times its strength and reorganized
it, strengthened the entire network of administration and
central government and made the latter absolute. His
aim was to stay all further disintegration by rigidly
pinning things down with iron bonds in their existing
state. When a social structure visibly threatens to topple
over, rulers try to prevent it from falling by prevent-
ing it from moving. The whole of Roman society was
fixed in a system of castes ; no one was to change his
avocation, the son must continue in the calling of his
father. Sedition, discontent, disloyalty, were dealt with
with a strong hand. Though partial to many Christian
religious ideas and counting many personal friends in
the sect, he even decided to put down Christianity. His
successor, Constantine, tried the opposite policy, that
of conciliation and concessions, had the ingenious idea
to avail himself of the admirable network of Christian
organization, Christian trade-unions, to assist and
strengthen the government .

PAX ROMANA 161

But evils secularly developed and lying at the very
root of a social order are not to be remedied at a stroke
by either vigorous or ingenious political measures.
Whether vigorously put down or conciliated, the masses
of exploited population and the municipia remained in-
different and hostile. When the barbarian flood broke
through, they not only did not resist, but welcomed them,
and joined with them. *' The 'powerful decide what the
poor have to pay. The poor thirst for freedom and
have to endure extreme servitude," writes Salvianus
in the fifth century, *' I wonder only that all the poor and
needy do not run away, except that they are loath to
abandon their land and families. Should we Romans
marvel that we cannot resist the Goths, when Roman
citizens had rather live with them than with us? The
Romans in the Gothic kingdom are so attached to the
Roman government that they prefer to remain poor under
the Goths, to being well-off among the Romans and
bear the heavy burdens of taxation." With unfailing!
instinct, the clergy saw in the wild Barbarians a better
promise of power and influence for the Church than in
the officially converted Roman Empire which, in spite
of Constantine and Theodosius, remained ' the Beast/
the enemy. They accordingly smiled on the invader,
encouraged him, flattered him. The Roman clergy
were undisguisedly pro -German. They resolutely,
winked at, and minimized any 'atrocities.' Had there
been a massacre? Well, men had to die sooner; or
later. And when Alaric put Rome to the sack, looting,
burning, and ravishing, St. Augustine employed himself
in composing a dissertation on the question whether or
no the outraged virgins would be entitled to the crown
of maidenhood in the next world.

11

CHAPTER IV

BARBARISM AND BYZANTINISM

have so far seen three broadly, distinguished stages
mark the course of human evolution. First the long,
primitive tribal stage in which custom-thought ruled
absolute, broken only now and again, and only to be
renewed with but slightly weakened force, by material
discoveries and the clash of cultures. To that original
phase succeeded that of the great oriental civilizations
wholly dominated by theocratic power- thought whose
absolutism is only occasionally and ineffectually challenged
by military power, and which, owing to its greater subtlety
of direction and elasticity of interpretation, virtually
nullifies the disruptive effects of cross-fertilization.
Thirdly comes the extraordinarily felicitous accident of
Greece, which at a blow almost completely liberates the
human mind from custom- and power-thought, and raises
it to undreamed-of heights of power and unfettered
efficiency. But while it utilizes all the available data
of rational thought, ,it contributes little to their increase,
and its poverty in that respect cripples the power which
it derives from freedom. iThe world contains as yet too
much barbarism and too much orientalism' ; and the
Graeco-Roman phase of civilization succumbs at last to
a gigantic tide of those elements which submerge and
overwhelm it. It is eventually succeeded by a fourth
phase, the one in which we live.

That phase is sharply separated from the foregoing one
by the tremendous cataclysm out of which it arose.
It is largely owing to that circumstance that the process
of human progress, when estimated by the narrow parallax
of our ordinary historic purview, is not obviously and
indisputably recognizable. That short space of time is

162

BARBARISM 163

divided in its very middle by the cataclysm which swept
away all previous achievements. Hence the whole curve
is broken and disguised. Under totally new conditions,
with new materials,"; a new development took place.
Throughout the greater part of it a glaring contrast
was presented between the painful struggles towards re-
construction of a world steeped in barbarism1, and over-
whelmed by a thousand rude and tyrannous elements,
and the lucid splendour of that civilization which lay in
the dust. Men looked to the past, for help, example,
inspiration ; they quite rightly and justly regarded them-
selves as the pupils of 'the ancients/ and quite justly
looked upon these as their superiors.

Yet eventually all foregoing phases of civilization have
been wholly transcended, and the powers and potentialities
of the human race magnified beyond estimation,
by the civilization which has arisen out of that melting-
pot of utter ruin and destruction into which every form
and every deformity of human power had been cast.
It is quite impossible to estimate rightly and judge at all
adequately the farces whose struggles and interaction
we see before us, unless our modern civilization is viewed
in its true place in the perspective of history ; unless we
know in their origin and development the character of
those forces, which have been brought together in the
phase of civilization which at the present day is struggling;
through the crisis of its development. But, although to
the modern European the genesis of the civilization in
which he lives may, of all phases of historical evolution
be deemed foremost in importance, so thoroughly have
traditional misconceptions and persistent misrepresentation
falsified his notions on that point, that they are only a
few degrees removed from the dim and fabulous concep-
tions which the Greeks and the Romans entertained
concerning their own origins.

Although the Graeco-Roman world did not sink under
a catastrophic blow, such as wiped out Babylon or
Susa, Asshur or Ecbatana, and wreathed the sand-
drifts of the desert over their graves ; although its

164 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

downfall was a process of transitional, though rapid,
disintegration rather than a sudden and violent cataclysm ;
although the contemporaries of Alaric and of Romulus
Augustulus were scarcely aware of what was happening,
that a world was dropping into chaos— yet no civilization
ever suffered more complete obliteration. It is the most
appalling catastrophe in history. Human civilization,
seemingly powerful and securely established, embracing
the known world in one large organized, peaceful, pros-
perous society was completely blotted out. All that
humanity had achieved seemed to be swept away and set
at nought. Athens and Rome had raised mankind to
a new plane ; they had set it higher above the old
civilizations of the East than the troglodyte of pre-
history was above the ape : they had created a truly
human world, mature and conscious. And now of all
that growth, of all that glorious evolution, practically
nothing was left. The hands of the clock had sprung back
to darkness and savagery.

The depth of that ruin is not generally realized in
its full horror. The records of the period are eked out
with the names of barbarian chiefs and their wars, and
do not dwell on the picture of the existing world. By an
optical illusion the light that shines before and after
tends to diffuse over the dark gap. From the fifth to
the tenth century Europe lay, sunk in a night of barbarism
which grew darker and darker. It was a barbarism
far more awful and horrible than ,that of the primitive
savage, for it was the decomposing body of what had
been a great civilization. The features and impress
of that civilization were all but completely effaced.
Where its development had been fullest, in Italy and in
Gaul, all was ruin, squalor, desolation. The land had
dropped out of cultivation-; trees and shrubs rapidly
encroached upon the once cultivated land, rivers over-
flowed their broken and neglected banks ; the forest
and the malarial swamp regained their sway, over vast
tracts of country which had been (covered with prosperous
farms and waving fields. The word \eremus, wilderness,
recurs with significant frequency in mediaeval land charts.
Cities had practically, disappeared. Where there is no

BARBARISM 165

trade there can be no cities. N They; were pulled down and
used as quarries, and only the central part walled in
when a bishop or a baron established himself there who
could afford some protection. In Nimes, for instance,
the remains of the population dwelled 'in huts built among
the ruins of the amphitheatre. Others Were completely
abandoned. Mantua Was submerged by stagnant waters
and deserted. The Germans who regarded 'walled cities
as a badge of servitude, hastened to pull them down. Of
all the prosperous cities built by the Romans on the
banks of the Rhine not one remained in the ninth century.
The ruins and the scattered settlements were visited by
herds of prowling wolves, boars, and even by bears . The
atria of the Roman villas, when not converted into
cloisters, were filled in with hovels and dunghills, the
surrounding living-rooms serving as quarries and ram-
parts. Clad in the skins of beasts and in coarse, sack-
shaped woollen garments, the enormously reduced popu-
lation lived in thatched wooden huts, huddled for
protection at the foot of the barons' lairs, or round
monasteries. Every such little group manufactured its
own materials and clothing, and supported its miserable
existence by scanty cultivation of small patches of ground
round their hovels. They did not dare to go further
afield for fear of wild beasts and of marauders. Famines
and plagues were chronic ; there were ten devastating
famines and thirteen plagues in the course of the tenth
century alone. Cases of cannibalism' were not uncommon ;
there were man-hunts, not with a View to plunder, but
for food ; it is on record that at Tournus, on the Sa6ne,
human flesh was publicly put up for sale. It was im-
possible to venture abroad without a strong armed escort ;
robber bands roamed everywhere. Water traffic was put a
stop to by the practice of wrecking, which was actually
encouraged by. charters. Anarchy was absolute 'and un-
checked ; there was no law but the arbitrary will of
the barons and their men-at-arms ; none had power to
check them. They lived in their towers in rush- strewn
halls, which frequently served also as stables for their
horses. They had no other occupation but brigandage,
private wars, and riot.

166 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

Because out of that abyss of darkness and desolation
civilization did ultimately emerge anew> "the fact is
generally accepted \vith careless indifference as if it were
quite natural and inevitable. It used to be in the popular
conception of history held tc* be sufficiently accounted
for by a reference to the ' Renaissance ' and the restora-
tion of classical literature after the fall of Constantinople .
Obviously a mere begging of the question ; for there is
little to be explained in the fact that the Europe which
had already produced Dante should proceed to bring
forth Messer Petrarca and an Italian Renaissance. It
has gradually become more clearly recognized that it
was in the period between the end of the tenth and that
of the twelfth century that Europe emerged out of the
night. The old misconception and confusion is per-
petuated by our current historical rubrics, which include
both that period and the Dark Ages under the term
' Middle Ages/ and apply the name of ' Renaissance '
to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whose culture
was but the ripe fruit of antecedent growth, a fruit
not only ripe, but in many respects rotten. That civili-
zation should have grown at all out of the troglodytic
Europe of the ninth century, far from being quite natural,
is a very remarkable fact.

The various Germanic hordes that trod down the
ancient civilization brought with them no qualities that
could help to build a new one. The panegyrical twaddle
that pervades all our histories about •'•' the young, virile
Teutonic races regenerating the effete and decrepit
Roman world," is a brazen effrontery of racial-historical
mendacity of the same order as the bestowing of the
benefits of Teutonic * Kultur ' by Prussian Junkerdom.

The cultural condition of the primitive tribal state is,
as we have already noted, rigorously precluded from
advancing beyond a definite limit. Only in exceptionally
favourable circumstances, as happened in the case of
Greece suckled at the many breasts of oriental cultures,
can tribal society become an agency, -of progress.

The barbaric tribes of Europe were, save for possession

BARBARISM 167

of metals, in much the same state as the Maoris when
first visited by Captain Cook. They lived in wooden huts
in swamps and forest glades. They possessed a few
household crafts, very little agriculture, and native poetry,
which is always of considerable merit among savages.
For the rest they were drunken, murderous, treacherous,
licentious brutes. Their savagery was of a particularly
base and bestial type. To libel them is not possible, to
sound the full measure of their infamy is revolting.
Gluttonous, riotous orgies, to shout, heated with strong
drink, was their ideal of enjoyment. , Slaughter, cruelty,
obscene violence, were the natural outlets of their
energies. In mind they were sluggish and heavy — gens
nee astuta nee callida (Tac. xxii.)- When not em-
ployed with bloodshed, food, and drink, they would sit
for days warming themselves at their fires, and making
their women work for them.

The barbaric courts were, one and all, scenes of per-
petual murders, parricides, fratricides, poisonings, per-
juries, bestiality, and whoredom. "It would not be easy
within the same historical space to find more vice and
less virtue," is Gibbon's comment, and he was not by any
means emancipated from the fable of barbaric virtues.
There are indeed no more utterly sickening pages in
human annals than the tale of unredeemed abominations,
the exploits of Clothaire, Chilperic, Fredegonde, recorded
with such inimitable unction by St. Gregory of Tours.
Procopius, the Byzantine historian of the Goths, shows
more delicacy ; he refuses to soil his pages with the
horrors exhibited by those savages, " lest I should trans-
mit to succeeding ages a monument and example of
inhumanity.'*

Clovis obtains the Ripuarian kingdom by inducing1
the king's son to murder his father, and by afterwards
cracking his skull. His progress is indeed rather
monotonously marked by an habitual breaking of skulls,
often by way of argument or facetious repartee, but
generally those of rivals decoyed to his court under
treacherous safe- conducts. As St. Gregory charmingly
remarks, " Thus did God every day fell down some one of
his enemies by his hand, and extend the confines of

168 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

his realm, because he walked with an upright heart
before the Lord and did what was acceptable in His eyes."
Charlemagne's son Louis the Pious tears out the eyes of
liis brother Pepin's son, drawn to his court under safe-
conduct. Louis's son, Lothair, vents his jealousy of his
half-brother by seizing the little daughter of his guardian
from a convent, fastening her up in a cask and throwing
her into the river. The Lombard court of the drunken
Alboin, assassinated by his wife Rosmunda, whom he
had compelled to drink out of her murdered father's
skull, and who afterwards married her accomplice, and
in turn murdered him, presents the same vile spectacle
as the Prankish court. In Burgundy the king, Gundebald,
consolidated his throne by killing his three brothers.
Theodoric himself, who represented more creditably than
any other barbarian the effect of a Roman education,
broke out after a time, as imperfectly tamed wild animals
are apt to do, into primal ferocity. Each of the Gothic
kings who succeeded him murdered his predecessor.

If any of the Teutonic chieftains rose at all above
the lowest barbaric level, it was owing to special con-
tact with Grasco -Roman civilization : Alaric, Odoacre,
Theodoric, had been brought up in the Roman legions .

But no barbarians have ever proved themselves more
refractory to all civilizing influences than the ' virile
Teutons.' Instead of absorbing anything of the civili-
zation which they overthrew, they became, with the means
and opportunities of indulgence, considerably more brutal
than they were before. They regarded their conquests
as occasions for sottish riot and bestial tyranny. When
they became Christianized they converted the monasteries
into Walhallas of drunken orgy. The appalling con-
dition of the Church and monasteries in the eighth,
ninth, and tenth centuries was not due to the corruption
of the Roman clergy so much as to the influx of barbarian
priests and monks. The convents resounded with' riot
through the night. Capitularies of the Carolingian
period enact among other rules that " priests shall
not have more than one wife," they lay down
detailed regulations concerning incest, they forbid
monks to spend their time in taverns, and ordain

BARBARISM 169

that "on no account shall an abbot gouge out the
eyes of his monks or mutilate them, whatever
fault they may have committed." l Legislation testifies
to the universal prevalence of female drunkenness ; and
St. Boniface complains that, under pretext of pilgrimages,
a trail of Teutonic prostitutes was left over every part
of Europe.2 Regarding as they did physical strength
and combative qualities as the supreme human virtues,
the contempt of the barbarian invaders for the pacific
population knew no bounds. They ascribed that " ignoble
effeminacy " to culture and education, and consequently
refused to allow their children to be educated, " for edu-
cation tends to corrupt, enervate and depress the mind. "3

The fabric of the Roman Empire had left one great
representative. Europe owes a perennial debt to the
Christian Church ; it constituted a bond which united
the congery of kingdoms and domains into which the
world had been broken up, into the theoretical body of
Christendom. Hence the development of our civilization
has not been Italian, or French, or German, but European.
The language of Rome, some relics and traditions of her
administrative order and ideas, were part of the uniting
bond preserved in the Roman Church.

The civilizing influence which the Church thus
exercised, was chiefly owing to its position as the repre-
sentative of Roman civilization, as imposing the tradi-
tion, the associations, the ideas, the language, the general
atmosphere of the latter, with the particular insistence,
privilege and authority of a proselytizing creed. It
played the part of a civilizing agent, not because it was
Christian, but because it was Roman. The religion of
Rome, untouched in its self-assertive dignity and claims
by the vicissitudes of the em'pire, was all that stood
for the glamour of the Roman name ; and the barbarian
could without derogation become a citizen of that new
Rome while he trod the remains of Roman power

1 Baluzii Capit. Reg. Franc. Cap. Metense.
3 Epist. Ixxviii, ap. Mon. Germ. Hist.
3 Procop. De Bell Goth. I, 4.

170 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

under his heel. He was disposed to accept the Roman
religion chiefly because of its association with the
prestige, the dignity and grandeur which the name of
Rome possessed even for its bitterest enemy ; very much
in the same way as the savage of to-day is willing to
listen to the missionary, not on account of any meta-
physical or ethical persuasiveness in the latter's creed,
but because he is the representative of the magical
power of European civilization. The barbarian felt
flattered by adopting the creed of the Roman man,
as the savage feels flattered by adopting1 the creed of
the white man. It was Perikles and Plato, Heracleitos
and Aristotle, Cato, Caesar, and Trajan, the hard rational
thought of Hellas, the shrewd ability of Rome, not Paul
or Athanasius, that converted the barbarian to Christ-
ianity. The words * Roman ' and ' Christian ' were
during the early Middle Ages used as synonym's.

Priests alone could read and some could write.
Kings and rulers affixed to the various charters which
they enacted " signum crucis manu propria pro ignora-
tione liter arum" Hence we still speak of ' signing '
instead of ' subscribing.' The word ' clerk ' denoted
indifferently a priest or a person able to read. But
not even all the clergy could write;, there were many
bishops who were unable to sign their names to the
canons of the councils on which they sat. One of the
questions put to persons who were candidates for orders
was " whether they could read the gospels and epistles
and explain the sense of these, at least literally."
King Alfred complained that there was not a priest
from the Humber to the sea who understood the
liturgy in his mother-tongue, or could translate the
easiest piece of Latin.

The glimmer of literacy in the monasteries isolated
in woods and on the crags of savage lands did not,
in general, go beyond those elementary attainments.
According to Benvenuto da Imola, grass grew in most
of the libraries and the literary activities of the monks
mostly consisted ini scraping away the literatures of
Greece and Rome to rnake room, for the legends of the

BARBARISM 171

saints. Of lay books there existed the manuals of
Boethius and Cassiodorus ; few Roman authors appear
ever to have been read besides Vergil, Terence and
Plautus. The wretched so-called schools established
by Charlemagne, of which such grossly exaggerated
fuss is made in all our histories, represented an
ineffectual attempt to manufacture more priests, and
to produce priests that should at least be able to read
and write. They only existed for a day, and offered a
curriculum of which a dame's infant school would be
ashamed. The * palatine academy * never existed at
all except in the imagination of historians; of con-
temporary evidence there is no{ a trace. We are liable
to be greatly impressed When we read that * schools '
were established, and that the ' seven arts,' that mathe-
matics, astronomy among other things were taught.
The impression is utterly misleading. Here, for
instance, is an account of the ' founding of a school.'
Charlemagne ordered the abbot of Fontenelle, one
Gervold, to open a school in his monastery. He
obeyed : he opened a school in which singing only
was taught, for " although he knew not overmuch any
other art, he was proficient in ]the art of singing* and
was not deficient in pleasantness and power of voice." l
Alcuin of York, the organizer of those precious
Carolingian schools, proclaimed " the most learned
man of his time," " whom no one in that age
excelled in learning," thus instructs his pupils in
grammar and rhetoric : he tells them to be careful
to distinguish between vellus and bell us, vel and
fel, quod and quot, and imparts to them the infor-
mation that hippvcrita is derived from hippo, falsum
and chrisis, indicium. His * mathematics ' did not
extend beyond a laborious and uncertain use of the rule
of three. Here is a fair and representative specimen of
it. " An accurate acquaintance with numbers teaches
us that some are even, others uneven; that of the
even numbers, some are perfect, others imperfect; and
further, that of the imperfect numbers, some are greater,
others less. . . . Take, for example, the number VI ;
* Qhron. FontanelL ad a.

172 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

the half of VI is III, the third is II, and the sixth part
I. The perfect Creator, therefore, who made all things
very good, created the world in six days in order
to show that everything that he had formed was perfect
of its kind. . . . When the human race after the flood
replenished the earth, they originated front the number
VII T; . .. . thus indicating that the second race is less
perfect than the first, which had been created in the
number VI. . . . The sixty queens and eighty concu-
bines (mentioned in the Song of Solomon) are the mem--
bers of the Holy Church," etc., etc. Even the study
of theology to which all other ' learning ' was strictly,
subordinate must not suggest to us any subtle dialectical
exercises; by theology was meant purely and simply
the capacity to quote from Holy Wirit and from the
Fathers ; the authority of a text was the sole conceivable
form of argument. Of such kind was the learning
which, we are told, survived and was preserved in
the monasteries. ;

But if bare literacy existed in the Church only, it
was also the dead weight of its influence which paralysed
intellect and culture. It is difficult for us to realize
the effect of that incubus in that age, the com'pleteness
with which it succeeded in snuffing out the human mind.
Not only was religious dogma, the thought of hell-fire,
an exclusive, constant, daily obsession; but any distrac-
tion of the attention, any deviation of the mental gaze
from that one object of hypnotic contemplation,, any
other interest, was denounced as in itself a deadly
impiety. The Church, it is important to observe, Was
not then opposed to knowledge on the ground that
it was * dangerous,* that it imperilled the faith. That
view was a fruit of later experience. In the primitive
simplicity of dogmatic confidence the thought hardly
occurred that any knowledge could be dangerous,
could conflict with holy truth. Knowledge might, on
the contrary, be plausibly valued as an adornment of
the Church, as enhancing the dignity of; its office, as
contributing to the greater glory of the faith. And
that notion did exist in some minds; monks like the

BARBARISM 173

Benedictines cultivated what knowledge they could,
regarding it as a tribute to religion, as its natural
appanage. But that notion Was in general vigorously
denounced and repressed. Secular reading was con-
demned not as an occupation dangerous to religion, but
as an occupation other than religion. It was an imper-
missible withdrawal of the mind from its one legitimate
cynosure. The attitude of the Christian mind towards
culture was that of St. Jerome who, though naturally
devoted to literature, renounced it utterly by an act of
self-discipline, as if casting off a tentptation of Satan,
as if purging himself from a state of sin. Alcuin
systematically discouraged secular study. In a letter
to a former pupil that egregious educator takes him
to task for reading Vergil; ** the four Gospels," he
says, " not the twelve VEneads (sic), should fill your
mind." The same attitude is found throughout the
Dark Ages. At a much later date Edmund Rich,
one of the founders of Oxford, while studying mathe-
matical diagrams has a vision of his mother, who draws
three interlaced circles representing the Trinity ; ** Be
these," she bids him, M henceforth thy diagrams." Pope
Gregory burnt all the works of Livy and of Cicero on
which he could lay his hands. The rumour having
reached him that Bishop Desiderius of Vienne had read
some discourse on a literary subject, he writes to him
with some embarrassment : ** A fact has come to our
ears which we cannot mention without a blush, that
you, my brother, lecture on literature. I hope to hear
that you are not really interested, in such rubbish —
nugis et seculartbus literis" Even attention to the
study of civil law was as late as the twelfth1 century
violently denounced by St. Bernard, who bewails that
the courts are busy with the laws of Justinian — the
pandects of Amalfi had just been discovered — instead of
confining themselves to the laws of God.

There was among the chief men of those times some
sense of the terrible wreck and ruin of things. The
vision, the memory of Rome and her civilized wo.rld,

174 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

was too great and too near not to remain present
before their eyes and impress them with a strong sense
of the existing degradation. Modern historians of the
Dark Ages employ themselves with describing the succes-
sive efforts that were made by barbaric rulers to intro-
duce some rudiments of order into the weltering1 chaos.
Theodoric did all he could, had laws codified, endeavoured
to establish some kind of administration ; the Lombards,
the Burgundians likewise got codes written down,
appointed officials, issued edicts. Charlemagne, the
pious barbarian fighting missionary who converted his
fellow-barbarians to Christianity by fire and sword,
and out of whom ecclesiastical gratitude has manu-
factured a legendary hero and great man, tried in
co-operation with the Roman Church to construct a
Christian Holy Roman Empire. Various chieftains after
him carved out little kingdoms,, each making desperate
efforts at organization, law, administration.

But one net result stands out of the recital of those
various political enterprises. They are all utterly futile.
The laws, organizations,; constitutions, as we should'
say, existed merely on parchment. States, kingdoms,
Holy Empires, are brought into existence at the point
of the sword, and with papal blessings, but they are
mere card castles, that come tumbling down as fast as
they are set up. Mfe may gauge the real value of the
well-meaning efforts of Charlemagne, which are repre-.
sented in detailed accounts as a reorganization of the
world, a * renaissance,' by the fact that the moment
he is laid in the crypt of Aachen, not a trace is to
be found of it all. Under all those fictitious official
titles and codes, those political shufflings which help
to fill the chronicle, the actual facts of human society
remain unaltered, they run their sweet course utterly
unaffected and unchanged : brigand chiefs warring
and plundering, murders and outrages, decimated
populations of miserable wretches clustering round for
protection. ,

The truth is that you cannot make laws, or organize,
or do anything with masses of humanity if culture is
non-existent. You may go on devising parchment laws

BYZANT1NISM 175

and kingdoms, and appointing officials with pompous
titles, and signing deeds and edicts till doomsday; if
humanity is in a condition of illiterate barbarism, is
intellectually destitute, all your politics and organizing
and legislating are vain beating of the air. ^Vie shall
have occasion later to note that no liberating movement
can originate from! the people themselves unless they
are intellectually prepared for it. The reverse is equally
true ; no reform, no organization, no progress can be
imposed on them by well-meaning rulers, if the people
are not culturally in a condition to receive it. Neither
from above nor from below can civilization be implanted
upon barbarism destitute of intellectual culture.

^Without intellectual light of some kind in either
people or rulers it was impossible to create a new
Europe. No extant elements derived either from the
rigid conservative structure of the Roman Empire or
from a dogmatic Church could give rise to a progressive
civilization in the Europe of the Dark Ages, any more
than did those same elements iri the empire of
Byzantium.

Among all the kingdoms of time Byzantium stands
a unique, strange, uncanny, half-understood figure of
warning, like a gorgeously decked skeleton at the feast
of life. Upon her as on no other empire fortune seemed
to have showered every favour and every advantage.
Set in a site of unparalleled vantage, the cynosure of
every empire-builder from the remotest time to the
present day, it survived all but unscathed amid the
ruin which all around it submerged the world. Wihile
Western Europe sank in headlong dissolution, it endured
to all outer seeming an opulent, prosperous, dazzling
civilization. The pomp, the wealth, the flashing
opulence, the stately ceremonial of its gorgeous court;
its basileus, resplendent under the jewelled shower of
the dalmatic, receiving in the Magnaura, more like a
vision of a superhuman being; th&n a man, the homage

176 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

of prostrate princes, amid the smoke of incense, the
blaze of hanging candelabra, the rustle of gold fronds,
and the peals of the silver organs, surrounded fby
hierarchies of patricians and protospatharians, by the
scholaric guards in their silver breast-plates, and
excubitors with their golden shields; the maze of
its Sacred Palaces, with their ivory doors, rising in
tiers of splendour on the erichanted shore whence, from
marble terraces, the eye roamed, over a panorama of
unmatched loveliness, the Marmora and the Prinkipo
islands, the waving hills, covered with groves and
gardens, with palaces and villas, the Palace of Fountains,
Chrysopolis on the Asiatic shore, and Bryas where stood
a replica of the Kasr at-Taj of Baghdad, Blachernae on
the Golden Horn, the private imperial harbour of
Boukoleon, where scarlet -and -gold dromons rode at
anchor; the glint of the polychromatic churches, their
clusters of airy domes, M hung as if tty a golden chain
from heaven"; the Hippodrome decked with the obe-
lisks of Thebes, the tripods of Delphi, and the statues
of Praxiteles — offered a spectacle! of dreamland
fastuousness never perhaps excelled, and which needed
not to be contrasted with the squalor4 and desolation
of the barbarous West. Byzantiuiri "was the natural
emporium of the world's trade; its industries were
flourishing; its dominions extended over the richest
provinces of Asia;: it controlled the granaries and
timber-yards of the world; it possessed the only
disciplined and scientifically trained armies; their,
officers carried the tactical manuals of Maurice and Leo
the ^Wise in their haversacks ; they were equipped with the
equivalent of an artillery, the dreaded Grecian fire —
some kind of flammenwerfer, of which" they shad the
secret. iWJiile all the rest of Christendom! were brutal
savages, the princes and citizens of the Eastern Empire
were marked by courtliness and polished manners, refine-^
ment in their tastes and mode of life. Byzantine culture
was the sole heir and repository of the Greek and
Hellenistic world;: it produced scholars, poets, mathe-
maticians. Notwithstanding its luxurious opulence
its court was, with singularly few exceptions and brief

BYZANTIN1SM 177

outbreaks, exceptionally free from] vice, corruption and
crime. It was, on the whole, a decent, orderly,,
well-behaved, well-intentioned society. Its elaborately
organized administration, the representative of Roman
law, worked smoothly. Its rulers were generally just,
generally patriotic, careful of public welfare, con-
scientious to a scruple. How many rulers has the
world since seen setting themselves to write army
manuals, or compendiums of law like Basil I, or an
account of their dominions, or a treatise on diplomacy
and the administration of the empire like Constantino
Porphyrogenitus? They invariably led their armies in
person, they were their own finance ministers, personally
attended to the administration of the treasury, and never
once allowed the coinage to become debased.

Thus during ten long centuries the Byzantine Empire
stood, the guardian of culture, the ark of civilization,
while the Christian world around it crumbled to
primordial anarchy and rose again to life. It would
not be possible to set forth conditions in appearance
more favourable to the development of a great, glorious
and mighty human society, the leader of progress, the
guide of civilization, the light of the world.

And yet that civilization, the pampered favourite of
fortune, has remained before the considered judgment
of history, in spite of the attempts of some Byzantophiles
to rehabilitate it, what it was to its contemporaries —
an object of contempt. So insignificant that almost
one is apt to overlook and ignore it in a purview of
the development of humanity. It has contributed
nothing to human growth; it lies outside the stream of
mankind's evolution, a relic, a mummified survival, a
failure. In those thousand years of existence it did
not exhibit a spark of progress, scarcely of life.
Surrounded by populations struggling out of darkness
and calling for rescue and redemption, it taught them
nothing, and it learnt nothing. Its fleets were swept
off the seas by the Arabs; its commerce was captured,
first by the Arabs, then by the Catalans, Genoese and
Venetians ; its army, though it did save the empire
again and again, ultimately came to be despised both'

12

178 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

by Frank and Saracen; its literature was puerile, a
model of bad taste, of nauseous, euphuistic pseudo-
mythologizing rubbish, an4 grotesque miracle tales; it
remains unreadable, save for the fable-distorted records
of its self-contemplating history; its few scholars-
there were not many — such as Leo the Grammarian,
Photius, were the merest compilers, scholiasts, and
pedants; the only works of any utility which they have
left us are the catalogues of the libraries they knew
not how to use, and the dictionary of Suidas. In the
bountiful prodigality of the advantages Which it enjoyed
and in their utter futility, the Byzantine Empire offers,
as; I said, a spectacle unique in history.

If we inquire into the causes of the phenomenal
sterility we find that they fall mainly under three heads.
First, the real power of the Byzantine Empire was wielded
by a host of ignorant and fanatical monks. They
swarmed throughout every province and every town.
In Constantinople whole districts Were filled with rows
of monasteries; there were over, a hundred; that of
Stoudion alone contained a thousand monks. Mount
Athos, Mount Ida, Olympus, the islands of the Marmora
and the Archipelago, were covered with conglomera-
tions of monasteries. You could not go ten steps without
meeting those long'-haired, short -skirted, Rasputin-like
figures, round whom the people crowded to kiss their
hands. Every noble, every merchant, every man of
wealth, every pious lady, either founded or endowed
a monastery. The Emperor Nicopheros, though himself
leading the life of a monk, wearing a hair-shirt and
sleeping on bare boards, was so alarmed at the depopula-
tion of the empire, at the flow of its wealth into the
monasteries, at the consequent recruiting and fiscal
difficulties, that he attempted to check the evil by
legislation. The long contest over the Images which
appears to us so paltry, was but a vain struggle of the
em'perors to shake themselves free of the intolerable
domination of the monks. They exercised complete
control over the minds of the people, of the women, of
the nobility; they fed them with Wonder-tales and
miracles, and lives of saints. Theology and even hell

BYZANTINISM 179

had little place in their doctrines ; every event, every
action was surrounded with a web of supernatural signs
and portents ; the Byzantine Greeks lived in a world
peopled with goblins, ghosts, angels and demons. The
supreme objects of their worship were miracle-working,
winking images of saints, most of them painted by
supernatural agencies, before which the crowds kissed
the pavements of the churches, and to which they had
resort for help in every circumstance of life, for success
in business enterprises, the finding of lost property, the
cure of rheumatism. Strong in the fanatical backing of
the populace and of the women, the monks set the
civil authority completely at defiance, bearded the
emperor in his palace, in the open street, whenever
they disapproved of his acts.

Secondly, that empire in spite of its priceless position
of vantage was effectually and very completely isolated
from the rest of the world by artificial barriers. For
the Latin and Germanic Christians the Greeks had
the most utter contempt; they regarded them — not,
it must be admitted, without ample justification — as
mere savage barbarians. The self-styled Emperor of
the Holy Roman Empire was in their eyes an absurd
upstart accoutred in a title which made them laugh'.
He appeared to them much in the same light as we
should regard a nigger Emperor of Dahomey aping
civilized man in a frock coat and silk hat. The term
' foreigner ' had for the Greek the same connotation
of unbounded contempt and hatred as it had for the
true-born Englishman. Those sentiments were accen-
tuated when the crusading rabbles came and foisted
themselves upon the empire, and their boorish, swash-
buckling chieftains came tramping round the imperial
palaces in their ill-cut clothes, clapping the emperor
on the back, plumping themselves down on his throne,
like bulls in the stately china-shops of Byzantine etiquette
and decorum. On the other hand that hatred and
contempt were thoroughly reciprocated. The fact that
a vast portion of Christendom^ the wealthiest, the most
outwardly brilliant remained obstinately, in spite of all
efforts, completely outside the power of the Roman see,

180 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

refusing to recognize it or acknowledge its authority in
any form, was the bitterest pill which the pride,
ambition and greed of the papacy had to swallow.
The hardened and recalcitrant ' schismatics ' were, as
usually happens, regarded with more ardent hatred
than even the ''pagan infidels.' Detraction of them
was inculcated everywhere by the spiritual guides of
Europe. The Latins and Germans looked upon the
' effeminate ' ' Griffins ' with as much contempt as these
did upon the western savages. The latter constantly
accused them, mostly quite unjustly — it was at best a
case of pot and kettle — of perfidious treachery. Like
our own rough soldiers in the Gallipoli expedition, while
they recognized, whenever they came into direct contact
with him, the Muslim asj an honourable foe, and could
not but be impressed with his well-nigh quixotic chivalry,
they scorned the Greek as a base, sneaking fellow1.
The splendour, the wealth, the dazzling luxury, the
civilization of Byzantium, excited in them not admiration
and emulation, but only covetousness and cupidity.
They 'were always in two minds whether to redeem the
Holy Land or fall upon the Greek Empire and loot it,
as in the fourth Crusade they ultimately did. Thus
Byzantine civilization was as effectually insulated by a
barrier of mutual contempt and hatred, as by any China
wall or silver streak.

It lived — and this is the third aspect of its sterility —
draped in the pride of its origin and exclusiveness.
The heterogeneous medley of all races Which con-
stituted its ruling classes were ' the Romans ' — for they
despised the name of Greek — their empire was ' the
Roman Empire ' ; they alone had culture, gt>od
government, true religion — an exclusively national church
far superior to the so-called Christianity of benighted
foreigners, and owing no humiliating allegiance to any
Italian bishop. Nothing called for change in that
highly desirable, sublime, historic, holy condition of
affairs. Their attitude towards things as they were,
was that of our old Tories, of our Castlereaghs and
Wellingtons, of our Morning Post, towards our
glorious constitution. They had inherited the con-

BYZANTINISM 181

stitution of the Roman Empire as refashioned in the
third century by Diocletian; and its ideal of rigid, un-
changing stability, of forming the whole population into
castes, so that one generation might step into the place
of another, and nothing but the human material be
changed. Their culture, the great Greek literature,
of which Byzantium was the reliquary, they came to
regard not at all as a stimulus and an inspiration, but
as a hieratic formula, an exercise of scholarship, a
litany without meaning or interest. They mostly despised
it as pagan and read lives of saints instead.

Under the paint and enamel of its outward civilization
it remained at heart coldly barbarous, and steadily grew,
in barbarism from age to age. With its stodgy con-
scientiousness and prim virtue went the cool and
customary practice of the most atrocious cruelty. Palace
revolutions were dramas of unmitigated horror — the
Empress Theophano opening the door to the emperor's
murderers, Zoe poisoning her husband ; the Empress
Irene, who founded churches, monasteries and orphanages,
and was canonized by the Greek Church, gouging out the
eyes of her son after luring him from the throne by
appeals to filial affection. To gouge out the eyes, cut
out the tongue, emasculate, impale, crucify and flay alive,
were the forms of punishment habitually inflicted. The
Chalke gate of the Palace on the Augusteon, like those
of the Seraglio of Turkish sultans, were usually
decorated with blackening heads ; the walls of Con
stantinople, after a victory over the Russians, wen.
garlanded with festoons of several hands ; one of the
few naval victories over the Saracens was celebrated by
adorning the coast from Adramytos to Strobilos with the
impaled bodies of the captives ; and after surprising
the Bulgars in the gorge of Kimbalongo, Basil II put out
the eyes of fifteen thousand prisoners, sparing one eye to
every hundredth man, that the groaning', bleeding multi-
tude might grope their way back to their king. -When
provinces like Armenia revolted they were punished
by wholesale massacres, rape, and devastation, and
pyramids of severed heads were set up as a warning.
The lapse of centuries did not bring about a trace of

182 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

moral and humanitarian development; and the Turks,
who took over much of the usages and traditions of
the Byzantine court, are blamed to-day for the barbarity
of the Byzantine peoples over whom it has been their
misfortune to rule.

Thus did Byzantium proceed for ten centuries, un-
changing, with its head turned backwards. But for
the glassy coruscations of its hieratic mosaics, the
gems and enamels of its ciboria, the gold of its
scapularies, the lily pillars, and peacock panels, the
marble tracery of its transennas, the sepulchral splendour
of its decorative craft which at once fascinates and
chills us like the beauty of a dead woman ;\ but for
some insignificant details of bureaucratic administra-
tion— for the age of Justinian is to be accounted, Roman
rather than Byzantine — it has contributed nothing to
human culture and civilization, nothing to the resurrec-
tion of Europe. , To those countries which developed
under its influence, to Russia and to the Balkan people,
it has bequeathed those elements which constitute not
their civilization, but their barbarism.

Such was the nature of that civilization in which by
unbroken continuity and in the fullest enjoyment of
every conceivable advantage the Roman Empire and
Christianity resulted ; such was the product of the fixed
conservatism of the one and the theocratic dogmatism of
the other. Historians nowadays labour to show that
there was no break between the ancient and the modern
world, to minimize the darkness of the Dark Ages, to
exhibit Europe arising out of them by a continuous
and uninterrupted process. The effect of such con-
tinuity is visible in the Byzantine Empire. Free cities
arose in the West out of relics of Roman municipia, trade
guilds out of the Roman associations ; but anteriorly
to the development of wealth and trade there were
and there icould be no free cities and no guilds . Mediaeval
culture grew on the soil of Greek and Roman literature,
but under dogmatic domination and amid universal
illiteracy those literatures were abolished, and before

BARBARISM 183

the operation and1 stimulus of other intellectual elements
mediaeval culture did not, arise. The 'young and virile
Teutonic nations,' those "• christlich-germanischen
Tugenden " of Giesebrecht and our Teutonic friends,
which for all our historians, from Stubbs and Seeley and
Green to the French Taine, are the source of the rebirth
of the modern world, did not infuse life into it, but
death and barbarism. The Christian -Germanic virtues
did not result in progress, but in steady and growing
barbarization. It is not true that a new world began at
once to sprout on the ruins of the old. On the contrary,
for close on five hundred years Europe sank lower
and lower,; things went steadily and continuously from
bad to worse. In the ninth century the conditions were
immeasurably more desolately dark and more utterly
hopeless than they had been in the sixth or seventh.
If we picture that dark continent of the ninth century
isolated from the rest of the world and left ta> its own
resources, there is no ground for surmising that it could
ever, by virtue of any element of life existing within it,
become civilized at all. Whatever possibilities might
exist in that dark welter of degradation, whatever factor
might under propitious conditions be turned to ad-
vantage, it contained no endogenous seeds of life and
progress that had power to germinate by virtue of their
intrinsic force. The fate of Europe might quite con-
ceivably have been to become fossilized into a kind
of barbaric Abyssinia.

The light from which civilization was once more re-
kindled did not arise from any embers of Grasco-Roman
culture smouldering amid the ruins of Europe, nor from
the living death on the Bosporus. It did not come from
the Northern, but from the Southern invaders of the
empire, from the Saracens.

CHAPTER V

BAR AL-HIKMET

(THE HOME OF SCIENCE)

THE Semitic people who raised the banner of Islam
were, like Europe, under the spell of a theological
dogma, and it was in its name that they rose from
their desert tents, and in a remarkably short space of
time conquered an empire vaster than that of Rome,
which stretched from Kashghar and the Pan jab to the
Atlantic and the South of France. But in addition to
the vital contrast between the rich luxuriance of the
Christian dogma, its stately and elaborate hierarchical
organization, and the bare, bald theism of Islam, with
its negation of systematic theology, of myth', of
tradition, almost destitute of ritual, arid, above all,
entirely without priesthood, — there were other and even
more fundamental differences.

No conception could be remoter from the truth than
that which commonly pictures the coming of Islam as
a sort of Mahdi rising, a jihad of wild darvishes fired
to frenzy by religious fanaticism. The experiences from
which such a picture is drawn, Muslim fanaticism, one
might almost say Muslim faith, all belong to a subsequent
age, when Islam's civilization had sunk to dust and its
creed had become transformed by Ash'arite theology.
Its origin and its halcyon days were far different.

The Kuraish' community in whose midst it first arose,
though untouched in the patriarchal simplicity of its con-
stitution, was by no means primitive in its mentality.
It was a society of wealthy and travelled merchants,
well in touch with the outer world, cultivating fine
manners, delighting in social intercourse, in cultured

184

DAR AL-HIKMET 185

female society, in poetry already grown artificial and
frivolous, in tournaments of song; a society that had
waxed too worldly and sceptical for serious convictions,
having like the more primitive Arab tribes around it
outgrown the conglomerate of traditional cults which
it conventionally continued to profess. The simple-
minded earnestness of one of their commercial travellers,
Muhdmmad, made upon that society much the same
sort of impression as a Unitarian missionary might expect
to make in Mayfair. The prevalent feeling which he
voiced was rather one of rationalistic dissatisfaction with'
the outworn palimpsest of cults than the enthusiasm
of a religious revelation. And it was in fact as a very
human destroyer of idols in the broadest sense, as a
protester against all religious superstructure above the
generalized idea of theism reduced to its simplest ex-
pression, that Muhammad, like a sort of Channing, with-
out any thaumaturgic or supernatural pretensions, in
the most undisguisedly commonplace, human way, pre-
sented his ideas of reform.

There was of course a nucleus of genuine fervour and
enthusiasm in the closer associates of the prophet, around'
which were Jater formed the Shi'ite and Sunnite parties,
there were leaders like the great 'Omar, the St. Paul
of Islam, the moving spirit of its expansion and organi-
zation, in a sense its true founder. But all those elements
became almost immediately submerged and reduced to
a subordinate position destitute of influence or im-
portance. The whole subsequent development and
marvellous expansion was not a religious but a political
movement, one whose sole aim, in fact, was conquest
and plunder. The mass of Muslim tribes knew and
cared nothing about Islam — amusement was caused on
more than one occasion by their inability to recite a
single prayer beyond the opening formula, " Bismillah
er-rahman, er-rahim" The dazzling rapidity of the
conquest was chiefly due, not to Muslim prowess or to
Byzantine inefficiency, but to the assistance and friendli-
ness of the Christian populations of Syria and Egypt, sick
to death of theocratic oppression and of theology.

After the first days of the ' orthodox ' Khalifs, when

186 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

the Commander of the Faithful was pointed out to
astonished pilgrims in the streets of Medina, clad in
a tattered jubba eating sesame bread and onions, and
when the great 'Omar journeyed on a camel to receive
the homage of conquered Jerusalem, accompanied by a
single attendant and with a bag of dates for luggage,
the Khallfate passed to the Kuraish Umayyads, the
bitterest opponents of Islam, who made no secret of
the purely political nature of their adhesion and claims,
and overtly flaunted their indifference. Never was a
religion propagated with so little religious faith. We
have in fact in Islam the rather extraordinary spectacle
of a professedly religious movement which, while it
gave rise later in its utter decadence to a widespread
and earnest religious faith of great vitality, was in its
origin and throughout its hey-day utterly indifferent to
religion, a movement in which large populations were
willingly converted by lukewarm and unbelieving
apostles, and whose final triumph as a religion was
effected by hordes of barbarian invaders who destroyed
it as a civilization. That peculiar evolution was the
exact converse of that of Christianity.

The 'Abbassid princes who became the founders of
Islamic culture, owed their triumph over the Umayyads
chiefly to the support of Persia where they had been
reared. The glorious and ancient empire of the
Sassanids, which had always been the great trysting-
place of Hellenistic and oriental commerce and culture,
had, when conquered to Islam by 'Othman, just reached
under the two Chosroes the climax of a rich and large-
minded culture. Gathering and inviting all the intel-
lectual and industrial products of India and China, it
also offered the only existing hospitable refuge to perse-
cuted Christian sects ; and the Nestorians, driven by
fanaticism from their school at Edessa, had been en-
couraged to found an even more brilliant one at Jundi
Shapur. In that tolerant, latitudinarian atmosphere of
Persia, which had seen so many ' new religions,' Islam-
was accepted in a philosophic spirit which soon further
attenuated its already simplified theology into a mild
theistic rationalism, known to Islamic pietists as the

DAR AL-HIKMET 187

Mu 'tazil heresy. Of Muslim faith' no more than that
slight nominal conformity was retained by the 'Abbdssid
Khalifs and those who built up the civilization of Islam.
" They are the elect of God/' said Al-Mamun, " his
best and most useful servants, whose lives are devoted
to the improvement of their rational faculties."

There were other propitious circumstances in the rise of
Islamic culture. The Arabs had once, like the ancient
Chaldseans, worshipped * the heavenly bodies/ hence the
interest of the desert -folk in astronomy. So likewise was
the rude cultivation of the healing art and of botanical
lore, in which Muhdmmad and Abu Bakr themselves
had been proficient, a tradition of the race. And as
the sons of Araby changed the tents of Shem for the
luxury of Damascus and Baghdad, they had occasion
to avail themselves of the services of the Nestorian
physicians ; and it was gratified admiration for their
skill and learning which first prompted the Khalifs to
inquire into the sources whence they derived them . They
thus became acquainted with the works of Hippocrates
and Galen, and with those of the latter's admired master,
Aristotle. Practically untouched in their desert home
either by the old theocratic empires or by the conquests
of Rome, they were still the nomad Semites of primitive
times. When they suddenly attained to wealth and
power, and came in contact with the traditions of the
great past civilization, spectrally surviving in the
Byzantine East, they were not, like the northern bar-
barians, held in awe by the great name of Rome, which
had loomed for generations as the embodiment of god-
like grandeur and power, and by the religion which
was identified with it. While they coveted the material
culture which lay sealed and idle in the hands of the
Roman mummy, they despised the barbarian of Rum.

There was indeed something of the old pagan, Hellenic
joy of life in the spirit of that new splendour which arose
like the fantastic creation of a jinni at the beck of
the Khalifs, and spread its glinting opulence and delicate
wizardry over the civilization of the Thousand and
One Nights&P '& hedonism refined withal and tempered
by the supefrb gravity of the Bedawin, and a philosophic

188 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

seriousness mindful while it quaffed the cup that it was
but a small matter, and a frail tenure resting upon the
caprice of kismet. The incorruptible treasures and de-
lights of intellectual culture were accounted by the
princes of Baghdad, Shiraz and Cordova, the truest and
proudest pomps of their courts. But it was not as
a mere appanage of princely vanity that the wonderful
growth of Islamic science and learning was fostered
by their patronage. They pursued culture with the
personal ardour of an overmastering craving. Never
before and never since, on such a scale, has the spectacle
been 'witnessed of the ruling classes throughout the
length and breadth of a vast empire given over entirely
to a frenzied passion for the acquirement of knowledge.
Learning seemed to have become with them the chief
business of life. Khallfs and Emirs hurried from their
diwans to closet themselves in their libraries and ob-
servatories ; they neglected their affairs of state — which
they in general sorely mismanaged — to attend lectures
and converse on mathematical problems '"with men of
science ; caravans laden with manuscripts and botanical
specimens plied from Bokhara to the Tigris, from Egypt
to Andalusia-; embassies were sent to Constantinople
and to India for the sole purpose of obtaining books
and teachers ; a collection of Greek authors or a dis-
tinguished mathematician was eagerly demanded as the
ransom of an empire. To every mosque was attached
a school ; wazirs vied with their masters in establishing
public libraries, endowing colleges, 'founding bursaries
for impecunious students . Men of learning, irrespectively
of race or religion, took precedence over all others ;
honours and riches were showered upon them, they were
appointed to the government of provinces ; a retinue
of professors and a camel train of books accompanied
the Khallfs in their journeys and expeditions.

It was under the influence of the Arabian and Moorish
revival of culture, and not in the fifteenth century, that
the real Renaissance took place . Spain, not Italy, was
the cradle of the rebirth of Europe. After steadily
sinking lower and lower into barbarism, it had reached
the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when

BAR AL H1KMET 189

the cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo,
Cordova, Toledo, were growing* centres of civilization
and intellectual activity. It was there that the new
life arose which was to grow into a new phase of human
evolution. From the time when the influence of their
culture made itself felt, began the stirring of a new life .

The fact has been set forth again and' again.
But it has been nevertheless stubbornly ignored and
persistently minimized. The debt of Europe to the
' heathen dog ' could, of course, find no place in the
scheme of Christian history, and the garbled falsifica-
tion has imposed itself on all subsequent conceptions.
Even Gibbon treated Islam depreciatingly, an instance
of the power of conventional tradition upon its keenest
opponents. Until the last century there did not even
exist anything approaching accurate knowledge of Sara-
cenic history and culture. "Those accounts of Mahomet
and Islam which were published in Europe before the
beginning of the nineteenth1 century are now to be re-
garded simply as literary curiosities.'* ' At the present
day, when wider and more exact knowledge is becoming
accessible, scarcely any history of the Middle Ages gives
Islamic culture more than an off-hand and patronizing
recognition. The history of the rebirth of Europe from
barbarism is constantly being written without any refer-
ence whatsoever, except to mention l< the triumphs of
the Cross over the Crescent," and " the reclamation
of Spain from the Moorish yoke," to the influence of
Arab civilization — the history of the Prince of Denmark
without Hamlet. Dr. Osborn Taylor has even achieved
the feat of writing two large volumes on the develop-
ment of The Mediceval Mind without betraying by a
hint the existence of Muhammadan culture.

That a brilliant and energetic civilization full of
creative energy should have existed side by side and
in constant relation with populations sunk in barbarism,
without exercising a profound and vital influence upon
their development, would be a manifest anomaly. That
no such suspension of natural law was involved in the
relation between Islam and Europe, is abundantly
1 Professor JBevan, Camb. Med. Hist,

190 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

attested in spite of the conspiring of every circumstance
to suppress, deform, and obliterate the records of that
relation. Its extent and importance have been beyond
doubt far greater than it is to-day possible to demon-
strate in detail. Like the geological record of extinct
life, our knowledge in the matter is derived from the
scattered and accidentally preserved fragments of
evidence which have been spared by forces uni-
versally tending to blot them out. When those
conditions, when the obliteration of evidence, its dis-
tortion, the persistent prejudice and misrepresentation
which fastens upon every single fact, are borne in mind,
there can be no doubt that our estimate of that influence
must err on the side of under-, rather than of over-
estimation. It is highly probable that but for the Arabs
modern European civilization would never have arisen
at all ; it is absolutely certain that but for them, ife
would not have assumed that character which has
enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution.
For although there is not a single aspect of European
growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic culture
is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous
as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the
paramount distinctive force of the modern world and
the supreme source of its victory — natural science and
the scientific spirit.

It must be admitted that, in recoil from the general
conspiracy of silence of our histories, several writers
who have sought to vindicate the claims of Arab culture
have somewhat exaggerated the achievements of Arabian
science. Against such loose panegyrics it has been
objected, that Arab science produced no surpassing
genius and no transcending discovery ; that it was de-
rived from extraneous sources. That is substantially
true, but entirely irrelevant. Arab astronomy did not
forestall Copernicus or Newton, though without it there
would have been no Copernicus and no Newton.
Although the complexity of the Ptolemaic system was
repeatedly criticized by Moorish astronomers, although
Al-Zarkyal declared the planetary orbits to be ellipses
and not circles, although the orbit of Mercury is in

DAR AL-HIKMET 191

Al-Farani's tables actually represented as elliptical,
although Muhammad Ibn Musa glimpsed in his works
on Astral Motion and The Force of Attraction
the law of universal gravitation, those adumbrations of
the truth were not fruitful of any great reform. The
only important facts brought to light by Arabian
astronomy, the discovery of the movements of the sun's
apogee by Al-Batani, and of the secondary variations
of the moon's motion by Abu '1-Wafa, exercised no per-
ceptible influence upon the course of research, and had
to be rediscovered by Tycho. Ibn Sina is said to have
employed an air thermometer, and Ibn Yunis certainly
did use the pendulum for the measurement of time ; but
neither of those devices, which were independently re-
introduced by Galileo, can be counted as a contribution
to the growth of science.

That, however, is entirely beside the point. The
debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist
in startling discoveries or revolutionary theories ; science
owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its exist-
ence. The ancient world was, as we saw, pre- scientific. The
astronomy and mathematics of the Greeks were a foreign
importation never thoroughly acclimatized in Greek
culture. The Greeks systematized, generalized and
theorized, but the patient ways of investigation, the
accumulation of positive knowledge, the minute methods
of science, detailed and prolonged observation, experi-
mental inquiry, were altogether alien to the Greek
temperament. Only in Hellenistic Alexandria was any,
approach to scientific work conducted in the ancient
classical world. What we call science arose in Europe
as a result of a new spirit of inquiry, of new methods
of investigation, of the method of experiment, observa-
tion, measurement, of the development of mathematics
in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and
those methods were introduced into the European world
by the Arabs.

Greek manuscripts were collected and translated at
the court of the 'Abbassids with an ardour even more
enthusiastic than that which inspired the Aurispas and
Filelfos of fifteenth -century Italy. But the choice of the

192 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

Arab' collectors and the object of their interest were
very different. Of the poets and historians of Greece,
beyond satisfying their curiosity by a few samples, they
took little account. Their object was information ; and
besides the writings of the philosophers from Thales to
Apollonius of [Tyana, and the textbooks of medical science,
it was above all to the writings of the Alexandrian
Academy, the astronomy and geography of Ptolemy,
the mathematical works of Euclid, Archimedes, Dio-
phantes, Theon, Apollonius of Perga, that they devoted
their attention. For speculative theories and broad
generalizations they showed little aptitude, valuing as
they did information for its own sake and as a means
to the extension of knowledge, rather than as the basis
of generalizing induction. They accepted tjie conclusions
of the "Greeks as working theories necessary to the
pursuit of scientific inquiry, only venturing to criticize
or modify them as the expansion of knowledge forced
them to adapt them to new facts. They have been
reproached with imposing a dogmatic spirit in science
upon Europe. Christian Europe had little to learn in
the way of dogmatism ; and those theories, such as the
Ptolemaic system, the geographical doctrine of
1 climates,' the doctrine of alchemical transmutation,
which it received from the Arabs, were not Arabic,
but Greek. But the spirit in which the Arabs made
use of existing materials was the exact opposite of
that of the Greeks. It supplied precisely what had
been the weak and defective aspect of Greek genius.
For the Greeks it was in theory and generalization that
the interest lay, they were neglectful and careless of
fact ; the Arabian inquirers* zeal, on the contrary, was
careless of theory, and directed to the accumulation of
concrete facts, and to giving to their knowledge a pre-
cise and quantitative form. What makes all the difference
between fruitful, enduring science and mere loose scientific
curiosity, is the quantitative as against the qualitative
statement, the anxiety for the utmost attainable accuracy
in measurement. In that spirit of objective research'
and quantitative accuracy the whole of the vast
scientific work of the Arabs was conducted, They

DlR AL-H1KMET 193

accepted Ptolemy's cosmology, but not his catalogue
of stars or his planetary table, or his measurements.
They drew up numerous new star catalogues, correcting
and greatly amplifying the Ptolemaic one ; they com-
piled new sets of planetary tables, obtained more
accurate values for the obliquity of the ecliptic and the
precession of equinoxes, checked by two independent
measurements of a meridian the estimates of the size
of the earth. They devised for the carrying out of
those observations elaborate instruments superior to those
of the Greeks and exceeding in accuracy those manu-
factured in the fifteenth century at the famous Nuremberg
factory. Each observer took up the, work independently,
sought to eliminate the personal equation, and the
method of continuous observation was systematically
carried out — some observations extending over twelve
years — at the observatories of Damascus, Baghdad, and
Cairo. So much importance did they attach to accuracy
in their records that those of special interest were
formally signed on oath in legal form.

The same objective and quantitative spirit is mani-
fested in all their activities. When Al-Mamun ordered
his post -master, Ibn Khurdadbeh, to draw up an account
of his dominions and of all the sea and land routes
in use — the first of those numerous geographical works
of the Arabs which opened a new view of the world1
and a new geography—he insisted that each place should
be localized by accurately detertnined longitudes and
latitudes. Al-Byruny travelled forty years to collect
mineralogical specimens ; and his tables of specific
weights obtained by differential weighing are found to
be correct. Ibn Baitar collected botanical specimens
from the whole Muslim world and compared the floras
of India and Persia with those otf Greece and Spain ;
his work describing 1,400 plants is pronounced by
Meyer l "a monument of industry." Contrast that
spirit of scientific minuteness and perseverance in
observation with the speculative methods of the
ancients who scorned mere empiricism ; with Aris-
totle who wrote on physics without performing
? Gesch. der Botanik, ii, 233.
13

194 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

a single experiment/ and on natural history without
taking the trouble to -ascertain the most easily verifiable
facts, who calmly states that men have more teeth than
women, while Galen, the greatest classical authority on
anatomy, informs us that the lower jaw consists of two
bones, a statement which is accepted unchallenged till
'Abd al-Letif takes the trouble to examine human skulls.
The Arabs gathered their knowledge from whatever
sources were at hand. The bulk of their astronomy
and some of their mathematics came from Greek and
Hellenistic sources. That ancient science of the Greeks
had itself been originally derived from the Babylonians,
migrants from Arabia to Mesopotamia, like the Arabs.
Thus that ancient science which the latter restored to
Europe was itself the achievement of their own ancient
cousins from whom the Greeks had once borrowed it.
But by a singular good fortune another source of
scientific knowledge had become available. In the
Gupta Renaissance of the fifth century in India a notable
intellectual movement had taken place. Two writers
in particular, Aryo-Bhatta and Brahmagupta, had pro-
duced important novelties in mathematics. In the hands
of the Arabs those new methods became combined with
the unwieldy and unpractical methods of the Greek
mathematicians, and further elaborated. While the
highest mathematical knowledge of the Christian West
did not extend beyond a laboured use of the rule of three,
and the simplest operations of arithmetic were performed
by means of the abacus — the same device of wires and
beads that is used in our kindergartens — the Arabs per-
fected the decimal system of notation by introducing
the use of the cipher or zero (Ar. zlrr) ; they created
Algebra and carried it to the solution of equations of
the fourth degree, and trigonometry, substituting sines
and tangents for the chord of the Greeks, and thus
multiplied a thousandfold the powers of human inquiry.
Not only did the Arabs create those mathematics
which were to be the indispensable instrument of
scientific analysis, they laid the foundation of those
methods of experimental research which in conjunction
with mathematical analysis gave birth to modern science .

BAR AL-HIKMET 195

Chemistry, the rudiments of which arose in the processes
employed by Egyptian metallurgists and jewellers — com-
bining metals into various alloys and ' tinting ' them
to resemble gold — processes long preserved as a secret
monopoly of the priestly colleges, and clad in the usual
mystic formulas, developed in the hands of the Arabs
into a widespread, organized passion for research which
led them to the invention of distillation, sublimation,
filtration, to the discovery of alcohol, of nitric and
sulphuric acids (the only acid known to the ancients
was vinegar), of the alkalis, of the salts of mercury, of
antimony and bismuth, and laid the basis of all
subsequent chemistry and physical research.

Like the Hellenistic materials of which it availed
itself, Arabian science, and with it the science of
the Middle Ages, was tainted with all the fantastic
disorders with which it had always been associated in
the oriental iand Hellenistic world. Its astronomy
arose from Chaldasan astrology, its chemistry from
hermetic alchemy. It was, in fact, largely from the
same mystical atmosphere of the Hellenistic Orient
whence the new religions, the theologies of the epoch
of Christian origins, had sprung, that the materials of
science were derived. But whereas in the case of
theologies and religions those fancies constitute the very
substance of the speculative fabric, in that of investi-
gation into natural phenomena they are no more than
the outward dress and terminology, the setting of
scientific inquiry, which can up to a certain point proceed
quite usefully and without being greatly vitiated in con-
sequence. Astronomical observation has not been seri-
ously impaired by being pursued as astrology. Tycho,
Copernicus, Kepler were astrologers. The narrow spirit
in which Ptolemy produced his compilation of astrono-
mical knowledge, and the authority of his name, have,
as a matter of fact, proved immeasurably more baneful
to the progress of science than all the notions of
astrology. And in experimental research the con-
cepts of alchemy, far from being an obstacle to
the progress of knowledge, were the fortunate occasion
without which that difficult line of inquiry might never

196 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

have been pursue'd. It was, rightly considered, a work-
ing hypothesis as good as could be devised in the absence
of the knowledge to which it was itself to lead the
human mind. All bodies and substances were conceived
to consist of a uniform and universal ' materia prima *
diversified by the admixture of the four Aristotelian
elements, water, earth, air and fire. But from the
presence and combination of those elements with primi-
tive matter, could not be deduced the peculiar properties
of substances ; hence they were ascribed to ' occult
virtues ' connected Sn some way with the seven metals,
which were imagined to bear some relation to the seven
planets ; and' in order to discover those properties or
virtues there was no other way but to study substances
in themselves and in their various combinations, to
endeavour to purge them! from the masking elements
and reduce them to their pure state, to discover the
processes and reagents which could bring about in them
the observed transformations. It should be noted that
among Arabian and mediaeval scientific inquirers the
relative importance attached to mystic theory and ascer-
tained facts varied widely in every degree, from that of
vulgar charlatanism intent on exploiting popular super-
stition, to that of the intellectual inquirer! concerned with
results, and to whom speculative theory had only the
interest of an hypothesis. Though to the mediaeval
popular mind all science was magic, and the Arab
scientists were spoken of as necromancers, the most
distinguished of them rose well above that atmosphere.
Thus with all the great Arabian astronomers observation
and analysis of results was the thing of importance, to
the exclusion of the trade in horoscopes and astrological
prediction, which they left to the vulgar practitioner.
And in the case of alchemical ideas, that premature
evolutionary theory was strongly contested by several
leading Arabian chemists ; and in the eleventh century
the dispute between its defenders and opponents de-
veloped into a lively controversy. So great an authority
as Ibn Sina himself said : ' Those of the chemical
craft know well that no change can be effected in
the different species of substances, though they can

BAR AL-HIKMET 197

produce the appearance of isuch change." Europe, where
the Lateran Council of 1215 had proclaimed the dogma
of transubstantiation, generally adopted the theory of
transmutation of metals, which had fallen into discredit
among the Arabs. " Theosophy and mysticism," says
Sir Edward Thorpe,1 " were first imported into Alchemy
not by the Arabs, but by Christian workers."

Science is not a tradition, but the essence of pro-
gressive thought. The science of one generation is
consequently looked down upon by succeeding ones from
those very heights of knowledge to which it has helped
to raise them. Our own physiological and biological
theories will probably appear as quaint to our de-
scendants as do the conceptions in which the infancy
of science was swaddled. Not until a quite recent
time has it cast them off. Kepler drew horoscopes,
Copernicus accounted for planetary motions by pro-
pelling angels, Newton himself applied his mathematical
genius to the working out of the astrological prophecies
in the Book of Daniel ; the doctrine of alchemical trans-
mutation was firmly held by Robert Boyle, by von
Helmont, by Boerhaave, by Newton, by Leibnitz, and
by Stahl ; Priestley, obsessed with the theory of
phlogiston, refused to recognize the significance of his
own discovery of oxygen. It was not till the eve of
the French Revolution that, thanks to Lavoisier, newi
conceptions of the various forms of matter supplanted
the hypotheses under which, from the days of the Arabs,
chemical analysis and the experimental investigation of
nature had proceeded.

In the -new methods which they introduced, in that
star-gazing, in those alembics, in that new lore — uncouth
and larded with gross fancies as much of it was—
which differed so entirely in temper from the old classic
culture, and long preceded the revival of its study in
Europe, lay the future of the world, the germ whence,
after a maturation of several centuries, was to burst
forth the titanic force of modern science.

Hist, of Chemistry, p 36.

198 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

Arabian knowledge began at an early date to percolate
into Christian Europe. If there be any ground of fact
in the legend of the alchemical pursuits of St. Dunstan,
Arabian lore must have been much more widely diffused
in the tenth century than can be shown by surviving
records. Under absolute religious tolerance, Christians
enjoyed complete freedom in the Spanish Khalifate ; they
had their own bishop ; several monasteries existed in
the outskirts of the capital which served as hostels for
travellers, and monks were commonly seen in the streets
of Cordjova. From all parts of Europe numerous
studjents betook themselves to the great Arab seats of
learning in search of the light which only there was to
be found. Alvaro, a Cordovan bishop, writes in the
ninth century : " All the young Christians who distin-
guish themselves by their, xtalent, know the language
and literature of the Arabs, read and study pas-
sionately the Arab books, gather at great expense great
libraries of these, and everywhere proclaim with a loud
voice how admirable is that literature." l The famous
Gerbert of Aurillac brought from Spain some rudiments
of astronomy and mathematics, and taught his astonished
pupils from terrestrial and celestial1 globes. Though his
learning was not deep, and it is probably erroneously,
that he is credited with introducing the decimal notation
—he still used the Roman abacus — his keen taste for
knowledge " stolen from the Saracen," in William of
Malmesbury's phrase, made him, as Pope Sylvester II,
the hero of fantastic Faust legends widely popular
throughout the Middle Ages.

During the next two centuries the process of diffusion
assumed an extensive scale. An African monk, Con-
stantine, who had acted as secretary to Robert Guiscard,
devoted himself with enthusiasm to the translation of
Arab textbooks and to introducing the new learning
into the mother house of the Benedictines at Monte
Cassino, whence the path lay open for its transmission
to the far-flung houses of the order. Another
Benedictine, Adelhard of Bath, brought with him from

1 Indiculus luminosits, in Florez, Espana Sagrada, vol. xi.

BAR AL-HIKMET 199

Cordova a large collection of books and much doctrine,
which he and his nephew actively spread abroad in France
and England. From his copy of Euclid all subsequent
editions down to 1533 have been published. Daniel de
Morlay likewise proceeded to Cordova to learn mathe-
matics and astronomy, published the fruits of his studies
and lectured at Oxford. Plato of Tivoli translated Al-
Batani's astronomy and other mathematical works. At
the end of the twelfth century a young Pisan merchant,
Leonardo Fibonacci, while travelling in Algeria and Spain
became enamoured of the new mathematical sciences of
the Arabs, and after several new journeys issued a trans-
lation of Al-Khwarismi's great work on algebra. He
definitely popularized the perfected decimal notation, which
became known, with the facilitated arithmetic resulting
from it, as algorism, from the Arabian writer's name.
Fibonacci, whose work had a wide influence, must be
accounted the founder of modern mathematics in
Christian Europe and the first of the long line of Italian
mathematicians. Gerard of Cremona was the most in-
dustrious among the popularizers of Arab literature ; he
spent fifty years in the Khalifate of Cordova and brought
forth no less than sixty translations, among which the
Almagest, and the Astronomy of Al-Haitham. Michael
Scot repeatedly visited Cordova for the purpose of obtain-
ing manuscripts and making translations. The influx
of students into Spain and the activity of translators
went on till the last days of the Khalifate. Arnold of
Villeneuve, and Raymond Lully, the friend of Bacon,
studied in Spain and taught at Montpellier ; Campanus
of Novara studied mathematics at Cordova and taught in
Vienna ; and systematic schools for the translation of
Arab textbooks were established in Toledo by Alfonso the
Sage.

The Jews shared under the complete tolerance of
Moorish rule in the cultural evolution of the Khalifate;
and as they scattered over Europe, especially after the
Almohadean conquest, became the carriers of that culture
to the remotest barbaric lands. We find them
freely teaching and discussing with the inmates of
secluded monasteries whose curiosity for the strange

200 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

learning prevailed upon their religious prejudices.1
French and German monks obtain from them the text-
books of the new sciences ; and even literary nuns in
Thuringian convents, such as the famous Hildegard and
Hroswitha, did not disdain to avail themselves of their
learning. They established numerous schools, such as
that of the 'Kimhis and of Ben Esra at Narbonne, where
Arabian science was popularized and Arabic books trans-
lated. Numerous Jews followed William of Normandy
to England and enjoyed his protection, building there the
first stone burgher houses which may still be seen at
Lincoln and St. Edmundsbury, and establishing a school
of science at Oxford ; it was under their successors at
that Oxford school that Roger Bacon learned Arabic
and Arabic science. Neither Roger Bacon nor his later

1 A passage of Joinville's, of interest in more than one respect, is
worth citing in full in this connection. I slightly modernize the
spelling : " II [St. Louis] me conta que il cut une grande
disputation de clercs et de Juifs au moustier (monastere) de Cluny.
L& estait un chevalier a qui 1'abbe avait dorme" le pain la pour
Dieu, et requit a I'abb6 que il li lessast dire la premiere parole, ce qu'il
lui octroya a peine. Et lors il se leva et s'appuya sur sa crosse, et
dit que lui li faist venir le plus grave clerc et le plus grant mestre
des Juifs, et si firent ils. Et lui fist une demande qui fut telle :
Mestre, fist le chevalier, je vous demande si vous croyez que la
Vierge Marie qui Dieu porta en ses flancs et en ses bras, enfantat
vierge, et que elle soit mdre de Dieu. Et le Juif re"pondit que de
tout cela il ne croyait rien. Et le chevalier li re"pondit que moult
avait fait que fol, quant il ne lo croyait, ni ne la lamoit, et estait entre
dans son moustier et en sa maison. Et vraiement, fist le chevalier,
vous le payerez ; et lors il hau9a sa potence et feri le Juif pres de
1'oreille et le porta par terre. Et les Juifs tourndrent en fuite, et
emporte'rent leur mestre tout b!6ci6 ; et ainsi demoura la disputation.
Lors vint 1'abbe" au chevalier, et lui dist qu'il avait fait grande folie.
Et le chevalier dit que encore avoit il fait plus grande folie,
d'essembler telle disputation ; car avant que la disputation feust
men6e a fin, avait il ceans grand foisons de bons Chretiens, qui se
furent parti tous mescreants, parce qu'ils n'eurent mie bien entendu
les Juifs. Aussi, vous dis-je, fist le roy, que nul, s'il n'esttres bon
clerc, ne doit disputer avec eux; mais rhomme laic, quant il oye
me~dire de la loi chretienne, ne doit pas de"£fendre la loi chr£tienne,
sinon de 1'espee, de quoi il doit donner parmi le ventre dedans,
tout comme elle y peut entrer." Intolerance and persecution of
Jews was a feature of the later, rather than of the earlier Middle
Ages.

DAE AL-HIKMET 201

namesake has any title to be credited with having intro-
duced the experimental method. Roger Bacon was no
more than one of the apostles of Muslim science and
method to Christian Europe ; and he never wearied of
declaring that a knowledge of Arabic and Arabian science
was for his contemporaries the only way to true know-
ledge. Discussions as to who was the originator of
the experimental method, like the fostering of every
Arab discovery or invention on the first European
who happens to mention it, such as the invention of
the compass to a fabulous Flavio Gioja of Amalfi, of
alcohol to Arnold of Villeneuve, of lenses and gunpowder
to Bacon or Schwartz, are part of the colossal mis-
representation of the origins of European civilization.
The experimental method of the Arabs was by Bacon's
time widespread and eagerly cultivated throughout
Europe ; it had been proclaimed by Adelhard of
Bath, by Alexander pf Neckam, by Vincent of Beauvais,
by Arnold of Villeneuve, by Bernard Silvestris, who
entitles his manual Experimentarius, by Thomas of
Cantimpre, by Albertus Magnus.

In the hands of Jewish doctors trained in Arab schools,
where medical art had been carried far beyond that of
the ancients, the practice and teaching of medicine re-
mained throughout the Middle Ages. The pharma-
copoeia created by the Arabs is virtually that which,
but for the recent synthetic and organotherapic prepara-
tions, is in use at the present day ; our common drugs,
such as nux vomica, senna, rhubarb, aconite, gentian,
myrrh, calomel, and the structure of our prescriptions,
belong to Arabic medicine. The medical school of
Montpellier was founded on the pattern of that of Cordova
under Jew doctors. The example was imitated at Padua
and later at Pisa, where together with the Canons of
Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and the Surgery of Abu '1-Kasim,
which until the seventeenth century remained the text-
books of medical science throughout Europe, were taught
the mathematics and astronomy of the Moors. Those
were the nurseries which were one day to bring forth
Fallopius, Vesalius, Cardan, Harvey, Galileo.

That power which has transformed the material and

202 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

mental world is the product by direct filiation of the
science of the astrologers, alchemists, and of the medical
schools of the later Middle Ages ; and those arose directly
and solely as a result of Arabian civilization. Down
to the fifteenth century whatever scientific activity existed
in Europe was engaged in assimilating Arab learning
without greatly adding to it. Prince Henry of Portugal
established under Arab and Jewish teachers his great
nautical academy at Cape St. Vincent, which prepared
the way for Vasco da Gamla, and for the expansion of
Europe to the uttermost ends of the earth. The first
mathematical treatise printed in Europe (1494) is but
a paraphrase and in parts a transcription of Leonardo
Fibonacci's translations by Luca Pacioli, the friend of
another Leonardo — Leonardo da Vinci. JIt was from Al-
Batini's tables that Regiomontanus constructed the
Ephemerides which made the voyage of Columbus
possible ; Kepler carried out his work by means of
the Hakemite tables pf Ibn Yunis ; Vesalius translated
Al-Razi. The spirit pf science passed through jthe period
of the Classical Renaissance without being influenced by
it, and developed in seclusion, independently of classi-
cizing influences.

Science is the most momentous contribution of Arab
civilization to the modern world, but its fruits were slow
in ripening. Not until long after Moorish culture had
sunk back into darkness did the giant to which it had
given birth rise in his might. It was not science which
brought Europe back to life. Other and manifold In-
fluences from the civilization of Islam communicated
its first glow to European life.

CHAPTER VI

THE REBIRTH OF EUROPE

THE industrial and commercial activity of the East,
of Moorish Spain and Sicily, created European com-
merce and manufactures. These gave rise to the wealth
and power of the merchant classes, and the commercial
cities ; the burgher communities became strong enough
to defy the feudal powers, and the new force of free
republics and communes overthrew the tyranny and law-
lessness of the barons. Thus, like culture, political liberty
and organization came to Europe with bales of goods
from the Levant. Until trade and industry had developed,
until burghers had waxed substantial through eastern
traffic there were no communes, there were hardly cities.
The coast towns of Catalonia and Provence were the
first to rise in importance and to life through trade with
the Arabs. Free and autonomous republics were estab-
lished at Marseille, Aries, Nice;. The source whence
from earliest days that wealth had grown may be
sufficiently gathered from the account given by
Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans, of a journey to the South
of France as one of Charlemagne's missi dominici. On
his arrival at Marseille,, he says, " the people came to us
in crowds, men, women, children, old men, loaded with
presents, persuaded that they had only to offer them to
us in order to obtain their wishes. . . . One offered
crystals and orient pearls, . . . another brought a heap of
gold pieces on which shone Arabic sentences and
characters . . . another said, ' I have cloths which
come from the Saracens and it is not possible to see aught
more richly coloured or more delicately and better
wrought . . . another showed me hides of leather

203

204 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

from Cordova, some white as snow, others red . . .
another offered me carpets." l

The cities of Southern Italy next followed ; Amalfi,
Salerno, Naples and Gaeta, rising gradually to wealth
and freedom through commerce with their Muslim neigh-
bours of Sicily, and gradually extending their connections
in conjunction with Arab traders to Africa and Syria.
The Emperor Ludwig II accused Naples of being as
Muhammadan as Palermo. Amalfi and the first Italian
free cities of Southern Italy entered into alliance with the
Muslims of Sicily (875) and actually assisted them when
they advanced to the gates of Rome, defying the ex-
communications of Pope John VIII. And when a crusade
was moved against Islam, they refused to bear arms
against the people who had helped them to wealth and
greatness. Pisa, Genoa, and Venice used the opportunity
to outreach Amalfi and Naples. Pisa, which the chronicle
of Donizo describes in 1 1 14 as " unclean with " swarm-
ing Saracens, " Turks, Lybians and Chaldasans," who
possessed a whole quarter of the city, known as Kin-
sica,2 rose, like Genoa, to importance by trade
with Saracenic Sardinia. Such was the destitute
condition of Europe prior to the development of
that commerce, that, having neither native products
nor money to exchange for the wares of the
Arabs, the first Italian merchant-adventurers kidnapped
the children of neighbouring villages, and paid for their
goods with cargoes of human flesh. Genoa and Pisa
joined forces to conquer Sardinia, which produced the
finest wool, that of England excepted ; the wool-trade
passed thence to Lucca, where the art of weaving had
been brought from Palermo, and whence, after the sack
of the town by Uguccione della Faggiola, the master-
weavers established themselves in Florence. Thus was
laid the foundation of that Florentine wealth and great-
ness, which before long made the Tuscan merchants
the bankers of Europe.

The Arabs opened up the land-routes to India, to China,
Malacca, and Timbuctoo, the emporium of Central

* Mon. Germ. Hist., Poet. Lat. I. 499.

* Muratori, Ant. Med. Aev., diss. 30.

REBIRTH OF EUROPE 205

African trade ; and sent their caravans to the rich lands
beyond the Sahara long before the Portuguese doubled
Cape Verde. They held the monopoly of the sea-routes
to India, and the Emosaids founded along the eastern
coast of Africa a line of trading colonies from the Sudan
coast and Socotra to Mombaza, Mozambique, Zanzibar
and Madagascar.

They improved the art of shipbuilding, taught
Mediterranean seamen to construct lighter sailing-ships
or caravels (gdraf), to caulk their boats with tar —
still known in Romance languages by the Arabic
name of gatran (Fr. goudron, It. caltramc) — to
handle sails and cables (Ar. hdbl). Moorish mer-
chants established their fundaks in the Christian ports,
plied between the great sea-ports of Andalusia, Valencia,
Almeria, and Malaga to those of Provence and the South
of France, brought their wares to the markets of Mont-
pellier and Narbonne. Arab dinars are to this day
found as far north as the shores of the North Sea and
the Baltic in greater abundance than Roman coins or
Greek besants. They introduced the system of bills
of exchange, and the commerce of the Mediterranean
was regulated by the institution of sea-consuls first
adopted at Barcelona.

The fine linens, the cottons, the silks, the delicate and
gorgeous fabrics of the Saracenic world, satins and
sarcenets, Persian taffetas, damasks from Damascus, bau-
dekin from Baghdad, muslin from Mosul, gauzes from
Gaza, grenadines from Grenada, moires, crepes and
chiffons (not ' rag/ but diaphanous chiff from
Tripoli), chamlets, karsies, and radzimirs, created a
demand for fine raiment among the coarsely clad popu-
lations of Europe. In the Nibelung lay Krimhild
anachronicly adorns herself with

" Die arabischen siden wiz also der sne,

unde von Zazamanc der gruenen so der kle . . .

von Marrock dem lande imd ouch von Libian

die aller besten siden die ie mer gewan."1

1 " The Arabian silks white as snow, and those from Zazaman
green as the clover leaf . . . from the land of Morocco and also from
Lebanon, the best silks that were ever won,"

206 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

The looms of Syria and Spain, of which sixteen
thousand were at work in Seville alone, and
where a hundred and thirty thousand silk-workers
were employed at Cordova, wove the materials for
the garments of nobles and the sacramental vest-
ments of Christian prelates ; and it was not an
uncommon spectacle to see a bishop celebrating mass
with an 'dyai of the Kuran elegantly embroidered on his
chasuble. The women of Europe learnt to wear an
Arab kamis (chemise) and jubba (jupe, jupon). The
warriors of Christendom were eager to wield blades forged
in Damascus, Almeria, or Toledo, and to ride in Cordovan
saddles. The sugar-cane was introduced and Europeans
first tasted confectioneries, sweetmeats and sorbets. By
and by the manufactures of the East were introduced and
imitated in Christian Europe. Silk-looms were estab-
lished in Norman Sicily. Venice copied with the aid of
native craftsmen the 'glassware of Antioch ; Lyons the
damasks, Paris the ' tapis sarrasins,' and Rheims the
linen of Syria. The rich dyes of the East were brought
to Bruges, where they were used to prepare English
wool for the market. The wares of Spain and
Majorca led to the establishment of Italian factories
for the manufacture of majolica. Sugar factories were
transferred from Sicily to Italy and from Spain to the
South of France.

The Arabs introduced three inventions into Europe,
each of which was to bring about a world- transforming
revolution : the mariner's compass which was to expand
Europe to the ends of the earth ; gunpowder which was
to bring to an end the supremacy of the armoured knight ;
and paper which prepared the way for the printing-
press. The revolution effected by the introduction of
paper was scarcely less important than that brought about
by printing. The extreme scarcity of books was in a
large measure due to the scarcity of parchment ; we
know how the texts of ancient manuscripts were erased
again and again to supply materials for writing missals
and legends of saints, so that scarcely a manuscript
older than the eleventh century survives to-day. The
price of books was consequently prohibitive : a Countess

REBIRTH OF EUROPE 207

of Anjou paid two hundred sheep and five measures each
of wheat, rye, and millet for a book of homilies ; and as
late as the reign of Louis XI, when that king wished
to borrow the medical works of Al-Razi from the
library of Paris University, he deposited in pledge a
quantity of plate, and was moreover obliged to procure
a nobleman to join with him as surety in a deed
binding him to restore it. The Arabs first adopted
the manufacture of paper from silk as practised in
China ; and silk paper was manufactured at Samarkand
and Bokhara ; for silk they at first substituted
cotton, Damasc paper, and later linen. The linen-paper
industry was long a monopoly of Xativa, near Valencia,
whence it was introduced into Catalonia and Provence,
and later to Treviso and Padua.1

The first parts of Europe to emerge from barbarism
were those most directly under the influence of Moorish
culture : the Spanish Marches of Catalonia, Provence,
and Sicily.

It is an entirely erroneous conception which pictures
the Moorish and Christian States of Spain as divided
by intolerant hatred and incessant warfare. Spanish
fanaticism is a later growth which mainly owed its intro-
duction to foreigners. To those who lived in contact
with the civilization of Islam it was hardly possible
to entertain the conceptions fostered among remoter popu-
lations by their priests, who represented the abhorred
' infidel ' as savage fiends addicted to the worship of
a hideous idol called Ma'hom. The gradual encroach-
ment of the Spanish kingdoms over the Moorish dominions
was as much the fruit of Muslim dissensions as of the
ardour of the attack, and was brought about by crafty
alliances with ambitious Moorish princes as much as by
the sword. Friendly relations and intimate intercourse
were the rule, not the exception. Since the days of
Roncesvalles, when Moors and Christians had together
defeated the marauding army of Charlemagne who, having

1 We call paper by the name of Egyptian papyrus, but we measure,
it by reams (Ar. rasma » a parcel).

208 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

crossed the Pyrenees at the invitation of Suleiman al-
Arabi, a rebel against the first 'Abd al -Rahman,
was returning laden with Christian booty and
without having fought a Moor, Christians and Moors
had constantly fought side by side and lent each
other support in their complex internecine quarrels.
Spanish princes marched at the head of Moorish troops
lent to them by a Muslim ally to recover their domains,
Moorish Emirs led Christian troops against their rivals.
Companies of soldiers of fortune both Christian and
Muslim hired themselves to masters of either religion.
The most brilliant of Moorish generals, Al-Mansur,
won his victories, and sacked the shrine of Com-
postella, with Christian troops. The famous Rodrigo
Diez de Bivar, transformed by legend into the
doughty champion of the faith, was a condottiere
who fought at least as often on the side of the
Moors as on that of the Catholics, remained
seven years in the service of the Emir of Saragossa,
looted churches with as much gusto as mosques, usually
dressed in Moorish costume, put his faith in a Moorish
bodyguard, and is known to fame by the Arabic
appellation of the Cid. It is no mere fiction, like the
transmutation of the ignominious expedition of Charle-
magne in Spain into an heroic epic, and its adornments
with the magicians, knight-errants, dwarfs, dragons and
enchanted palaces of Arabian romance, but an accurate
tradition which represents in the tales and poems of
chivalry, Christian and Moorish knights as freely con-
sorting on friendly terms, joining together in jousts and
tournaments and entertaining each other as honoured
guests. Spanish and Moorish princes and their retinues
of men of science and minstrels constantly resided at
each other's courts. Christian rulers entrusted the
education of their sons to Arabian tutors ; and when
afflicted with some obstinate disorder betook themselves
to Cordova to consult the most eminent physicians. Even
between Christian ecclesiastics and Moorish princes there
was friendly intercourse ; the translation of the Arab
Almanack by Bishop Harib, and a history of the
Franks written in Arabic by Bishop Gobmar of

REBIRTH OF EUROPE 209

Gerona, were dedicated to Khallf Hakim. Inter-
marriage, common among the people, was not in-
frequent among the nobility, and even King Alfonso V
of Leon gave his sister in marriage to Muhammad, King
of Toledo, and Alfonso VI married Princess Zayda,
the daughter of Ibn Abet, King of Seville. Al-
Mansur married Teresa the daughter of Bermudo II,
who, with the consent of her family, adopted her
husband's faith. Moorish princes who acknowledged the
suzerainty of the King of Castile sat in the Spanish Cortes.

The lustre of Moorish elegance circulated unimpeded
throughout the peninsula and the South of France. A
shifting population of Mozarabians (Muslim Spaniards)
and Jews passed continually from Andalusia to Catalonia
and Languedoc ; the papal legate charged the Counts of
Provence with harbouring '-' Moors, Jews, and all manner
of infidels." Provence, where the Moors had dwelt
nearly two hundred years, became united to the Spanish
March, where the same language was spoken, when Ray-
mond Berenger, Count of Barcelona, married Douce, the
daughter of Gilbert of Gevaudan, the last scion of the
Counts of Provence. There and then it was that the first
efflorescence of European culture and elegance, which
was so tragically blotted out in blood in the ghastly
Albigensian Crusade, blossomed forth under the stimulus
of Moorish civilization.

Rude, illiterate, unwashed robber-barons gave place
to men who delighted in poetry and music, and for-
gathered in tournaments of song. Loose woollen gowns
and leather jerkins were exchanged for close-fitting
braided pourpoints, first known as gipons (Ar. jubba)
and mantels of shimmering silk, the fashion for which
gradually extended to Northern Europe. Women joined
as equals, as in Moorish Spain, in the intellectual
interests and artistic tastes of men. They discarded nun-
like habits for fine apparel and jewels, developed a waist
and rustled silken trains ; instead of wearing their hair
in long plaits they did it up elegantly, a change which came
to be known in the North as ' cheveux a la Provengale ' ;
they wore embroidered and jewelled Persian tiaras of
cendal (Ar. candal), which in the fourteenth century

14

210 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

were exchanged for the sugar-loaf and horned head-
dresses known as ' bonnets a la Syrienne.' An Arab
author, Ibn Jobair, thus describes the appearance of the
women of the period : ' ' They went forth clad in robes of
silk the colour of gold, wrapped in elegant mantles,
covered with many-coloured veils, shod with gilt shoes,
laden with collars^ adorned with kohl and perfumed with
attar, exactly in the costume of our Muslim ladies. " Such
dalliance did not fail to call forth the shrill denuncia-
tions of monks who, elsewhere supreme arbiters of life,
slunk away in impotence before the indifference of the
people and the sirventes of the poets. Song and
music, which filled the rose-gardens of Andalusia, where
every court rang with the sound of romances and quat-
rains, where poets and musicians formed part of the
retinue of every Moorish prince and every Emir, where
skill in versification was counted an indispensable accom-
plishment of every knight and every lady, spread to
the adjacent lands of Castile, Catalonia and Provence.
Stringed musical instruments, which are throughout the
Middle Ages spoken of as 'mauresques,' were first intro-
duced into Europe, the lute or laud (Ar. al fud), the
viol or violin, known at first as rubeb (Ar. rabab), the
psaltery (Ar. santyr), ancestor of the piano, the zither,
the tabor, and the guitar (Ar. kuitra).

Exactly to what degree the Catalonian and Proven-
gal poetry which was sung to the accompaniment of
that Moorish music was moulded by that of Arab'
Spain, is the subject of controversy among specialist
scholars. What measure of prejudice may enter into
the conclusions of those who pronounce the literature of
Provence to have been " an extraordinary instance of
spontaneous growth," may pardonably be suspected when
the manner in which every other contribution of Arab
culture has been treated by European scholarship, is borne
in mind. There was a popular vernacular poetry in
Provence as everywhere else, but only there did a
courtly fashion for verse appear, distinct from popular
song, and court -singers identical in function with the
ruwah of Moorish courts. Rhyme of a rude kind had
previously been used in monkish doggerel, but its

REBIRTH OF EUROPE 211

elaborate pattern in Troubadour song, the assonant
repetition of the same word in alternate lines, the
research of ' difficult rhymes/ the tornada or envoi
(invariably used in the ghazal), are traits of Arabic
poetry, and of the Spanish school in particular, which
invented the muwashdh and zajdl stanzas, and was
as partial to husht, or learned obscurity, as Guiraut
de Bornelh and so many Troubadours to the trobar
clus. More even than its technical features, the new
song reflected the somewhat euphuistic sentiment, the
conventionalized erotics of Arabo -Persian poetry ; and
Bernard de Ventadour and his fellow-poets who lament
" DC la donha me dezesper" were, like their And&lusian
brethren, ' sari al-ghawdni,' * victims of the fair.'

Spanish and Provencal poetry is the birth-song of
European literatures, awakening poetic echoes through-
out Europe, from the Minnesingers of Germany to pre-
Dantesque Italy, calling the ' vulgar tongues ' of the
new Europe to literary life. The earlier Italian
singers, Malaspina, Zorgi, Sordello, Lanfranc Cigala,,
used the language as well as the prosody and
style of the Provencal Troubadours. It was in Sicily
at the Saracenized court of Frederic II, that the first
Italian lyrics were produced in the native tongue — il dolce
stil nuovo of Guido delle Colonne, Jacopo Lentini and
Pier delle Vigne. Dante hesitated long whether he
should write his great poem in Latin ; his decision
was determined by his admiration for the achievements
of Provencal song, and from them his language, form
and treatment were derived. Without the Spanish
Moors no Troubadours, without the Troubadours no
Dante.

It was the conquest of Muslim Sicily and of Southern
Italy by Norman mercenaries which moved William
the Bastard to that of England. When after a struggle
of thirty years the Muslim kingdom and its capital
of Palermo, which rivalled Cordova itself in splendour
and culture, at length submitted to the Hauteville adven-
turers, it was only on condition of being granted full

212 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

and equal rights and liberties; and so willingly were
the terms carried out in letter and spirit, that Roger,
the first King of the Two Sicilies, and his successors
were, not without good ground, accused of being more
Muslim than Christian. Sicily down to the last
Hohenstaufen rulers remained a centre of Muslirrt
culture and became the focus of awakening civilization.
It was — strange irony of fate I — by Muslim troops that
Pope Hildebrand was rescued from Castle S. Angelo
when Henry IV. sought to wipe out the shame of
Canossa. Not only were the troops, the religion, and
to a large extent, the administration of the Muslim
retained under the Normans and Suabians, but the posts
of honour and command remained in Moorish hands.
Their amyr al-bahr became in latinized form ammirati,
or admirals ; their diwans, or government offices, became
dohanas or douanes. Sicilian administration served as
a model to Europe. The English^ fiscal system, like
the name which it bears to-day — the Exchequer, was
derived from Muslim Sicily, whence Thomas Brun, who.
served as Khaid under Roger II, introduced it when he
transferred his services to our Henry II. Between
Norman England and Norman Sicily there was con-
tinuous intercourse through which many elements of
Muslim culture came directly to distant Britain. Its
great and far-reaching civilizing influence over barbaric
Europe reached its height when the kingdom' passed
into the hands of the great Italian-born Emperor
Frederic II, whose radiant figure filled the Middle
Ages with wonder. If the name of any European
sovereign deserves to be specially associated with the
redemption of Christendom from barbarism and ignor-
ance, it is not that of Charlemagne, the travesty of
whom in the character of a civilizer is a fulsome
patriotic and ecclesiastical fiction, but that of the
enlightened and enthusiastic ruler who adopted Saracenic
civilization and did more than any sovereign to stimulate
its diffusion. : \

His brilliant court where, under the stalactite roofs
of Moorish halls, and amid oriental gardens adorned
with murmuring fountains, and aviaries filled with rare

REBIRTH OF EUROPE 213

birds, and menageries of strange animals, the gifts of
friendly Khalifs, the professors of Arabian science
forgathered as honoured guests, and discussed mathe-
matical problems and questions of natural history;,
where troubadours from Provence and Moorish
minstrels sang to the music of lutes and tabors, and.
inspired the first-fruits of Italian poetry; that wonder
court, the seat of learning, refinement and beauty, so
utterly contrasting with the gloomy, xush-littered halls
of other European potentates, which swarmed with"
monks and vermin, ignorance and superstition, was
an object of astonishment and malicious rage. Among
the accusations and denunciations that were hurled
against Frederic, it was alleged with horror that he
indulged in a daily bath — even on Sundays. He
established universities in Naples, Messina, Padua,
renovated the old Byzantine medical school of Salerno
in accordance with the advances of Arab medicine ; en-
couraged by his patronage Plato of Tivoli and Lorenzo
Fibonacci, the founders of European mathematics ;
gathered Jewish and Arab scholars to undertake trans-
lation of every procurable Arabic book ; sent his friend
Michael Scotus to Cordova to obtain the latest works of
Averroes, and distributed copies to every existing school .

The course, not only of political history, but of
European development and culture would doubtless have
been very different had he, as was his dream, united
Europe under a new empire with its capital in Italy.
But the opposing forces of ecclesiastical power were
as yet too strong. The popes moved heaven and earth'
against the Hohenstaufen Emperor. Gregory IX stirred
the Lombard cities to revolt, and rewarded and
secured their loyalty by, setting up the Inquisition in
their midst, and burning a few hundreds of their
citizens — pour encourager les autres. Mendicant monks
penetrated into the very palace of the Emperor,
threatened and bribed his closest friends, and thrust
daggers and poison into their hands.

The Church dreaded, no less than a united Italy
and the loss of its temporal dominions, the new
intellectual light which was being flashed across the

214 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

darkness of Europe. Gregory declared Frederic to
be the Antichrist. " That pestilent king/' wrote the
Pope, " affirms that the world has been deceived by
three impostors, Moses,. Jesus and Mahomet. He
further proclaimis with a loud voice — he dares to utter
lies to the extent of saying] that none but fools can
believe that the all-powerful Creator of the world was
born of a virgin. He maintains the heresy that no
man can be born without the concourse of a man and
a woman. And he adds to those blasphemies that
what is proved by the laws of things, and natural reason,
is alone worthy of belief." The supporters of the
Emperor throughout Italy were regarded as infidels,
the name of Ghibelline was synonymous with
' epicurean,' the current designation of the time for
philosophic unbelievers; and when Guido Cavalcanti
walked through the streets of Florence, absorbed in
thought, the populace, Boccaccio tells us, whispered
that " he Was thinking out arguments to prove that
there is no God." The interdicts, the anathemas, the
repeated excommunications of the Church, proved a
more formidable weapon than even the swords of the
Guelphs. Vanquished, baffled, betrayed, harassed, dis-
heartened, embittered by long years of strife and daily
peril, the Emperor craved for terms from his implacable
foe; he agreed to depart from Italy on a crusade to
Palestine; and betaking himself to Jerusalem, that
strangest of crusaders was there received as an honoured
friend by the Sultan Melik al-Kamil. As he walked
arm in arm with the noble and learned Melik on the
terrace of the mosque of 'Omar, discoursing of the
latest advances in his beloved mathematical sciences,
and of the folly of men who like darkness rather than
light, he cast a scornful glance on the fanatical crowds
that crawled on their knees before the gates of the
Holy Sepulchre, and exclaimed, like Philip -Auguste,
" Happy Sultan who knows no pope ! " As a token
of his regard, Melik presented Mm with a marvellous
clock, in the form of a large domed tent, in which the
sun and moon were moved by mechanism, and made to
rise and set, showing the hours.

REBIRTH OF EUROPE 215

Christian and Saracen mingled their tears when the
great Hohenstaufen ' che fa d'amor si degno ' was
laid in the crypt of Monreale, leaving behind him the
foundations of a power greater and more mighty than
any empire he had dreamed of, a power that was one
day to avenge him, and break the tyranny of pope and
priest like a reed.

A cause more immediate in its effects than physical
science and deeper than romantic and poetical literature
aroused the European mind from its lethargy. It has
not in general been sufficiently emphasized that one of
the chief agencies by which the dead hand of theological
dogma was shaken off, was theology itself. " The naive
mysticism and emotional' inconsistency of a religious
creed," as Al-Ghazali remarked, " cannnot be brought to
an intellectual focus without being dispelled." Already
in the ninth and tenth centuries there Were sporadic
signs of insubordination in Christendom. In England
and Ireland, partly owing to the tradition established by
Theodore, an Eastern monk with an ardent taste for
literature, who, under Pope Valerian, had been appointed
to the see of Canterbury, partly in consequence of the
protection from the Gregorian obscurantism of the
central Church government, afforded by isolation and
remoteness, the status of culture among the monks of
the Benedictine order and of St. Columba was distinctly
higher than on the Continent. Egbert, Bede, Alcuin
are examples of that pre-eminence. Not that it amounted
to much; but by comparison with the almost complete
illiteracy of other countries, the taste of the English,
and, above all, of the Irish monks for Latin authors, and
even an occasional, though rare, acquaintance with
Greek, placed them upon a higher level. The con-
sequences were not long in showing themselves : in
reading Scripture and the early Fathers, they dared
to exercise their mind. The Irish monks are spoken of
as " sophia clari" and a chronicler describes the
disturbing inroads of those herds of philosophers — •
" philosophorum greges" — -across the stormy sea. St.

216 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

Boniface, while engaged in Christianizing Germany,
encountered nothing but trouble with his Irish assistants.
One Brother Verigil had the assurance to speak of
4 antipodes ' ; Father Clement flatly scorned the authority
of Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory, and even that of
the Canon, and aired views about marriage with a
deceased wife's sister, and the marriage of bishops,
which made one's hair stand on end. Father Macarius
was no better than a pantheist, and he set the devil loose
in the monastery of Corbie, whence presently Father
Ratram came forth denying the miracle of the
Eucharist. But the boldest and greatest of those Irish
disturbers of the Faith was John Erigena, a superior
man, who had travelled in the East and knew! Greek,
and who with great power and learning endorsed
Ratram's view of the mass, accounting it a mere
symbol, and expressed purely pantheistic views. There
was no one in that day at all capable of even
appreciating the magnitude of his heresies, much less of
making any show of argumentative fight against the
terrible Irishman. Theology merely consisted in the
submissive reading of the Scriptures and the Latin
Fathers, and had no weapon but their authority. The
eucharistic heresy smouldered for over a century in
the Benedictine monasteries until it was — it was hoped
— adequately laid at rest by Archbishop Anselm of
Canterbury. But that hope was cruelly shattered by
Roscellin, who hanselled the new weapon of Aristotelian
logic lately come from Spain in his fierce onslaught upon
Anselm. One of the disciples of Roscellin was the
great Peter Ab61arld, who with impassioned eloquence
proclaimed not only that reason had a right to examine all
authority, but that it was the supreme and13ole authority.
Exactly in what measure the earlier disputes of
' pre -scholastic scholasticism ' were influenced by
Muslim thought, we have little means of knowing with
accuracy. The first systematic body of heretical doctrine
within the Roman Church which resulted in widespread
theological controversy, arose in Muslim Spain, and
originated in the ninth century with Bishop Elipandus
of Toledo, who infested with the Adoptionist heresy

REBIRTH OF EUROPE 217

the clergy of the South of France. Muhammadan
philosophy and theology had, we know, been carried to
the Benedictine monasteries through the Jews, and the
metropolitan house of Monte Cassino ; and Alvaro of
Cordova tells us that many Christians in the ninth century
*' studied the Muhamrnadan theologians and philoso-
phers." not always, he adds significantly, " with a view to
refuting them." Peter the Venerable, the Abbot of Cluny,
with whom Abelard took refuge after his condemnation
by the Council of Sens, lamented that, during his stay in
Spain, he had seen troops of students from France,
Germany, England, flocking to the Moorish seats of
learning. In order to do something to stem the tide, he
had the Kuran translated into Latin, naively remarking
that the text of such-like ' inspired ' books constitutes
their most effectual! refutation. The exact parallelism
between Muslim and; Christian theological controversy
is too close to be accounted for by similarity of
situations, and the coincidences are too fundamental
and numerous to be accepted as no more than
coincidences. A single metaphysical qui'bble raised in
the Isagogize of Porphyry concerning ' universals '
supplied the cardinal formula about which the whole
edifice of controversial thought both in Islam and
Christendom was raised. The same questions, the same
issues which occupied the theological schools of
Damascus, were after an interval of a century repeated
in identical terms in those of Paris.

The culture of the courts of Damascus and Baghdad
had been eyed askance by the zealots of Islam; and
when Al-Mamun established his famous school of trans-
lators, the Dar al-Hikmet or ' Home of Science,' he
had to placate the pietist conscience by assurances that
it was merely a college of household physicians. To
the Muslim faithful and their 'Ulama, the whole cultural
movement remained from first to last a thing accursed;
Harun and Al-Mamun had sold their souls ; and in
Moorish Spain there were constant outbursts of fanatic
zeal in which the books of science were consigned to
the flames. The attitude of religious ardour towards
intellectual culture was precisely the same in the Muslim

218 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

as in the Christian world. Only there Was this differ-
ence, that in the former it was the intellectuals
and heretics who for a time held the whip -hand of
power; the pious had perforce to rest content with
sour looks and suppressed1 growls, and to Wait patiently
until the Turk, the Berber, and the Spaniard came to
their assistance, and plunged Islam back into the purity
of faith and the darkness and ignorance of barbarism.
If, while in the tenth century European aspirants to
knowledge sought the schools of the learned Moors, in
the twentieth century Professor Westermarck journeys
to Morocco to study the ways of primitive barbarism,
it is because in the two worlds the contest between light
and darkness had opposite issues; in the one case
dogma was defeated by rational thought, in the other it
prevailed over it.

Although the intellectual energy of the Arabs
employed itself by preference with objective mathe-
matical and scientific pursuits, it was inevitable that
it should be applied to the interpretation of religion.
From their Nestorian teachers and from Galen they
derived a profound veneration for Aristotle, whose orderly
and encyclopedic cast of mind chimed with their dispo-
sition. He was '' al-^elahi^ the ' divine ' Aristotle,
the philosopher, and pilgrimages were made to his
supposed tomb in Palermo as to the shrine of a saint.
The Arab apiplied his terminology, metaphysical ideas
and classifications, and logical method to the endeavour
to elucidate, making more definite and precise, reducing
to a rational order, to a ' science,' the dogmas of their
religion. A maze-like structure arose out of the subtle
disputations of theology, al-katan, the * science of the
Word.' And intellectual thought set about the endless
task of * reconciling ' religious dogma and rational
thought. Al-Farabi paraphrased Aristotle, enumerated
the principles of ' being,' elaborated the doctrine a£
the double aspects of the intellect and the question of
universals. Ibn Sina sought, upon the basis of Farabi's
work, to spiritualize the naturalism1 of Aristotle by a
free admixture of mystic neo-Platonism derived from
Jewish and Alexandrian sources. Others rationalized the

REBIRTH OF EUROPE 219

mysteries of the faith into pantheism; and Ibn Roschd
(Averroes), the last of the Arabic philosophers, pro-
claimed the unity of the intellect, and put forth the
fatal solution of ' double truth/ that a thing may be
true in theology and false in science — or, as Professor
Bury has aptly expressed it, that a thing may be true
in the kitchen but false in the drawing-room.

The whole logomachy passed bodily into Christendom.
The catchwords, disputes, vexed questions, methods,
systems, conceptions, heresies, apologetics and irenics,
were transferred from the mosques to the Sorbonne.
The deification of Aristotle, introduced by the Arabs,
together with his works, which had previously only
been known in meagre fragments in Cassiodorus,
Capella, and Boethius, stood at first for the assertion of
the rights of reason. The reading of his works, and
of the Arabian commentaries, was in Paris forbidden.

It soon, however, became apparent to the defenders
of orthodoxy that their original principle — that the
methods of rational thought must not be applied to
religious dogma — condemned them to an unequal fight.
They accordingly abandoned it, and reversed their policy.
It was determined to fight intellectual insubordination
with its own weapons, to enlist Aristotle in the cause
of faith. The canonization of Aristotle was the first
of the long series of surrenders of theology to rational
thought. The Dominicans devoted themselves to the
task of harmonizing ' the philosopher ' with religion.
It had already been performed for them; and all that
Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, both proficient in
Arabic literature — the former was as famous as an
alchemist as a theologian, and the latter had been one
of the earliest pupils in Frederic II 's university of
Naples — had to do, w'as to reproduce the arguments,
formulas, and methods of Ibn Sina and his predecessors
in the ' reconciliation of reason and religion/ Al-Farabi
and Al-Kindi. They were met by their antagonists wi h
the bolder logic of " the impious and thrice-accursed "
Averroes.

The banners under which the battles of intellectual
progress have been fought have been subject to strange

220 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

mutations. The same Muslim infidel, Ib'n Sina, furnished
both the weft of the Tomistic, or official philosophy
of the Catholic Church, and the text-book of the
medical schools ; nurtured the Vatican and the Holy-
Office with one hand, and Galileo with the other. ;We
are accustomed to think of Aristotelian authority andi
of * the schools ' as the foes against which the
European intellect had to win its victory. When
science and modern thought at last unfolded their wings
with Galileo and1 Descartes, it was by the overthrow
of Aristotle and his authority that that first liberation
was marked. But at an earlier stage it was those
same authorities which the Arabs had transmitted to
Europe, it was that very Aristotle, which had stood
for intellectual freedom, for reason against obscurantism
and mysticism. Aristotle was the shield under which
in the universities and the medical schools, thought
and science were brooding and maturing. -When the
humanists of the Renaissance, when Petrarch, when
Erasmus inveighed against Aristotle and Averroes, it
was not dogmatism or authority which roused their
ire, but science, ' impiety,' ' materialism.' They were
occupying the same position as the opponents of
Copernicus, of Darwin, of that science whose chrysalis
was wrapped in the ' authorities ' of the Arabs.

Scholasticism, like Greek Sophism, is one of those
vanquished things whose name has been indelibly
branded by the triumph of its opponents. Neverthe-
less those argumentative contests which seem to us
absurd and unintelligible, were the first stirrings of
the mind in Europe after the death-like trance and
Cimmerian darkness that went before. In the hair-
splitting subtleties and grotesque disputes of the schools,
the weapons were tempered that were to arm the human
mind for the battles of its liberation and triumph. ' To
the Schoolmen," J. S. Mill rightly observes, "we owe
whatever accuracy of thought, and lucidity of logic,
we can boast." We may laugh at some of the problems
on which the scholastic disputants exercised their wit —
" whether divine essence engendered the Father, or
was engendered by the Father; whether attributes or

REBIRTH OF EUROPE 221

substance 'determine persons " (Beter Lombard), or
"whether the Holy Ghost appeared as a real dove;
whether Adam and Eve had navels ; whether Christ
took any clothes with him to heaven " (Thomas
Aquinas) ; l but the laugh would not be altogether on
our side if some of the paralogisms which sometimes
pass to-day as arguments with untrained and slovenly
thinkers, could be submitted to the mediaeval worshippers
of Aristotle. ' Formal logic ' is pedantic, and the
syllogism is not the sum of rational method; but
they have supplied a very beneficent and useful
training. And it is by passing through the mill of t
scholasticism that the European mind has acquired that )
appreciation of accuracy, that habit of precision, that /
care in the use and definition of words, that protective/
immunity against plausible fallacies, that indisposition
to being put off with irrelevant and lofty phrases, which,
have been its strength, and to which it owes its growth'
and achievements.

And it (was that unflinching application of logic which
in the days of Roscellin and Abelard had struck terror
in the champions of dogma and tradition, which ultimately,
shook off their intellectual tyranny, in spite of their
attemtpt to press the two-edged weapon into their own
defence ; and which produced Roger Bacon and William
of Occam, who dealt the death-blow to the phantasms
of dogmatic abstraction, and pointed to the methods of
accurate observation, inquiry, experiment, and mathe-
matical analysis, introduced into the World by Arabian
science, as the basis of rational judgment and knowledge. ^

By the end of the thirteenth century, among' the
propositions which the Paris Sorfoonne was called upon
to censure, we find the following : " The discourses
of theologians are founded on fables " ; M True
knowledge is made impossible by theology"; "The
Christian religion is an obstacle to education."

The spell which had held the human mind captive
during the Dark Ages was broken for ever.

1 It is, of course, on the orthodox or "realist" side of
scholasticism that such speculative gems are to be met.

CHAPTER VII

THE SOI-DISANT RENAISSANCE

IT is in the first three centuries of thq preisent millennium
that the rebirth of Europe took place. The term
1 Renaissance ' applied to the Italian and Italianate
culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is a
misnomer stamped upon our notions by the traditions of
that culture itself. The gaudier splendour of European
life at that epoch was the outspreading of overblown
blossoms whose buds the previous centuries had called
to life and unfolded. To that antecedent impulse it
owed its worth . The invention of printing, to a far
greater extent than the study of ancient literature,
strengthened and accelerated the process.

The paramount part played by Arab culture in the
awakening of Europe, on which I have dwelt at some
length — proportionate to the grossness and insistence of
current misrepresentation — it would be difficult sto ex-
aggerate. But there is no need to magnify the intrinsic
worth and quality of that culture. Admirable as was
that quality, and supremely momentous as its action
and influence proved, it did not possess the principle
of indefinite development and growth. Had it not
succumbed to fanaticism it is doubtful whether it would
have pursued a career of prolonged progress. Europe,
making use of what it acquired from Islam, outstripped
it, as Greece had surpassed the oriental cultures whence
hers was derived. There was in point of fact something,
some particular quality in the European mind which
Islam lacked. Arabized knowledge in passing into
Europe, however barbaric, became European, western,
acquired some new virtue which vitalized and fertilized
it. That something, that quality of the European mind,
is not an intangible and undefinable racial mystery.

SOI DISANT RENAISSANCE 223

It is a quite definite fact. It is nothing1 else than its
geniture and parentage from the clear and discursive spirit
of Greece. The European mind is what it is, differs
from the East and Islam, in that it has Greece and
Rome at its back. That is the supreme fact in its
constitution and quality. The Greek spirit, its emanci-
pation, its fetterless freedom, its irrepressible curiosity,
its secularism, its criticism, its spontaneous, unimpeded
use in the face of all facts and situations of human
reason pure and simple, that is what has made the
western world possible. And Europe has grown because
it issued out of that ' antiquity ' which was' the
civilization of the Greek mind ; and even in the dark-
ness of degradation and deepest depth of ruin, the dust
of that world preserved, however faint, some element
of its intrinsic quality.

' Renaissance ' humanism was, then, in its form
representative of that paramount fact. I say ' repre-
sentative,' no more ; for it neither initiated, nor deter-
mined, nor in any essential degree established its
action. Roman, and subsequently Greek literature, were
sought and cherished before the rise of Italian humanism
and the advent of Greek refugees. The patriotic
enthusiasm which looked back upon the only national
literature, the only great European literature then exist-
ing, and saw in its ' revival ' and cultivation the only,
issue out of the dark sterility of the times, existed in
Italy even before Petrarch. Vilgardus of Ravenna
early in the twelfth century paid to the Latin poets
the same extravagant and superstitious worship as the
humanist idolaters of the Renaissance. Those studies
extended in the same measure as all other intellectual
activities. But that quality and influence of which I
have just spoken, is in truth something much deeper,
and more subtle than any effect of book study. It
lies in the very genesis and constitution of Europe, in
its language, its forms of thought, its memory, its whole
mentality. Study of ancient literature is but a small
and accessory part of it, its roots lie much deeper in

224 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

the mental structure, which even in the me.diaevlal Church
and law and language derived from Greece.

The humanism of the Renaissance gave a new impetus
to the perusal of the only secular literature then existing,
and thus helped to establish the dominion of secular
thought in the modern world. The republished works
of Greece and Rome did not bring life and power
by virtue of their specific contents, by virtue of any
particular contribution to knowledge or ideas, of any
concrete * wisdom/ or any forgotten and regenerating
inspiration which they transmitted, but purely and simply
by helping, in virtue of their secular character, to sever
the bonds which had held the human mind fettered in
the bolgia of ecclesiastical thought.

But everything that can ungrudgingly be set to the
credit of ' Renaissanqe ' humanism is more than counter-
weighed by influences the most baneful and pernicious,
which it exercised on the development of Europe.

"It may be doubted," justly remarks an historian,1
" whether the human mind has gained by ceasing to
develop along the path upon which it had been set
during the Middle Ages, and by suffering that revolution
which is called the ' Renaissance.' ' iWUiile it crowned
the antecedent growth of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, the Italian Renaissance was in reality a phase
and manifestation of essential rottenness and decay. It
was in intrinsic respects as much' a set-back and a falling
off, as the rule of the petty usurpers whose aulic influence
fostered the literary vendors of flattery and ' immor-
tality ' was a falling off from the vitality and spirit of
the communes and republics they smothered. Availing
itself of the powers which a healthier and more creative
age had developed, it wasted and prostituted them and
remained essentially sterile.

The literature and thought of Greece and Rome are

among the greatest, most glorious, and most momentous

achievements of humanity. But Renaissance humanism

and its far-reaching effects afford a conspicuous illustra-

1 Wahl, in Lavisse et Rambaud, Hist. G4neralet

SOI-D1SANT RENAISSANCE 225

tion of the truth that no matter howi excellent a thing may,
be in itself, its influence is rendered wholly pernicious
from the moment that it becomes an object of idolatry,
and is invested with a sacred and superstitious authority.
Instead of being vitalizing and inspiring it becomes
deadly and paralysing. The * ancients ' and what was
conceived by the humanists to be ancient taste were
by them set up as idols. Lamps were set alight
before the bust of Plato ; Alfonso of Naples sent
Beccarelli to Padua to beg for an arm-bone of Livy.
The cult of the ' antique ' became a delirious and
paralysing superstition . A spirit of intellectual parasitism
more abject than that of the schoolmen for the ipsissima
verba of Aristotle, extended! a canonical authority to all
the newly consecrated ' classics.' Plato, or rather a
mystic farrago of Neo-Platonism, supplanted Aristotelian
authority. So completely was intellect dulled by slavish
deference that it was scarcely capable of even discerning
the incompatibilities between the authorities it wor-
shipped. Intellectual views, theories, ideas, thoughts,
information, were indeed of little or no concern to the
pedants of Italian humanism. They cared for none
of those things ; the only things that mattered, the
things of real importance, the supreme object of intel-
lectual interest and of culture, were words, syntax, style.
It was not as thinkers, as creators, as cogitating beings
that the * classics ' were canonized and worshipped and
their authority set up, it was simply and solely as
dealers in words and periods. The Greeks had
been concerned with ideas, the Arabs and Arabists
with facts, the pedants of the Renaissance were con-
cerned with' words.

It had been the very plausible ideal of those who in
ages of semi -darkness turned, like Petrarch, to the litera-
ture of Rome, ta revive the culture which had existed1
in the past and; existed no longer, while the embrya
of a new culture Was only then struggling into feeblje,
though healthy life. They were inspired by the wish
to bring back the glories of Rome ; what they brought
back was the palsy of its dotage. The 'revival of learn-
ing ' was the revival of pedantry. The spirit of the

15

226 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

4 culture ' that was set up by the humanists was precisely
that of their teachers, the Byzantines round whom they
crowded to learn Greek ; it had in it as much of the
elements of progress and life as that culture which had
for ten centuries rotted in its mummy cloths on the
Bosporus. It very nearly succeeded in smothering the
young life of the European intellect which was moving
in the new world.

Never, except in the last phases of Rome and in
the Byzantine Empire, have the contents of the human
mind been so completely displaced and supplanted by
borrowed verbal vacuities and hollow presentments of
ideas. Of rational thought, of even a tendency towards
a critical and independent attitude, there is among the
pundits of Italian learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries hardly a trace. Whatever serious intellectual
activity existed in Italy during those two centuries, in
men like Telesio, Giordano Bruno, Campanella, Pompo-
nazzi, stood apart from the humanistic movement, had
no connection with it, and, except as regards the
last, exercised no influence. Alone among the Italian
humanists, Lodovico Valla, who was thought cold
and aloof, regarded Latin and Greek scholarship as
means to greater ends, and he mayj be said to
have initiated historical criticism1 by] his exposure
of the frauds and forgeries — the decretals, the
pseudo-Dyonisius, the donation of Constantine, the
Apostles' Creed — which constituted the credentials of
the Catholic Church. The greatest mind1 of all brooded
in complete silence and solitude ; "I am no humanist,"
declared Leonardo da Vinci.

But one may look in vain among the great lights
of the time, in Poliziano, Ficino, Poggio Bracciolini,
Filelfo, for a spark of spontaneous thought. Nothing
can match the utter intellectual impotence and sterility,
the crass stupidity — there is no other word for it — of
the authors of that strange ' revival of learning,' who
prided themselves upon their Latin style and Greek
hexameters, and made the great discovery that what
they have dubbed ' scholarship ' is the supreme
goal of the human intellect. They were arid pedants,

SOI DISANT RENAISSANCE 227

grammarians, translators, imitators in whom' all faculty
for thought had become atrophied. Imitation, more
imitation, and still cloiser imitation was for them
the highest ideal. Truth of thought or justice of
feeling had no place in their scheme of mind, and
the only quality which they could conceive as worthy
of endeavour and of appreciation was an aping faculty
for Ciceronian periods and Platonic sentiments. The
works of Marsilio Ficino, the leader of the Florentine
Academy, are a wretched hotch-potch of mystic rubbish
beside which the writings of Madame Blavatsky are
products of intelligence. Covered with amulets and
charms, " the greatest philosopher of the age " went
abroad in fear of the evil eye and of ubiquitous goblins
and sprites. And that intellectual level was representa-
tive of that of his contemporaries. The controversies
conducted with ponderous classical elegancies and
scurrilous personal vituperation between Poggio and
Filelfo, are more grotesque than the most puerile
scholastic disputations. The * divine ' Poliziano reached
at a jump the most fulsome heights of that charming
literary style which the * Renaissance ' has bequeathed
as a curse to succeeding ages. He cannot speak of
Florence, but must say * the city of Sylla ' ; he cannot
mention that some one is ill, but must needs describe
the ' Goddess of Fever ' sitting at his bedside. Pico
della Mirandola wrote a tract against astrology, and
one might imagine that he was moved by some
rationalistic impulse ; but the absorbing interest of that
champion of common sense lay in the Cabala, and his
influence on Erasmus, Reuchlin, Colet, and More, was
that of the morbid fascination which vapid mysticism
exercises .

The religious scepticism of the later Italian Renais-
sance was not the outcome of any critical process of
thought, but of entire lack of mental earnestness. The
contempt of religion began with the clergy themselves.
In secure and undisputed possession of all their claims
and powers, they had come to treat their business overtly
as one of pure and undisguised exploitation. What
men thought was of no account to them so long as

228 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

the powers and revenues of the Church remained secure.
Of dogmatic zeal and persecuting spirit there was little
in the [higher Italian clergy. They smiled on a declared
atheist as long as he paid his Church dues and was
not an earnest propagandist. Nicholas V appointed
Valla to a post at his court ; Leo X invited Pomponazzi
to discourse before him on the mortality of the soul ;
and he and his advisers allowed Luther to gain time
and ground through their avowed indifference to the
theological issue. Only when political power was at
stake did heresy call forth severity. And the courtly
scepticism of . the Renaissance, while it laughed at
dogmas and ridiculed monks, was perfectly loyal to
the Church as a social and political institution. Men
like Machiavelli who treated religious dogma with
scepticism and ridicule, did not do so because of any;
shock to their intellectual conscience. They were utterly
devoid of such a sense. To the relation between dogma
and truth they were absolutely indifferent. The passion
for truth, the mark of all real intellectual activity, even
the most languid interest in abstract truth, are things
conspicuous by their absence in the Italian mind of
the Renaissance. It believed as little in reason as
it did in inspiration, and in general assumed religion to
be an expedient, and, on the whole, beneficent, and even
necessary institution ; at the worst a necessary evil. That
there is any connection between truth and what is
practically desirable and expedient, is an idea which'
was not thought of. That good can come out of a
lie was never doubted. The practical concern of the
Italian intellect was not to distinguish between truth and
falsehood, but between the respective expediency and
desirability of various lies.

Thus the pseudo -scepticism of the Italian Renaissance
never approached to anything like consistency. It was
quite common for the commonplaces of sceptical ridi-
cule to be cbmbined with a practical belief in the essential
doctrine on which the power of the Church was founded
—fear of hell. Lorenzo de' Medici scoffed as freely as
any one, yet cringed in terror on his death-bed, and
sought absolution fr_orrj Savonarola, -the only priest he

SOI DISANT RENAISSANCE 229

knew who was not a hypocrite." Even the grossest
popular superstition was by no means incompatible with
that superficial scepticism-; Machiavelli himself believed
in ghosts. There is no length of incongruity to which
that worthless and irrational scepticism could not pro-
ceed. Aretino " che dlsse mat d'ognun JuorchZ di Dio,
scusandosi col dir ' Non lo conosco, ' composed
manuals of devo,tion. Blaspherny, like murder and
treachery, was the outcome of moral unscrupulous-
ness, and absolution was sought for the one as for the
other. The writers of the Cinquecento pass by a quite
natural transition from religious satire to prayer. Pulci,
in whose poem gastronomical parodies of the Credo
alternate with hymns to the Madonna, may by his tone
seem a distant progenitor of Voltaire-; but the re-
semblance is only superficial. Mocking, sco fling Voltaire
was in grim and deadly earnest", the sceptics of the
Italian Renaissance never were.

In France, in Germany, in England the same tedious
foolery went on as in Italy. Latin verses and Sapphic
odes, epistles spun of platitudes and commonplaces were
profusely exchanged ; dedications, prefaces, testimonies
of learning in Latin verse and prose, were com-
posed for each other by the members of a mutual
admiration society in which every scribbler of sham
Latin verses was a ' modern Horace/ and every com-
piler of a compendium combined * the elegance of Sallust
with the felicity of Livy,' exercises diversified by pro-
longed controversies conducted for the entertainment of
the ' republic of letters ' and adorned with the amenities
and ponderous JaceticB of classical billingsgate, in
which each vir doctissimus became aslnus ignarus.

But in the northern lands humanism did assume a
more serious complexion than in Italy, tending in general
to theology. It thus became mostly associated with
the Reformation initiated by Friar Luther, who de-
nounced in the same elegant terms both Rome and
reason—" Die Verfluchte Huhre Vernunft" In the
European world, flooded for the first time with books

230 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

by the multiplying press, thought circulated and fer-
mented, and the revival of thought which rapidly super-
seded the outlook of the ancient world proceeded in
spite of the * revival of learning ' and the ' reformation
of religion.*

But in the land where it swayed unmodified the pro-
ducts of the humanistic movement were intellectual death
and corruption. The blight of mere artificial imitative -
ness fastened on men's minds, and the Italian intellect
never fully recovered from the hollow and false spirit
of the Renaissance. " This Was it which damped
the glory of Italian wits, that nothing had been
written there now these many years but flattery and
fustian."

Torrents of nonsense have been and are still daily
gushed forth about the Italian Renaissance. The charm
of the period in a land which lay closer to the old
springs of culture, that efflorescing brilliancy and pagan
opulence of artistic production which still affectionately
holds us, were not the fruit of humanism, but of the
time when the Italian mind was stimulated by the culture
of the Moors and of Provence, when the Italian spirit
was stirred to vigorous life in the struggle for freedom
against Pope, Emperor and feudal lords. It was the
age which produced Dante and Giotto and brought to
life Italian art and literature. Their resources were
deliberately used as a political means of power and
diversion by the ambition of the princes who crushed
liberty, and the course of their development, which had
begun in freedom and vital energy,, though borne onward
for a short time by the initial impulse, after they had
become the creatures of aulic patronage, was one of
rapid parabolic decline. Italy has produced no second
Dante. No Italian poet after him can be named in the
same breath. Instead of the Divine Comedy the
Renaissance produced Sannazaro's Arcadia. Not only
did the Italian Renaissance produce no Dante, it was
absolutely incapable of appreciating him ; it set him
aside and disparaged him, " banished him," in the words
of one of the humanists of the time, " from1 the assemblies
of the learned and made him over to wool -carders and

SOI-DISANT RENAISSANCE 231

bakers." Latin was once more restored to the position
of literary language and the growth of Italian literature
stamped down. This had already been the ideal of
Petrarch, the father of humanism, who chiefly prided'
himself on his Latin epic, the Africa ; and Boccaccio,
though infinitely superior to all his successors, shows
already in his weakness for Ciceronian ' elegance ' in his
Italian writing the poisonous imitative spirit which was
to kill off so much of native genius ; and he apologizes
for having written " things in the vulgar tongue fit for
the ears of the populace." From that time on, while
humanism reigned supreme, Italian literature sinks into
mellifluous euphuisms, elegant conceits, and sugary
ornateness, till in the seventeenth century it becomes
a by -word for hollow bombast and turgid absurdity —
" flattery and fustian." Before its final sinking into
utter degradation we have, it is true, a Tasso and an
Ariosto who charm by the sonorous suavity of the verbal
music in which their sensuous fancy is clothed . But you
may search their pages in vain for a character or a
thought. And the manner in which their felicitous talent
was appreciated by their princely patrons of culture is
sufficiently well known. Tasso was cast in prison, and
Ariosto 's florid adulation was by Cardinal d'Este re-^
ceived with the words, " Dove diavolo, Messer Lodovico,
avete trovate tutte queste corbetlerie? "

Italian painting, which quickly grew in technique
through the Lippis and Masaccio, was at its technical
height under Raphael already stricken with the canker
of mawkish grace and artificial ornateness, and sank
with him into rapid degradation and liollow formalism.
Only in such men as were least tainted with the spirit
of the times, in whom something of the proud indepen-
dence and enthusiasm of an earlier age survived, in
Leonardo, Michel -Angelo, and the Venetians, whose mind
dwelt outside the current of courtly elegance and
modish classicism, was true creative power "manifested.
And their faults were proportionate to the pestilent
influence upon them of prevalent taste, from which not
even Leonardo or Michel -Angelo could altogether escape.

It was indeed a precious revival of ' taste ' and

232 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

of " appreciation for antiquity ' which1 inspired its
patrons and arbiters, the papal princes, to tear down
the venerable historic basilica of St. Peter's, and set
Michel-Angelo and Raphael quarrying the sacred remains
of the Roman Forum in order to erect them into that
pile of overgrown hideousness on the Vatican hill!

Immediately its transmitted impulse was spent the
culture of classical humanism resolved itself into its
elements, and issued in the basest degradation of litera-
ture and art which the world has looked upon — barroque
classicism and rococo taste. If it has contributed any
spark to the fire which lit the new life of Europe,
almost everything that is base and false in the ideals
and tastes which for nigh three centuries have oppressed
it and warped its growth, is likewise to be traced to
Renaissance humanism. That pestilent pseudo -classic
' elegance * which infested Europe during the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, that cold blight which
poisoned the literature of France in the critical period
of its growth and its influence, so that its men of talent
lay palsied for two centuries gibbering about * Cupid's
darts,1 * the Graces,'. ** the Muses,' and ' divine
Chloe ' ; that corruption which degraded the tongue
of Villon and Rabelais into that of Vauvenargues and
the H6tel Rambouillet, Elizabethan English into that
of Addison and Pope ; that deformity of literary ideals
which praised Racine and scorned Shakespeare ; that
baseness and blindness which covered Europe with
perruques allongtes, Wren architecture, ' artificial ruins,'
and * classic * colonnades, with furbelowed Romans
striking Raphaelesque attitudes with outspread fingers,
and goddesses sprawling on clouds, and of which all
that is artistically mean and hideous in the modern
world is the outcome ; the unspeakable absurdity in
notions of polite education which weighs to this day
upon the most vital functions of our culture and life-
all those things are the legacy of Italian humanism.
We owe, if nothing else, to Ruskin that he first boldly
exposed the contemptible worthlessness of that Renais-
sance taste whose tyrannous influence so blinded our
grandfathers that even a Goethe could go into ecstasies

SOI-DISANT RENAISSANCE 233

over the sugary counterfeits of Palladio and pass by
the genuine glories of Italian Gothic, snatch at the tinsel
and cast aside the gold. That baseness is but the
reflection in art of the imitative artificiality and unreality
in which the pedantry of humanism moved, and which
utterly extinguished in it every impulse of rational and
critical thought.

CHAPTER VIII

ELEMENTS OF EUROPE

IN the motley, multifarious world of Europe every form
ever assumed by ruling power was represented in its
full vigour. A theocratic power more strongly organized
than any the East had seen, tmore untransactingly jealous1
of its claims to control over men's affairs, their lives,
their thoughts, seemed at first to tower over all, and
aimed in fact at that absolute supremacy which the
Church of Hildebrand and Benedict VIII regarded as
the logical right of its divine authority. Beside it stood
the power of the kings. The barbaric tribes had origi-
nally no kings. The style was assumed by the war-
lords who led them in their conflicts with Rome and
raised their kingdoms on its ruins, in imitation of that
of its emperors. The Church sought to set up an actual
successor to the Roman emperors of the West, who,
as her mandatory and secular arm, should wield temporal
power over Christendom. But a strong central govern-
ment was impossible in barbaric Europe. The actual
temporal rulers were the feudal chiefs, dukes, counts,
barons, margraves, or whatever they might call them-
selves, among whom Europe was parcelled out into
domains varying in size from the few acres round their
castles to provinces as large as kingdoms; and who,
besides the actual possession of the soil, exercised
unrestrained arbitrary power over its inhabitants as their
villeins and serfs. The manner in which barbarism
was first broken by commerce with the civilization of
Islam, gave rise to a fourth form1 of power, that of
the traders, the power of money. They were enabled
to defy other powers, to wring charters from them, to

set up communes. Their example was followed every -

234

ELEMENTS OF EUROPE 235

where in Europe ; towns purchased home -rule for cash
from barons rendered penurious by their own devasta-
tions, by the crusades, from kings, from emperors. A
lively trade was driven in charters, to the intense disgust
and indignation of the more powerfulf-nobles and bishops,
who cried that the foundations of society were being
sapped by those " execrable inventions by which," in
the words of Abbot Guilb'ert of Nogent, " contrary to
law and justice, slaves withdrew from1 the obedience
which they owed to their masters."

The inevitable result of that multiplicity of rival
powers was a series of long and desperate conflicts
aniong them all . Popes and emperors, kings and priests,
feudal lords and kings, kings and emperors, communes,
barons and popes, all promptly flew at one another's
throats, covered Europe with pikes and battlements, and
filled its annals with battles and blood. Europe, though
it bled, profited by the quarrels of its masters ; all of
them "ggjTweakened . It was the obvious policy of each
to play off its less influential against its stronger rivals.
Thus the Church set up and consolidated the Lombard
communes against the emperors ; the emperors and
kings set up communes and bishoprics and abbots as
a check against the barons ; the English barons played
off the commons against the kings, and the kings in
turn played them off against the barons. The moneyed
burghers in general profited, and when at last they had
so waxed in power as to threaten and defy kings, nobles
and priests, they identified themselves with the power-
less, and called themselves * the people.*

But the contests and death -grapples of rival power-
holders gradually merged into a new situation. The
policy of combination and alliances among them gradu-
ally developed. At first the power of the central govern-
ment of the kings was extremely small. Dukes, counts
who were supposed to hold their lands of the king
as fiefs, ruled over far larger domains, flouted his
authority, and carried on predatory wars with their
neighbours on their own account, or joined with foreign
invaders, as it suited them. But the weaker lords
naturally appealed to the king for protection, and more

236 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

power gathered round him. It was found that, instead
of fighting private wars on one's own account, it was
quite as advantageous to lend one's serfs and vassals
to fight in the king's wars, and to share the spoils in the
form of royal favours and gifts ; hence the phrase * to
fight for king and country.' Henry VIII consolidated
Tudor despotism ;by giving his nobles the Church -lands
to loot. In France, in Spain the central power gradually
grew and extended by marriage -alliances, conquests and
purchases ; in England it had been unified by the
Norman Conquest-; Italy was kept fragmented by the
Balance of Power maintained by the Pope, and Germany
by the power of the elector princes and bishops. The
Church', having utterly weakened the terrible emperors
whom it had so thoughtlessly helped to set up, found
it to be to its interest to make common Cause and identify
itself with all kings. The advantage was mutual. The
kings received their crowns from1 priests and became
the anointed of Godi, the representatives of Divine power,
sacred persons that could do no wrong, answerable to
God only, and the people were taught the duty of
submission to the Divine Right of kingly power. Even
the burghers, after many desperate struggles against
other powers, found it advantageous to range themselves
on their side, and to make common cause with king and
noble and Church. In England, "this fastness built
by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand
of war ; This precious stone, set in the silver sea, Which
serves it in the office of a wall Against the envy of
less happier lands," large armies were unnecessary for
defensive purposes, and therefore expensive. For the
purposes of the king's offensive wars money had con-
stantly to be obtained, and the burghers who held the
purse had therefore to be treated with consideration.
The parliament of embarrassed and open-mouthed
burghers which Simon de Montfort, the son of the
leader of the Albigensian crusade, had set up against
the king, acquired extraordinary importance. England's
chief means of aggression, moreover, as well as of
defence, lay in a navy rather than in an army ; and
ships were chiefly the property of the trading class

ELEMENTS OF EUROPE 237

who, now that Vasco da Gama and Columbus had
changed the channels of the world's commerce, served
all interests as well as their own, by supplying the
Spaniards with slaves and relieving them of gold galleons,
and by building empires overseas. Thus the trading
classes of moneyed burghers rose to great power in
England, which accordingly became an exemplar of free
institutions to ' less happier lands.* The Industrial
Revolution of the eighteenth century and its develop-
ments further transformed the relation of power -holders.
The power of money, of capital, came to overshadow
and render more or less obsolete all other forms of
power. Theocratic power, kingly power, landed power,
military power, became to a large extent dependent
on the power of money. But they remained, never-
theless, extretnely useful adjuvants to it . Military power;
for example, would seem amid the enormous sources
of power developed by the ' arts of peace * the most
obsolete, serving no further purpose. XViars, in spite of
the popular axioms that ' there have always been wars/
that ' human nature, etc./ which our beatific ignorance
is taught to repeat, are a relatively recent invention in
the history of mankind. * Human nature ' has acquired
the habit as a means of acquiring property within the
last five thousand years or so ; it was unknown to
4 human nature ' during hundreds of thousands, of years,
and is still unknown to most primitive races. , But as
a matter of fact militarism was found to be a most
important ally of financial power, opening up new
markets, feeding vast industries, stimulating patriotism,
discipline, obedience, and all sorts of subtly and
essentially useful virtues. And so of all other forms
of power. The upshot of the process of development
through which Europe has passed, is that the extra-
ordinarily incongruous medley of rival powers which',
in its origin, struggled for mastery, tore one another
to pieces, turned Europe inta the cockpit of their
desperate rivalries and! conflicts, have come ta be
firmly united, bound1 fast together by a common
spirit, common thoughts, and common interests; throne,
altar, the sword, the pen, and the guinea, stand

238 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

firmly side by side in one huge, indissoluble Holy
Alliance.

A striking instance of that process is presented by
Germany. In no part of Europe has the conflict between
the various powers been more desperate and more pro-
longed. The power of the elective emperors was
jealously resisted and kept down by the popes ; that
of the territorial lords and bishops in whom the elective
rights were vested inevitably came to overshadow com-
pletely that of the nominal ruler. The emperor was
destitute of revenues ; Charles V's predecessor was
known as ' Maximilian the moneyless/ and the great
Charles himself was ever at a loss to cope with his penury.
Every rood of land of the imperial domains eventually
passed away in bribes to the Electors. The trading
cities of the Hansa threw off all allegiance to emperor
or territorial lords. Germany became ultimately frag-
mented by the incurable separatist tendencies of its
conditions, and ruined and devastated by the fierce-
ness of its conflicts. It was rent asunder by three
different religions. Every form of power, that of
emperor, priests, barons, and burghers became crippled
and exhausted by the perpetual conflicts between
them all.

Yet on the eve of Germany's fatal bid for ' Weltmacht
oder Nledergangj what do we find? All those powers
which for centuries had been engaged in a death -struggle
against one another are firmly united in the bonds of-
common ambitions and interests. The Kaiser, repre-
sentative of the mediaeval ideals of Divine Right and
empire, is at one with the Junkers, successors of the
Teutonic Knights and robber -barons ; the financial in-
terests, the Frankfort bankers, the Hamburg shipowners,
the industrialists, the Essen steel magnates, representa-
tives of the trading burghers, assisted and promoted by
Kaiser and militarists, make the aims and schemes of
the latter as much their own as court and camp ; even
the Vatican is not altogether unsuspected of having a
finger in the plot. So united have been all forms of
modern power in their aims and action, that it becomes
a matter of considerable difficulty to disentangle tbeir

ELEMENTS OF EUROPE 239

respective responsibilities, and to point beyond doubt
to the main culprit.

No sooner had the centralized power of kings become
sufficiently consolidated in their own domains than they
sought to overpower their neighbours and seize theirs.
To the class wars between orders of power, succeeded
the strife amongst the centralized powers themselves.
England, being, thanks to geography and the Norman
Conquest, the first to get consolidated, was accord-
ingly the first to attack its neighbours. The inhabitants of
France failed at first to perceive any distinction between
the aggression of one royal power-system against another
and the local wars of duke against duke, and king against
duke to which they were accustomed ; and they remained
as indifferent in the one case as in the other. It took
nearly a hundred years of English pillage and devastation
to rouse them against the nuisance, and for that senti-
ment to assume the form of patriotism and loyalty to
their king. No sooner had the English been swept out
of France than the French king, confirmed in turn in
his power, hastened to follow the example they had set,
and to start predatory wars on his own account, attack-
ing Naples and Milan on the pretext of precisely such a
title as that of the English king to the crown of France.
The Pope next bethought himself that he too would like
to capture a couple of towns and villages to which he
also had a ' title,' albeit a forged one, and set France,
the Emperor, Aragon, and the Italian princes route-
marching against Venice ; and, having secured his loot,
suggested that the allies should now turn, for want of
better to do, upon France. And so the dance went on
that never since has ceased. The personal duel to which
Francis I challenged the Emperor Charles unfortunately
never took place ; but they instead fought six wars, de-
vastated Italy, Artois, Navarre, and successfully, ruined
Spain and the Germanic Empire. For a share of the
disintegrating corpse of that empire, German and Austrian
princes, Dukes of Savoy, Sweden, Denmark, France,
scrambled for thirty years, killing two-thirds of its popu-
lation. The King of France, the chief profiter, continued
the plunder by seizing Alsace and Flanders, and laying

240 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

out picturesque ruins in the Palatinate. The settling of his
family in Madrid gave rise to a European war which
went on until every one was weary, and forgot what it
was about, except Marlborough, who protracted it in view
of commissions from the army-contra£tors ; it left the
map unchanged, and the chief profit to England of her
most glorious victories was the monopoly of the slave-
trade, which was secured to her by the Asiento Contract .
Frenchmen first became acquainted with Russian
moujiks on the Vistula, because Stanislas Lecszinski was
not persona grata with the Russian Czar and the Austrian
Emperor. In order to find an income for her children
Elizabeth of Parma, with the help of the gardener's son,
Alberoni, kept Europe on tenter-hooks for twelve years.
Another little family arrangement of the Austrian Emperor
Charles VI — for the sake of which he sold the trade of
Belgium to England who, in turn, bestowed Serbia on
Austria and Greece on Turkey at Passarowitz — started
a European war which lasted seven years. But the worst
evil which the blundering Charles VI inflicted upon
Europe was to save the life of Frederick Hohenzollern,
who was about to be shot by his father, and whose first
act was to attack and rob the daughter of his preserver.
She refused Sir Thomas Robinson's pressing offer to join
England and Prussia against France, and dried her
Silesian tears with a share of the loot of Poland. The
robber of Potsdam, assisted by English subsidies of money
and men, ran amuck, and kept Europe well occupied
while he created the German Empire, thus enabling his
English partner to create the British Empire.

The kings had called themselves ' England,'
' France,' ' Spain,' as our bishops call themselves
* Canterbury/ ' York,' ' Winchester.' More recently
Jo 'burg Jews have been known to call themselves
'England.' The issues of those contests corresponded
to no human cause or interest, whether ' racial ' or
•' national.* Race, as the term is used and abused, nations,
are but the product of the establishment of centralized
powers in Europe. At the outset, thanks to oecumenical
tradition of the Roman Empire and of the Church, Europe,
Christendom, was thought of as a single gozrwrmnity ;

ELEMENTS OF EUROPE 241

no portion of it was shut off from the rest, or grew in
isolation. Considering .the conditions of the e!arly Middle
Ages the closeness and extent of intercourse was remark-
able ; it was relatively closer and more extensive than
in our own times. Monks from Ireland and England
travelled and settled in Germany, France and Italy ;
Italian priests became archbishops of Canterbury and
chancellors of England, and an Englishman became
chancellor of Sicily ; an Irishman was the friend of
the Emperor and studied in Spain ; every Englishman
who cared about such education as was obtainable went
at least as far as the Paris schools ; the early univer-
sities in Paris, Bologna, Padua, Naples, Montpellier,
•Vienna, Oxford were divided into ' Nations * of
students gathered from1 every part of Europe ; French-
men swarmed in England, Spaniards travelled in Germany,
Germans in Spain. There was the closost constant inter-
course between the Norman courts of Winchester, Rouen
and Palermo ; between the courts of Barcelona and
Toulouse, of Carolingian Fran'ce and Germany, of Naples
and Vienna ; and between every country and the papal
court of Rome or Avignon. Merchants spent their lives
trudging backwards and forwards from Italy over the
Brenner Pass, through Switzerland and along the Rhine
to the Kansas and Flanders, and vice versa ; postal corre-
spondence was unsatisfactory, so people went themselves.
Priests, poets, students, and Jews wandered everywhere ;
pilgrims from Normandy or Ireland went to Rome, to
the Holy Land, to the shrines of Southern Italy. The
population of the eleventh, twelfth, arid thirteenth
centuries were far greater travellers, considering the
different conditions, than those of the age of railways.
That early unity only disappeared, and that intercourse
and cultural communion became more and more restricted
as the various centralized powers became stronger. The
* nations ' grouped about the consolidated thrones with-
drew more and more into themselves. The tendencies,
the ' self-determination ' of the peoples themselves, when-
ever they have been able to show them freely, have
in general been towards greater unity ; and we have had
Pan-German, Pan-Slavic, and Pan-Italian movements.

16

242 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

Only the sufferings of countries governed as conquered
dependencies, such as Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Ire-
land, have given rise to separatist tendencies, and to
the ideal of setting up house for themselves. European
wars took place between power- systems composed pf
agglomerations for the most part heterogeneous in regard
to race, language, and religion ; and were largely con-
ducted by means of hired mercenaries, or the troops
lent by allied powers. Charles VIII and Francis I fought
with Swiss and even with Turkish troops ; the Burgundian
Charles V sacked Rome with Spanish land German troops
led by a Frenchman ; the armies of Tilly, Wallenstein,
Maximilian, Mansfeld, Christian of Brunswick, Gustavus
Adolphus, which well-nigh blotted out civilization from
Central Europe, were composed of adventurers from every
country, *' raised out of the scum of the people by princes
who have no dominion over them," as Lord Chichester
wrote, who passed as occasion offered from one side to
the other, were paid and fed by plunder, and were more
dreaded by their 'friends' than by their 'foes.' The
Prussian army was founded by Frederick William' with
likely-looking fellows kidnapped by. his recruiting officers
from Scandinavia to Transylvania, from the Liffey to
the Niemen ; and of Frederick's armies in the Seven
Years' War and at Rossbach, where they defeated a
thoroughly German army, not one half were Prussians.
The Queen of Hungary defended herself with Italian
troops ; and England garrisoned Gibraltar, Minorca, and
India with Germans.

The domain of European civilization has been turned
into a cockpit for five centuries and more for reasons
which not a single group of its inhabitants cared two
straws about, or even comprehended. The wars of religion
are somewhat of a relief in the midst of dynastic wars.
Religious fanaticism is at least sincere ; it may be de-
plorable, but by the side of naked greed it is respectable.
But, as a matter of fact, the wars of religion were so
inextricably mixed with purely political motives, that the
religious fervour of the few was but a tool of the intrigues
and scrambles of rulers for possession and power. The
Protestant Hollanders called the Catholic French under

ELEMENTS OF EUROPE 243

the Duke of Anjou to their aid against Alexander Farnese.
In the ghastly Thirty Years' War " there is no trace,"
Gardiner justly sums up, " of mutual hostility between
the populations of the Catholic and Protestant districts
apart from their rulers." French soldiers whose
fathers had massacred the Huguenots and whose brothers
were engaged in putting them down, were sent by a
Cardinal to support the Lutherans against the Catholic
emperor.

What is called the * Political History ' of Europe
is not edifying. The Marquise du Chatelet said that '* she
could not overcome the disgust with which all modern
history since the fall of the Roman Empire inspired her."

In Greek history, though after the epic of the Persian
repulse it may seem to be taken up with the pettty
parochial politics, personalities, and protracted brawls
of two or three neighbouring villages, we see the play
of every contingency in the medium of the Greek mind,
in the exceptional light of that clear, free thought, with-
out disguise or distortion ; so that those parochialities,
and personalities, and village feuds assume the aspect of
general questions, and open out into universal thought ;
and every trifling and trivial detail becomes precious, and
its local dimensions are lost in bearings and interests
that are wide as humanity. Even at its very worst and
basest, when we come upon the crudest greeds and ugliest
instincts, as in the discussion in the Athenian ecclesia
on the fate of Mytilene, or in what is known as the Melian
dialogue in Thucydides, the arguments are brutally cynical,
but they are not lies ; they are not attempts to turn
black into white, to persuade into a state of self-
righteousness, to circumvent the mind in diplomatic
verbiage, in hypocrisy, to disguise and falsify thoughts.
We are not dealing with false values, but with
human facts. In the history of Rome we are ultimately
dealing with the most selfish motives of sordid greed.
But the exploitation of mankind as Jhe Romans understood
it, entailed the task of organizing mankind ; and their
mind was from the first penetrated ;with the principle

244 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

that the only means by KvhicK hiankind can be organized
is by fairness, equity, justice.

But the conflict of cupidities in the barbarian- born
world of Europe is uninformed by thought and 'unrelieved
by its organiznig power. Its baseness is, on the contrary,
made more vile by the abhorrent disguise of simulated
virtue, by the travesty of every purpose and every motive
in the hypocrisy of self-righteous and fulsome idealism.
Reared under the dominance of theocratic power -
thought which, however sincere, must needs clothe
all its aims in the terms of its ethical and spiritual
conventions, European society has from the first
been trained to give to every act and purpose the
garb of moral self -righteousness . Priests, often mere
barbarians raised to ecclesiastical offices by kings
and dukes, were the first ministers and diplomatists
of European States. To them fell the task of
translating into beseeming and unctuous language
the unscrupulous lusts and shameless treacheries of bar-
barian chieftains. Dissimulation and perjury were the
ordinary adjuvants of force. The traditions of European
statecraft grew up in an atmosphere of perfidy and
sanctimony. Of those arts of statecraft and diplomacy,
the Roman court caine to be the recognized mistress and
model. The task of keeping the petty Italian princi-'
palities divided among themselves, of warding off powerful
influences from the peninsula, of maintaining * the
Balance of Power/ in order to safeguard the couple of
provinces which the Popes claimed as their temporal
domain, developed craft, intrigue and deceit into a fine
art which became the atmosphere of Italian political
thought and its absorbing study and interest in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The nanie of
Machiavelli has come to be indissolubly linked with that
political ra'scality and unscrupulous fraudulence, and he
is, rather unjustly, branded as the originator of
pernicious doctrines of systematic depravity. But
the Prince is nothing more than a simple exposi-
tion of the ordinary accepted principles of political
action in the Italy of his day. The industrious
Florentine secretary would probably have been

ELEMENTS OF EUROPE 245

greatly astonished at being regarded as the theorist of
political perversity on the score of the journalistic task
he had undertaken of setting down the current approved
maxims of government. All European powers have, like
Frederick of Prussia, loudly disowned and denounced as
their scapegoat Machiavellian principles, and sedulously
practised them. Italian statecraft became the admired
model of governments. The heart of Louis XI so melted
with tender admiration for Francesco Sforza, the per-
fection of political rascality, that he refrained from
robbing him. Thomas Cromwell prided himself, in carry-
ing out the policies of Wolsey and Henry VIII, on
his Italian training, and carried the Prince in his
wallet. Women naturally became the competitors of
princes and prelates in the arts of mendacity ; Louise of
Savoy and Margaret of Austria showed at Cambrai equal
to any envoy in the arts of haggling and overreaching,
Catherine de Medici, to whose grandfather Machiavelli
had dedicated his manual, Mary Stuart, the pupil of the
Guises, were only surpassed by Elizabeth in the
tortuosities of deceit on which the latter so highly plumed
herself. The intricacies of crooked schemes, plots, in-
trigues, and machinations were to such a degree the
habitual means of political action that rulers became
actually blind whenever an obvious and straight means of
achieving their ends presented itself. W<hen, by the death
of Charles the Bold, the chief prize which the King of
France had for years schemed to obtain was ready, to
drop into his mouth, he lost Burgundy because the means
of obtaining it were so obvious that he devised instead
circuitous machinations. In the same manner, as
Bismarck declared, the most assured and insidious means
of dissimulation was to speak the truth. Historians have
long conceived it to be their chief function and en-
deavour to penetrate through the manifold palimpsest
of ostensible pretexts and intricate mendacities to the
actual purpose which the chief actors on the stage of
history had in view.

Thus have the traditions of European diplomacy and
politics been formed, that haute diplomatie, those sapient
webs of combinations and intrigues, that polished and

246 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

punctilious fraudulence, those cat's-paw schemes and
over -reaching mystifications, the felicitous^ phrasing of
* formulas ' that enable unavowable vileness to utter
itself in words, and convenient crime and cool atrocity
to be glossed over with simulated rectitude, that decorous
rascality that stinks in the grand manner, those oblique
and secret transactions of pilfering designers in which the
destinies of mankind are played away with loaded dice
—thus hitherto has the government of the human race
been constituted. In the year 1648 the Power-States
of anarchic Europe, exhausted, depopulated, ruined,
fatigued and unnerved by thirty years of the most de-
vastating of wars, sent their delegates to the first
European Peace Conference at Minister and Osnabruck,
that some -settlement ' might be effected. But even in
the extremity of universal need and suffering the dominant
anxiety of great and small wias not at all to ' settle '
anything, but to scramble for loot, for Naboth's vine-
yards, for ' satisfactions/ ' compensations/ ' indemni-
ties/ and to seek increase and profit out of the misery
of humanity.

Divested of those decent veils with which its nakedness
is customarily disguised by the reflections of power-
thought, the purview of European history appears to
be conducive to a Yahoo view of humanity. It may not
unnaturally be asked, * If the elements of the modern
world are so much baser than those of the civilization
it supplanted, what then becomes of our law of human
progress? '

There is, as a matter of fact, no aspect of history which
more brightly illuminates that law in all its splendour.
The truly sublime fact is that through all that name-
less slough of mire and sordidness there runs a trail
of growing light, a sight of the stars. It is no
ambiguous and debatable value sentimentally interpreted
into questionable history, but the precious adamantine
core of life that lies indestructible under all friable
incrustations of murk and clay. Not only has that
European world been the mediurq of human evolution,

ELEMENTS OF EUROPE 247

but the phase of that evolution which has issued thence
has transcended every foregoing phase. What neither the
free power of Greek thought nor the organizing skill
and ideals of Rome did, or could accomplish, has been
compassed by modern Europe. The powers of develop-
ment jand control of which individual man disposes have
not only been infinitely extended, but the task of their
adjustment in the organism of humanity has been ad-
vanced as never before. If our world stands to-day
quivering in anxiety and bewilderment before the issues
that confront it, that very distress and those doubts
are the signs of accomplished evolution ; and those issues
and the potentialities out of which they arise are such
as would to any previous age, could it have so much
as conceived them, have seemed the distant problems of
utopic speculation.

The phenomenon of that marvellous development is
wholly the outcome of the operation of rational thought.
The manner in which that operation has taken place will,
I trust, become clearer in the following pages. Before
considering it, we must, however, first note some of the
characters of the development of thought in modern
Europe .

Like its social state, the culture of Europe is a medley
of the most disparate and incongruous ingredients. If
our intellectual world is so sharply divided into a number
of separate realms of thought, a theological, a literary,
or rather three or four separate literary spheres,
philosophy, science, that is not, as might be assumed,
a natural division of the spheres of intellect grounded
in the nature of things, nor is it merely the exprean
sion of a convenient division of labour due to the
vastness of present knowledge. It is, on the con-
trary, a curious and peculiar anomsaly due to his-
torical causes, to the circumstances in which the
intellectual development of Europe has taken place.
Religion, literature, poetry, metaphysics, science, are not
in the nature of things separate realms of thought, having
incompatible standards and values and moods ; there
is but one order of standards and values of thought.

248 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

In no other culture have those sharp divisions existed.
The oriental priest, the Greek philosopher, the lover of
wisdom, regarded all knowledge and all art as their
province ; like them the Muslim sages were universalists
and joined the cultivation of astronomy to that of poetry,
of metaphysics to that of medicine and music. Whether
such universalism is now either needful or possible is
not the point. It is impossible, not so much because of
the expansion of our omne scibiley but rather because
we have practically three or four totally separate
cultures coexisting side by side, but in their essence
alien, unrelated, immiscible, differing not in their scope
alone, but in their standards and outlooks, influencing each
other, but only as might the cultures of different civili-
zations ; cultures which have grown along separate lines
without mixing, almost without meeting. We have
the vestige of the theocratic thought which once
controlled all thought, standing apart front every
other realm of the human mind, from historical thought,
from metaphysics, from science, from the currents of
educated thought, surviving in another universe. jWe have
an academic world, the offspring of Renaissance humanism,
beatifically repeating its formulas, living amid its
own peculiar likes and dislikes, and controlling what
we are pleased to term education, helping to keep secret
the fact that the world has moved since the fifteenth
century. We have somewhere or other a philosophical
world, whose function should be to unify all thought and
mould and guard its unity, but which, owing to its un-
fortunate development partly at the breast of theology,
partly in desperate \conflict with it, has proved wholly
abortive, a miserable misbirth, whose existence is not
certainly known in the living world. WJe have a world
of science that has grown in solitary seclusion and
isolation from all other culture, despised and abused ;
which has only compassed toleration and some measure
of influence through the circumstance that, as a by-
product of its activities, it has acted as the jinnee -slave
which has transformed the material world ; and it has
continued on the whole secluded, silent and alien to
surrounding thought. »We have a vast, billowing flood

ELEMENTS OF EUROPE 249

of popular literature, ephemeral press, fiction, pamphlets
and clap -trap, a literature which might be termed the
Literature of Ignorance,, whose first object is to get itself
printed and sold, •which lives accordingly by tickling and
pandering, and represents the mentality of the multitude
whose intellectual pabulum it provides. That condition
of our European culture with its water-tight compart-
ments, its theology ignoring philosophy and science and
literature ; its abortive philosophy ignorant of science ;
its science ignorant of philosophy and despising literature ;
its educational literature ignorant of everything save Greek
syntax and ' the wisdom of the ancients ' ; its general
literature ignorant of all else save the arts of the pimp
and the pander— that, I say, is not at all a natural state
of things but an abnormality, indeed a monstrous
deformity of our existing intellectual development.

If intermixture, variety, diversity of cultures and ideas
are beneficial and necessary, they are only so to the full
on condition that they become truly intermixed, unified,
assimilated into an harmonious whole. Greek assimi-
lation of all previous civilization was only so master-
fully successful because it absorbed and assimilated
them into a wonderfully homogeneous unity, filtered
through its critical attitude, stamped with the impress
of its own logical spirit. Our civilization, our intellectual
culture, rich as it is from the multitude of its component
elements and the variety of its experience, suffers pro-
foundly from the fundamental accident that those elements
have remained in a large measure unblended and ununified.
Our culture, our cultures, I should say, are unassimilated,
undigested. Our civilization has hence remained in its
structure heterogeneous, unbalanced, disorderly, unequal,
lacking equilibrium to such an extent that its elements
and principles are constantly toppling down over one
another in the confusion of inconsistency.

At the outset, as we saw, the .world of theological
thought was supreme. The Scriptures, or the Fathers
were the sole admissible source -of ideas, of thought,
of knowledge. The attitude of the European mind
was that ascribed to 'Amr in the doubtful anecdote
of the destruction of the Alexandrian library : " That

250 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

knowledge which is already contained in the Kuran is
superfluous, that which conflicts with it is false." From
that fatal situation Europe has been saved by the power
of the secular civilization of Greece and Rome. The
exclusion of secular thought could not be maintained
against that influence ; secular thought, often in conflict
with, often crippled by theological thought, could not
be kept out ; it made the development of Europe
possible .

But that development, in its mental aspect, differed
totally from that of the ancient world. Secularism did
not supplant the original theocratic thought, but grew
alongside it in strained adaptation and conflict. An
entirely new element, moreover, entered the European
mind, setting a difference between it and all previous
thought .

With the effects of that new element, quite foreign
to classical culture — the scientific spirit — we are, in
their grosser aspects, tritely familiar. The expansion
by its means of European civilization to the four
quarters of the globe, the complete transformation of
its material aspects, the rise of industrialism, the conse-
quent redistribution of alj. powers, the multiplication
of the means of intercommunication and the ensuing
dissemination of thought, are results as commonplace
in their obviousness as they are gigantic in their
significance. Scarcely less so is the transformation by
science of man's ideas, the revelation of the universe
and of man's and his world's place within it, the con-
ceptions of natural law, of the conservation of energy,
of evolution, which have transmuted the outlooks of
the human mind, and sapped, as no other power could,
the foundations of all power-thought and authority.

But the action of that new influence cuts even deeper
and more subtly into the very nature of the European
mind and of its growth. >W3ien experimental research,
the investigation of nature by the observation of details
and exact measurement, when mathematical analysis,
and also scholastic disputation fine-spun on the web1 of
Aristotelian dialectic, began, at the very dawn of its
awakening from the night of the dark centuries, to

ELEMENTS OF EUROPE 251

occupy the mind of Europe, a new form, a new turn
was given to it which radically distinguished it from
the mentality of the Grseco-Roman world.

The nature of that difference in the character of
human thought is perhaps best illustrated by reference
to the highest and more subtle forms of its activity,
to the conceptions of pnilosophical thought. (With the
Greeks philosophical thought, founding itself on a very
slender and perfunctory analysis and investigation of
experience, aimed primarily and directly at an inter-
pretation of the world, at the construction of a complete
and harmonious conception of the universe that
should furnish a rounded -off outlook satisfying in the
symmetry of its finished outline. The refinements of
logical and dialectical thought had for their object to
secure and test that harmony and consistency of
the various parts of such a system with one another,,
a task which was performed by the thinkers of Greece
with an acuteness which has forestalled almost every
subsequent path of thought. During1 the Middle Ages
any such attempt at interpretation of the world was,
of course, precluded by the veto of dogma. Scholastic
thought, confined within the limits of that postulated
interpretation, employed itself with the discussion of
separate aspects and questions, 'which', owing to the
large infusion of Hellenistic and Neoplatonic doctrine
in the Christian theology, offered ample scope for such
exercise ; it considered also the criterion of authority
upon which those various aspects and parts of dogma
rested.

The first thinker who in the new Europe anslwers
to the appellation of philosopher, Rene* Descartes, was
an ardent student of the new world and methods of
science which were just then disengaging themselves
from the husks of Aristotelianism in the Paduan school ;
an original investigator in anatomy and physiology,
an expert mathematician whose progress in analytical
geometry led the way from the tentative efforts of Kepler
and Cavalieri to the calculus of Leibnitz and Newton ;
and so deeply interested in the Copernican doctrine that
he had written a work upon the subject which he,

252 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

however, destroyed in dismay on hearing of the impeach-
ment of Galilei. The way in which the tasks of
philosophical thought presented themselves -to the first
European philosopher at once marks the deep-set, radical
contrast between modern and Greek thought. * On
coming to examine the various things which I had
been taught and supposed I knew,' Descartes said,
' I found that, in truth, I could not be said to
know any of them; that my information and my views
had been taken on trust and that I had no guarantee
of their accuracy and validity. Finding that no single
item of my supposed knowledge could stand the test
of critical examination, I resolved to reject and discard
it altogether, and to start again from the beginning
to endeavour to discover what things I could1 regard
as really known. I decided, therefore, not to accept
any truth whatsoever unless I had thoroughly satisfied
myself of its validity, and saw it beyond doubt quite
clearly and distinctly.' That conception of the task
of philosophical thought differs completely from that
of the ancients. No longer to build up a rounded
and complete system of the universe presenting at all
cost a purview of harmonious contemplation, was the
object of the thinker, but to assure himself of the
validity, of the legitimate nature of whatever know-
ledge he, in the process of thought, was called upon
to use; to test the value of his currency, to cast
aside all such coins of the mind as did not give the
sterling ring of solid worth; not to be constructive
but critical. That in the development of his thoughts
Descartes fell far short of the rules and principles he
had set himself, is of no essential relevance. Of
immeasurably greater importance even than any products
and results of thought is the desire that animates
it, its aim, its method. Always and everywhere it is
not between Truth an!d Error in the fruits of thought
that the essential conflict, the ^ significant contrast lies,
but between the truth and error in the aim of thought,
in the nature of its sanctions and validities.

The aim of philosophical activity, then, with Descartes
and with the European thinkers, Locke, Berkeley,

ELEMENTS OF EUROPE 253

Hume, Kant, who succeed him, is no longer, as with'
the ancients, satisfying harmony, beauty, interpretative
completeness, but accuracy of thought. The function of
philosophy is not to construct, but to test.

Philosophy, metaphysics are, we have made up our
minds to consider, remote and detached backwaters of
the human world. It is hardly to those dusty volumes
on the top shelves that the throbbing life, the excite-
ments and events, the political, the social developments
of Europe are to be traced. In what measure the
vogue of Cartesian philosophy, the academic enthusi-
asms and controversies of Dutch universities, of Paris
and Oxford, the gushing dilettantism of fine gentlemen
and fine ladies, of my lord van Zuitlichen, of Elizabeth,
Princess Palatine, or Queen Christina of Sweden, have
had any bearing on the world's course; in what measure
all philosophical ideas percolating downwards through
all the strata of thought, may tinge and perfuse even
the thought of the street to Which philosophy and
philosophers are unheard-of exotics, it is not need-
ful to discuss here. Philosophical thought, if it
is not the source and guide, philosophers, if they
are not the leaders, are at least, like all else, the
expression and the product of the times, the index of
their moods and characters.

What has been illustrated by reference to philosophic
thought is distinctive of all European as contrasted
with foregoing thought. The conditions in which it
has formed and developed have stamped upon it that
critical, questioning, testing character which has marked
every tendency of its growth and expansion. From its
dogmatic cradle where only the relative authority of
authorities was in dispute, through' the various stages
of its liberation from authority, of its secularization, to
the growing challenge it casts, as secular thought, to
all sanctions, the progressive accentuation of that
critical attitude is evinced. Follow and compare,
for instance, in one train of thought the attitude
of mind in, say, Augustine or Aquinas with that
of Hooker, and that again with what it has become
in Hobbes, and from Hobbes to Montesquieu, from

254 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

Montesquieu to Mill or Bentham, arid; from th'em to tHe
same train of thought as it presents itself to-day. What
successive metamorphic changes in the character of
thought, no less startling; than any transmutation of
species ! Throughout the modern period the spirit that
manifests itself in whatsoever sphere of mental attitude
is the same. Ultimately it proceeds towards* a challenge
to every existing! fact and estimate to justify 'itself
on rational grounds. By degrees every consecrated;
opinion, every theory, every foregone judgtnent, every
venerable institution is brought to question. The tabu
of traditional, inviolable, unquestionable and un-
questioned sacredness and * taking for granted ' has
been ruthlessly torn from every established power,
institution, opinion and conception . ' 1%>on what title
does this thing rest, that power stand? Up^ what sanc-
tion is that fact assumed, that belief held, that custom
acknowledged, that notion accepted, that claim advanced,
that estimate founded? If it can give an account of
itself, in clear terms of reason, Well and good.. But if it
can put forward no better title than venerable antiquity,
established use and1 Wont, ancient tradition, hitherto; un-
disputed acceptance and sanctity, it has no claim to
our deference. Immemorial recognition constitutes in
itself no title. Can it justify itself rationally to-day?
Would we on apprehensible rational grounds accept the
estimate to-day, would we choose that as the best
possible way of managing the matter, or could we
devise a better? If the thing" is! rationally acceptable,
it matters not whether it be new or old, if it be not
rationally acceptable its age and origin likewise are
irrelevant. Mere custom, mere undisturbed reputation
of inviolable sanctity, have nothing' to do with the case,
constitute no claim, no title, and no sanction.' Such
is the spirit in which the modern age has faced the
order of established thing's in the human world, whether
astronomical view's or religious opinions, political institu-
tions or moral estimates, thoughts or things,, theories
or privileges. Step by step it has thrown its
challenge to every assumption however old, immemorially
consecrated, however axiomatically acceptec}; The scope

ELEMENTS OF EUROPE 255

of the critical process Has extended from century to
century and from decade to decade; that, which
remained tabu to the iconoclastic examination of the
seventeenth century Was traduced before the tribunal
of the eighteenth, that which was indulgently taken
for granted by; the criticism of the eighteenth century
was impeached' by the nineteenth; until there is not a
principle or a human fact, however deeply rooted in
the very constitution of the race, or] hedged with the
halo of immemorial inviolability that is not to-day
dragged before the bar of free inquiry, examination and
discussion.

In what manner European development has, in its
structure and inmost worth', been determined by that
character of U^ught, it will bo the purpose of the
following c^f>ters to elucidate.

PART III
EVOLUTION OF MORAL ORDER

17

CHAPTER I

MORAL LAW AS 'LAW OF NATURE'

I

MEANING OF THE SUPREMACY OF ETHICS

THAT the world of material wonder which the one-
time troglodyte has built him, that his mansions of
knowledge and stately pleasure- houses of art and ease,
are conquests of the cunning quality of his mind's
power, is manifest beyond serious doubt or dispute.
But all those things, the material side of human progress,
the improvements in life's resources and comforts,
industry, commerce, arts, culture, intellectual growth,
are, many will be prompt to exclaim, but husks and
externals. They constitute indeed the vaunted triumphs
of ' civilization,' of ' progress ' ; but precisely on that
account there are those who scoff at those conceptions
as hollow delusions. Humanity does not necessarily
stand upon a higher plane of being when riding above
the clouds, nor does a hundred miles an hour consti-
tute progress ; man is not even intrinsically transformed
by being able to weigh the stars and disport his mind
over wider spheres of knowledge. There is a deeper
aspect of human affairs. There is something Which
stands nearer to the essence of human worth than any
form of material or intellectual power, than the control
of nature or the development of the mind's insight.
Power, civilization, culture count for nought if they
are associated with moral evil. The real standard by
which the worth of the human world is to be truly
computed is a moral standard. It is in an ethical
sense that the word ' good ' bears its essential meaning
when applied to things human; and no process x>f
human evolution can be counted real which is not above
all an evolution in 'goodness/

359

260 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

The customary traditional grounds from which" such
a judgment proceeds may be more than disputable.
The judgment itself is, strange to say, correct. The
ethical criterion is supreme. It stands as the measure
of human development and its achievements paramount
over all other values.

Our confidence and assurance in the foundations of
our moral judgments are nowadays sorely shaken. The
* categorical imperative ' no longer carries conviction.
kWe look round* in vain for some solid peg of fact
whereon to hang those colossally sanctified ideas of right,
of righteousness. In * nature ' we seem to see none ;
nature is cruel and cold; ** the gods," as Heracleitos
long ago used to say, " are beyond good and evil.*'
In the whole universe no trace of this colossal thing,
this supreme morality, is discernible; look as we may
we can discover! among the laws of nature no trace
of this 'moral law.' Only in the traditions of men
can we find it, uncertainly formulated, variously re-edited
according to time and latitude. It is, we are driven
to conclude, but a man-made convention ; not a law
of nature, and something sacrosanct and Wonderful, but
at most a police by-law, as ' sacred ' and no more
as yonder notice that warns us that ' Trespassers will
be prosecuted.'

How conies it, then, to have usurped such an out-
rageously large place in human thought, in human
life? For many illegitimate reasons, doubtless. But
also and above all for a very legitimate and real
reason . That ' moral law ' is, in fact, after all, a law
of nature. That ' supremacy of ethics ' does correspond
in truth to a very real and supremely important fact in
human development.

And that fact is the one which we ^have already
noted : that the peculiar means and conditions of human
development necessitate that that development shall take
place not by way of individuals, but by way of the
entire human race ; that the grade of evolution of each
individual is the resultant of that oecumenical develop-
ment ; that the race alone is the bearer of the hereditary
transmission of the products of that evolution ; that the

SUPREMACY OF ETHICS 261

task necessarily imposed upon man by the conditions of
his evolution is the creation of a new organism, that
of humanity ; that the development of his individual
powers can only take place in relation to that larger
organism ; that it is rigorously conditioned by that
necessity and must, as an indispensable pre-requisite,
be adjusted to it; that by that task, in its difficulty
and magnitude, all other issues of human development
are overshadowed.

The making of humanity 1 that is the burden of man's
evolution. And that is the solid, nay, somewhat hard
fact, of which the ' moral law ' is the vaguely conscious
expression. It is no throbbing impulse of altruism, no
inspiration of generosity for its own sake, but a heavy
weight of necessity laid upon man's development by
the unbending conditions that govern it. And the
supremacy, the paramount character of morality corre-
sponds to the overshadowing magnitude of the evolu-
tionary task which it expresses, and of the difficulties
that beset it. The questions and problems comprised
under the terms * ethics ' and ' morality ' are no other
than the problems arising from that task. The necessity
of ethical considerations is no other than the hard
necessity of adaptation to facts as they are. There are
in the relations between man and man conditions which
are, and others which are not adapted to actual facts.
The unadapted result in failure, the adapted in evolu-
tionary growth and life.

Man by the* law of his development seeks power
over his fellows. But now the peculiar human situation
arises. The exploited competitor is a fellow-man, an
element in the, human world. The inevitable conse-
quence of that situation is that the condition of the
exploited reacts upon the exploiter himself. The
exploiter can only wield power over his competitor at
the expense of his own evolutionary power and of that
of the race.

The necessary concomitant of power exercised by
man over man is power -thought ; and nowhere is the
falsification of power-thought more profound than in
the sphere of ethical values. The most important

262 THE MAKING OF^ HUMANITY

product of power-thought consists precisely in false
values, in false ethical systems. Man's world is thereby
falsified in regard to the most essential and vital aspects
of his evolution. That evolution is inevitably vitiated
at its very source.

In the case of the individual himself the nemesis
is unfortunately not strikingly and immediately con-
spicuous. It is no less real, because his whole develop-
ment, his ideals, his values are falsified and debased;
they cannot be the full quality of life's highest values.
But that real life does not exhibit the ideal retribution,
the poetic justice which was once the commonplace of
dramatist and novelist, that wickedness is not punished,
nor virtue rewarded, that, on the contrary, injustice,
fraud, oppression do commonly triumph in exultant
enjoyment of the fruits of their assault upon right,
and that right goes unrighted to the end, has become
in turn a platitude. What really happens is that the
phase of society, the order of things in which
disregard of right is habitual and accepted, inevitably
deteriorates and perishes. However much the individual
may temporarily benefit by iniquity, the social organism
of which he is a part, and the very class which! enjoys
the fruits of that iniquity, suffer inevitable deteriora-
tion through its operation. They are unadapted to the
facts of their environment. The wages of sin is death,
by the inevitable operation of natural selection.

The ineludible fact is that recognition of the real
conditions of his environment and conformity with them
is the sole means of development and of real power of
which man disposes. If he chooses to set aside the
powers and conditions of human evolution, and to rely
instead upon force and false doctrine, upon bludgeons,
and intellectual and moral chloroform, the result must
correspond to the means — it is not evolution, it is not
development of human power, it is not progress. If
he abdicates the only means of human power and adopts
those of brute power, his progress is not towards human
power, but backwards, towards brutality.

Nietzsche, having perceived the invalidity and
anarchy of current ethical notions, concluded that the

SUPREMACY OF ETHICS 263

only principle having any real basis in natural facts is
the exercise and development of human power. That
is quite true; all human evolution is the development
of man's powers of control over the conditions of his
life. But the peculiarity arising out of those conditions
is this : from the moment that the ' will to power '
of the individual seeks to realize itself at the expense
and to the detriment of others, it defeats the very object
for which it strives. All the enormous power which
humanity has developed and created has been attained by,
checking the encroachments of individual power; all
the encroachments of individual power in the history
of mankind have had the effect of checking the actual
development of human power. The power of the
average man to-day is absolutely and beyond all com-
parison greater than the power of Alexander the Great,
of Caesar, even of Napoleon. He has actually more
material, intellectual, and spiritual forces at his command
and under his control than the ' masters of the world '
in bygone days. His life can in every sense, except
that of actual despotic domination over his fellows, be
a fuller, richer, and more powerful life; and he can,
in point of fact, obtain very much more effective service
from his fellows than it was ever in the power
of any despot to obtain. And that prodigious in-
crease in power has been obtained precisely at the
expense of the old power of individual domination. In
proportion as that futile and sterile power has been
abridged and rendered impossible, the real substantial
power of individual man has increased. A world of
masters perfectly and completely dominating a multitude
of slaves would be a world of complete stagnation,
shorn of the power of evolution, fatally and utterly
emasculated. It would lead, as I have said, not towards
Superman, but towards Caliban man. If such a world
had been completely realized in the Stone Age, the
result would be that we should still be in the Stone
Age. The advantage to the ' masters ' would be some-
what questionable. If in the early sixteenth century
the pupils of Machiavelli had succeeded in permanently
establishing their power on Nietzschean principles, we

264 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

should be still in the early sixteenth century; or rather
we should be in the condition in which Spain was under
Carlos II as a result of the perfectly ' successful '
application of those principles, when it was the proud
boast of her rulers that there was not a single heretic
or a single, disloyal person in the realm; when in
the midst of a desolate and depopulated country, sunk
to the lowest depths of abject misery and degradation
which ^.ny land] once civilized has ever touched, the
imbecile king himself was unable to obtain a sufficiency
of food. Such are the ultimate fruits of power.1,

'The moral law is a law of nature. Like every,
other law governing living organisms, it is a condi-
tion of adaptation to facts. Unlike a physical law,
it can be transgressed ; but it is transgressed only at
the peril of the race, at the sacrifice of its most
intimate and vital interests, at the sacrifice of its
evolution. Justice is; the condition of human adapta-
tion to the facts of human life. It is not merely
a demand of self-interest, a cry of the weak; -for
protection; it is the call of the paramount interests
of the race, it is an expression of that i spirit, of that
agency which actuates its evolution. And it is as imuch
a rational aim, that is, one corresponding to the demands
of existing facts, as is that of any human device for
the better control of the conditions of existence.

II
MORAL AND MATERIAL PROGRESS

iWith the notion of an innate moral sense and
categorical imperative went the incredible delusion that
no essential progress has taken place in the moral sphere,

MORAL PROGRESS 265

that the principles of right and wrong became obvious
long ago, and have remained immutable. That delusion
is due in part to the circumstance that moral injunc-
tions are indefinitely elastic. As long as there have
been any moral notions at all, some such law has been
recognized as ' One ought to be good ' ; and it might
be alleged that nothing essential has ever been added
to it. But within the terms of such a sentiment is, of
course, included every possible type of ethical standard
from that of the primitive Hebrew and the Thug, to
that of Plato and of modern man; and the worst
atrocities which the world has seen have been committed
by men who were intent on being * good.' The moral
principle that it is wrong to commit murder is doubtless
very old. But in early Judaea to sacrifice the first-
born was not murder ; in the seventeenth century ' not
to suffer a witch to live ' was not murder ; in the
twentieth century war is not murder. The moral precept
that it is wrong to steal is ancient; but it has always
been held glorious for military states to steal from
one another, and right and proper for every powerful
class to steal from those below it; and doubt still
exists in the minds of some as to whether the present
social order is not founded on legalized theft. Every
ethical principle has been hel;d at first to be applicable
and valid only within a certain restricted sphere, while
in other cases its direct contravention has been regarded
as not only permissible, but right and laudable; just
as the virtue of religious toleration, when first dis-
covered, was as a matter of course assumed to be
wholly inapplicable to non-Christians. Abstract precepts
are of very little significance in the ethical history ;
of mankind; it is their concrete interpretation which1
has varied. The mere utterance and iteration of moral
platitudes is almost entirely irrelevant as an index or
factor of moral evolution. People uttered the same
unctuous moralities in the thirteenth century as they
do to-day, and were quite as blind to the actual
enormities around them as dealers in copy-book maxims
are to-day to the patent immoralities which stare them
in the face. Facts, not fine maxims, are the measure

266 THE MAKING OP HUMANITY

of moral evolution. Principles are of significance only
when they are new, when they are genuine moral
discoveries traversing the current and accepted codes,
and therefore representing a real mental awakening.

Justice has been preached in the name of tyranny,
liberty in that of oppression, and men holding the1 Gospel
in one hand, have with the other put Europe to the
sword, just as theologians have been known to
express dissatisfaction with the conclusiveness of mathe-
matical reasoning, and Italian priests to condemn super-
stition. Moralists have done comparatively little for
morality. Its progress has been promoted by quite
other agencies, unconnected in appearance and in name

!with professed morality. Morality has been thought to
remain stationary because whenever it has advanced
1 it has been called by some other name.

Moral ideas and v; morality, it is to-day pretty generally
recognized, show change and advance, are aspects of
evolution and of progress in at least the same degree
as material development, intellectual progress, know-
ledge, or any other face of human growth. But, while
it may without difficulty be admitted that other
aspects of progress are the result of rational thought,
that view will be pronounced preposterous when applied
to moral evolution. It is, on the contrary, commonly
held that moral excellence is totally distinct in its
nature and in its sources from any form of intel-
lectual development. It is assumed as an axiom that
the two things, moral excellence and intellectual
development, are wholly unrelated ; that the one
can develop independently of the other ; that a
society may be rich in the products of the intellect
and poor in morality, or rude in point of civilization
and culture and exalted from the point of view of
ethics ; that there exists no direct connection between
the two orders of qualities. There is even a widely,
diffused notion that they are directly antagonistic, that
moral excellence goes with a lowly intellectual state,
that high culture and intellectual development corrupt
it,xthat advanced civilization is generally unfavourable

MORAL PROGRESS 267

to it, and that it is chiefly to be found in the poor in.
mind, and in simple, primitive and unsophisticated phases
of society.

Those views are, I maintain, utterly erroneous.
Ethical development, like every other aspect of human
progress, not only goes hand in hand with the growth
and diffusion of rational thought, but is the direct out-
come of it.

The fact too glaring to be ignored or effectively
disputed that during the modern age, in spite of the
continuous decay of every commonly accepted sanction
of morality, the sensitiveness of moral judgment has
at the same time grown keener than ever before, has
proved disconcerting to the upholders of those long
current theories upon which whole systems of thought
have been based. Marked by an unprecedented growth
of rational thought, by the strenuous extension of the
critical spirit to every sphere, by the boldness with
which every categorical assumption has been challenged,
the last three centuries have witnessed the continuous
growth of scepticism, not merely in regard to the dogmas
of religions, but also in regard to all things which fail
to furnish a clear rational account of themselves. To-
day not only are dogmatic faiths in a state of dissolution,
but every traditional sanction and standard of morality
is being subjected to the most unsparing criticism. Con-
fusion, doubt, and indecision reign wherever direct denial
does not altogether repudiate the old foundations and
norms of moral conduct. And yet, in spite of the
uncertainty attaching to all phases of transition, there
never was, not by many degrees, an age so moral, in
the fullest and truest sense of the term, as the present.
Whatever indictment can be brought against it, it is
certain that the appeal of sentiments of justice, fairness,
humanity, has never been so powerful and so general.
Never was sensitiveness to wrong, oppression, injustice,
so keen ; never was the conscience of society wherever
suffering, evil, abuse exist so lively and susceptible.
Injustice, abuses, crime, and vice, exist to-day as they
have done in former ages, but never have they stood

268 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

so universally arraigned and condemned at the bar of
public opinion. The claims of right and righteousness,
of high and earnest standards of life and conduct, have
never been, even in the most puritanical communities,
so strongly felt. All existing evil, however gross, is
conscious as it never was before of the force of repro-
bating moral opinion. Even the strongest promptings
of individual and class interest dare not openly profess
indifference to any form of oppression, suffering and
dissoluteness .

And more [truly and more clearly than in any sentiment
or opinion, the ethical development of the age is mani-
fested in the concrete facts of human relations. We
frequently contrast the material marvels of our present
civilization, our network of railways and swift steamships,
our telegraphs and ethergraphs, our electric light and
power, our automobiles and aeroplanes, the abolishing
of distance, the wonders of industry, the contrivances
and comforts of our daily life, with the material civili-
zation of Europe, say, a hundred and fifty years ago.-
But the contrast between the greatest marvels of modern
machinery, and the lumbering conveyances, the guttering
candles, the filthy streets, the distaffs and looms, the
crude hand implements of the eighteenth century, is
not so great as that between the common notions and
practices of justice and humanity at the present dav(
and those which obtained in Europe even at that not
very distant period. The slave-trade Was , in full swing ;
hundreds of slave-ships sailed from Liverpool ; petty
larceners were sold to the American colonies at five
shillings a head ; public executions at Tyburn, the
victims often being women convicted of shoplifting,
offered frequent occasions for popular festivities ;
publishers of heretical books were placed in the
pillory at Charing Cross, at Temple Bar, at the Royal
Exchange, and were handed over to the populace to
be pelted and stoned ; press-gangs scoured the country,
men were seized in the street, in their homes, at their,
weddings, and sent in chains to the King's or the
India Company's navy ; women and children worked,
half -naked in coalmines ; coalminers and salt -workers

MORAL PROGRESS 269

in Scotland were legality in the position of predial slaves ;
the cockpit and the prize-ring offered to English gentle-
men their daily amusement ; the English government
under the elder Pitt issued letters of marque to privateers
to plunder the shipping of Holland while it was at
peace with that country. On the Continent the state
of things was even worse, the feudal system and all
its abuses were in force, the rack and the boot were
at work in Paris, lettres de cachet were issued,
every product of independent thought was visited upon
its author with persecution, the galleys were full, the
Inquisition sat in Spain, and autos-da-fe were still'alight.
Those revolting conditions, which we have so com-
pletely outgrown that we are no longer able to conceive
them distinctly, were those of comparatively recent
times ; and they stand, I say, in far more complete
contrast with the conditions of civilized European coun-
tries to-day, than does a modern express train to the
stage-coaches in which our grandfathers journeyed. And
that enormous ethical development has gone hand in
hand with the decay of all the influences which have i
been credited with fostering the moral sense, and with ,
the operation of all the critical and rational forces
which have been supposed to be unfavourable to its
high development. But in truth that moral progress
is connected with the critical attitude of the modern
age, not accidentally and circumstantially, but as directly
as are its scientific discoveries and its mechanical ,
achievements. Both changes, the material change and ;
the moral change, are the effects of the same cause.
The abolition of the horrors of feudalism, the abolition
of gross iniquity and inhumanity, are as much results
of the critical attitude of rationalism as is the abolition
of the Ptolemaic system or that of the degeneration
theory. That intolerance of abuse and wrong, that
imperative insistence upon justice and humanity which
place the present age, from a moral standpoint, above
all its predecessors, are the direct products of the same
intellectual processes which have given us the steam-
engine and the dynamo,

270 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY .

Ill

POWER AND JUSTICE

The ethical spirit of the modern age, it must be
aoted, is above all characterized by the ideas of justice,
fairness, fair -play, rather than by those of abnegation,
self-sacrifice, and emotional sentiments, which marked
the morality of religious periods.

Now in the first place, the practice and attitude of
justice is essentially a matter of exact judgment. Tfee
attitude of fairness, the judicial attitude, which requires
all relevant circumstances to be taken into cognizance,
every case to be regarded objectively, the elimination
of all preconception and prejudice, the minimizing of
the personal equation, is precisely the mental attitude
which critical judgment demands. The judicial mind
is the essential qualification of the scientist, no less
than of the judge. The man to whom we turn when
looking for fair dealing, fearless rectitude and impartial
judgment, is he whom we deem capable of taking a
broad, unbiased, a well-informed, and logical view of
the case, the man who will not be swayed by pre-
conceived impressions, carried away by impulse, blinded
by custom and tradition, ruled by emotions. They are
qualities of the intellect, both in regard to fullness of
adequate knowledge, and to critical and discriminating
use of it ; they are qualities which constitute intellectual
honesty and competence ; they are the essential and
fundamental conditions of rational thought.

But the connection is, we shall see, still closer. A
postulate lies at the foundation of all notions of justice :
the equal claim of all individuals. But that postulate,
though affirmative in form, really embodies a series of
negations. It rests upon the repudiation of all claims
to privileged conduct and privileged dealing. Those
claims can produce no other title to recognition than
traditions, consolidated assumptions, established power,
claims which are utterly incapable of bearing the test
of critical examination, which cannot make good their
pretensions on the ground of Rational sanction. It has
been as a direct result of the growth of the critical

JUSTICE 271

spirit that such irrational claims have been attacked
and repudiated. It has been as a consequence of that
critical repudiation that the ideal of equality of rights
has been established ; and it is upon that affirmation
and that repudiation that the modern spirit of justice
and all its ethical consequences are founded.

Considered abstractly and isolatedly an individual has
no rights. A right presupposes a contract ; and there
exists no formal or tacit contract establishing any of
the claims advanced in relation to life, liberty of conduct,
of thought or speech, property, or any other demand
made on the social organization by individuals or classes
in the name of right and justice. The affirmation of
the rights of man is pure unsupported fiction and dog-
matic assertion. Right only exists as a correlative of
wrong. Apart from the circumstance that there are
wrongdoers, the notion of individual right is devoid of
meaning. It is because there have been men who have
used their power to do violence, to oppress and exploit
others, because there have been murderers, robbers,
despoilers, extorters, compelling their fellow-men into
slavery, appropriating their labour, crushing their lives
and their minds, that the notion of ' the rights of man '
has arisen, the rights, namely, not to be murdered,
robbed, exploited, crushed. The right of the individual
is simply the right not to be wronged. Hence it is
that all ethical law, in its primary and primitive form
at least, is negative : ' Thou shalt not . . .' The.
affirmation of human right is in truth the denial of the
title to inflict wrong. It is quite true, as Nietzsche
tells us, that ethic, morality, originates with the weak,
that is, with the oppressed. It is protective, protestive.
* Thou shalt not . . .' means * Thou shalt not injure
me.' Manifestly it could never have originated with
the oppressor himself, as a protest against his own action,
as ' I shall not . . .' It is the expression of wrongs
suffered by the weak at the hands of the strong ; it is
the protest of the oppressed against the powerful. The
oppressed weak are always morally in the right. When
they protest against power, they are protesting against
moral wrong : when they defend their interests, their

272 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

concrete ' rights/ they are defending moral Right,
righteousness. Their interests and those of abstract
morality necessarily coincide. From the nature of the
case rebels are always right. Kings were right against
pope and elnperor ; barons and priests were right against
kings ; the middle class were right against barons and
priests ; the proletarians are right against the middle
class. The weaker are morally right.

And the powerful are always morally wrong.
Primarily power and wrong are coextensive. All
power wielded by man over man is an aggression. That
power, the object of human competition, seeks the profit
of the strong at the cost of the weak ; all power
encroaches on equity, is unjust, oppressive. Even when
expedient as an administrative function, or necessary
as guidance and protection, or beneficial and blessed as
leadership, power, of its own nature, inevitably tends
and turns to abuse and oppression.

It has long been discovered that absolute power is
intrinsically bad, no matter who exercises it. The Eng-
lish came to perceive very definitely that to give absolute
power to a saint would mean throwing open the gates
of hell. Absolute power has been abolished not because
rulers are bad men, but because absolute power is
necessarily bad. Lord Acton well said, " Power tends
to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great
men (meaning powerful men) are almost always bad
men, even when they exercise influence and not authority^
still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty
of corruption by authority." In English history there
is scarcely a sovereign from William I to George I
who, tried on the count of murder alone by the same
standards as common delinquents, would have escaped
the gallows.

It is not at all a question of deliberately abusing
power, of ' yielding to the temptations of power/ it is
not a question of 'wickedness.' It is an inevitable
consequence of the fact that power -thought is inseparable
from the exercise of power, that the mind of the power -
holder ceases to move in the orbit of rational thought,
that his mental processes become inevitably stricken with

POWER 273

the disease of falsification by power -thought. He may,
with all the force of his intention earnestly exercise his
power in the service of humanity, yet he can only do so
by power -thought ; he wields power, therefore he is
right in the manner he wields it. The very best moral
intentions in unchecked power are stultified by the very
fact of power in the service of individual opinion, and
by the falsification of judgment inseparable from that
fact. The saint and the philosopher are every whit
as pernicious in possession of absolute power as the
raving despot. Louis IX of France was canonized not
only by the Church, but by universal opinion, as the
ideal of a crowned saint whose sole end was righteous-
ness and his people's good, yet he was in fact a villainous
persecutor, and we have already had occasion to note
in his own words his amiable conception of his duties.
It would be difficult to point in the Renaissance period
to a figure more perfectly admirable in its quiet wisdom,
idealism, and gentle heroism than that of Sir Thomas
More ; yet his one brief spell of power as Chancellor
of England is marked by bloody and heinous persecu-
tion.

What is true of absolute power is correspondingly
true of all power whatsoever in every form and in every
degree ; whether it be the power of privilege, or of the
strong hand, of money, of mere intellectual authority,
whether it be that of a ruler or of a Jack -in -office, of
priest or demagogue. It results in injustice not because
men are wicked, but because power corrupts moral
judgment. The power of an autocrat is not indeed
by any means the worst evil. Far more deeply pernicious
is that of a class ; for the authority of the approved
morality it creates is proportionate to the numerical
strength of that class. The very worst and most
immoral tyranny is that of a majority.

Paddy's proverbial attitude of being * agin the
government ' is the expression of the universal law that
all power, no matter by whom exercised', tends to abuse
and injustice ; the chances are, therefore, always ten to
one that in order to be on the side of right you must be
' agin the government.'

18

274 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

THE ' INNATE CONSCIENCE ' OF POWER

Primarily and essentially morality is nothing else than
protest and resistance against power. In a mere state
of nature the strong man has it in his power to cudgel,
maltreat, reave, rob, despoil and kill the weak. What
is to prevent him from so doing? Anteriorly to the
development of a moral tradition nothing whatever, no
sentiment, or categorical imperative, or sympathy.

There is no such thing as an inborn, inherent moral
conscience. Conscience is a social product. So far
is the strong man from being restrained by any
conscience that, on the contrary, his feelings are highly
flattered by the consciousness and exhibition of his
power. His wigwam is hung with the scalps of his
victims ; the spoils of his depredations are ostentatiously
displayed. The praises of his strength which none dare
resist are sung by his poets. He is the ' hero,' the
strong man celebrated by the bards from Achaean court
to Icelandic hall, the noble, the aristocrat of the historian ;
till, in another age, he becomes the * successful man/
the self -helper of Sir Samuel Smiles. " Seldom hast thou
provided wolves with hot meat," scornfully exclaims the
coy daughter of the Jarl in the idyll of the Saga, spurn-
ing the suit of Egil, " for a whole autumn no raven hast
thou seen croaking over the damage " ; but the hero
conciliates and wins her by proudly singing : " I have
marched with my bloody sword, and the raven has
followed me. Furiously we fought, the fire passed over
the dwellings of men ; and those who kept the gates
we have sent to sleep in blood." Heroic and mag-
nificent, not in their own sight alone, is the boundless
fiendishness and treachery of the wild beasts of the
Italian fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of the Sforzas,
the Visconti, the Baglionis, the Malatestas. Matarazzo,
the chronicler of the Baglioni, exhausts every epithet
in giving vent to his admiration for those ruffians.
Grifonette who, for no other motive than ambition,

'CONSCIENCE' OF POWER 275

slaughtered nearly the whole of his relatives in their
beds, " sembrava an angiolo di Paradiso " ; Astorre
is compared to Mars, and Gianpaolo, who, like the rest,
murdered many of his kinsmen and his own wife, was
"a valiant and gallant knight of almost divine talent."
And after aeons of morality is the millionaire exploiter
of to-day incommodated by qualms of conscience? Is
he not, on the contrary, inordinately proud of himself?

The innate and original psychological correlative to
power and every abuse of it, every evil-doing, is not
at all contrition or a guilty conscience, but exultant
pride_.. Pride is the accompaniment of power. Every
form of pride and ostentation is a display of power and
injustice ; despotic pride, aristocratic pride, martial
pride, pride of birth, pride of wealth — the glorifications
of abused power. Is not pride the last and most per-
sistent attribute of the wielder of power, his last
infirmity? When all is lost, when he has been dis-
possessed, brought to justice, a grand heroic aureola will
yet surround him to the last, wherein he will with
magnificent gesture cloak himself, and contemptuously
turning to the canaille, proudly exclaim : "I have
treated you as dogs."

Of such kind is the ' innate conscience ' of powec.

CHAPTER II

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY GENESIS
OF MORALITY

I

PRIMARY GENESIS OF MORALITY

How, in a humanity that is gratified and flattered by
the exercise of power, whose conscience exults in the act
of oppression, is, like all nature, like all animality,
cruel, and declares force and craft to be admirable-
how can a moral conscience arise at all? How can
any restraining idea giving the lie direct to nature, to
the inevitable judgments and values of power -thought,
introduce itself, come into existence and develop?

That strange phenomenon has had two distinct, succe3-
sive origins : one primary in the primitive herd, the
other secondary in differentiated society.

The primary genesis of morality has taken place in
a quite automatic and inevitable way in the primitive
human herd. The propensity of the strong man to
bully and kill is very soon and very naturally felt to;
be a peril to all weaker men. He is a danger to all.
He must be stopped, he must be ' punished.' Even the
strong man can be overpowererd by numbers if he runs
amuck. And as every member of the tribe, even the
strongest, may at any time find himself in a position
of disadvantage with regard to another, it very soon
becomes a tacitly accepted principle that one member
must not kill or do violence to another. The sixth
* commandment,' as likewise the seventh (the female
being one of the earliest forms of property), and the
eighth, are automatically established conditions of gre-
garious existence. They establish themselves by the
force of circumstances even before the appearance of

276

PRIMARY MORALITY 277

spoken language and formulated thought, even before
the appearance of humanity. They are immediate
necessary results of gregariousness .

The self -protective putting down of a dangerous indi-
vidual evolves very naturally from a feeling of fear
and prudence, into one of anger, of * righteous ' indig-
nation. The dangerous man becomes the ' bad,' the
' wicked ' man. The deterrent dread of the community's
anger becomes, on the other hand, a shrinking from
its disapproval. The man who is ' tempted ' to use
his advantage to the detriment of another, is primitively
restrained by fear of the consequences. But has he not
himself been with the rest of the tribe ' righteously
indignant ' at acts of despotism in others? Has he not
denounced others as ' bad '? To the fear of the con-
sequence is added a sense of consistent shame ; the
deterrent motive becomes * conscience,' self-respect, a
point of honour. When the strong man finds himself
in a position to take advantage of the weak, his self-
esteem, his jealousy of his good name (a type of feeling
very keenly developed in primitive man * as in children)
will restrain him. He does not like being called
1 bad ' : he shrinks from being an object of public
indignation.3

The point of honour as a moral motive is, be it
incidentally noted, far older and more primitive than
any feeling of sympathy and humanity. Among the

1 See Westermarck: Origin of Moral Ideas, vol. ii. pp. 138-9.

* That other elements enter into the primitive evolution of the
moral deterrent, I am quite prepared to admit. I am here
concerned only with setting forth what I consider to be the
essential and fundamental feature of that evolution. Religious
ideas play an early and conspicuous part in the process. As has
been shown by Frazer (Psyche's Task], dread of the ghost of a
murdered man constitutes a widespread form of deterrent feeling ;
and so likewise do the tabus attaching to property and sex relations.
But it is easy to perceive that those religious ideas are but a
manifestation and expression of the self-protective hostile attitude
of the community towards violence. They are secondary and
derivative. The gods punish what men resent. Religious feelings
powerfully reinforce morality — as when the ' bad ' man is looked
upon not only with indignation, but with superstitious horror — but
they do not create it.

278 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

Semites, for instance, the rigid observance of tKe code
of honour, as in the laws of hospitality, may coexist
with the most callous ferocity ; as when the robber
Yacub in a nocturnal raid on the treasure-house of the
Prince of Sistan, stumbled over a lump of salt, the symbol
of hospitality, and by chance tasting it, retired forthwith
without spoil. The mere fact of stumbling over a: tent-
rope necessitates that a strangter, even] if he belong! to
a tribe with which a blood-feud exists, should be con-
sidered and treated as a sacred guest ; and so forth.1
So in the barbaric ages of Europe we constantly meet
with acts of ostentatious magnanimity, conjoined in one
and the same person with ghoulish deeds unscrupulously
committed.

The simple natural mechanism of the primary genesis
of morality is vividly demonstrated by the fact that
where such relations and causes have not operated, no
morality, no idea of morality, no conscience has developed
at all. The causes which have automatically given
rise to those ideas when operating on the individuals
of a community, did not exist and did not operate in
the relations between tribe arid tribe, nation and' nation.
Hence there is no such thing as international morality.
The combination of the weak against the strong is here
much more difficult and uncertain. One tribe or State
could not clearly realize that aggression against some
other distant tribe was a menace against itself ; it was
not its business to meet trouble half -way and convert
the possibility of conflict into a certainty. To organize
an alliance of menaced States against a possible aggressor
was a complex diplomatic operation, and there was in
most cases no guarantee that the combination would
be strong enough to ensure its object. Conse-
quently such a thing as international morality has never
developed ; those human relations remain, or have
remained until quite lately absolutely, crudely and
primitively immoral. The very acts condemned by social

1 See, for many further examples, W. Robertson Smith, Kinship
and Marriage.

SECONDARY MORALITY 279

morality are in the same breath glorified in international
relations. No trace of conscience developed. Bad
faith, theft, murder remained, as they are in the primitive
psychology of power, not vices but virtues. In the Italian
and European doctrine of the ' Balance of Power ' there
came into operation a principle somewhat resembling in
its operation that of primitive herd -equilibrium ; and
it consequently gave rise to some ideas of international
right, of international law. But it was obviously extremely
crude and ineffectual in its action, and it is only to-day
that by the scheme of a * League of Nations ' the
artificial construction of the very mechanism which has
automatically brought the idea of morality into the world,
is being contemplated.

II

SECONDARY GENESIS OF MORALITY

The fact, which presents itself as a difficulty to the
conception of moral progress, that many of the lowest
and most primitive tribes are more moral than civilized
communities is perfectly true— in a sense. They are
moral from the absence of the conditions of immorality,
in the same way as beasts are more moral than
men. Perfect morality is maintained by the automatic
operation of the laws of primary gregarious morality.
So long as that state continues morality is secure.

But let any form of personal or class power arise, let
any difference establish itself, as between conquerors and
conquered, priests and laymen, owners and non -owners,
and the entire foundation of the primitive condition of
mutual abstention is at once entirely destroyed. There
is then no motive whatsoever why the strong should not

280 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

do as he pleases with those whom he holds in his power.
No restraint will arise front the action or opinion of his
fellow-masters. Quite on the contrary, it is their interest
that their own power and privilege should be upheld,
and it is most strenuously upheld by every notion, estimate,
system of moral values obtaining amongst them.
Established opinion, that is, the opinion, the morality
of the dominant class, will emphatically justify and
sanction the aggressor.

We have then to do with a second genesis of morality,
quite distinct from that which is the automatic outcome
of the gregarious state. When a system of dominant
powers and prerogatives, upheld and sanctioned by
an equally consolidated body of opinion, supplants the
promiscuous equalitarian community, the primitive law
of mutual abstention ceases to be operative.

That primary morality of gregarious origin actually
favours the immorality introduced by the differentiation of
power. For it supplies it with the already existent moral
values, with the portentous words * good ' and ' bad,'
* right ' and ' wrong ' which it has created. And those
values are at once seized upon by power-thought and
transformed. So that they actually come to be used
as its weapons in the service and validation of its immoral
position. The established power at once becomes
' good * and * right,' and it is the resister, the insubor-
dinate, the rebel, who becomes * bad,' 'wicked.' It
is he, not the oppressor, who comes to suffer from a
' bad conscience ' I

Here then is a situation— and it is that of the constituted
world of human relationships above the most rudimentary
phases— far more desperate for the prospects of moral
development. Not only is necessarily immoral power in
the saddle, fairly secure against any self -defensive action,
but the very moral values, transformed by its power-
thought, are deflected from their original significance and
are now: on its side. They are transposed. Wrong is
right and right is wrong. How can that falsification
rectify itself, how can the original values reassert them-
selves, how can the second genesis of morality take
place?

SECONDARY MORALITY 281

Ultimately in one way only. In the same way as
primitive morality imposed itself, in the same way as
the powerful have imposed their will and their morality,
in the only possible way— by physical force. As the
existing system of human relations is, in its immoral
aspect, representative of the cold steel of oppression,
so in its moral aspect, it is representative of the cold steel
of revolt. Every human right, every step in the develop-
ment of justice in human relations, has been wrested
by actual physical force from the grasp of the holders of
power.

But a far greater difficulty presents itself. Estab-
lished power is protected by a much more formidable
defence than any physical force of which it can dispose.
It is protected by power- thought, by its falsification of
values, a weapon so formidable that it renders physical
force itself almost superfluous. Just as the oppressors
could never bring themselves to acknowledge the real
foundation of their power, to admit that it rested on
physical force, but have always insisted on ' justify-
ing ' it, on regarding it as founded upon right, righteous-
ness ; so likewise the oppressed, so long as they have
remained under the influence of power-thought have re-
mained loyal to their oppressors ; they have looked upon
it as a sacred duty, an honour and1 a glory, to toil, to
fight, to lay down their lives for them. The slave, the
serf, the oriental or feudal vassal, may suffer and lament,
but he does not dispute the authority of his oppressor, or
rebel against it. On the contrary, he would be shamed
and scandalized at any attack on that power. He laments
his misfortunes as he would those arising from an earth-
quake or a storm, without a thought of blasphemy. The
physical force wielded by oppressors has mostly been
that lent to them by the loyalty of their victims. It
is through the power of intellectual and moral theories
that they have held and exercised their mastery. The
peasant armies slaughtering one another in the dynastic
quarrels of their masters are glowing with patriotism.
The Vende'an peasant is filled with heroic rage against
those who would liberate him from his tyrants. The
Russian serf worships his * little father.' There is

282 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

nothing more tragically pathetic than the persistent loyalty
of the oppressed to theiri oppressors.

To-day when the rumblings of proletarian revolt are
clearly audible, we are somewhat offended by the crude
irreverence of the rebels, their brutal discard of all respect,
their * bad manners.' But the real wonder is the old
humility and deference of the poor, the harrowing ' sweet
reasonableness ' of the wretch who ' knows his place/
who knows ' what is due to his betters/ his gratitude and
respect for ' the gentle folks.* Our feelings are wounded
by the brutal cynicism of the rebel, but how could our
feelings endure the coals of fire heaped upon the heads
of the rich and educated by the deference of the poor
and ignorant? As if forsooth their poverty and ignorance
were not the most stinging of reproaches.

So long as the extra-rational foundations of privilege
were unquestioningly accepted, claims to equality, to right,
to justice, could not, and did not arise. So long as the
divine nature of kingship was undisputed, every abuse
of tyranny could exist unchallenged, so long as feudal
power was looked upon as part of a superhumanly estab-
lished order, every excess to which unchecked authority
gives rise could proceed unquestioned. It is only when
they have come to perceive that what they regarded as
a sacred truth was a lie> that what they had been taught
to look upon as right was iniquitous wrong, it is then only
that the injured have rebelled. It is the exposure of the
basic irrationality, of the justifying lie, which brings
about the overthrow of the abuse. The oppressed have
only revolted against tyranny or injustice, however
atrocious, when they have clearly learned to perceive
it as irrational, mendacious, false.

INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION 283

III

NECESSITY OF INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION

The mental world created in harmony with the ruling
interests of the strong is necessarily false. Necessarily,
because that which is out of harmony with natural law,
unjust, cannot be justified by ideas corresponding to
facts. While the thing itself is unadapted, the theory
of it cannot chime with the reality of things. Wrong
can only be justified and sanctioned by a lie. The wrong
and the lie are indissolubly correlated. And it is not
the wronged who attack the wrong-doer, but rational
thought which attacks the lie. The process by which
justice is advanced is never a mere contest of force, any
more than it is a process of conversion of the unjust.
The system of ideas by which unjust power is ' justified '
must first be stripped of its halo of sophistry and sanctity
by rational thought, must first stand out in its naked
irrationality, before there can be any forces of revolt.

Revolt takes place, of course, against actual grievances,
and is therefore interested. The actual motive is interest,
not principles. The oppressed are in the first place
driven to revolt by actual suffering, hunger, and even by
mere envy and greed. The revolt of the wronged is
moral, not because they are animated 'by any high ideal,
but because their interests necessarily coincide with
morality. It is out of the conflict of interests or private
ends that the principle, the tnorality is evolved.

And since it is impossible for the utterly crushed and
oppressed to revolt at all effectively, when they have
done so it has usually been in alliance with other classes
whose motives were frankly venal and interested. And
thus that sordid element has played a conspicuous part
in many of the most important emancipating movements.

The powers of an omnipotent and all-devouring Church
were first curbed by needy and rapacious nobles. The
power of kings and nobles, that is, power founded on
privilege, has been constantly checked and sapped, and
finally overthrown, by the growth of another form of

284 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

power, the power of money. The opposition offered
by the commercial classes, by Lombard, Florentine,
Flemish, Hanseatic, English merchants, in the later
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, against the exactions
of imperial feudatories, nobles, and kings, was one of the
main checks on tyranny, one of the chief seeds of liberty.
The enormous part played by interested purposes of
the most fulsome kind, by sheer covetousness, in all
the movements of the Reformation, is familiar to all.
In Germany the secession from Rome was brought about
by the appetite of rulers for Church lands; in Switzer-
land the success of Zwingli was owing to the appropria-
tion by Zurich and other cities of the domains of the
Church. The foundation of the Anglican Churcih is one
long story of the most utterly sordid avarice and un-
mitigated greed and bribery. And we find everywhere,
in every emancipating movement, the same selfish, cal-
culating, mercenary spirit at work. The American Revo-
lution arose from the reluctance of shopkeepers to part
with tax-money. Even the French Revolution was
initiated, not by starving and oppressed millions, but by
profiteering merchants and speculators who objected to
being taxed.

But those facts are apt to be profoundly misappre-
hended. The exponents of economic determinism find
it easy to use them in representing avarice and interest
as the sole agents at work in all those movements.
But those agencies have never operated until intellectual
criticism had done its work.

As long as the world quailed in terror under the one
paramount, exclusive thought of hell-fire, the Church
could draw into its ubiquitous suckers the entire sub-
stance of Europe. There was no protest, no resistance.
Not until the twelfth century when 'the ice began to
crack, when unquestioning faith had ceased to be
universal, when Europe rapidly became riddled with
heresy, did the land-hunger of priests and monks begin
to be opposed and curbed, and kings and barons to
cry ' Hands off.' No thought of seizing Church goods,
of arresting the 'bleeding of their domains by Rome,
ever occurred to German princes till Huss, and Luther,

INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION 285

and Zwingli had formulated clearly the outrageousness
of papal pretensions. Henry VIII could do nothing
but for Erasmus and Colet and the Lollardry smoulder-
ing among the people. The interests and cupidities of
princes have merely been powerful auxiliaries in the
battles of emancipation, auxiliaries which have often
determined the victory, but were themselves but tools of
the intellectual forces. The actual sufferers, the crushed
and oppressed, when they have risen against tyranny,
and barbarity, and injustice, have been interested, not
theoretically inspired by abstract principles ; but those
interested motives could not operate until the critical
unmasking of irrational claims had taken place. Till
then all the forces which make for justice are paralysed.
Every one is familiar with the accounts of the misery
of the French people on the eve of the Revolution,
the crushing exactions, feudal dues, dimes, gabels, Church
tithes, which wholly swallowed up their substance, the
chronic famine and destitution which sent haggard ghosts
wandering over the desolate land. It is obvious, we
think, that such a state of things could not endure ;
it must inevitably result in rebellion. But things were
just as bad at the death of Louis XIV as at that
of Louis XV,, and there was no rebellion. The
conditions were worse in Germany than they were
in France. On the other; side of the Pyrenees, a
hundred years earlier, the oppression and misery of
the people was even worse ; the country was depopulated
by famine, desolated by utter anarchy and by exactions ;
the people were bond-slaves, the starving population
fled from the villages at the approach of the tax-
gatherers, while these tore down the wretched dwellings
to sell the materials ; armed crowds fought for bread
before the bakers' shops more fiercely than they did
in Paris ; the unpaid household troops begged for food
in the streets and at the doors of monasteries. And
yet, beyond some demonstrations against the ministers
in Madrid, nothing happened. Or rather, the most extra-
ordinary thing continued to happen ; the starving,
spoliated, and tortured populace was filled with the most
passionate loyalty towards its oppressors ; it was ready

286 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

to die for ' throne and altar.' A few years later, when
the power of the Bourbons was being humbled by Marl-
borough and Prince Eugene in Germany, Flanders and
Italy, when Peterborough and Stanhope scattered before
them the wretched armies of Spain, the same victims
of misrule rose everywhere in defence of their king,
the plundered villagers scraped together all the money
they could lay their hands on, and brought it to the
king with tears of passionate devotion, and the peasants
of Castile and Andalusia neutralized by their obstinate
heroism the triumphs of Blenheim and Ramillies.

There was no rational thought, no criticism of the
situation in their case, no glimmer of light whereby to
discern the source of their evils in their true aspect. It
is that purely intellectual process of enlightenment and
criticism which is the indispensable condition of the protest
of the oppressed. Until it has taken place their ethical
conceptions are as immoral as those of their oppressors ;
their loyalty, their devotion, their endurance, their venera-
tion, their bowing submission to the divinely appointed
order, their contentment with the station in which
Providence has placed them, are the counterpart of the
ruthless injustice, the tyranny ^ the rapacity, the cruelty,
the barbarity of the holders of power.

IV

EUROPEAN LIBERATIONS

But furthermore, the revolt of the oppressed, although
instigated by the crude facts of self-interest, is never
viewed by them for long under that aspect alone. It

EUROPEAN LIBERATIONS 287

is true that class interest and general principle, must be
felt to coincide in order that large masses of men may
be stirred to vigorous, to desperate action. Any one
who has ever had any share in endeavouring to organize
collective action in support of an abstract principle
dissociated from any perceptible and palpable utilitarian
interest, knows full well what a dead weight of inertia
and indifference has to be encountered. But it is a
psychological law that the cause, the principle, the claim',
the war-cry, which at first was adopted at the suggestion
of an interested motive, comes in time to claim devotion
for its own sake. The force of the interested motive
vanishes more and more, that of the principle, the abstract
claim increases until it completely fills the mental field.
Exactly the same thing happens, as I have already hinted,
in the case of unjust and oppressive power : by dint of
repeating the theoretical justifications of injustice, the
oppressor comes to firmly believe them ; and the tyranny
which began with barefaced cupidity and rapacity, ends
by dying a blessed martyr to those sacred and divine
rights which it invented. That is how clashing interests
become moral principles. It was not a feeling of self
or class interest which upheld the Protestants who
marched to the stake praising God, the Flemish women
who, laid alive in their graves, sang hymns while their
murderers shovelled the earth over their faces.

Religious enthusiasm itself, that is, reforming, heretical
religious enthusiasm, was the form which rational criticism
assumed for a long time with the masses of the people,
the only form which it could assume. So inextricably
are the religious emancipating movements of European
history entangled with aims of social and political emanci-
pation, that it baffles the analysis of historians to
disentangle the two. Speaking of Charles V, Motley
remarks : '* He was too shrewd a politician not to recog-
nize the connection between aspirations for religious and
for political freedom'. It was the political heresy which
lurked in the restiveness of religious reformers under
dogma, tradition, and supernatural sanction to temporal
power, which he was disposed to combat to the death."
That religious sanction is by far the most common and

288 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

important— though not the sole — form of justifying theory
on which constituted despotism founds itself. Divine
Right is the type of sanction to power. Hence religious
heresy and criticism has always led to resistance against
tyranny. Heretical thought has invariably been accom-
panied, or immediately followed by revolt against estab-
lished power. The bold teaching of Ab61ard resulted
in the revolt of his pupil, Arnaldo da Brescia, and the
proclamation of a republic in Rome ; Wycliff was
followed by John Ball and the Lollards ; John Huss
by the revolt of Bohemia ; and with the Lutheran
reformation all the forces of social revolt were let loose ;
the great Peasant War of Germany, the Dutch rebellion
were its immediate results.

With the one glorious exception of the Netherlands,
all those efforts of resistance on the continent of
Europe bore scarcely any fruit. The forces of coer-
cion were too mighty. ; revolt extinguished in blood and
fire, only tightened the fetters of oppression. Many of
the most atrocious features of the feudal system, date
from the Jacquerie and the Peasant War. The United
Provinces, which celebrated their deliverance from
Spanish tyranny and obscurantism by founding the Uni-
versities of Leydlen and Utrecht ; and where, round
jolly Roemer Visscheri and his accomplished daughters,
there gathered a company which included Vossius, the
great Grptius, author of International Law and The
Freedom of the Sea, Brederoo the comic poet, van
Vondel the dramatist, Descartes, Baruch Spinoza,
Swammerdam the first biologist, van Leeuwenhoek the
founder of microscopical science, Huygens the physicist,
Rembrandt, Franz Hals, — became the seed-bed of all
"^liberal thought, and prepared the way for English
and all subsequent political development. Owing to the
inability of unarmed English rulers to enforce * law,
and orderi/ England's laws and England's political order,
became an envied example to the world. Nearly every
step in the struggle which built up English liberties,
wore a religious aspect. But those struggles were fruitful
of results, not because they were religious, but because
they were Protestant. Catholic religious enthusiasm in

EUROPEAN LIBERATIONS 289

France, in Spain, in England, produced, not liberty,
but tyranny, not Commonwealth and Declaration of Right,
but St. Bartholomews, quemaderos, and Bloody Maries.
Protestantism meant, so far as it went, criticism, rational
revolt against dogmatic authority, attacks by private judg-
ment, whether acknowledged in principle or not, on con-
stituted lies. The attitude of Protestantism, of No-
Popery — whatever dogmas and fanaticisms it might hug-
was towards the audacious unveracities of the old
orthodoxy, towards priestcraft, hocus-pocus (hoc est
corpus), identical with that which rational criticism would
have adopted. The Lollards and Independents treated the
sacred and holy things of the established cult in exactly
the same blasphemous and sacrilegious way as the sans-
culottes. The Protestant speaks of Catholicism in the
self -same words as the most * vulgar, ' and * offensive '
militant atheist. The throwing off of injustice and
despotism, and later, as a necessary consequence, the
extension of humanitarian principles, has been accom-
plished in England by the Protestants, and by those
shades of Protestantism in particular which were furthest
removed from constituted religious authority, by Inde-
pendents, dissenters, puritans, nonconformists, evan-
gelicals. Whiggism and liberalism are traditionally
associated with nonconformity. The contemporary pietist,
who states that England's greatness is due to the Bible,
is not altogether wrong ; it is due to the Bible in so far
as the Bible stood as the symbol of the right to private
interpretation, as against theocratic absolutism. .While
Europe still lay sunk in mediaeval barbarism, England pre-
sented by contrast the spectacle of a land of freedom, and
was, not without right, conscious of superior righteousness..
But the liberating, force of Protestantism which had
made the Revolution of 1 649 reached the term imposed
by its inherent and necessary limitations. Intellectual
development meanwhile did not stop at the phase which
had found expression in the Protestant Reformation.
The process of secularization went on apace;, no longer
were the issues theological, but purely secular. From
the great school of Padua, where from the fourteenth
century Aristotelian tradition and that of Arabic experi-

19

290 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

mental science and mathematics had commingled and
struggled, and the contest had at last resulted in the
triumph of the latter and a new conception of the spheres
and methods of knowledge, a wave had swept over
Europe on the crest of which rose Descartes and Gassendi.
William Harvey had not only profited there from the
lessons of Fabricius; of Aquapendente, but even more
perhaps from those of the professor of physics, Galilei.
Pascal, prosecuting the researches of Galilei's pupil,
Torricelli, had weighed the air. Seeking refuge on
the Continent from the tumults of the Puritan Revolution,
Bacon's secretary, Hobbes, had met Galileo, Gassendi and
Mersenne; and when the Merry Monarch, in the reaction
against puritanical tyranny, re-entered London, the first
person he greeted was his old tutor, who not only furnished
him with the doctrine of his own omnipotence in the
Leviathan, but with a lively interest in the new
developments of the experimental philosophy. That
interest became a universal fashion ; not only the King,
but Buckingham, peers, prelates had their own
chemical laboratories. " It was almost necessary," in
the words of Macaulay, " to the character of a fine gentle-
man to have something to say about air-pumps and tele-
scopes " ; and the beauties of .Whitehall drove to the
Gresham laboratories to see experiments in static
electricity and magnetism. That dilettantism was the
outward manifestation of deeper and more momentous
developments of the spirit of the times in Restoration
England — the Royal Society, Robert Boyle, Hooke,
Hallay, Newton. The efflorescence of seventeenth -century
English science, was in turn but an aspect of the
operation of the same spirit in every field of thought.
One of the members of the Royal Society, Sir William
Petty, created the science of Political Arithmetic, the
precursor of political economy, and showed the
agricultural labourer's wage to be fairly fixed at four
shillings a week. As Puritan Protestantism had produced
the Revolution of 1649, the new secular matter-of-fact-
ness produced the Whig Revolution of 1688, of which
John Locke was the philosophic apologist as Milton had
been that of the Commonwealth.

EUROPEAN LIBERATIONS 291

Those great developments of English thought, the
social results already achieved by English freedom,
wrought a profound influence upon the intellect of the
Continent, where Montesquieu placed the English con-
stitution, and Voltaire English science and English
thought on pedestals for the admiration and emulation
of all thinking men. The seed fell on fertile soil.

In the same manner as the Protestant liberation of
the Northern Renaissance had settled upon its lees, while
the evolution of rational thought proceeded upon its
course, so the intellect of Whig-revolution England snugly
ensconced itself in smiling slumbers in the beatific con-
templation of its unforgetable achievements, of its
Glorious Constitution, the perfection of which nothing
could better ; while the growth of human thought passed
meanwhile on ; and the seeds of its English season
fructified at the new spring in France.

The French eighteenth century is one of the grand
climacterics in the history of human growth. All the
seeds which had been germinating in Europe since the
twelfth century ripened then into fruit : a new era began,
in its significance one of the epochs of most concentrated
glory in the evolution of the race. Our current view
and impression of it has been, and still is in a large
measure, too deeply coloured by the profound detestation
of all its tendencies that has poured upon it, to permit
of the full magnitude of its worth being adequately
appreciated. Our attention has for a hundred years
been trained upon its defects and imperfections. Much
in the theories of the philosophes (contemptuously
so referred to by Carlyle, to avoid desecration of the
appellation of philosopher) was crude and a priori, and
lacking in a sufficient basis for induction ; their generali-
zations were superficial, their shibboleths and abstractions
trivial, their rhetoric declamatory. It is precisely
because it was so genuinely alive and fruitful that their
thought has outgrown its early form, and become 'old-
fashioned.' We do not generally go to it fort inspira-
tion because it has become renewed as living thought
in our own blood. It is only the traditionalism which
struggles against progress which finds inspiration in

292 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

unchangeable authorities : when our appetite is for
fossils, we go back to the Stone Age for our textbooks.
»When we wish to study physical science we do not go
to Prevost, and Fourier, and Coulomb, or Lavoisier : we
study Prevost's theory of exchanges, Fourier's theorem,
Coulomb's balance, and Lavoisier's discoveries in modern
scientific language and modern textbooks.

As in seventeenth-century England science expanded
in eighteenth-century France, widely and eagerly culti-
vated, popularized in crowded lecture -rooms, and was
there shaped for the first time into that organized body
of knowledge and systematized inquiry which was to
bear immediate fruit in the conquests of the nineteenth
century. In all the intellectual activity of that active
time — even the most seemingly trifling, and flippant, and
superficial — a new quality, a terrible new dangerous
virtue became awake. When the King's permission was
requested for the performance of Beaumarchais' comedy,
The Marriage of Figaro, he exclaimed, " But, Mes-
sieurs, if permission is granted to perform this play,
one ought — to be quite consistent — to pull down the
Bastille! ' Figaro went through sixty-eight per-
formances,— and the Bastille did duly get pulled down.
It was by those men, Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire,
Diderot, D'Alembert, Volney, Holbach, Condorcet, and
their contemporaries, who cast aside all conventional
formulas, resolved to think for themselves, and, what
is more, to speak out boldly what they thought, to own
no other sanction or criterion than rational thought, that
the world has been transformed. Behind them and
around them stood medievalism in all its ignorance
and darkness and tyranny over life and mind, for all
the superficial veneer of refinement laid, over it by the
Renaissance and the * Grand Siecle.' After, them is
a changed world, the modern world. It was those men
who threw open the portals from the one into the other.

The Revolution — the product and culmination of the
gigantic intellectual battle — stands alone among the
events of human history. The antagonist which it faced
was unredeemed feudalism and absolutism, in the most
consolidated and ugliest form of its iniquity, un-

EUROPEAN LIBERATIONS 293

adulterated and untouched by any evolution. On that
one occasion in history there was no tinkering, or veiled
issues, or compromises, or expedient formulas, or semi-
logic, in the cry of protest and the work of reform. Only
for a moment, in '89 and the Constitution of '91, was
there any such genteel, mealy-mouthed, good -mannered
reserve in dealing with evil. After that first moment,
things were actually called by their names, and treated
accordingly — sans phrases. With a radicalism and
drastic thoroughness destined to strike everlasting horror
in future ages, not only gross enormities and injustices,
feudalism, Divine Right, Sacred Majesty, but the entire
world -system of lies and artificialities, irrationalities, root
and branch, bag and baggage, down even to stupid
weights and measures and calendars, were swept away
at one fell swoop. Those newly emancipated feudal
vassals were not content with ' glorious constitutions,'
' ballot boxes/ ' liberal reforms within the sphere of
practical politics ' ; they called in plain, ringing, un-
measured words for the last consequences of rational
thought, for plain, uncompromising justice, for equality,
for the total and final abolition, without terms or re-
serves, of humbug and injustice in its million forms.
Nay, they called for it, not only fori ' the State,' not
only for France, but for the human race.

Of course they ' failed/ Every European govern-
ment, England, with its Puritan and Whig liberties and
' model constitution ' at the head of them, rose in arms
to put down the unutterable scandal. How ragged
Revolution held its ground against them all, and against
priest -led peasants, and swarming traitor vermin in its
midst, and humbled them to the dust, is one of the
wonders of history. But in the end many of the ghosts
of the Past came back to sit to this day in possession,
and pour their venom on the pages of history, and turn
up the whites of their eyes over ' the horrors of the
French Revolution.' (More men were killed on St.
Bartholomew's day by ' throne and altar ' than during
the whole Revolution, September massacres, Terror and
all.) What those audacious hot-heads, those enrages,
what Marat and the Hebertists aimed at, still remains

294 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

in Utopia. Nevertheless the world which they left be-
hind them, is a realized Utopia compared to the evil
dream which they for ever dispelled.

V
ETHICS AND POLITICS

I may seem to be confusing politics with ethics, social
with moral issues. But 'the real confusion is that whereby
such an objection is offered and such a distinction drawn.

Mankind has been uplifted out of a past weltering
with cruelty and, injustice, a past in which four-fifths
of the population of Europe endured under the heels of
their tormentors such treatment as would to-day raise
a storm of indignation were it inflicted on dogs ; when
men in thousands were legally flayed, impaled, quartered,,
roasted, boiled ; when London was called ' the city of
gibbets ' ; when none but tyrannous princes and priests
had human rights ; when the producers of food were
made to pay for the right to use their implements ;
when the infamy of nameless injustice was imperturbably
sanctified by law, acquiesced in by literature, upheld
by religion ; when no murmur could be uttered against
it save at the price of martyrdom. Yet no elaboration
of professed morality has had anything to do with the
triumph of justice which has swept away that hideous
nightmare. No great new ethical principle has been
discovered or proclaimed between the age of the Tudors
and that of Victoria. Writing in the latter period,
Buckle could actually maintain the time-honoured
doctrine that morality never changes. No new code,
no new moral law, no new creed has burst upon the
world ; old codes, old moral laws, old creeds have
instead been shaken to their foundations.

ETHICS AND POLITICS 295

The changes which have taken place have been
intellectual, social, political changes. That moral evolu-
tion whose continuous course towards higher standards
of equity, of common justice and humanity we can trace
through the centuries, and even within the span of
our own memories, has been brought about by resistance
to evil in movements which we are pleased to call
' political ' and * social.' Irrational justifications of
power have been challenged and become invalid, the
invasion of individual rights by arbitrary prerogatives
has been resisted, baseless formulas have ceased to be
uncritically accepted, and, as a consequence, iniquity
has been put down, and the world has grown better
because the relations between man and man have become
more just. The readjustment of human relations has
taken place, not through any mysterious growth of moral
sentiments, not through any reform in the conscience
of wrong-doers, but through the resistance of the
wronged. It is to the revolt of reason which has clinched
its arguments with pike #nd powder that we owe that
measure of moral decency which graces our present
civilization, and distinguishes Europe from Dahomey,
the twentieth century from the sixteenth. Justice and
humanity have been promoted not by ethical codes or
Platonic discourses, but by the curtailment of powers
established on unreason, by liberty, by democracy.

Democracy is the worst form of government. It is
the most inefficient, the most clumsy, the most un-
practical. No machinery has yet been contrived to
carry out in any but the most farcical manner its
principles. It reduces wisdom to impotence and secures
the triumph of folly, ignorance, clap -trap and demagogy.
The critics of democracy have the easiest of tasks in
demonstrating its inefficiency. But there is something
even more important than efficiency and expediency-
justice. And democracy is the only social order that
is admissible, because it is the only one consistent with
justice. The moral consideration is supreme. Efficiency,
expediency, even practical wisdom and success must go
by the board ; they are of no account beside the
categorical imperative of justice. Justice is only pos-

296 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

sible when to every man belongs the power to resist
and claim redress from wrong. That is democracy.
And that is why, clumsy, inefficient, confused, weak
and easily misguided as it is, it is the only form of
government which is morally permissible. The ideal
form of government is an enlightened and benevolent
despotism ; but that is an absolutely unrealizable dream
much more visionary than any democratic Utopia. There
can never be an adequately enlightened and justly
benevolent despot. Your philosopher king is not a
practical success. Put a Sir Thomas More in power,
and you have a Torquemada ; your ineffectual Marcus
Aurelius is succeeded by a Commodus. Justice is only
possible through the diffusion of power, and it is in point
of fact by the progress of democratic power that the
progress of justice has been brought about.

And justice is the whole of morality. To do wrong
is to inflict wrong, to injure. There is no other
immorality than injustice. So manifest is that truth
that it never occurred to the ancients in their best
days to regard it as otherwise than self-evident, and
the connotation of the words Si/ccuoo-wr; and justitia
was with them equivalent to that of our terms virtue,
righteousness, morality. It has taken centuries of
oriental ethics to obscure that simple truth.

All forms and aspects of morality which are not
mere conventional figment and immoral pseudo -mor-
alities, are in truth but aspects of justice, rights that
have to be defended against the encroachrnent of power
to do wrong, rights oppressed by irrationalities and lies.
Sentiments of humanity, respect for human life, com-
passion for suffering are in fact forms of the spirit of
justice, and all wrongs which offend against those feel-
ings are acts of injustice countenanced in the first
instance by the morality of dominant power.

It is commonly assumed that the moral condition of
a community is the result and expression of moral ideas ;
but the order of causation is in general the exact reverse
— moral ideas are the result of moral conditions. So
long as unresisted predominant power, predominant inte-
rest, are free to perpetrate wrong, that wrong is neces-

ETHICS AND POLITICS 297

sarily countenanced and consecrated as right. The
whole moral life of a community is necessarily deter-
mined by the standard which, as a concrete system of
ethics, upheld and sanctified by accredited opinion, is
in actual operation. If the organization of a society be
unjust, if it be founded upon the interests of power-
holding classes, it is vain to seek for absolute standards
of justice, even where those dominant interests are not
directly involved. The mental law which sets the seal
of authoritative approval on the established order, and
pronounces it moral, likewise shapes every ethical
estimate under that order. Divine law always conforms
to the type of established human law. Some barbari-
ties have not been direct acts of encroachment on
the part of a dominant power and subservient to its
immediate interests, but they were countenanced by the
character of those encroachments. And it is through
the action of rational criticism that barbaric custom
and inhumanity, like the abuses of legitimized power,
are eliminated.

CHAPTER III

MORALS AND CULTURE

I

SENTIMENT, SYMPATHY, AND REASON

THE favourite doctrine that moral sentiments have arisen
out of a natural feeling of sympathy or commiseration,
adopted by Schopenhauer and by Darwin as the chief
factor in the genesis of ethics is, I believe, entirely
erroneous. Feelings of sympathy, of commiseration, of
humanity, instead of being the source, are on the contrary
the product of moral judgment. The moral feeling is
posterior to the fact of moral practice. It is after a
course of conduct has become established as right, after
an injustice and inhumanity has been abolished, that the
corresponding feelings of pity, sympathy, become de-
veloped. What is regarded as right and proper, or
even merely as customary, does not awaken commisera-
tion and sympathy. Those feelings, if any germ of
them exists at all, are dismissed and suppressed when the
transaction is unquestioningly accepted as praiseworthy.
If Queen Louisa of Spain was touched with pity when
she turned her head away at the harrowing appeal of
the Jewish girl, who with a number of others was led to
the stake amid the festivities of the royal marriage, the
passing feeling must have been severely checked as a
sinful thought .

Nothing is more remarkable in this connection than
the fact that witch persecution passed away without a
single protest ever being raised against it on the ground
of morality. Not a voice was heard in denunciation
of the most hideous form of murderous savagery in
human annals, more brutal than any gladiatorial shows
or religious persecutions, because its victims were the
most helpless of human beings. And it was in Scotland,

SENTIMENT AND REASON 299

in puritanical England and in New England, when the
influence of moralistic cant was at its height, that those
horrors attained their vilest proportions. They lapsed
into desuetude fairly rapidly, simply because belief in
witchcraft ceased, not because any moral indignation
protested in the name of humanity. The abomination
of the thing was never perceived until it had ceased to
exist. Judicial torture was not generally regarded with
feelings of pity. In a remarkable passage John Evelyn l
minutely describes the torture of a suspected thief which
he witnessed at the Chatelet prison in Paris. Although
he mentions that the spectacle was " uncomfortable," it
does not elicit from him a single word of indignation
or condemnation, and the only comment which the
hideous scene suggests to him is that " it represented
to me, the intollerable sufferings which our Blessed
Saviour must needs undergo when his body was hanging
with all its weight upon the nailes of the crosse."

We have noted that the old notion that very primitive
communities are in many respects more moral than highly
civilized ones, is not altogether an illusion. But the
reason is, as we saw, that the head source of immorality
—the existence of privileged class -power — does not exist
in those communities. The savage is not morally more
advanced, but the occasion for morality has not yet
arisen. That the primitive morality of the savage is
not the effect of any delicacy of humane feeling is very
strikingly proved by the circumstance that those very
primitive communities which charm us by their un-
sophisticated morality are almost invariably cannibals.
The old travellers found it difficult to realize that those
idyllic South Sea Islanders with whose guilelessness,
honesty, hospitality, and peaceful natures they were so
charmed, were habitual man-eaters.

4\Vholesale human sacrifice was once universal. The
substitution of animal, and later, of ritual sacrifice, arose
from a semi-conscious rudiment of scepticism as to the
real efficacy of sacrifice. As long as it was firmly
believed without a shadow of misgiving that it was
expedient that one man should die for the people, that
1 Diary of John Evelyn, March n, 1651.

300 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

the desired object— tribal safety, prosperity, etc. — would
be certainly assured by the procedure, men would not
be likely to forgo a direct means of securing! those
important objects ; they would have been great fools
had they done so. The very greatness of the price
asked — a human life — was a sort of guarantee of the
return. The early Hebrew father who sent his first-
born ' through the fire to Moloch ' was probably a
kind father ; just as the Fijian who brained his aged
mother was a dutiful son. The superstitious theory
takes precedence in every case over any sentiment or
feeling. The decay of human sacrifice and cannibalism,
was not the effect of any mysterious and uncaused ' de-
velopment of moral sentiment/ but a beginning of
religious scepticism.

Moral progress has in every case consisted not in a
development of .feeling, but in a development of thought ;
the rational evolution has preceded and brought about
the ethical evolution. Of course when once injustice
has been rendered obsolete by the pressure of rational
revolt in a particular case, a precedent, a principle is
created, a sentiment becomes established, just as in the
case of the physical power of oppression which becomes
converted into ' right/ loyalty, and all the other
principles of oppressor morality. where successful
resistance has continuously asserted itself against in-
justice, the principle of justice becomes itself a war-
cry, the moral sentiment becomes naturally extended.
But nothing is more conspicuous than the feebleness, the
impotence of abstract moral sentiment as such. Unless
there be a real material interest disguised under it, or
it be the expression of a clear rational process, mere
moral principle has scarcely achieved anything at all
in the betterment of the world. All history bears witness
to the tragic futility of pure abstract moral principle.
The morality which confronts evil without allies, merely
in the name of morality, has always been waved aside
as irrelevant, impracticable, quixotic, inexpedient ; it has
never succeeded in entering * the sphere of practical
politics.' The protest against negro-slavery which arose
in England, where freedom had been won under religious

SENTIMENT AND REASON 301

banners, was for a long time a hopeless cause ; the
enthusiasts who espoused it were near losing heart.
Negro slavery was abolished as an inevitable logical
consequence of the rationalistic thought of the French'
eighteenth - century philosophers, and Wilberforce
lamented bitterly in the House of Commons that it
had been left to " atheistical and anarchic France "
to accomplish that for which he had so long striven
in vain. Duelling did not die out in England on moral
grounds, but because it came to be thought foolish and
absurd. And it is very manifest that war will ulti-
mately be abolished not because it is an atrocious crime,
but because it is an intolerable nuisance.

If I do not discuss a province of morality which by
a fantastic usage commonly monopolizes in popular
language the connotation of the term, namely, sexual
morality, it is not only because the theme is too far
and deep -reaching in its manifold bearings to be
adequately dealt with here, but because no evolution
is as yet to be traced in regard to it ; for the simple
reason that from time immemorial to the present day
sexual morality has been entirely dominated by the con-
ception of woman as a proprietary article, and the
breeder of heirs to property and caste. The infliction
of countless wrongs upon women, the shifting upon them
of every burden of factitious disaster arising from
passion, as well as its unnatural stimulation by the
entire apparatus of prudery, ' modesty/ restrictions,
clothes, are all alike products of the institution of
despotic proprietary possession which in turn is the
foundation-stone of our social order. To * covet thy
neighbour's wife ' was as wicked as to covet his ox,
or his ass, or anything that is his ; nay, more so, for
is not every woman the possible mother of an heir to
property? Hence must her body be regarded as sinful,
tabu, and be carefully veiled and hidden. The root-
injustice never having altered, there is little to choose
between the sexual morality of one period and that of
another. Orgies of ' purity ' have naturally alternated

\

302 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

with orgies of enhanced licentiousness, but no process
of rational evolution can be exhibited. But now that
the momentous question is happily coming to be debated
in all its aspects, and that woman like man is claiming
power of protest and resistance, this much at least must
appear clear. — that all hope pf setting right the jnountain-
mass of evil, suffering and injustice fori which it stands,
lies solely in the resolute facing of facts as they are,
in the ruthless disregard of tradition and convention,
prejudice, shams and spurious values, no matter how
iJmmemorially consecrated, and in resistance to the powers
founded upon such. The law of moral progress is the
same here as elsewhere — the abolition of injustice
through the destruction of lies by rational thought.

II
MORALITY AND CIVILIZATION

The two things, intellectual development and moral
development, far from being, as is commonly pretended,
two totally distinct and unrelated aspects of human
growth, following each its separate course irrespectively
of the other, are on the contrary found everywhere
and always indissolubly associated. Barbarism does not
only mean a rude material life, a primitive fashion of
clothes and dwellings, rough tools, ignorance, illiteracy,
superstition, it means also inhumanity, cruelty and in-
justice. Culture and civilization do not represent arts,
material comforts, knowledge and intellectual 'interests
and achievements only, but a greater measure of equity,
humanity and justice in the life and relations of men.
The moral development of a people in all ages bears
an exact proportion to its degree of intellectual com-

MORALS AND CIVILIZATION 303

petence and rationality. Wherever vigorous intellectual
growth takes place, there also the conduct, the mores,
the morals of the community stand through their fairness
and mercifulness in .contrast with those pf their barbarous
and superstitious neighbours.

The culture of the first theocratic empires was crude
and sterile ; so was their ethics. But it marked an
advance above primal savagery as notable as the intel-
lectual achievements of Babylon and Heliopolis. The
dawn of material and intellectual culture was also that
of moral ideals. Semitic and Egyptian civilization have
emerged shamefacedly from their infant phase of human
sacrifice and cannibalism. In a dim and confused, but
zealous and enthusiastic way they recognize and pro-
claim moral ideals. They have no clear principles, they
are incapable of defining the ^nature, the why and where-
fore, of right and wrong ; the form of their ethical
notions is still largely that of the savage, an enumeration
of tabus and rituals, things to be done and things for-
bidden, decalogues ; they are divine commands ; justice
and mere rites are grotesquely muddled together,
abstention from murder and Sabbath observance are
tabus of equal importance and authority, philanthropy
and phylacteries stand on the same plane of moral obli-
gation. But there has arisen amongst them nevertheless
the concern for morality, the conception of right which
finds expression in Ptah-Motep and in the code of
Khammurabi, in the Psalms of Babylon and in the
various religious poetries which she inspired.

But it is to Greece, the renewer of mankind, the
uplifter of human evolution to a new level, to rational-
istic Greece that we must turn for the foundations of
ethical development also. Of that activity which un-
locked every portal of intellectual inquiry, quite the
largest proportion was devoted to ethical thought, to
wrestling with the problems of conduct, to the building
of the conception of ideal right. As part and parcel
of that mighty intellectual unfolding, infused through
all its manifestations, was the ideal of man's worth, of
the beauty of his purpose and conduct, matching that

304 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

beauty of his body which inspired Praxiteles and
Polycleitos. The ethical thought of Greece, like all
else that she has put forth, has fed all that came after
her. As in art and in literature, so here also the
foundations and principles which she laid down have
been the standards which have shaped the world's
thought. Nay, to a far greater extent than in either
art or literature, the results of Greek thought upon the
question of right conduct, of just life, which she was
the first to make the object of discussion, have remained
the highwater-rriark of what man has been able to
think upon that subject up to the coming of quite new
conditions of knowledge, have indeed been in advance
of his capacity for many subsequent ages.

Yet so longf has our European thought been under an
influence committed to the depreciation of that aspect
of the legacy of Greece, with a view to the extolment
and glorification of what passes for the Semitic ideal,
that the ethical achievement of Hellas ha,s been prevented
from towering on our horizon with the same transcen-
dence as the other fruits of her creative power. Even
a Matthew Arnold and a Seeley could, under the heavy
incubus of that influence, play upon the leit-motiv of
the superiority of Hebraic over Hellenic ethical inspira-
tion. We shall presently have occasion to note how
radically false is that traditional estimate.

Ethical thought manifesting: itself in principle and
precept is, as I have said, not the true measure of
moral development. But the case is somewhat different
when we have to do, not with the unctuous profession
of fine sentiments consecrated by secular standards, but
with principles propounded for the first time, which are
accordingly the living expression of real growth. That
Hellenic ethical thought, like her philosophic and scien-
tific thought, was not decisive, was an inevitable conse-
quence of the lack of scientific data and of the conditions
of the ancient world. Only the modern age, with its
systematized experience and its adequate perception of
universal processes and relations, is in a position to
approach the root of those problems. iWithout anthropo-
logical data, without the conception of evolution, without

MORALS AND CIVILIZATION 305

co-ordinated natural knowledge, it would be as futile
to expect to find the Greek thinker seizing upon the
essential meaning and relations of ethics, as to expect
Pythagoras or Archimedes to discover cathodic rays.

•But apart from extensions and reconsiderations which />
are only just now beginning to be possible, it was ^
Greek thought which created all those ideals which have
up to the present constituted the moral sense of Europe ;
and it went indeed far beyond even the professed and
theoretical expression of European morality for many
centuries. .We are apt to fail in appreciating the evolu-
tion of what is to us trite and commonplace, and to
realize what an achievement lay in its birth into the
world. Greece not only enounced the paramountcy of
moral right over all human goods whatsoever, but in
a world which implicitly acknowledged the lex talionis,
an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, affirmed
that " it is wrong to requite injustice with injustice,
to inflict evil1 upon any man, whatever we may have
suffered at his hand." The dying Perikles rejoiced
above all his claims to honour " that no Athenian had
ever mourned on his account," and the dying Socrates
that he felt no anger against those who had voted for
his death. And consider, for example, the attitude of
Greek thought towards the notion of punishment — that
since all evil proceeds from ignorance and folly it
calls, like a disease, for the healing hand of the moral
physician and not for senseless retribution; to punish
is in the Greek speech * to make just ' — Si/caioui', * to
make temperate ' — a-axfrpovL^ew. It has taken twenty
centuries for Christian Europe to catch up to that plane
of judgment. And those conceptions founded them-
selves upon faith in the natural excellence of man, " for
no man is naturally wicked," and sought no external
sanction but only the honour of that manhood — " self-
reverence, self-knowledge, self-control."

Like all her products, the ethical thought of Greece
suffered from over -abstraction, from a too detached
intellectualism. It was first and foremost as thought
pure and simple, rather than as thought struck out
from the sharp contact with experience and life, that

20

306 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

it took shape. It was only later, in the world-contacts
of the concrete Roman mind, that it attained the full
glow and fertility of its ripeness. Yet originally, as
the Greek was the intellectual superior of the Roman,
so was he his ethical superior also. The hardness of
Rome, her coarse tastes, her gladiatorial shows, never
could acclimatize themselves on Hellenic soil. Intellect
told inevitably on the moral nature of the Greek, even
though it was essentially an abstract fruit of thought
rather than of life that his ethical spirit developed.
The moral philosopher, the representative Greek, a
Socrates, a Perikles, a Euripides, with all their thought -
detachment, do not present themselves to us as pious
blackguards like a David or a Solomon. With the
effulgent growth of the Greek mind, there went a quiet,
great and real moral redemption ; the Draconian code
was but a softened redaction of the usage, the morality
of the primitive Greek tribes, and to full-grown
Greece it became a proverbial by -word of ferocious
brutality .

It is under the influence of Greece that both
intellectual culture and humanitarian spirit grew on Latin
soil. The one accompanied the other from the day
when Carneades, in the interval of a diplomatic mission,
lectured on justice, and initiated the Greek conquest
of Rome. The aboriginal virtus of Rome, whose
energy was absorbed in struggle, domination, and organ-
ization, was valour and patriotism, filial and civic
discipline, and issued forth in a certain grand punctilio
of honour in her dealings with foes and conquered
people, as, for instance, in the rule never to attack
without previous declaration of war, in the strict and
at times heroic keeping of faith. It was as Hellenic
influence became more and more complete, as all the
mental culture and inspiration of Rome became Greek,
ceased to be antagonized by the native sternness of
the fighter, and was felicitously combined with her native
orderly genius fori organization, government, law, her
natural seriousness and! stoicism, and her long habit
of balancing conflicting claims, that the great and
glorious growth of Roman morality, humanitarian

MORALS AND CIVILIZATION 307

thought and legislation proceeded to develop. From
that influence and combination resulted the most
important fructification of ethical ideals which the world
has seen, ideals which were, as we shall have occasion
to note, in many respects false, which suffered at their
very root from an original and irremediable deflection,
but which nevertheless have served the world for ages
as the guiding and guarding lodestar of moral
authority. For in truth those fixed and accepted
standards of moral law, the spirit which has stood for
the categorical ethical imperative throughout the
development of Europe, are particularly the product of
Rome. The foundations and fertilizing1 impulse came
from Greece, and, both through Greece and directly,
from the old religious spirit of the East ; but
in the final form and character which it assumed
and in which it has been handed down to the modern
world, the * eternal and absolute ' laws of righteousness,
and those which stand for the equity of just dealing,
the entire ambit of traditional European moral ideas
is Roman.

To the intellectual culture of Islam, which has been
fraught with consequences of such moment, corresponded
an ethical development no less notable in the influence
which it has exercised. The fierce intolerance of
Christian Europe was indeed more enraged than
humiliated by the spectacle of the broad tolerance which
made no distinction of creed and bestowed honour and
position on Christian and Jew alike, and whose [prin-
ciples are symbolized in the well-known apologue of
the Three Rings popularized by Boccaccio and
Lessing. It was, however, not without far-reaching
influence on the more thoughtful minds of those who
came in contact with Moorish civilization. But barbaric
Europe confessed itselfj impressed and was stung to
emulation by the lofty magnanimity and the ideals
of chivalrous honour presented to it by the knights of
Spain, by gentlemen like the fierce soldier, Al-Mansur
who claimed that, though he had slain many enemies in
battle, he had never offered an insult to any — an ideal

308 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

of knightly demeanour and dignity which twentieth -
century England might with profit perpend. The
ruffianly Crusaders were shamed by the grandeur of
conduct and generosity of Saladin and his chivalry.1
The ideal of knightly virtue was adopted, the tradition of
noblesse oblige was established. Poetry and romances
deeply tinged with Arabian ideas formed the only
secular literature which circulated and appealed to
popular imagination ; and a new conception of the
place and dignity of woman passed into Europe through
the courts of Provence from the Moorish world, where
she shared the intellectual interests and pleasures
of man.

There never was an ' age of chivalry.' Like the
golden age it has only existed as a mirage dimly
located in the vague distances of an imaginary past.
Poetic imagination has associated it with the brutal
and barbaric timesi of Charlemagne, or with the
legendary figures of a King Arthur or a Parsifal. But
the ideal of knightliness, of courtesy and honouri
was throughout the iniquities and abominations of

1 Of that contrast, which might be so amply illustrated, one
instance shall suffice. I give it in the words of Professor Palmer
from Besant an,d Palmer's Jerusalem : "It was agreed that the
lives and property of the defenders of Acre should be spared
on condition of their paying two hundred thousand dinars, releasing
five hundred captives, and giving up possession of the True
Cross. . . . The first instalment of a hundred thousand dinars
was given up, but Saladin refused to pay the rest, or to hand over
the captives until he had received some guarantee that the
Christians would perform their part of the contract, and allow the
prisoners of Acre to go free. . . . The money was weighed out
and placed before Saladin, the captives were ready to be given up,
and the ' True Cross ' was also displayed. Richard (Cceur de Lion)
was encamped close by the Merj 'Ay tin, and had caused the Acre
captives to be ranged behind him on the neighbouring hillside.
Suddenly, at a signal from the King, the Christian soldiers turned
upon the unhappy and helpless captives, and massacred them all in
cold blood. Even at such a moment as this Saladin did not forget
his humane disposition and his princely character. The proud
Saladin disdained to sully his honour by making reprisals upon the
unarmed prisoners at his side ; he simply refused to give up the
money or the cross, and sent the prisoners to Damascus. Which
was the Paynim, and which the Christian, then ?"

< CORRUPTION ' 309

feudal and tyrannic Europe the one source of
substantial, concrete moral qualities. That gran
bonta dej cavalier i antichi forced by the sheer moral
superiority of the Moors upon the brigand nobility of
Europe, became the sole redeeming ethical grace of
Christendom ; and the tradition has been handed down
to our own1 day in the notion so dear to the English
mind of a 'gentleman.' Thus, shocking as the paradox
may be to our traditional notions, it would probably
be only strict truth to say that Muhammadan culture has
contributed at least as largely to the actual, practical,
concrete morality of Europe as many a more sublimated
ethical doctrine.

That ' refining,' humanizing influence which men
have always ascribed to culture is not a mystic, obscure,
and vague effect of elegant taste and aesthetic effeminacy,
but the direct and inevitable result of intelligence, .
knowledge, and rationality of thought, upon the founda-
tions of all ethical estimates. Where people are
ignorant, uncritical, and' irrational, they are unjust, cruel,
ready to perpetrate and to tolerate abuses of un-
scrupulous and unchecked power. Those abuses, those
injustices, those cruelties become, when their minds are
enlightened, as intolerable and impossible to accept as
the puerile conceptions and crude world-theories of the
barbarian and the savage.

Ill
' CORRUPTION *

But some phases of highly developed culture, it is
objected, have been profoundly immoral. Decadent
Rome and the Italian Renaissance are consecrated

310 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

instances which flash before the mind. Those
phenomena, when analysed, illustrate the law which
they appear to infringe. The immorality, the violence,
the unscrupulousness, which are adverted to in such
epochs, were the effect of great power and wealth in
ruling classes, which, while commanding the fruits of
culture and pressing them into the service of their
self-indulgence and luxury, were nowise associated with
its creative impulse or with any form of its progressive
activity. That corruption was the effect of power, not
of intellectual growth. That which offends us in those
periods is to be met with not among* the Senecas or
Leonardos, but in the surfeited master classes which
had reached the limit of power to indulge their passions
and appetites in Imperial and in Papal Rome. It was
the product not of growing culture, but of the cul-
mination of personal power in the Empire and in the
Papacy .

The phenomenon of cultured depravity is a character-
istic of periods of transition. Culture, intellectual
development, greatly increase the means of power, of
gratification and self-indulgence in poweri-holders. They
supply them with extended means of pleasure, luxury
and display. Hence that result takes place whenever
a class possessing* great power and wealth coexists with
a condition of high culture which it did not produce : a
situation which, as we have seen, is invariably one
of unstable equilibrium. That culture may be, as
with Rome, the legacy of a former period of intel-
lectual activity, or, as in the Renaissance, the firstfruit
of new circumstances leading to an influx of culture.
It is never associated with actual intellectual activity
in the morally corrupt class.

Somewhat the same situation has recurred in various
periods, in France before the Revolution, for instance,
when modern culture was bursting through her seed-
coverings, but feudalism, though doomed, was still in
full vigour. Even to-day something of the same
phenomenon may be seen in the unintellectual wealthy
classes (affording an opportunity for preachers to dwell
on the * materialism of the age '). To a large extent

< CORRUPTION' 311

it constitutes that corrupting influence which is commonly
ascribed to civilization. Wherever that phenomenon
manifests itself we find the real intellectual element,
whatever may be its relation to the ruling class, in
actual opposition to it, working out its downfall. And
the corruption is painted to us in vivid colours because
it is painted by the hand of the indignant intellectual
class which in the Renaissance is as loud in its impeach-
ment of * avaricious Babylon/ as Juvenal in his
denunciation of the dissolute plutocracy of his day,
as the French philosopher in his indictment of Versailles
morality, or the modern socialist in his accusation of
the * idle rich.' The forces of which corrupt ruling
classes avail themselves to enhance the opulence of
their orgies of power, are those which are about to
overwhelm them. It is largely because of the vigour
of the forces of moral protest in periods of hi'gh culture,
that all their abuses and corruptions stand pilloried in
the fierce light of denunciation.

The evil itself is necessarily a very limited and partial
phenomenon, a particular point of view which may with-
out difficulty be brought into focus in almost any period.
As Professor Dill remarks, it would be easy for any
satirical -writer of our own day to match every single
denunciation of Juvenal.

The consecrated conception of Roman corruption,
traditionally cultivated as an essential part of our scheme
of history, is by now fit for circulation only among
the uninformed. The popular fancy picture of the
Roman world filled with Neronian orgies which serve
as a lurid background for the figures of Christian
martyrs, might indeed without any historical knowledge
be sufficiently discredited by its own inherent incon-
sistency. For who, pray, were those Christian martyrs,
those saintly bishops, those noble women, those Clements,
those Cecilias, those Laterani? Were theyt not Romans?
Was it from a soil putrid with moral corruption that
their moral enthusiasm; and fervour fructified?

The whole notion of * corruption ' has originated
with Roman writers themselves. What they meant by
4 corruption ' was any departure from the Spartan

312 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

simplicity of life, of the old peasant community.
'* Among the examples which they think most scan-
dalous," says Ferrero, " are many which to us appear
innocent enough ; as, for instance, the importation from
Pontus of certain sausages and salt fish which were, it
seems, excellent to eat, the introduction from Greece
into Italy of the art of battening, fowl. Even the drink-
ing of Greek wines was during many centuries considered
a luxury to be indulged in only on thei most solemn
occasions. In 18 B.C. Augustus got a sumptuary law
passed which made it illegal to spend more than two
hundred sestercia (about two pounds) on a banquet on
ordinary days, three hundred sestercia (three pounds)
on Calend and Ide days, and one thousand (ten pounds)
for wedding dinners. Even allowing for the difference
in the value of money, the masters of the world feasted
at a cost which we should consider absurdly moderate.
. . . Silk was looked upon askance even in the
most opulent periods of the empire, as a luxury of
questionable taste because it showed off too prominently
the liries of the body. Lollia Paulina's name has been
handed down because she owned so many jewels that
their value amounted1 to some four thousand pounds.
There are so many Lollia Paulinas to-day that none
can buy immortality at so small a cost. . . . The boon
companions of Nero and Eliogabalus w'ould be dazzled
if they coulfd come back to life in any of the large
hotels of Paris, London, or New York. They had
seen more beautiful things, but never such reckless
luxury. . . . Rome, even at the height of her splendour
was poor compared with our cities. There were far
fewer theatres and amusements. Many vices which are
•widely diffused to-day were unknown to the ancients;
they knew few wines, they had no alcohol, no tea, no
coffee, no tobacco. They were ever Spartans com-
pared to us, even when they thought they were indulging
themselves. The Romans considered it quite an ordinary
precaution to keep a watch on tfhe individual citizen
within the walls of his home, to see that he did not
get drunk, or eat too much, or incur debts, or spend
too much, or covet his neighbour's wife. In the age

' CORRUPTION ' 313

of Augustus exile and confiscation of a third of their
property was the penalty imposed on Roman citizens,
men or women,, for adultery, and any one was free to
bring a charge against the delinquents. The law
remained in force for centuries."

Idle, ignorant rich, and insane autocrats were in
a state of moral dissolution in Imperial Rome as they
have been everywhere and in all ages ; but though
the annals of every country can furnish Neros and
Domitians in abundance, how many can parallel the
figures of such rulers as Trajan or Marcus Aurelius?
As we have already had occasion to note, Roman civiliza-
tion, which by a strange and pathetic irony has been
branded in the popular imagination as the example of
moral corruption, was on the contrary for nothing more
notable than as the period of most active ethical
enthusiasm and moral development in the history of the
world, and the outstanding legacy of Roman genius to
humanity has been one of moral aspiration and
redemption.

I have said enough about the character of the Italian
Renaissance to show1 that it had in it more of corruption
than of real culture. In its social aspect it marked
the pouncing of beasts of prey upon the material! and
intellectual heritage of the race, and if it coincided
also with developments of the first moment for human
evolution, it is because there Was also initiated then the
fiercest round of the struggle in Which mankind has
striven to wrest that heritage from her despoilers. It
need, therefore, nowise surprise us that that period
should be for utter moral corruption, unscrupulousness,
and brutal selfishness without a parallel in human annals,
and that the patrons of that false, vain, and insincere
culture, should have been a Leo X, an Alexander VI,
a Caesar Borgia, a Lodovico Sforza, a Lorenzo the
Magnificent, protector oli the arts, author of elegant
and vile Canti Carnascialeschi, sacker of Volterra,
despoiler of orphans, murderer, traitor, and tyrant.1

1 Lorenzo has, I am aware, been duly whitewashed by sundry
recent authors ; their evidences are unconvincing.

314 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

One character by, which perhaps the Italian
Renaissance exercises most fascination, by contrast with
the tinsel artificiality of its intellectual fruits, is the
very boldness and naturalness of its depravity, its
unashamed individualistic animality, its undisguised
rascality disdainful of reticence and hypocrisies, which
so congenially blended with the more sensuous aspects
of the pagan spirit. And we find a certain charm in
the swash -buckler blackguardism of a Cellini, and in
the world of gilded ruffianism which he so ingenuously
reflected. That aspect at least was unmincingly
sincere.

CHAPTER IV

THE GUILT OF OPINIONS

I

DILEMMA OF AMBULATORY MORALITY

THE ineptitude of the so-called sciences of ethics which
occupy our academic chairs, stammering forth their
feeble dogmatisms in apologetic consciousness of their
invalidity, reaches its reductio ad absurdum when our
principles of moral philosophy are confronted with the
task of passing judgment upon history.

In considering the criminal acts of unenlightened
ages — Richard I, say, putting out the eyes of fifteen
French knights, or James I suggesting refinements of
torture to extract confessions of witchcraft — we remark
that those worthies would not have behaved as they
did, had they lived at the present day; the turpitude
of their acts was not an attribute of their personal
depravity, but of the age they lived in. Whatever
perversity they may have naturally possessed would,
in our own day, have taken a different and less out-
rageous form ; the atrocities which they committed
are to be set down to the nature of the views,
customs, and opinions current in their day Lion-
hearted Richard would, had he lived to-day, have
proved himself a very gallant gentleman, his breast
would have been resplendent with many well-earned
decorations, and he would scarcely have controlled the
exuberance of his indignation while reading of German
atrocities in his morning paper and of the dastardly
treatment of our prisoners in German cam'ps. The
most high and mighty prince James, by the grace of

315

316 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

God defender of, the faith, would have been a pillar
of the Establishment and a zealous supporter of religious
education, but he would not have hammered nails in
John Fian's finger- tips. The mores, the public opinion
of Plantagenet England were perfectly accustomed to
worse Norman atrocities than King Richard's : a Norman
king or baron who did not devise some egregious cruelty
or treachery would have been an object of amazement ;
and King Philip Augustus of France was nothing loath
to retaliate by treating fifteen English knights in
the same manner as Richard had treated the French.
Public opinion in England in the sixteenth century quite
approved of torturing persons suspected of witchcraft.

Yet while we are thus accustomed to set down the
atrocities and revolting moral judgments of rnen in the
past to the barbarism and ignorance of the current
opinions of their day, we at the same time continue to
profess the dogma that moral good and moral evil are
intimate personal attributes of individual ' character,' and
to regard opinions and intellectual judgments as wholly
outside the sphere of moral values. The two views
stand, of course, in as flat contradiction to one another
as is possible. They are the re duetto ad absufdum of
the principles which govern our moral judgments. If
in one age the grossest iniquities were committed by
men who would/ certainly not have perpetrated them
had they lived in another age, the attribute of moral
' badness ' belongs not at all to their personal character,
but to their opinions. If Sir Thomas Browne, who
picturesquely set his face against 'ambulatory morality/
and Sir Matthew Hale, no less fluent in ethical theorizing,
could assist in convicting old women of witchcraft, if
Shakespeare could callously countenance the pillorying
of the memory of Joan of Arc, it was not Sir Thomas
Browne, Sir Matthew Hale, and Shakespeare who were
morally perverse, but the irrational current opinions
which they accepted. It was not bad men who burned
women alive, but the Christianity of the sixteenth century.

You cannot have it both ways. Either the conscientious
intention is bad or the opinion which justifies it ; either
Sir Thomas Browne was immoral or the verse of Exodus

OPINION ON OPINIONS 317

and the ignorance which accepted its authority ; either
evil-doers are morally reprehensible, and no generally
accepted opinion can be morally condemned, or the stigma
of moral goodness and badness attaches to those
opinions and not to the men who act upon them.

Our current ethics are here reduced to impotent
titubation .

On the one hand our ethical theories justify as blame-
less all conduct which proceeds from good intentions, a
good conscience, steadfast principles. Our traditional
moral estimates are concerned with ' judging ' actions
with reference to punishment or reward. A bad action
in terms of those notions, means a punishable action. And
the chief, the only relevant considerations in an assessment
of punishment or reward — or their equivalent, blame or
praise— are the motives of the individual, his conscience,
his responsibility, his intentions.

The current doctrine, on the other hand, is that opinions
are etliically irrelevant ; that whatever their nature, pro-
vided only they be sincere, they are entitled to respect ;
that they are private personal concerns for which the
holder is not answerable to any man ; that, pertaining
as they do to the domain of the intellect, they lie
entirely outside that of morality ; and that no stigma
of moral reprobation can attach to any opinion as such,
which is held in good faith.

II
CURRENT OPINION ON OPINIONS

At one time, when rationally irresponsible dogma and
authority were claimed to be the foundations of belief, the

318 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

directly opposite doctrine was held. The grossest evils
from which the European world has suffered, have been
the results of attempts to put down opinions which were
regarded as wicked and immoral. The enormities of
dogmatic intolerance produced a revolt to which it was
found expedient to yield. The reverse doctrine thus
received tacit assent — that all opinions are equally
entitled to respect and consideration. In other words,
when it was found no longer possible to enforce the
standard of arbitrary authority superior to reason, the
assumption was encouraged that no definite standard
of right opinion exists. It was thus possible to elude
the necessity of recognizing the real standard of valid
opinion — rational thought, and intellectual honesty. The
tyrannical mediaeval doctrine pf intolerance and the
modern illogical doctrine of tolerance, are at one in
refusing to acknowledge rational thought as the sole valid
sanction of opinion. Irrational authority, having lost
the 'power of effectually exercising intolerance, claimed
the benefits of tolerance ; finding it impossible to main-
tain the absolute supremacy and universal recognition
of irrational sanctions, it secured the best terms of sur-
render, by obtaining for them equality of status with
rational sanctions. But it did more than secure the
acceptance of the outrageous doctrine that irrational
opinions have exactly the same moral status as
rational opinions. Since the supporters of irrational
authority had treated the opinions of their opponents
as morally reprehensible, it came to be professed that
no opinions are morally reprehensible ; thus the alter-
native inference was eluded, that irrational opinions are
themselves morally reprehensible.

Thus it is that the modern attitude towards opinions
has arisen. Rational and irrational opinions being exactly
on the same footing, no standard of valid opinion, no
standard of intellectual ethics, no standard of right
judgment is recognized. Opinions are sacred and
inviolable individual rights. Their sanctity is as jealously
protected as that of property. The grossest irration-
ality is secure in that protection. Every folly and patent
idiocy can claim the same ' respect ' as the most stringent

OPINION ON OPINIONS 319

rational conclusion. The baby-farmer is sent to gaol,
but the ' Christian Scientist ' is entitled to considera-
tion and even protection for his 'honest ' opinions. It
would be heinous to dispute his right to propagate them
and to impose them upon tender children. If any one
should venture to raise a doubt about the right to inflict
deliberate and irremediable deformation on the defence-
less mind of a child, to instil irrational prejudices, to
teach falsehoods, to cripple effectually and completely
his rational powers, to poison the sources of judgment,
to rob him of his human heritage — such a suggestion
would raise a storm of righteous indignation, the cry
would go up from the successors of the Inquisitors and
High Commissioners that the sacred rights of conscience
are being challenged, that it is sought to bring back the
days of persecution and intolerance, that liberty, freedom
of teaching, the most indefeasible rights of the subject
are being menaced and violated. It would be as
scandalous to dispute that the parent has as absolute a
right to strangle a child's mind as it would formerly
have been to dispute his right to strangle his body. To
interfere at all with conscientious opinion is rather worse
than bad taste. All sincere opinions are ' honest.'
While their truth or falsehood may under proper cir-
cumstances be debated, to apply moral judgments to
them is itself a turpitude, and. a violation of the canons
of debate. Hence opinions have come to be regarded as
really of little or no ethical importance ; they are ab-
stracted as adventitious and irrelevant. Morally speak-
ing we have to do with good or bad men, not with
opinions. To insist on taking opinions too seriously is
a mark of vulgar narrowness and intolerance. W;rong
must not be tolerated, but every opinion has a sacred
right to be tolerated. That anarchy of tolerance is
necessarily extended to our historical judgments ; we
can only bestow praise ori blame on ' good ' or -'• bad '
men ; opinions are morally neutral.

320 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

III

THE WICKEDNESS OF THE ' GOOD '

But, as a matter of fact, the good and the bad in
human history have not at all proceeded from the
* goodness ' or ' badness ' of men, but from their
views and opinions. The men who have inflicted
the worst calamities upon the human race, opposed
its welfare by every means in their power, obstructed
its advance, betrayed its destinies, drenched the
world in blood, oppressed it with injustice, the
foes of humanity, have not been men of bad
intentions — bad men ; they have been purely and
simply men who have held \vrong, that is, irrational
opinions. Far from desiring to inflict injury, they have
for the most part been actuated by a sincere and dis-
interested sense of duty towards mankind. Torquemada,
who died " in the conviction that he had given his best —
indeed, his all — to the service of God," was a ' good
man'; he loved humanity, he Was animated, not by
any personal and selfish motives, but by a perfervid
sense of duty : he roasted alive ten thousand men and
women with the sincere purpose of benefiting them and
the human race — and quite consistently. Calvin, who
murdered Servetus under circumstances of aggravated
treachery and atrocity, and John Knox, who demanded
the slaughter of every Catholic in Scotland, were men
whose whole lives were dedicated to a paramount ethical
ideal. Charles V, who decreed that every heretic should
be beheaded, burned, or buried alive, and who put from
fifty to a hundred thousand people to death in Holland
alone, had as his supreme object the maintenance of
true religion, and was '•' clement beyond example."

Read the expressions of Roman Catholic opinion in
instigation and in praise of the massacres of the
Huguenots, the paeans of* exultation over the glorious
and meritorious deed, the pious hopes that it might
prove but the beginning of more extensive butcheries,
and mark the awakening of Christian princes to a sense

WICKEDNESS OF THE ^ GOOD ' 321

of their highest moral duty. Those men spoke like
pillars of moral conviction, their language is that of
conscious rectitude and dignified sense of right. One
might be reading a leading article in The Times. We
call them bloody murderers, infamous monsters ; but
they were in their own sight pre-eminently virtuous. The
mind of Gregory XIII celebrating a Te Deurn over
the St. Bartholomew was suffused with as much righteous
pride and joy as that of Thomas Clarkson on hearing
of the abolition of the slave-trade. It is doubtful whether
we could even call them cruel : one French bishop on
being informed of the plot nearly fainted from physical
horror, but yielded to a sense of moral duty.

The upholders of feudalism were inspired by what
appeared to them the most noble and sacred ideals. Read
their memoirs ; see in what light their hideous cause
appeared to them, with what sense of playing the tvau
role they fought against the liberation of humanity from
the most outrageous cruelty and injustice. Their romantic
young women were fired with heroic inspiration, ready
to shed their blood to bring back the rack and the
Bastille, the corvee, misery, famine, and spoliation, ready
' to die for their king.'

All the tyrants, the oppressors, the kings, the priests,
the inquisitors, the reactionaries of all ages, who have
striven to check human growth, to maintain the ugly
past, to crush mankind, who have upheld and perpetrated
every infamy and abomination, have had in their minds
the loftiest sentiments, and on their lips the words which
they accounted most sacred — truth, religion, morals,
honour, loyalty. And the things which they fought tooth
and nail bore in their language the ugliest names— error,
blasphemy, sedition, disloyalty, treason, infidelity, anarchy,
atheism. Those distorted terminologies were not mere
rhetorical pretences and controversial tags ; they, as a
general rule, truly represented the point of view of those
who used them. Very few men indeed have ever with any
vigour espoused and defended a bad cause, knowing it
to be bad. All the evil which they have inflicted on
the human race has been wrought with a clear and approv-
ing conscience. The deepest and most atrocious crimes

21

322 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

in the Newgate Calendar of history are associated with
good intentions and conscientious purposes. It is
' good ' men who have always been the true evil-doers,
the most pernicious and dangerous foes of the race,
and the blackest traitors to its highest and most vital
interests. And the evil which they have wrought when
they have acted as the organs of wrong opinions, has
been in exact proportion to their ' goodness/ to their
zeal, sincerity and conscientiousness.

The hell of human suffering, evil, and oppression is
paved with good intentions. The men who have most
injured and oppressed humanity, who have most deeply
sinned against it, were, according to their standards
and their conscience, good men ; what was bad in them,
what wrought moral evil and cruelty, treason to truth and
progress, was not at all in their intentions, in their purpose,
in their personal character, but in their opinions.

The plain truth is that views and opinions are the
only ethically significant, the only moral and immoral
things. It is not what men do, knowing and judging it
to be bad and wicked, but what they do considering
it to be highly moral, conscientiously believing it to be
good, which is answerable for by far the largest measure
of the wrongdoing and injustice in the world. The
calamities which have afflicted the human race, the crimes
of history, do not arise from malignant intentions, but
from excellent and erroneous intentions. The true police
function of morality should be not to restrain bad men,
but to restrain good men. The ' wicked man ' of the
Nicomachean ethics who ' calmly x does wrong/ who
habitually and systematically does what he apprehends
to be wrong, is a rare monster. He is either
a miserable weakling or a pathological pervert. Hie is
exceptional. Conscious, intentional and self-condemned
iniquity is as a drop in the ocean of conscientious,
approved iniquity.

And moral wrong is conscientious and approved because
it rests upon wrong opinions. I

The moral reformer who attacks a glaring injustice
and perversion of the moral sense invariably finds that
his real adversary is not at all a false sentiment or a

WICKEDNESS OF THE 'GOOD' 323

deformed feeling, but an irrational falsehood about a
four-square matter of fact. He denounces persons for
wickedness, injustice, and finds, to his embarrassment,
that they are in their intentions neither wicked nor unjust,
that they believe themselves to be in the right, and that
the real tyrant, the real evil-doer is some opinion, some
intellectual absurdity which justifies them in their
own eyes.

Strictly speaking, opinions are the only indictable
offences. And they are culpable to the extent that they
are irrational. There is not a false opinion, an error,
however theoretical it may appear, which is not charge-
able with moral evil, with injustice in its consequences.

What, for instance, seemingly more inoffensive, nay,
almost amiable form of idiocy than that of a saintly,
devout little Catholic lady whose feminine emotionalism
finds its outlet in passionate indulgence in the mysticisms
and rites of her religion? What fanatical rationalist
would be so vulgarly tactless as to offend the feelings
of the poor, sweet lady who spends the surplus of her
treasures of tender emotion in sacrifice and good work?
But give that inoffensive little lady power, set her on a
throne, and you have Isabel and the Spanish Inquisition,
Bloody Mary and the English Inquisition, Madame de
Maintenon and the Revocation of the Edict, the
dragonnades and the ruin of a kingdom.1 Inoffensive!
No lie in this world can manage to be inoffensive. No
lie and no error whatever. If it has power it will be
bloody and murderous.

We are prone to think of intellectual inquiry, of the
pursuit of truth, as amiable forms of curiosity. But
in point of fact there is not an error that has not shed
blood, not a false opinion that has not been a breeder
of injustice. And every freedom and immunity from

1 It is now customary to state that Madame de Maintenon had
nothing to do with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. If we
bear in mind the character of her influence on Louis XIV, the King's
suspiciousness of being in any way led by others, the clever tact-
fulness of his wife in guiding him without ever appearing to do so,
and the evolution of his fanaticism from his " conversion " onward
under her influence, we can have little doubt as to whence his
religious policy emanated.

324 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

wrong which we enjoy is the fruit of some intellectual
truth. The supposed line of demarcation between the
intellectual and the moral is a fiction. It is to intellectual
products that moral values are applicable.

That is true of individual opinions, but it is even more
momentously and tragically true of those opinions which
are widely prevalent, which constitute the established
standards of a people, of an epoch, or of a party, which
constitute ' public opinion.' Morality, mor]es, is custom,
in the sense that it is dependent upon the nature of
acknowledged and current opinions. Individual 'good-
ness,' good intention, deliberate righteousness, a good
conscience, simply mean conformity with the constituted
opinions and views of the age. And the constituted
opinions of various ages havd countenanced and supported
every crime under the sun. If those opinions be bad,
unjust, irrational, no degree of conscientiousness, of well-
meaning and enthusiasm for virtue, can make an
individual's conduct and attitude moral.

There are at all times evil-doers who stand condemned
by the accepted standards of their age — how far their
immorality is the effect of the irrational provisions arid
arrangements of the age, of its injustice, is another
question. But the ethical measure of evil resulting from
that immorality, is as nothing by comparison with that
which is inherent in the accepted and approved opinions
of the age.

It is public morality, public opinion, accepted views
and beliefs, approved standards of judgment, and not
at all individual character and malignant intentions which
are responsible for overwhelming the world with blood
and injustice. Those are the real culprits, those are
the criminals, those are the actual malefactors. The
immorality which has afflicted humanity is not a matter of
sentiments, of broken commandments, of moral insensi-
bility ; it resolves itself into intellectual ignorance, into
irrationality which renders possible the uncritical founda-
tions of wrong. It is in that supposedly ' intellectual "
field that the real moral reform takes place ; progress
in morality takes place through the overthrow of some
view or theory which in itself is regarded as having

THE UNPARDONABLE SIN 325

nothing to do with morality. We are not under the
influence of a higher ethical code than our forefathers,
we are not animated by a more intense and loftier moral
purpose than Sir Thomas Browne, or Melanchthon, or
John Calvin, but the field of rational thought has enlarged .
If Dominicans no longer burn heretics, judges no longer
use the * question,' tyrants no longer exercise fantastic
forms of oppression, it is not because we have received
some sublime moral enlightenment. Our morality has
improved because our intellectual "developmenT^and
rationality have

IV ,
OUR TRIVIAL ESTIMATE OF UNPARDONABLE SIN

The anarchy of our ethics, the stultification of our
moral judgments, which renders possible the glorification
of scoundrels by historians, of Frederick II, for example,
by Carlyle, of Henry VIII by Froude, is most crucially
exposed when the delinquent is so merely through the
natural consequence of opinions to which even to this
day no definite moral stigma is held to attach.

Take as an illustration the case of Queen Marie
Antoinette. She was a woman of considerable charm,
and the weakness of her personal character, that she was
appallingly ignorant and frivolous, that those entrusted
with her education were compelled to give up the task
in despair, that she could never read any book except
the most trashy novels, which she took with her to church
bound as prayer-books to while the tedium of the service,
that she was vain and pleasure-loving — were no more

326 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

than the ordinary faults common to most fashionable
women of her day and ours. In a court notorious for
the looseness of its sexual morality, her conduct stands
decidedly above the average, and above what might have
been expected of her. Though scandal was ever viru-
lently busy with her name, the demonstrably slanderous
nature of most of its allegations bears witness to the
slight ;hold which her conduct gave to defaming tongues .
Lauzun and Fersen were possibly her lovers, but the fact
is by no means established. In the days of trial she
proved a devoted wife and a good mother. There is
nothing in the weaknesses of her private life that can
detract from the tragic pity of her career from throne
to scaffold, or that can lessen the sympathy which the
sufferings which she bore with dignity and fortitude
naturally excite.

But if we judge the Queen by the part which she played
in the events amid which her lot was cast — and on what
other ground is any historical judgment possible or valid?
— our view must closely coincide with the fiercest invec-
tives of the French Republicans against ' la panthere
autrichienne.' She was the soul and centre of all the
forces arrayed against that Revolution which was the
greatest and most fertile impulse of regeneration, redemp-
tion, and emancipation in the career of the human race, the
source of all that mankind has won of freedom and justice
in the last century. She was vowed to implacable hatred
and hostility against it, and in order to oppose and defeat
it every means appeared justified in her sight. She
encouraged the King to break hi(s pledges, she engineered
his desertion to the enemies of his country, she unre-
mittingly urged and incited those enemies against the
country which she represented and against the liberties
which her people had won ; she supplied the foe with
every information and assistance ; she poured all the gold
of France on which she could lay hands into the war-
chests of Austria and Prussia. For one tithe of those
treasons any individual would, according to all existing
codes, be summarily shot. If the workman who made the
iron safe is to be believed, she did not stop at murder
with her own hand. Even that was justified in her eyes

THE UNPARDONABLE SIN 327

by the purposes of the absolutist cause. If ever France
had an enemy it was she ; if ever the most vital and
paramount issues of the evolution of the human race had
a truceless and uncompromising opponent it was she.

Can anything be more pathetic than the bewildered
helplessness of our so-called ethical principles when
applied to such cases? We are 'supposed to possess a
perfectly clear notion of the distinction Between right and
wrong ; yet when we are called upon to pass judgment on
one who devoted herself to the defence of wrong and the
defeat of right, our ethical assessment is virtually allowed
to be as purely a matter of individual taste as the appre-
ciation of an Indian curry. There is nothing in our
standards to exclude the canonization of Marie Antoinette
as a saint and martyr. After all, say our historians, she
was only a foolish woman ; any aristocratic Primrose
Dame of to-day would, placed in identical circumstances,
have acted exactly as she did. Her attitude and conduct
were the natural outcome of views which she regarded as
superlatively moral. Exactly the same plea can be ad-
vanced to justify Torquemada, Mary Tudor, the Guises,
William Hohenzollern, and every self-righteous scoundrel
in history.

We have not by any means yet left behind us the
grossness of immoral opinions. We have our approved
and accepted opinions which breed iniquity as inevitably
as Sir Thomas Browne's or King James's opinions on
witchcraft .

The inquisitor and the tyrant, the block, the stake,
and the torture-chamber are melodramatic enormities
which to us have become so remote that we almost
fail to think of them as ever having been terribly real
actualities ; they have become semi-fabulous, almost
ridiculous in their grossness, like ogres and werewolves,
and reference to such obsolete horrors is apt to leave
us somewhat cold. But the psychological and logical
relation is precisely the same in regard to what
we consider debatable points of present actualities, moot
views and opinions in the actual order of the world.
Thy tyrant and the inquisitor have changed their names
and callings, they wield less sensational weapons, but

328 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

they are still with us, standing in the same relation as
of yore to the cause of human destinies.

And the same is true of the moral issues at stake
in the present world, and of men's attitude and conduct
in regard to them as of the most violent actions. The
determining factors of constituted immorality in the ages
of darkest tyranny arp the same which operate to-day
in apparently — but only apparently — more innocuous
forms. We have amongst us the same delusions of
gross immorality believing itself conscientiously moral
as in the days of inquisitions and witch-hunts.

Murder and torture, however validated and sanctified
by existing opinion, are unmistakably recognized as evil
when those opinions have lost their force. But other
evils may be inflicted on humanity besides homicide and
gross instant tyranny. Lord Acton, seeking a fixed
standard of historical moral judgment, made homicide
the criterion. But if we look at human affairs from
the point of view of the actual natural laws which govern
them, even human life is not the most important con-
sideration. Even the sacrifice of many human lives is
not so great an evil as the setting back of the course of
evolution for centuries. The ends of the great process
manifested in the development of humanity, the fulfilment
of its destinies, the compassing of justice, are objects
even more sacred than human life. Individuals are willing
to sacrifice life for those things ; the race does not hesitate
to cast away lives in thousands, in millions, to sacrifice a
whole generation for the sake of those objects. Humanity,
which has been bleeding to death, would think its blood
well spent if the goal of its efforts were thereby brought
nearer, if the world were made substantially better by,
the sacrifice.

Yet a man may stand in open and avowed
opposition to those issues more sacred than human life
itself without in the least degree forfeiting his moral
character. The one truly unpardonable sin, impiety,
treason against the one supreme Divine Fact and pur-
pose we know, is a matter of respectable difference of
opinion, of politics, of cr&ed, of expediency, of what you
will, but not a matter of morality.

THE UNPARDONABLE SIN 329

We do not burn people alive, we have no Torque -
madas or Ezzelins among us to-day. But in the code
of natural moral values there are blacker crimes than
homicide. The benevolent old gentleman with whom
you dined last night is intent on frustrating Human
Evolution, on circumventing and defeating the Purpose
of the race. The villains in the Divine Comedy of
humanity are such benevolent old gentlemen.

The conflict and struggle of which human good
and human progress have been the outcome, an'd
which is daily being waged for the same objects, is
noi a battle against men, but against opinions. It
is not recognized immorality which needs to be com-
bated, but recognized morality. Not what is known
as wrong, but what passes for right. And the founda-
tion of that immorality and of that wrong is a structure
reared not by reason, but by power-thought. The task^
of the forces of moral progress is an intellectual one ;.
it does not call so much for greater purity of purpose,!
as for more critical intellectual rectitude.

MORALS AND BELIEF

I

MORALS AS COMFORT

ETHICAL thought suffered early from1 a radical confusion
which almost completely stultified its operation; and
that confusion still obtains. It became stultified and
sterilized when its point of view became shifted from
humanity to man, from human relations in general,
their significance as a social question, to the exclusive
consideration of personal and individual character.
When the Greek thinkers in the first flush and bloom
of their enthusiasm for rational thought began to con-
sider the question of right conduct, their first notion
was justice, theif first ideal the just man. Afterwards,
when in the Mediterranean world Greek rationalism
became diluted, adulterated, and ultimately swamped
by the influences of the Orient, that ideal became
changed, under the Stoics and Epicureans into thai
of the Wise man, wise, that is, in contriving to arm
and protect himself by mental fences against the hard-
ships and sufferings of life. The two actual religions
of the cultivated Roman and Hellenic world, Stoicism
and Epicureanism, had alike for their aim, not the
regulation of the relations between man and man, but
the formation of individual character in such a way
that the individual might himself enjoy a comparative
degree of immunity from the effects of the trials and
vicissitudes of life; teaching him to make the best
of things, comforting him. They produced an i mas
naiuratiter Christianas. The process was carried a step
further, and the ideal of the current philosophical
religions, the wise man, developed into that of the

330

MORALS AS COMFORT 331

Asiatic saint. The individual was further comforted.
Thus the original purpose of ethics, the only one which
possesses any meaning, its raison d'etre, the regulation
of the relations between man and man, the elimination
of wrong and the establishing of right, was entirely lost
sight of and forgotten. It ceased to be the business
of ethical thought ; and in its stead the condition of
the individual mind, its peace and comfort, ' a good
conscience,' good intentions, became substituted as the
end-all of so-called morality. As the ' just man '
gave place to the saint, so for the notion of wrong and
injustice was substituted that of sin, and thus mere
equity, mere justice came almost to be thought of as
an inferior order of moral good, and moral excellence
came instead to be associated with the notion of certain
exalted conditions of the feelings and emotions, and
to be judged with reference rather to the state of the
individual's mind than to the effects of his conduct.

That transformation by Stoical and Epicurean thought
of the original Greek conception of morality constitutes
the most profound perversion which the ethical ideals
of man have ever suffered. Morality, right conduct
between man and man, becomes destitute of signifi-
cance if it does not result in the actual good of mankind.
It is shorn of its function. That function is not the
individual's own good, his salvation, though it is in
reality the highest condition of that good, but his
conduct, his relation to the vaster organism of which
he is a part. And of that actual moral relation the
essence and foundation is justice.

And justice is not an ethereal ideal, it is not a
constructive conception, the created product of some
sublime vision. It is simply the negation of wrong,
of injustice. It demands that there shall be no despotic
oppression, no arbitrary violence done by man to man,
no gratuitous abuse and cruelty, that, in his life, his
activity, his thought, man shall not be tyrannized over
by man, by virtue of mere power, privilege, factitious
and false authority. Those things are wrong, purely
and wholly wrong, in whatever light we look at them,
so long as we attach any meaning whatever to the word

332 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

' wrong.' In demanding immunity from them, man
demands only, as, he puts it, his right. That right,
although not founded on the sanction of any contract,
noc demonstrable by any legal formula, although, if
you Kvill, quite an arbitrary claim — regarded as a claim—
constitutes the fundamental demand, the root and essence
of the significance of morality. It is right, as dis-
tinguished from wrong. The elimination of wrong is
the irreducible minimum of morality. Whatever lofty
superstructure of ideal ethical emotion be reared above
that irreducible minimum, it counts for nothing so long
as the primary essentials of right are not secured,
so long as wrong is upheld. Such a superstructure is
not moral at all. In order that a man or a society
of men should have any claim to be regarded as moral,
they must cease to do wrong. It is of no avail that
they should entertain sublime emotions, that they should
live in a sustained ecstasis of exalted feeling, if they
do not fulfil the primary condition of forgoing wrong-
doing, of ceasing to be unjust.

Not only is the prime function of morality obscured
and overshadowed by the personal and ascetic ideal,
but a radically conflicting and opposite function becomes
substituted for it. Not right, but renouncement is the
ideal of Stoicism, not abstention from wrong, but the
protection of the individual from the effects of wrong.
The object of morality is no longer to resist evil, but
to submit to it ; not to advance justice, but to bow
to and ignore injustice. The basal function of
all morality becomes inverted ; it actually behoves to
' resist not evil.' Through such a perversion the
effect of ethical emotion, instead of being to promote
the development of the race, comes to be the exact
opposite. It loses all concern for the human future,
for the means of achievement, the efforts of progress.
All those things it rejects and denounces as ' the
world ' ; it comes to place its ideal precisely in the
completeness of its detachment from all that which
constitutes the evolutionary force and life of humanity.
It not only does not contribute to them, but despises
them, resists, abhors them.

MORALS AS COMFORT 333

Thus it is that those epochs and those societies in
which that ideal has been in the ascendant, in spite
of any humanitarian character they may present, in
spite of any austerity, have not only been phases of
harshness and cruelty, but phases of stagnation in the
course of human progress, and have promoted neither
freedom nor justice.

It is a reproach commonly urged against Christianity
that throughout its history it has constantly associated
itself with arid: supported power and oppression, that,
except in those rare instances where the cause of the
oppressed happened to coincide with the political
interests of the Church, the power of the latter has
been generally inefficiently exercised in the cause of
freedom, in the liberation and uplifting of classes,
in the rectification of intolerable Wrongs, but has, on the
contrary, been the consistent bulwark of privilege,
despotism and established abuse. The old claim that
Christianity abolished slavery can now no longer be
insisted on : slavery in the ancient world disappeared
owing to the failure of the supply, and Christianity
had as little to do with the failure of the supply of
slaves as it has to do at the present day with the
failure of the supply of domestic servants. It is not
altogether fair to charge Christianity with the support of
Divine Right, feudalism and all established powers and
abuses. Motives of policy influenced, not by the spirit
of Christianity, but by human avarice and greed for
power, the corruption of religious offices and ideals
in hierarchical princes and powerful monks, not those
ideals themselves, have been responsible for the part
played by Christian Churches in opposing* every mani-
festation of liberty and progress. But, while that
distinction should be duly borne in mind, it must never-
theless be admitted that that characteristic attitude has
only been rendered possible because the idea of
justice is necessarily thrust into the background by
ascetic ideals.

My friend Dr. Falta de Gracia, indeed, in his usual

jaundiced and offensive manner goes even further.

' The notion of justice," says the famous Spanish

334 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

Professor, "is as entirely foreign to the spirit of
Christianity as is that of intellectual honesty. It
lies wholly outside the field of its ethical vision.
Christianity — I am not referring to interpretations
which may be disclaimed as corruptions or applica-
tions which may be set down to frailty and error, but
to the most idealized conception of its substance and
the most exalted manifestations of its spirit — Christianity
has offered comfort and consolation to men who suffered
under injustice, but of that injustice itself it has remained
absolutely incognizant. It has called upon the weary
and heavy laden, upon the suffering and the afflicted,
it has proclaimed to them the law of love, the duty of
mercy and forgiveness, the Fatherhood of God; but in
that torrent of religious and ethical emotion which has
impressed men as the summit of the sublime, and been
held to transcend all other ethical ideals, common
justice, common honesty have no place. The ideal
Christian, the saint, is seen descending like an angel from
heaven amid the welter of human misery, among the
victims of ruthless oppression and injustice, bringing
to them the comfort and consolation of the Paraclete,
of the Religion of Sorrow. But the cause of that misery
lies wholly outside the range of his consciousness; no
glimmer of any notion of right and wrong enters into
his view of it. It is the established order of things, the
divinely appointed government of the world, the trial laid
upon sinners by divine ordinance. St. Vincent de Paul
visits the living hell of the French galleys ; he proclaims
the message of love and calls sinners to repentance;
but to the iniquity which creates and maintains that
hell, he remains absolutely indifferent. He is appointed
Grand -Almoner to His Most Christian Majesty. The
world might groan in misery under the despotism
of oppressors, men's lives and men's minds might be
enslaved, crushed and blighted; the spirit of Christ-
ianity would go forth and comfort them, but it would
never occur to it to redress a single one of those wrongs.
It has remained unconscious of them. To those wrongs,
to men's right to be delivered from them, it was by
nature completely blind. In respect to justice, to right

MORALS AS COMFORT 335

and wrong, the spirit of Christianity is not so much
immoral as amoral. The notion was as alien to it as
was the notion of truth. Included in its code was,
it might be controversially alleged, an old formula, ' the
golden rule,' a commonplace of most literatures, which
was popular in the East from China to Asia Minor;
but that isolated precept was never interpreted in the
sense of justice. It meant forgiveness, forbearing, kind-
ness, but never mere justice, common equity; those
virtues were far too unemotional in aspect to appeal to
the religious enthusiast. The renunciation of life and
all its ' vanities/ the casting overboard of all sordid
cares for its maintenance, the suppression of desire,
prodigal almsgiving, the consecration of a life the value
of which had disappeared in his eyes to charity and
love, non-resistance, passive obedience, the turning of
the other cheek to an enemy, the whole riot of those
hyperbolic ethical emotions could fire the Christian con-
sciousness, while it remained utterly unmoved by every
form of wrong, iniquity and injustice."

To such intolerable and unbeseeming exaggerations
does the fundamental: difference between all Stoical,
ascetic, personal and individual misconceptions of moral
ends, and the natural function' of morality in human
development lend specious colour.

In one of his most charming essays Matthew
Arnold enlarges upon that favourite contrast between
' paganism ' regarded as the religion of joy, and
Christianity as the religion of sorrow. The point of
his argument is that, since there is an enonnous amount
of suffering in the world, since " for the mass of man-
kind life is full of hardship," the religion of sorrow
finds a much wider application than the religion of joy.
But of that suffering, of that hardship with which the
life of the mass of mankind is full, nine-tenths is the
direct product of perpetrated injustice, of conduct which
is wrong and immoral precisely because it produces that
suffering and hardship. And morality, I repeat, is con-
cerned first of all, if it has any meaning at all, with
right and wrong. Comfort and consolation are admir-
able and blessed things, though at may be questioned

336 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

how far delusive comfort is ultimately beneficial or false
consolation expedient — but they are not morality. They
are not morality especially while the question of right
and wrong is entirely set aside and discarded. Comfort
and consolation, forgiveness and loving-kindness, admir-
able though they be, no more constitute morality than
do the opiates and narcotics sometimes administered
to the victims' of the Holy Office before they were
stretched on the raclki or sent to the stake. By iall
means let us have comfort and loving-kindness and
mercy, but let us have justice first, let us have right.

The failure so unfortunately charged against Christ-
ianity to discriminate between established wrong and
manifest right is not wholly unconnected with an
incapacity it has sometimes shown of discerning between
error and truth. Unconsciousness of right and wrong,
of justice, of the elementary moral values, is the
inevitable correlative of unconsciousness of intellectual
values.

The two things, intellectual honesty and justice, are
in fact directly connected, two aspects of one and the
same mental quality. The feeling for truth and the
feeling for right, the judicial atthude towards human
relations and the judicial attitude towards facts and
intellectual relations, are but the same condition of the
mind under slightly different aspects. It is impossible
for the man who is destitute of the sense of intellectual
honesty, who can palter with facts, circumvent his own
reason, deliberately put out his mind's eye, blink at
the data of truth, manufacture and manipulate evidence,
for the self -deceiver,, for him who is insusceptible to
the morality of truth and falsehood, to perceive aught
of the distinction1 between right and wrong, between
justice and injustice. His judgment on the moral plane
is inevitably the same as his judgment on the intellectual
plane. Moral rectitude is incompatible with intellectual
obliquity.

In the low state of moral development in which
the notion of honesty of thought is unknown, honesty

A FALLACY 337

in the relations of man to man is also unper-
ceivable; justice, the rudiments of morality are un-
apprehensible. Honesty of thought, honesty of moral
judgment — the two issues, that which we call intellectual
and that which we call moral, are inextricably united,
are in reality inseparable.

II

THE MISOLOGICAL FALLACY

Lurking at the root of the misconception which
entirely severs moral conduct from intellect and reason,
is a psychological confusion of thought of wider import
than even the present question, for it involves our whole
estimate of the position and significance of rational
thought. And it is the more pernicious because it
contains a nucleus of truth.

Strictly speaking all conduct, all action, arises out
of desire, feeling, and their concomitant emotion
Thought, whether rational or not, can of itself supply
no motive of action, but only furnish the means of
attaining an end which is given by extra-rational desire. /
Whatever line of action be adopted, there is an ultimate--''
end assumed in it which lies outside the sphere of
the intellect and of rational thought. If I take up my
hat and umbrella, my act is rational because it is my
wish to go out ; if I take a conveyance to the city,
the fact that I have a business appointment to keep
affords a rational justification of my behaviour. But if
at last you ask me the reason why I should attend to
business, I can only answer that I must live; and the
strict logician is entitled to say, with a far better right
than the finance-minister of the anecdote, " I fail to see

22

338 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

where the necessity comes in." And no matter what
course of action we investigate, we sooner or later come
up against the blind wall of an ultimate motive which
is extra-rational.

The operation of rational thought is entirely confined
to its informing function, the reaction of the organism
to the environment thus perceived depends upon the
emotional colouring, the desire, which the perception
evokes. So that conduct can only be strictly described
as rational or irrational in so far as it emjploys means
appropriate or inappropriate to the attainment of an
extra-rational object. Thus it is that the nature of
conduct is quite correctly liable to be viewed as a matter
of feeling, of appetite, of sentiment, and quite outside
the sphere of rational processes

But the contrast is in reality illusory. For the nature
of motives, of desires, of sentiments, is wholly deter-
mined by the range of the perceptions of the individual,
of the impression, which he has of his relations to the
environment. If I start at the sight of a lion, my
actual motive is an extra-rational instinct of self-
preservation; but in orden that it should operate I
must first realize the nature of the danger. If what
I took to be a lion is only a poodle, my absurd behaviour
is not the result of perverted instinct, but of inaccurate
perception. It is the nature of a man's impression
of the world about him which determines the play of
motive. A man's conduct depends upon extra-rational
instinct, emotions, desires ; but these are themselves
in turn determined by his view, his estimate of the
world he lives in, by his beliefs, his opinions.

And that impression, the range and complexion of
his perception, is a matter of intellectual development,
of knowledge. What the world is to him, what
determines his appetites and desires is the product of
his intellectual reach and outlook.,

The gigantic fallacy that pain and pleasure are the
simple ultimate determinants of all conduct, that fallacy
which has dominated both popular and philosophical
theories, is the sheerest confusion of thought. That
we endeavour to do what we like and avoid doing what

A FALLACY 339

we dislike is mere tautology. But conducts differ
because likes and dislikes differ; the determinant of
variety of conduct is not the common factor of likes
and dislikes, but that which differentiates likes and dis-
likes. The hog desires hog's wash; the thinker is
ready to surrender all to the power of an idea. Both
are governed by desire for ' pleasure/ only the
* pleasure ' differs in each case. That of the hog
would not be pleasure to Giordano Bruno, that of Bruno
is incomprehensible to the unthinking philistine. The
man who has felt what it is to live in the glow of a
great and absorbing idea, to be worn in the service of
it, to feel his being identified with the creative forces
which shape the world, declares that that alone is life,
that the happiness of it, even though it entail bitterness
of struggle, of obloquy, and even death, is not to be
exchanged for anything that life can offer. * Well 1 '
it may be asked, * is he really happier than the hog? '
The question is an absolutely idle and absurd one.
There is no means or method of instituting a com-
parison of the quantity of happiness obtained by the
hog or the thinker.

The interminable discussion on pleasure and pain,
happiness and suffering as motives of action are futile
reasonings in a circle. Pleasure and happiness are
the aims of all conduct, but precisely because they are
the common aims of all conduct they are entirely
irrelevant in discriminating one course of conduct
from another. The common factor may be altogether
neglected without the result being thereby affected. It
is the kind of happiness, or satisfaction, the nature of
the thing desired which constitutes the differentiating
issue between one type of conduct and another. And
that difference depends upon the way in which the
individual's relation to the outer world presents itself;
it depends upon his perception, upon his conception,
upon his thought, upon his knowledge. The degree of
adaptation of the means of perceiving those relations
does in fact determine the desires and motives which
actuate him. So that rational thought, which owes
its existence to that need, and whose function it is to

340 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

carry to its most efficient degree that perception, does
determine the individual's reaction, his conduct. The
more perfect the perception, the truer the belief, the
more perfect the desire, the more adapted the conduct.
Conduct depends upon desire, feeling', emotion, but
desire, feeling, emotion depend in turn upon the nature
of the perception/

The old discredited notion of mediaeval Christ-
ianity that the supremely important fact about a
man was what he believed, that according as that
belief, that creed, that opinion was true or false, he
himself was to be counted good or bad, that his
moral worth, his conduct were but the outward reflection
of his intellectual attitude, that notion that has come
to be branded as infamous and abhorrent was, as a
matter of fact, strictly and incontroverdbly correct.
Only the incongruity and inconsistency of the
historical situation, which brought about the advo-
cacy and special pleadings) of Locke, Bayle, Voltaire
for the ' toleration ' of freedom, the * toleration ' of
rationality of thought, and reduced the values and
foundations of all opinions to the same level, abolishing
all -distinctions of validity and invalidity, legitimacy or
illegitimacy, right or wrong, thus giving rise to that
outrageous and intolerable ^rnodern tolerance which
regards every opinion as equally respectable, could divest
intellectual belief of moral value and significance.

Ill

RATIONAL THOUGHT AND NIHILISM

There is a strange irony in the circumstance that
those who most indignantly reject as a degradation of

NIHILISM 341

the moral ideal any dependence of morality on rational
thought, are precisely those who complain that the foun-
dations of morality are being sapped by rational criticism .
What they mean when they say that the foundations of
morality are sapped, is that the motive of reward, the
motive of future life, is destroyed ; and that, consequently,
morality can no longer be rationalized into a formula
of self-interest, but is reduced to the emotional response
of the human mind to the perception of facts as they
are, to pure detached morality. To do that is to sap
the foundations of morality, of morality which is not
to be rationalized, but is a spiritual emotion. Self-
contradictory inconsistency could hardly go further.

And yet I would not be too hard on those inconsistent
ones. There is a germ of truth in their contention.
// we were positively certain that our transient being
ends in complete annihilation, in every possible sense
of the word ; if we were convinced that the whole
human race itself, after its struggles, its evolution, would
be some day as if it had never been, that our world
would roll through space, a frozen morgue, carrying
with it the final and net result of all that the life of
the race has achieved and striven for, that

the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind;

such a certainty would make a difference. It would
not make so great a difference as might at first be
imagined, because the will of the race is too strong in
us, because we are only to a certain extent individuals.
It would not extinguish the aspirations and progress of
the race any more than it would extinguish the repro-
ductive impulse. Men would still, in spite of themselves,
take a keen interest in humanity ; they would still be
intent on sowing what they cannot hope to reap ; they
would still yield to the attraction of the future, the pull
of evolution ; they would still feel, quite justly, that
to be dominated by that race spirit, to surrender one's
individual ends to it. is the keenest form of life, the

342 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

best life worth living ; they would still be ready to
sacrifice themselves, to give their life for the intensi-
fying quality which the race ideal alone can impart
to it, for truth, for justice, as mothers are ready to
give their life for their offspring. It has happened
before, and would happen still. Men utterly disbe-
lieving in any form of survival have walked firmly to
the stake for truth's sake. And at the present day,
in the transitional confusion of thought, there are many
men who while holding the above view devote their
lives enthusiastically to human progress, to the cause
of disinterested truth. But still, I admit that the certainty
of complete and universal annihilation would, in the
absence of adequate organized training, act as a ipowerful
motive on certain minds, that it would strongly confirm
them in the temptation to cry " Apres moi le deluge"
to scramble recklessly for power and material pleasure.
But such a certainty would be quite irrational. It
can never be a certainty, and we are very far from
having any logical justification for entertaining it even
as a probability. That our present mode of exist-
ence, our individual consciousness, depends upon certain
conbinations of forces, constituting our physiological
organism, and that it must therefore come to an
end when that combination is dissolved, does not
admit of any practical doubt. But it does not
follow that that mode of existence which we alone know,
is the only form. The universe exists though it is not
a physiological organism. What is the nature of its
existence? One thing is absolutely clear ; the notion
of ' matter/ such as it is currently conceived, such as
it has necessarily always been conceived by uncritical
man, as a ' dead ' thing, is as much a delusion and an
absurdity as the grossest and most primitive mytho-
logical fable. To say that there is a thing called
* matter ' which exists independently of our feeling it,
and that the nature of its existence — when we do not
feel it — is to be extended, impenetrable, massive, etc.,
or, in other words, that what there is of it when we do
not feel it, consists purely and essentially in ' feltness,'
is to contradict oneself flatly in one and the same

NIHILISM 343

breath. A more flagrant and direct self-contradic-
tion is not possible. We see, we feel the universe ; but
to consider that we are describing the character of its
existence when we say that it is seeable and feelable,
that it is big, heavy, hard, is more absolutely non-sense
than the most grotesque absurdity that can be imputed
to any theology. Unfelt feltness is not a description
of any possibility, any more than ' white blackness '. ;
it is a thought -muddle of mutually cancelling predicates,
j (lux of void sounds, not ideas, not even words. Of
course we vividly conceive matter as feltness, as
something extended, hard, visible : that is the only
way in which we have ever known it, or can ever
know it. But it needs but the most rudimentary alle-
giance to the elementary principles of rationality, to
recognize that either that something felt must have
some mode of existence other than ' feltness/ or that
when not felt it does not exist at all.

We do know another form of existence, namely our
own ; not ' dead ' existence, but living* existence, not
feltness but feeling. Now there are about a dozen
different and independent lines of argument and con-
siderations— which it would take too long to go into
here — by which it can be shown that the idea that
there are two completely and essentially different forms
of existence, is, to say the least, a highly improbable
and unwarrantable hypothesis. It is, for one thing,
entirely opposed to every scientific conception, among
others to the conception of evolution. I am not quite
sure whether we are entitled to say that it can be dis-
proved— an hypothesis like that could only be disproved
by showing that it necessarily involves a clear self-
contradiction — but it is a gratuitous supposition, leading
to fatal difficulties, and which carries the burden of
proof. The hypothesis of special creation can in the
same way not be * disproved,' but it is an overwhelm-
ingly untenable, gratuitous hypothesis, which possesses
no claim to consideration by the side of the theory of
evolution.

There is the highest degree of scientific probability
for the simple supposition that what we perceive as

344 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

tissue cells, nerve cells, brain cells (which latter do not
differ in any essential respect either in character or
function from any other amoeboid cells) and what on the
other hand we know as feeling, as conscious existence,
are not two things differing totally in their mode of
existence, but the same thing of which we are made
aware from two entirely different points of view, from
the outside, as it were, and from the inside.

We have then two conclusions, the one an absolute
certainty, the other a highly probable scientific hypo-
thesis, ( i ) that the notion of ' -matter ' as merely dead
' feltness ' is an absurdity, absolutely inadmissible in
rational thinking ; (2) that it is highly probable that
the kind of existence which it has independently of our
feeling is much more like our own feeling existence
than like a ' dead ' unfeeling one.

Now we should be careful not to take those two solid
rational conclusions — which would be recognized as uni-
versally as the motion of the earth, were it not for
the peculiar play of prejudices which dominates such
questions — for anything more than is really warranted
by their rational basis. They have been so much abused
that rationally minded people have got to distrust them.
When nowadays a philosopher disproves the notion of
' dead ' matter, he will in the majority of cases by
and by 'prove' to you the Thirty -nine Articles. Or
else people who would like to prove the Thirty -nine
Articles hail him as a saviour and deliverer and thrust
him triumphantly down the throat of the detestable
materialists. Consequently many people prefer — quite
excusably under the circumstances — to stick to
' materialism ' pure and simple, and not to look too
curiously into the metaphysics of the notion of matter,
than to have anything! to do with such hocus-pocus.

From the more than legitimate conclusion that the
kind of thing of which the universe is really made is
much more likely to be akin in nature to our own living
mind than to any self-contradictory nonsense like
' dead ' feltness, people at once jump to the notion of
pantheism, to saying that the universe is a mind
resembling our own. That supposition differs totally

NIHILISM 345

from the conclusion in question and is not at all warrant-
able by it. All that we are entitled to say is that our
mode of existence represents in a general way more
truly what is meant by existence than any other concep-
tion we can form, and that certainly * dead feltness '
is not a possible mode of existence. But the conception
that the universe is like our own mind is not only
unwarrantable, but untenable. Sensation, for instance,
could mean nothing in the case of the universe, for
the simple reason that there is nothing outside of it to
feel. Thought, which is but elaborated sensation, and
like it a means to an end, can likewise not be attributed
to the universe. No definition by which our own
form of mind is commonly characterized could apply to a
universal mind.

We are thus faced with two possible alternatives,
( i ) either the universe (matter) is some lower, more rudi-
mentary form of mind, or (2) it is a higher form of
mind. So far as I can see we have no ground whatever
to enable us to pronounce in favour of the probability
of one hypothesis rather than the' other.

I must point out one more consideration. We are
in the habit of speaking of the uniformity of nature as
* necessity.' That is quite incorrect.- The notion of
necessity can properly only be applied to logical impli-
cations, such as that a thing cannot at the same time be
and not be, that two and two make four, which, in spite of
what J. S. Mill says, would hold good in any universe.
But there is no necessity whatever why a stone should
fall to the ground. The fact that a given cause is
always followed by a given effect and that the sequence
holds good throughout all eternity does not make it
one whit more * necessary.' For aught that we know
uniform sequence might be a form of uniform volition.

I have been obliged to slip into this metaphysical
digression because it was necessary in order to show
that the notion that the dissolution of our individuality,
that is, the redistribution of the indestructible energy
of which we are composed, necessarily means that we
have no permanent stake in the universe, is not, and
never can become a rational certainty. And therefore

346 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

the progress and development of rational thought, the
diffusion of its method, the confidence in its authority,
can never make for nihilism ; and the outlook of nihilism
can never be that of a humanity conscious of its
allegiance to the sole valid foundations of its know-
ledge and beliefs.

IV
MORALS ON THE MARCH

To-day, with the Mene Tekel Upharsin of coming
change blazing upon every wall, as of old in just such
a groaning, labouring world, the old remedies are pressed
upon us — the cultivation of personal virtues, self-
renouncement, ' Reform yourselves and the world will be
reformed.'

It is precisely to such remedies, to the diverting of
attention from the essential conditions and requirements
of the human social organism, to intellectually easier
and more slothful moral palliatives, to personal virtues
protectively cultivated and emphasized to the neglect
and exclusion of rational effort and will to justice, that
those very failures are due which now so sternly call us
to account. It is not by any complacent individualistic
self-cultivation, it is not by abnegations and renounce-
ments, and ascetic ecstasies, that whatsoever progress
has been effected in our social order was brought about,
but by hard thinking and devising, by fearless facing
the foundations of wrong, and by resisting it. It is not
by the reformation of the individual, but by the refor-
mation of the world's thought, of the medium', mental
and material in which man develops, of the conditions
of his life and the quality of his thought, that the

MORALS ON THE MARCH 347

iniquity which filled the world of our forefathers, the
flagitious perversity of their current moral judgments
have grown inconceivably fabulous. 'Reform your-
selves '? ; it would be considerably truer to say—
' Reform the world and your own reform will take care
of itself.' Men are the product of the kind of world
they live in, of the kind of world which it in fact is,
of the relations which actually obtain in it between
man and man, and of the ideas and values which
correspond to that actual world. It is public and un-
acknowledged immorality, not private morality which
is important. And moral progress does not consist
in conformity with the ethical ideals of the age, but in
the detection of the immorality of those ideals . Personal
virtue is the most admirable thing in the world ; but
the morality of the world has nevertheless not been
advanced by personal virtue, but by changed conditions
brought about by the force of rational criticism enlisted
in the conflicts of human interests.

And our age which is witnessing the dissolution of
all the traditional sanctions of ethics, which tears without
awe or scruple the veil from every sentiment and con-
vention, which questions with unprecedented temerity
the very principle of good and evil, this sceptical,
iconoclastic age, has not only given more practical effect,
more current realization to those ideals of temperance
and compassion which previous ages dreamed of and
preached ; this emancipated, sacrilegious age is doing
more, it is carrying those ideals higher, it is creating
new ones, it is witnessing the development of a larger
and truer conception of ethics, evolving a loftier
morality. And it is doing so in no formal, speculative
manner, not by way of theoretical construction of new
codes, but as the living reflection in its feeling and
sentiment of the ideas which feed and fill its mental
atmosphere.

The foremost factor in that development is precisely
the perception of that human evolution which we have
been considering. As we have noted, that perception
of the life of the human race as a ceaseless growth rising

348 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

from animality and savagery to our present state, im-
pelled onward by an irresistible natural power, ruled
by definite and indeflectible laws which nothing can
evade and which can be relied upon to operate in the
future as in the past as inevitably as the law which
governs the course of the planets, is a new conception.
There has been nothing like it, as a generally diffused
belief, in the world before. There have been Utopias ;
but a Utopia is but a wistful dream of stagnant per-
fection. There 'have 'been conceptions of national
millenniums associated with the Messianic ideas of
the Jews, or with the Roman Empire in the Augustan
age ; but all such ideas differ totally from that of
progress regarded and recognized as a natural law.
The process of inevitable growth which constitutes the
life of the human race, which has created it, fashioned
it, raised it to its present powers, overcome seemingly
insuperable obstacles, turned them to its own advantage,
which daily leaves the past behind, and throws open new
futures, which can only cease with the extinction of
the human spirit, that conception is a revelation of
to-day.

And as that revelation becomes clearer, fuller and

more familiar to our thoughts, the fact is ever more

clearly impressed upon us, individuals, that we are

particles of that great stream1, moments in that great

/process. Our thoughts, our feelings, our desires, our

/ joys and sorrows, our interests, our aims, our entire

being is the slowly accumulated product of all the

generations of the past, our life is the fruit of millions

of lives, of countless efforts, aspirations and struggles.

We are not isolated entities, but a parcel of human

existence ; our ' self ' is the resultant of all the past.

Our individuality is an illusion. It is but a resultant

and component of the larger life of the race, which

\ moves onward impelled by the same spirit, the same

\ desires which move us. Our thoughts are not our

\ thoughts, the remotest past has gone to the building

\ of them. The length of our individual tether, our

capacity for going maybe a little beyond the expressed

thought of the age, is itself determined by the stage

MORALS ON THE MARCH 349

of evolution which we happen to have reached. Our
very pleasures, even what we call our egoistic feelings
and tastes, are the expression of the life of the race.
The individual cannot present a single feature which
is not the direct outcome of the social organism in which
he and his ancestors have lived. We are nothing apart
from humanity.

In attacks of world -weariness it is common for
passionate and sensitive natures to be filled with a
feeling of boundless disgust for the human world about
them, its ugliness, its vulgarity, its shams, its falsehoods,
its ignorance, its injustice, its brutality ; their souls
are racked by the seeming hopelessness of its prejudices
and coarse instincts ; they shrink from the besmirching
contact of the " barbarians, philistines, populace " with
which it is peopled ; they are sickened by the exultant
triumph of crass ignorance, imposture, and respectable
infamy. They long to fly from that ugly human world,
to seek refuge in solitude, in the midst of nature, on the
majestic heights of the uncontaminated mountains, there
to fill themselves with the vitalizing and sublime influ-
ences of natural beauty, to possess their thought -wo rid
in freedom, unsullied and untroubled by the meanness
and degradation of the world of man. But they do not
know, or do not reflect that those very aspirations,
those soaring ideals, those high sentiments, those im-
pulses and delights of the mind, that very sensitiveness
to the faults about them and to the exalted* impressions
of nature, that world of thought and ideals in which
they long to dwell alone, are the child and product of
that same human world from which they recoil in horror
and contempt as from a thing unclean. It is in such
a world that the substance of their souls was conceived
and born, there that it was created ; it is that humanity
with all its faults and passions which has through its
daily life of strifes and wrestlings brought to being,
that spirit which lifts them upwards, it is that humanity
which has endowed them with the sublime seeing and
conquering mind ; and the common life of humanity
through millions of years immeasurably darker, more
horrible and more ugly than the world which surrounds

350 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

them, has fashioned every one of those thoughts and
feelings in which they would proudly withdraw them-
selves .

And as we are but the resultant of all past generations,
so too are we the makers of the future evolution of
the race ; as the function of the past was to make us
what we are, so the future is dependent upon our being
and doing.

/ The great riddle of existence, the great objective
/ universe which encompasses us, its nature and meaning,
will probably remain for ever unknown to us. But we
1 are beginning to perceive that that impossible know-
ledge is not so essential as we had been wont to believe.
Of one thing we may be perfectly certain : if we knew
the word of the enigma, we could not know more
certainly than we do now that our part in the great
cosmos is wholly contained within the life and destiny
of our race. We can be no less certain now, than we
should be if the last veil of the mystery were torn,
open, that our task, our function, our 'duty is with the
human race, that we are not concerned with altering
the courses of the stars or kindling the brooding fires
of the nebula, but with building the human world, with
making it better, greater, with fulfilling the law of
untiring effort and ceaseless improvement which governs
the entire process of tnat racial life, of which ours is
a part and parcel.

How far and in what sense our being is transient
or permanent, how much is momentary, how much im-
perishable in the combination of universal and inde-
structible forces which we call our 'self/ does not
fundamentally affect the issue. The thing that flows
through us, the thing we are, has its source in the
untold receding ages, and will flow on. We are it, it
is us. Whether or not the exact mode of our 'indi-
viduality's ' relation to that unbroken stream' is such
as would satisfy our wishes, could we apprehend it, the
fact remains that we cannot wish, think, act outside the
current of that stream of which we are a portion. If
we have any interest, if we have any aspiration, if we
have any permanent stake in the universe, they are

MORALS ON THE MARCH 351

bound up with the aspirations, the growth, the destinies
of our race.

If that be so, then the ideal of altruism which has
hitherto been assumed to be the obvious ne plus ultra
of morality is but a partial and incomplete one. Our
relation to the life of the race is not confined, as
that ideal supposes, to the present generation, to those
of our fellow-beings with whom we are brought into
actual contact, but extends to generations yet unborn,
to the entire future of humanity, is above all and
essentially related to the future. Our relation to our
contemporaries constitutes only a small portion of our
ethical relation ; our contribution to the destiny which
the race is fulfilling, our part in the great process
which it is accomplishing implies a far larger altruism.
The law by which that great natural process is actually
governed only takes account of the existing generation
as a stepping-stone to future evolution ; that evolution
is the all -important object to which all others are sub-
ordinate, the present is of no significance except as the
seed, the determinant of what is to come ; the present
is constantly being sacrificed to the future, each succes-
sive moment is subservient to the process of which it
is but a transient phase.

That is the standard of valuation actually current in
the natural law which in fact governs the process of
human destiny. If the conscious principles of human
action and the standards by which we estimate it are
to be founded in the 'reality of actual facts, if they are
to be something more than an artificial and arbitrary
convention, if they are to be in harmony with the laws
which, irrespectively of our opinions and predilections,
govern the course of human affairs, if the principles
and standards are not to be in direct and futile opposi-
tion to them, it is in terms of those laws that all our
ethical judgments and estimates must be formulated.
Good and evil, right and wrong, must be measured,
and understood with reference to the laws from which
the notions actually derive their ultimate significance.
The natural process which governs the course of human
life stamps human acts and achievements with certain

352 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

definite values ; they are real, natural values, all others
are artificial and arbitrary, whether we like it or not.
In the natural scale that action is good which contributes
to the process of human development, that act is evil
which tends to impede, retard, oppose that process ;
that individual life is well deserving which is in the
direct line of that evolution, that is futile which lies
outside the course of its advance, that is condemned
which endeavours to oppose the current. That is the
natural, the absolute and actual standard of moral
values. Nature does not value the most saintly and
charitable life which brings no contribution to human
growth as much as a single act which permanently
promotes the evolution of the race. In the book of
Nature's recording angel more is set down to the credit
of Gutenberg and of Rousseau than to St. Francis of
Assisi. The only measure of worth of which Nature
takes any account — by perpetuating it — is- the contribu-
tion offered towards the building up of a higher
humanity .

As the true relation of human individuality becomes
apprehended, as we come to realize the nature of the
great process that made us, of which our life is a
product and a parcel, that process of humanity -making,
the most wonderful and sublime within our ken, it is
hard to escape the wish that our life shall be indeed a
particle of that great stream, not merely as a passive
product, but in howsoever infinitesimal a degree as an
active factor also, animated by the same impulse which
made us what we are and which will bring forth new
humanities. We cannot but feel a sense of obligation
to contribute something towards that growth of which
our being is the fruit, we cannot but be at one with
the exsurgent spirit which leads the destinies of the
race. A new ethical sense, the true and natural ethical
spirit whose vaguely conscious operation has created
mankind, is inevitably developing. To be with the forces
of human growth, to be truly a living part, and not a
mere dead excretion, of the creative impulse of the
race, that is the obligation which, if we have indeed
apprehended our real relation, is inevitably laid upon us.

PART IV
PREFACE TO UTOPIA

CHAPTER I

MISOLOGY

BY that detached, inexperienced judge, an extra-terrestrial
observer of this world, who saw to what prodigious
ascension that attuning virtue of thought to universal
actions had lifted the sons of earth, it would be supposed
as a thing of course that its talisman, the Palladium
of such proud power, would in the sentiment of the human
race be hedged with something of idolatrous veneration ^
pride of intellect would seem at the least pardonable ;
rational thought, its authority, transgressed against though
it might be by human infirmity, would, he could not but
assume, be, in theory at least, reverently deferred to
and held inviolable. iWhat a contrast the actual attitude
of mankind presents ! It is the paradox of human thought
that man has ever looked askance upon that very power
by virtue of which he has wrought his portents, to which
he owes all. The sentiment with which he has commonly
regarded it has been, not one of reverence and pride,
but, on the contrary, of deep distrust, of disparagement,
of positive antagonism, nay, of fierce open hostility.
Throughout the course of his career, rising to unimagined
heights by means of it, he has never ceased to brand
its name, to revile it and scorn it, to belittle it, to point
to it in scorn as to a treacherous enemy, a thing unclean,
to oppose it, and use his utmost endeavour to stifle its
voice. At this late hour to represent it, as has here
been done, as the supreme organ of his life and growth,
is not a simple truistic statement, but one to be advanced
with apologetic delicacy. To express contempt for
rationality of thought is, on the other hand, the unfailing-
cue to popular applause.

Not popular clamour only or the voice of laHaboth
denounces reason as ' pride? of intellect,' and pleads

355

356 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

for the expediency, the utility, the beauty of lies, but
laborious philosophers addicted to its subtlest exercise
vie in impeaching and discrediting reason, in showing by
the production of cogent reasons that it is unreasonable
to be reasonable, in performing the Miinchausen-like
feat of lifting themselves out of the bed of their dogmatic
slumbers by their own hair, of discrediting rational
thought by means of rational criticism ; and in delighting
us with the discovery that no truth has ever been dis-
covered, but merely made and manufiactured ; Columbus
having thus manufactured America, and Le Verrier
created the planet Uranus.

From the philosophers' caves to the market-place the
echoes of learned misology are propagated in joyful re-
percussion. And every occasion and pretext is eagerly
embraced to set some other source of judgment and
guidance, and conduct, less exacting, more pliable to
our wishes, and invested with the glamour of mystery and
inintelligibility, in the place of the power wkich made
man and by which he rules. Intuition, inspiration, in-
stinct, divination, subliminal consciousness, illative sense,
direct knowledge, pragmatism, under countless and various
names and descriptions, with the solemnity, of the dog-
matist, and with the flippancy of the wit, with the
assertiveness of ignorance, and with academic apparatus,
in the most opposite ways, and in the name of the most
conflicting opinions, as inquisitor or as scientist, as tyrant
or as revolutionary, man has pursued his quest for sub-
stitutes for rational thought. Most pathetic sight of all,
the very soldiers who are fighting the War of Libera-
tion of Humanity, combating unreason and injustice,
are at one with the obscurantist in giving expression to
their disdain for * mere rationality,' ' logic grinding,"
4 intellectualism,' * the fetish of consistency.'

Reason, it has been preposterously demonstrated, is
4 fallible.' That, of course, is not so. Reason is not
fallible, reason is infallible. There is no instance of
the failure of rational thought. There is a rueful record
of the disastrous failures, wreck, ruin incomputable,
desolation, agony, and misery due to irrational thoughts,
to substitutes for reason. The chief task of rational

MISOLOGY 357

thought has been to rescue man front the overwhelming
disasters brought about by those substitutes.

The extravagant spectacle of his incongruous attitude
of persistent suicide— as if a race of Aristophanic birds
should inveigh against the power of flight, or a
society of electrical engineers devote their evenings
to expressing their scorn of the notorious uselessness
of electricity— becomes less paradoxical when we reflect
that irrational thought is the necessary) expression of all
established order which depends for its continuance on
the prevention of fatal change, evolution, progress. So
that rational thought is the eternal enemy, and as such!
must, according to all rules of was, be discredited,
vilified, and contemned.

The irrational power-thought with' which every issue
is fenced about against reason, is not, as we are led to
suppose, an infirmity of prejudice with which * human
nature ' is inevitably afflicted ^ it is the natural means of
defence of all the powers interested un clinging for their
existence to established conceptions^ amid the perpetual
menace of the forces which are destructive of lies. It is
an artifact. And there is in the nature of things no
ground whatever why it should not be eliminated from
the world. People are not born with' prejudices, they
are taught them. And the artificial deformation of men's
minds is no more* necessary and unavoidable than is
that of Chinese ladies' feet. There is nothing more
visionary in the conception of a world without prejudice
than in that of a world without typhoid or small -pox.
It is conceivable that a stop might be put to the teaching
of prejudice.

Power-thought is an inevitable disease of power, and
power in some form, power of guidance, leadership, talent
is necessary, desirable, precious, indispensable. Yes, but
that beneficent power is not the sort of power that either
naturally feeds or thrives on pudding. Natural inequality,
aristocracies of talent, of wisdom, of true insight, let
us by all means pray for ; let us have leaders. But to
offer high wages for leadership is precisely the way nat
to get it. Given decent fullness of life to all, it is- your
true leader that can best dispense with high wages. The

358 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

true difficulty and problem of differentiation of function
in the human world, is not so much to allot leadership
as to allot the dirty work. Under rational conditions
of equal opportunities, your leader will soon appear when
you cease advertising for him, connecting his function by
an obsessing atavism with the image of a Persian satrap.
To preserve human beings from becoming brutes when put
to the dirty work of the world, that is the greater
difficulty. To them the high wages. Power dissociated
from pudding will no longer necessarily breed pestilence
and infection.

A process out of which the cure of power-thought may
conceivably evolve, should not be overlooked. Power-
thought has, of course, under pressure and compulsion
become liberalized ; it has of necessity had to undergo
transformation at the point of the bayonets of rational
thought. It is less homicidal than it once was. The reac-
tionary of to-day, with the views and conduct he is com-
pelled to adopt, or to pretend to adopt, would a hundred
years ago have been hanged and quartered as a raving
revolutionary. The animal instincts of self-preservation
are full of craft, produce protective colorations and
mimicries. Reaction speaks in the name of liberal
ideas, of freedom, of progress . Our Tories are the loudest
advocates of * reform,' our obscurantists of * education/
of * enlightenment.' More, the self -protective instinct
has learned by experience ; it has learned better than to
wait stupidly to have reform thrust upon it by revolt.
It has learned to meet it half-way when inevitable, to
forestall it, to turn reformer and avoid the worst. Alii
that is but self-protective mimicry and is taken for what
it is worth. But, all the same, it comes to this, that the
sight of power-interest is compelled to take a longer
view, its sight is lengthening. Suppose a further lengthen-
ing ; may not truth, may not justice loom at last into
view as its own ultimate interest? May laldaboth not
make the discovery that his power-thought, for all its
cunning, animal, self-preservative instinct, has not only,
desolated and ruined humanity, but likewise himself!

CHAPTER II

THE HOPEFULNESS OF PESSIMISM

SUCH as it stands to-day reared by his mind's powers,
the »World of Man is at once the most venerable and'
wondrous fact in the universe and a thing to make angels
weep, a glory and an abomination, an inspiration and a
stumbling-block, a thing sacred and vile, sublime and
grotesque, a fit object of worship and of contempt, of
pride and of shame, of hope and of despair. According
as we view it with an eye upon the portent of its growth
out of crudest origins, or in the light of the
knowledge and ideals that are in us of what it should,
could, and ought to be; \Ve have cause to be filled with
a religious reverence or with a sense of cynical disgust.
That optimism and that pessimism' colour all our outlooks
and estimates.

There is abundant justification for the darkest picture.
The powers of evil against which mankind has struggled
from earliest times, transformed, docked and diminished
though they be, still loom defiant, battling fiercely and
astutely. They oppose justice, oppose freedom, oppose
reason, oppose truth. As of old they colour and distort
the mental world in the sense of their ends and interests.
Though a thousand abuses have been swept away, the
world swarms with abuses, gross, glaring, patent, and
convicted. Despite all the glories of human progress
anachronisms and archaisms, superstitions — in the strict
etymological sense of the word— dating from every age
of savagery and barbarism, violently incongruous with the
knowledge and judgment of modern man, pageant
arrogantly up and down the earth.

The principle of economic heredity dooms the bulk of
the race to congenital material and mental degradation.

360 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

The principle of the Power-State, possessing immoral
interests and standing outside ethical laws, the shibboleths
of nationality, and military power, have materialized in
their logical issue, and convulsed the world in a maelstrom
of ruin dwarfing the records of its bloodstained annals.
Sexual life is perverted and tortured by notions and
institutions founded upon the primitive chattel estimate
of woman. Man's intellectual life is chaos. Moloch,
as of old, calls for the little ones to: come unta
it, claims and exercises the right of mental infanti-
cide. Every organized and recognized channel of
ideas, press, school, public utterance and opinion,
is deliberately fed with falsehood. The entire de-
velopment of the human mind during its long and
glorious progress is sedulously put aside, concealed, sup-
pressed, garrotted, and silenced ; so that in an age when,
as never yet, man is in possession of the means and data
of far-reaching rational thinking, when, as never before, he
is in a position to know, to think, {to judge, it is virtually
impossible for a man to know, think, or judge save by
subreptitious personal effort, in opposition and defiance
of all established and approved formulas of thought.
In its racial, economic, familial, moral, religious, in-
tellectual organization, the entire fabric of existing civili-
zation presents a consistent structure of blunder, of
folly, of ignorance, of falsehood, and of iniquity.

The war, with all its monstrous manifestations, which
fills our consciousness to-day with distracted bewilder-
ment, is not an accidental cataclysm, a fortuitous phe-
nomenon. All the criminal absurdities, all the hypocrisies,
and blasphemies, and falsehoods, all the callousness, all
the vertiginous waste and demented destruction of human-
life, power, wealth, all the bedlam insanity of it all,
existed, every one of them, in our pre-war European
civilization. The war wasi but the visible avatar, the
materialized out-throw of the multitudinous abominations
amid which we lived. It has but torn the mask.

Yet while we contemplate with unflinching eye that
mountain-mass of evil and falsehood, our faith in humanity;

HOPEFUL PESSIMISM 361

and in its destinies, if we have clearly apprehended the
course of past development and the forces by which it
has been brought ab'out, will stand unshaken. Such as
it is, this sore-smitten world does yet surpass every pre-
ceding phase in the upward struggle of the race. Every
one of those abuses, every aspect of that folly, of that
iniquity, of that ignorance under the weight of which
our present world appears to be irredeemably floundering,
represents but the whittled remnant of the incubus which
has formerly weighed upon its growth. Gross and in-
tolerable, hardy and defiant as every avatar of the powers
of darkness appears to-day, it is but the shadow: of a
tyranny once immeasurably greater. It puts a strain on
our imagination, we complain, to conceive a world purged
from those secular evils ; but it is in reality even more
difficult to form a duly vivid conception of the conditions,
material and mental, of those phases which our world has
outgrown. And, on the other hand, all evil is to-day,
as never before, sharply accentuated by our clearer
insight into its absurdity, its iniquity, its obsolescence,
its wanton needlessness. The time is no more when
anachronisms could pass unnoticed as on a Shakespearean
or an Addisonian stage.- Out-of-date stupidity and ini-
quity stand out more clearly visible because our conscious-
ness of what is wise and right is infinitely more lucid.
Never was the contrast between our knowledge, our
conscience, and existent fact so strident ; never before
has there been so clashing an antithesis between man's
thought and that upon which rests the orders of his
world.

And it is precisely that contrast which is the surest
token of the future. The world of man is built out of
his mind, is the materialized expression thereof ; it is by
his thought that it has grown into what it is, it is his
thought that has gradually, cast out evil. The realization
of man's rational conclusion, of what he perceives to be
true, of what he perceives to be right, of what he perceives
to be just, is as inevitable as the process of the stars.
The greater the antithesis between man's world and his
spirit, the greater the assurance of the future.
* The war, we were told, threatened the existence and

362 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

future of our civilization. But in reality what lies in
mortal jeopardy is not civilization, but war. .War and
all the unmasked forces which have made the war possible,
of which the war was the visible embodiment and logical
result. In the midst of it the world has never been more
eirenic, been more clearly in ^ight of the passing away of
all war barbarisms. And \vhat is true of that representa-
tive anachronism is equally true of all others. The powers
of darkness and reaction loom most dangerous the nearer
the term of their downward course ; when existence is
imperilled all finer modesties and abstentions are dis-
pensed with, purposes are laid bare and existence is
defended with tenfold defiance. But inconsistency and
incompatibility with the present is but accentuated by all
apparent triumphs, and humanity is brought nearer to
deliverance .

However impredicable and uncertain the immediate
issues, the ultimate issues are certain and inevitable.
Delays, adjournments, the victory of reaction, the triumph
of folly, the insolence of privilege, the arrogance of
confuted lies, ruin, cataclysms, are immaterial in the
general course of the natural process. They are but
transient accidents, and we know that the evolutionary
forces turn accidents and obstacles to profit and account.
Destruction involves what is doomed, frees what is death-
less. Such has been the invariable result of all the
disasters which have seemed to jeopardize the evolution of
humanity.

In the light of a clear apprehension of past develop-
ment, all current scepticisms and cynicisms (become negli-
gible. The idiotic cry of 'Utopia' is but foolish
gibbering. To any one who has at all adequately realized
the significance of the past evolution of mankind, all
our halting millennial dreams are by comparison puny and
impotent ; the retrospective vision of accomplished fact
is the most fantastic of all Utopias. Compared to it
the tasks which our limited vision can see lying ahead
of us are singularly simple. . '

CHAPTER III

THE CONTROL OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

HUMAN evolution is probably as yet in a comparatively
early stage. There is no ground for supposing that it will
not attain to phases surpassing the present one as signally
as that surpasses even the dimmest human beginnings.
There is no reason why the standard of development
of human faculties and qualities attained by a few
individuals whom we call great, should not become the
average of the race. That is the ordinary course of
evolution ; the individual exception becomes the type
of the race.

Properly speaking, specific human evolution can
scarcely be said to have yet begun. The stages through
which mankind has passed and those which appear im-
mediately about to follow, are preparatory in character.
For all the growth of humanity has so far been engaged
rather with developing the means of its evolution than
with using and applying them . The goals which humanity
at present envisages are not so much ideals of ripe per-
fection—which does not exist in any evolutionary process
— as a condition of suitable equipment for its free develop-
ment. The use of the means at the disposal of mankind
for the control of the conditions of life is not as yet
systematized and organized, hardly are those means
recognized, hardly at all distinctly apprehended.

The operation of progressive forces has been, speaking
in mechanical parlance, inefficient in the extreme. The
wastage is colossal. Only an infinitesimal fraction of
human power has been applied to the task of develop-
ment ; the course of the evolutionary process has been
choked by self-created obstacles, and by far the larger
proportion of the progressive effort has been spent in
overcoming them. The abolition of each obsolete sur-

363

364 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

vival means not only an obstacle removed, but the setting
free of all the force which had been engaged in struggling
against it. Huge sources of power await liberation, in-
calculable stores of energy lie as yet untapped.

But if all the results of human evolution have hitherto-
been achieved by means that are only a fraction of those
in the power of humanity, which are but in part realized
and purposively applied, there is one aspect of that evolu-
tion which human effort has as yet done virtually nothing
at all to assist and control. And that aspect constitutes
half the evolutionary, process, namely, the transmission
of its results from one generation to another.

When progress, reform, reconstruction, are discussed,,
the scepticism of the more moderate setters-forth of world
wisdom usually finds expression in some such comments
as the following : —

' Those consummations which we all devoutly wish,
the casting off anachronism, absurdities gross and
palpable, would be a simple enough matter1, would indeed,
come about automatically, were everybody — well, like
you and me, were the majority of human beings amenable
to reason, pervious to the obvious, if they were at all
capable of the simplest thinking, if they cared at all
for any of those things. Clearly there would be no folly if
there were no fools. But, my dear sir, cast your eyes
wherever you please upon the actual crowd of men and
women, consider for a moment the concrete individual
human beings which make up that aggregate in which
you would see the agent of intelligent endeavour,, which
you etherealize into the germ of an exalted humanity.
That humanity; is the greengrocer round the corner,,
the haberdasher, the thief, the beadle, that jockey trainer,
that lean clerk, that adipose government official wiping
the sweat of his pomposity from his brow, that country
gentleman with arterio -sclerosis, sodden with squire -
archical tradition, those youths whose one dread
in the world is the risk of being' bored \>y} their
own company, whose minds revolve in the orbit
of the music-hall, the restaurant, " rugger " and
" socker," the ossified Eton-Oxford brain, the sordid
dinginess of those suburbans careworn with the

CONTROL OF TRANSMISSION 365

pettiest individual problems, the tragic mankind of our
heartrending comic artists, the Phil-May, the George
Belcher people, and all the unspeakable dumb, submerged
multitude of animality. That is your humanity 1 Glance
at the bookstalls, at their literature, their press ; consider
the food of their dim mentality. \Vhat thoughts are
theirs? ftVhat rational impulse towards even the most
trivial platitude of progress can you look to issue thence?
•What force, save the habitual clap- trap that is appro-
priately employed, is capable of moving that mass of
hopeless inertia?

' I will go further. Your " progress " is, whatever
you may say, in a great measure illusory. Apart from its
material aspects it has only effected any essential change,
any real evolution in an infinitesimalfy small percentage of
the race. That wider vision, those expanded horizons, that
clearer consciousness and conscience, are the heirloom
of but a small fraction of the human race, even though it
be larger than in past ages, even though, it no longer con-
stitutes an esoteric class. Though the whofe community
unconsciously benefits by the conquests of justice and of
thought just as it does by the development of material
power, still the vast mass of mankind remains to-day,
under the external appearance of transforming civilization,
at heart much what they have been in the rudest ages,
barbarians, as unthinking, as nescient, as mentally help-
less, a prey to similar superstitions and formulas, blindly
governed by the same unmodified passions, with minds
and hearts and lives revolving in the same cramped sphere
as the savage and the barbarian, and liable to break
out at any time through all their veneers into primitive
savagery and barbarism.'

Ruefully must that justification of the * veneer * view
of civilization be admitted, fttye live in a certain phase of
human evolution termed * twentieth-century ' which stands
for a certain achieved growth of the human mind, its
powers, its experience and attitude. But the vast majority
do not belong to that phase at all. In the population,
high and low, of the present day every phase of human
evolution is represented, from the Stone Age onward. The
actual men we see about us are not twentieth-century

366 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

men at all, but Mousterians, men of the fifteenth century;
with Master of Arts degrees, Norman chieftains, Tudor-
men, Victorians. They, travel in railways, fly in planes,
use telephones, do not settle their family, disputes with
stone hatchets, do not eat with their fingers ; but all
that is but * veneer.' Essentially, in all that really
counts as marking their place on the genealogical tree
of human evolution, in their mind, in their ideas, they,
appertain not to this, but to some remote and primitive
period. Civilization is, so far as they are concerned,
but a material setting, of no more significance than the
cut of their clothes.

But what does that fact actually signify and amount
to? To this : that the results, the products of human
evolution since palaeolithic, Tudor, Victorian days have
not been transmitted to them ; have not been transmitted
by the only agency that can perform that function, by
the human environment, human organization. That
function has been performed partially, and imperfectly, or
not at all. The Carrier of Evolution upon which they;
are wholly dependent for their human heredity has trans-
mitted to them railways and policemen, but the actual
essentials of the accomplished evolution it has entirely
failed to transmit. It is no incurable * human nature *
that is at fault, no irredeemable stupidity or folly, but
the mechanism of human evolution. It is not their proto-
plasm or their blood that is to blame if they are troglodytes
or barbarians ; they cannot be anything else but for the
handing down by human organization of the growth of
humanity since troglodytism and barbarism. Human
purpose has, as a matter of fact, never yet so much as
bethought itself of exercising any control over that
function ; no steps have been taken by the human race
to transmit it3 evolution . Mankind has never deliberately
organized its reproductive mechanism.

We have, it is* true, something spoken of, and! con-
siderably spoken of, as * education.' But it is scarcely-
possible to contemplate it seriously as a rational
endeavour to discharge the above-named function. So-
grossly ludicrous, so fantastically archaic is it, that one
can hardly employ the same term to designate it and

CONTROL OF TRANSMISSION 367

an attempt to organize the transmission of human evolu-
tionary products. There is scarcely anything! in common
between that which1 at the present day goes by the
name of education, and the actual conquests and achieve-
ments of the human mind. It seems, on the contrary, to
be the deliberate aim of our pedagogy to wipe out, to
conceal, bury, and render inaccessible; all that the human
mind has acquired of power and knowledge since the
fourteenth century, and, to secure its victims against
any, danger of acquiring it. Amid all surviving ana-
chronisms it would be difficult to point to one which
has remained so completely primitive and rudimentary
as our so-called education, or to a subject concerning"
which even our more advanced conceptions and ideals
have so generally failed to rise above the level of
our rudimentary practice.

,What is termed! education is founded upon the
patriarchal notion of the sacred right of the father
to do as he pleases with the mind of the child who is
heir to his property. As the father in reality has neither
the knowledge, nor the means or the power to train
the child's mind, any more than he has any right to
control the evolution of the race, the child is sent to
school. The school is more or less expensive according
to the means, ambition or vanity of the parent. All
our schools are derived by very direct and undisturbed
filiation from the monastery schools established in the
darkest ages of Europe for the manufacture of priests.
They teach the same subjects, by the same methods, as
were taught in the quadrivium in vogue when the human
mind reached its lowest level of degradation ; to those
are added the subjects predilected by the humanists of
the so-called Renaissance who gave a baleful twist to
the development of modern Europe.

Of those subjects the most important are Latin, the
language of the Roman Church, and Greek, that of the
Renaissance humanists; thus the youth of the twentieth
century is said to be provided with the key wherewith
* to unlock the wisdom of the ancients.' The teaching is
conducted by priests, or under the supervision of priests.
Subjects, methods, and teachers are the same as in the

368 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

fifteenth century and by no means up to trie level of
even the best fifteenth -century mentality. Fifteenth-
century knowledge is not the means to twentieth -century
thought.

As to the education supplied to the ' lower classes/
>vhile by the omission of some of the traditions of the
church schools it is more real and healthier in tone,
so far as it goes, than that of the expensive schools, it
is so rudimentary as scarcely to amount to more than
mere literacy, providing the pupil with sufficient letters
to read shilling shockers (instead of six-shilling ones,
like his more fortunate brother brought up on Vergil
and Xenophon), and sufficient figuring to shop or cheat.

,The transmission of the products of mankind's mental
evolution takes place to-day in spite of any system of
* education,' in direct conflict with it, by resolute indi-
vidual discarding of its influence, almost solely through
the btoad-scattering of the printed page.

It is unnecessary to dwell here upon an unspeakable
absurdity so gross that it has become a recognized
scandal currently commented upon. It may, however,
not be out of place to point out that much of the
criticism directed against it stultifies itself and lends
a handle to the guardians of tradition, by setting up
in opposition to its hieratic unrealities the ideal of a
•' utilitarian education.'

It is reasonable and right that every man should with
all available knowledge and training be fitted for the
particular work he is intended to perform ; but that is
not the first object of education. It is not in the
proper sense education at all. The carpenter should be
trained in carpentering, the doctor in medical science,
the farmer in agriculture., But a man besides being
a carpenter, a doctor, ox a farmer, is first and foremost
a man. In addition to carpentering, or doctoring, or
farming, in addition to having to deal with the problems
of materials and construction, or of pathology, or of
the chemistry of soils, he is confronted with the
problems of life, with the problems of the living' world.
In addition to being a working member in the division
of the world's labour, he is a living mind., He is the

CONTROL OF TRANSMISSION 369

heir of all the ages, of the complex organism of humanity
through which the evolutionary process is moving; he
has a right to his human inheritance, to the development
of his powers to the full extent which that inheritance
makes possible. He is the builder of the future and
contributes as a citizen of humanity in his measure to
its growth. Education is the imparting to every being
of the means and methods of rational thought.

Any adequate discussion of what such an organized
transmission of human power to the rising generation
would entail, would be out of proportion with our
present purpose. I must leave the reader to conceive
a real system of education which shall not be a subor-
dinate side-track of human organization, but its chiefest,
paramount sphere of action and endeavour; in which
the growth of the child and the development of his
mind shall take place, as the concern of the whole race,
amid all the influences of healthfulness and beauty that
human resource can devise; in which the schools shall
be the temples, the palaces, the treasure-houses of the
race, adorned with all that human art and wealth can
lovingly lavish of beautiful and precious; in which the
child shall be disciplined to health, to work, and to
thought; in which he shall be -fitted with utmost
efficiency for his appointed work, but shall first and
foremost be fitted to be a man and a citizen of humanity ;
in which the free development of his powers and judg-
ment shall not be a drudgery, but a joy; in which his
mind shall be taught and furnished with the data of
competency through every avenue of the senses, by
his life and surroundings, by pictorial art, collections,
the theatre, the cinematograph, by music, by travel,
by undogmatic spoken word, and unlimited access to
books; in which he shall acquire by daily contact a
first-hand acquaintance with most subjects and know-
ledge of some, and, while his mind shall be trained in
essentials and representative spheres, it shall not remain
a stranger in any ; in which he may learn Greek prosody
by all means if he be so minded, or it bears upon his
life-work, but shall in any case learn the beauty of :he
Greek spirit and its freedom, and something of the

24

370 THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

spirit and achievement of all the ages to which! he is
the heir, what they have done for him, what they have
bequeathed to his life ; in which' he shall learn something;
of the world he lives in, behold its infinite greatness
through the telescope, and its minute perfection through
the microscope, learn something of what is known of
life and its functions, behold the evolution of its forms ;
of which a period of travel and an exchange with the
children of other countries shall be a part, and' he
shall learn Greek, if he chooses, in Greece, and French
in France; in which representatives of all types of
thought and opinion shall be free to place their inter-
pretations before him, when he is old enough, and: hie
shall be free to choose; in which his powers shall be
exercised and tested by expression, debate, and dis-
cussion among his1 fellow-learners, and the debating-
room shall be the examination hall, leading by continuous
stages to the councils of citizens and of nations; in
which, while he shall be provided for, fed, clothed and
cared for on princely scale by the community of which
he is the precious heir, he shall from1 the first contribute
his labour and take his share of work, shall be trained
to discipline and endurance, as well as to joy and power ;
in which work and the training of body and mind shall
go hand in hand, and that training shall not end with
any period of childhood, but shall be available and
rendered desirable through life; in which the pupil
shall become accustomed to the meanest task and to
the highest thought; in which the only meaning of
human equality shall be realized, — equal opportunity of
free development to all.

To forecast the future growth of that human world,
so rich as yet — for all our bruised optimisms and
defeated moods — in potentialities and expatiating sap,
is beside our present scope. Our concern has been
to trace that growth in the past and to track through
its gnarled and ragged form the mounting forces which
have pushed, after all, ever lightward, creative in suffer-
ing and in joy. Regarding those emancipations and

CONTROL OF TRANSMISSION 371

renewals for which the world is loudly crying, and for
which it appears ripe — for the discordance of its thoughts
with the bonds of its structure has reached a pitch
of incompatibility beyond which nothing short of trans-
formation appears possible — one clear and emphatic
lesson stands out above all others from our survey.
Like every step of moment in past development, the
successful consummation of present and coming efforts
is conditional upon the mental equipment of humanity.
In the phase which its evolutionary aims have reached
the .first indispensable reform which must precede or
accompany all others, if they are to be aught but stages
in the long process of trial and failure, is an organized
effort to provide for the handing down with untampering
honesty the full measure of those powers which man
has acquired, and to transmit them to the race. Failing
such a provision troglodytism and mediaevalism must
necessarily continue with us, and all attempts to shake
off the dead hand of unburied evil must remain
essentially ineffectual; and by such a provision alone
more than half the goals to which humanity is dis-
tractedly reaching out will ipso facto have been
attained.

Printed in Great Britain by
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LON'DON

Library of Philosophy

General Editor: PROFESSOR J. H. MUIRHEAD, LL.D.

ANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY By G. P. STOUT. Two Vols. tfh Edition. 21$. net.

APPEARANCE AND REALITY By F. H. BRADLEY. 6th Edition, us. 6d. net.

ATTENTION By Prof. W. B. PILLSBURY. J25. 6d. net.

CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY By Prof. G. VILLA. IK. 6d. net.

HISTORY OF AESTHETIC By Dr. B. BOSANQUET. ^ih Edition. 125. 6d. net.

HISTORY OF ENGLISH UTILITARIANISM By Prof. E. ALBES. 12s. 6rf. net.
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY By Dr. J. E. ERDMANN.

Vol. I. ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL, tfh Edition. 155. net.

Vol. II. MODERN. 6th Edition. 155. net.

Vol. III. SINCE HEGEL. $lh Edition. 155. net.

HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY: ANCIENT AND PATRISTIC By G. S. BRETT,

M.A. i2s. 6d. net.

MATTER AND MEMORY Bv HENRI BERGSON. Translated by N. M. PAUL
and W. S. PALMER, yd Edition. I2s. 6d. net.

NATURAL RIGHTS By Prof. D. G. RlTCHfE. yd Edition. 125. 6d. net.

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY By Dr. J. BONAR. 12$. 6d. net.
RATIONAL THEOLOGY SINCE KANT By Prof. O. PFLEIDERER. 125. 6d. net.

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND By G. W. F. HEQEL. Translated by
J. B. BAILLIE. Two Vols. 255. net.

THOUGHT AND THINGS; OR, GENETIC LOGIC By Prof. M. BALDWIN. -

Vol. I. FUNCTIONAL LOGIC. \

VoL II. EXPERIMENTAL LOGIC. 1- izs.dd. net per vol.

Vol. III. REAL LOGIC (I., GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY). )

TIME AND FREE WILL By HENRI BERGSON. Translated by F. L. POOSON.
yd Edition. 12$. 6d. net.

VALUATION: THE THEORY OF VALUE By Prof. W. M. URBA*.

I2s. 6d. net.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE By Prof. G. M.
STRATTON. 125. 6d. nd. .

THE GREAT PROBLEMS By Prof. BERNARDINO VARISCO. Translated by
Prof. R. C. LODGE. . izs. 6d. net.

KNOW THYSELF By Prof. BERNARDINO VARISCO. Translated by Dr.

GCGHBLMO SALVADOR!. I2S. 6d. net.

ELEMENTS OF FOLK PSYCHOLOGY By W. WUNDT. Translated by Dr.
EDWARD L. SCHAUB. ' 155. net.

(GIAMBATTISTA VICO By BENEDETTO CROCK. Translated by R. G.
COLLiNGWOOD. izs. bd. net.

.ELEMENTS OF CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY By Prof. J. S. MACKENZIE.
2nd Impression. 155 net.

:SOCIAL PURPOSE By Prof. H. J. W. HETHERINGTON and Prof. J. H.
MUIRHEAD. , xos. 6d. net.

INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY By BERTRANO
RUSSELL, F.R.S. . los. 6d. net.

GOD AND PERSONALITY (GiFFORD LECTURES) By CLEMENT C. J. WEUB.

105. dd. net.

XDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LIMITED.

,

14 DAY USE

RBTUKN

LOAN DEPT

LD
(A9562slO)476B

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY