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 THE LIVING PAST
 
 THE 
 
 LIVING PAST 
 
 A SKETCH OF WESTERN PROGRESS 
 
 BY 
 
 R S. MARVIN, M.A. 
 
 SOMETIME SENIOR SCHOLAR OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE 
 OXFORD 
 
 Gird on thy sword, O Man thy strength endue, 
 In fair desire thine earth-born joy renew ; 
 Live thou thy life beneath the making sun, 
 Till Beauty, Truth, and Love in thee are one. 
 
 ROBERT BRIDGES. 
 
 OXFORD 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK 
 TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY 
 
 HUMPHREY MILFORD M.A. 
 
 PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY
 
 PREFACE 
 
 PUBLIC interest in history is clearly on the increase. 
 There is, however, one obstacle to its effective study 
 which is growing likewise, and has in recent years become 
 serious and even threatening. Not only is mankind, 
 by thought and action, constantly accumulating the 
 material for fresh history, but our knowledge of the past 
 is, by the exploration of the world, by the discovery of 
 fresh documents, above all by the widening of our notion 
 of history itself, becoming immeasurably fuller and more 
 complex. The growing interest seems to run some risk 
 of being smothered by the abundance of its food. 
 
 The study needs a clue, especially in England where 
 our accustomed methods of teaching and the exigencies 
 of examinations have hitherto precluded the more general 
 view, and the student who comes to the great subject 
 in somewhat maturer years is apt to feel lost in its 
 immensity. The keen teacher anxious to extend his 
 knowledge and improve his methods, the workman in 
 his tutorial class, are well aware of the difficulty. It will 
 increase, for ourselves and others, as time goes on, unless 
 we take steps to meet it. 
 
 2234783
 
 vi Preface 
 
 The clue which this little book follows is no new dis- 
 covery. It first came clearly into view with Kant and 
 the philosophers of the eighteenth century. Take Kant's 
 theory of universal history as the growth of a world- 
 community, reconciling the freedom of individuals and 
 of individual states with the accomplishment of a common 
 aim for mankind as a whole. Add to this the rising power 
 of science as a collective and binding force which the 
 century since Kant has made supreme. You have then 
 one strong clear clue which, with the necessary qualifica- 
 tions, seems to offer in the field of history something of 
 the guidance and system which Newtonian gravitation 
 gave to celestial mechanics in the seventeenth century. 
 The growth of a common humanity ; this is the primary 
 object to keep in view. But it will prove vague and 
 inconclusive, unless we add to it a content in the growth 
 of organized knowledge, applied to social ends. 
 
 The greatest encouragement which has occurred to 
 me during the two or three years spent upon the book, 
 came at the close, in Mr. Bryce's Address on April 3, 
 1913, as President of the International Congress of 
 Historical Studies. It agrees so strikingly and in so many 
 points with the view which I have suggested, that a few 
 words must be quoted. ' The world,' he said, ' is becom- 
 ing one in an altogether new sense. . . . More than four 
 centuries ago the discovery of America marked the first
 
 Preface vii 
 
 step in the process by which the European races have 
 now gained dominion over nearly the whole earth. . . . 
 As the earth has been narrowed through the new forces 
 science has placed at our disposal . . . the movements 
 of politics, of economics, and of thought, in each of its 
 regions, become more closely interwoven. . . . Whatever 
 happens in any part of the globe has now a significance 
 for every other part. World History is tending to 
 become One History. . . . The widening of the field is 
 also due to a larger conception of History, which (through 
 the aid of archaeology) now enables us faintly to discern 
 the outlines of a process of slow and sometimes interrupted 
 development of mankind in the Old World during a 
 period each one of the divisions of which is larger than all 
 the time that has elapsed since our first historical records 
 begin.' 
 
 To write a small book on such a theme is to court 
 innumerable errors, but it enables me to ask one favour 
 of the reader, and it is this : whatever his own preference 
 may be, however keen his critical faculty, to . read the 
 sketch as a whole, and to give the author the benefit of 
 the doubt that his particular point may' be implied when 
 it is not expressed or only omitted in necessary deference 
 to the settled plan. 
 
 It will be obvious that the book, brief as it is, could not 
 have been completed without the suggestion and advice
 
 viii Preface 
 
 of more friends than I can mention. But there are four 
 whose assistance I must here gratefully acknowledge by 
 name. Miss F. M. Stawell for helpful counsel in several 
 parts ; Mr. Frederic Harrison for stimulus and en- 
 couragement, and for reading a large part of the book 
 in manuscript ; Professor Gilbert Murray for criticism 
 of chapter 4 ; Mr. Lawrence Stratford for kind co-opera- 
 tion on the Index. 
 
 F. S. M. 
 
 May 20, 1913.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 i 
 
 PAGES 
 
 LOOKING BACKWARD 2-7 
 
 Man seems to become keen on moulding and improving the 
 future just as his interest and knowledge of the past increase. 
 ' Thinking backward and living forward.' The idea of progress 
 needs definition. Clear advance discernible in at least three 
 great branches of human activity knowledge, power over 
 Nature, and social organization. Necessary in tracing historic 
 progress to follow the clearest threads. 
 
 THE CHILDHOOD OF THE RACE .... 10-27 
 Man's tools have given the best concrete evidence of his 
 advance, from flint-axe to steam-engine. Prehistoric tools 
 identified in the middle of the nineteenth century led to the 
 mapping out of the stages of early culture. At first appear- 
 ance man already shows the main distinctive traits of human 
 superiority, fire, tools, language, art. But Eolithic remains 
 suggest stages by which he may have arisen from the purely 
 animal. Physical and intellectual development went hand in 
 hand. Service of anthropology in portraying the early process 
 as a whole. The two great stages of prehistoric culture, 
 Palaeolithic and Neolithic, clearly divided by their content, 
 and in England by physical conditions. England in earlier 
 stage joined to the Continent. Palaeolithic man inferior in 
 arts, except of representation ; survives the glacial period. 
 Extent of practical advance of Neolithic man well shown by 
 the perfection of his stone weapons and growth of social
 
 x Contents 
 
 PAGES 
 
 organization. But on this side a strict limit, except for the 
 possibilities of abstract reasoning implied in language. 
 Wealth of early language and its relation with the germs both 
 of science and religion. 
 
 3 
 
 THE EARLY EMPIRES 30-45 
 
 Physical conditions necessary for larger settlements. Simi- 
 larity of development all over the globe. The Mediterranean 
 world selected for study in view of the sequel, and first the 
 two great river-valley civilizations east of the Mediterranean. 
 Their points of likeness. Chronology starting about four 
 millenniums B.C. Interpretation of hieroglyphic writing in 
 the last century has revealed an early world of thought. Its 
 dependence on religion, which was the basis of large, orderly, 
 and conservative communities. Next to this work of con- 
 solidation, the great contributions of these theocracies to 
 progress were the beginnings of measurement and writing. 
 Towards the first Egypt did most in measuring the land, 
 geometry, Chaldaea most in measuring the heavens, astronomy. 
 Alphabetic writing has a similar origin in both. Towards the 
 close of this period the movements of two sets of tribes herald 
 the approach of another age. 
 
 4 
 
 THE GREEKS 48-90 
 
 The last millennium B.C. is primarily the age of Greece and 
 contains the turning-point in history from a regime of tradi- 
 tional authority to one of freedom, inquiry, and progress. 
 The Greeks one of a more northerly group of tribes akin to 
 ourselves. Their geographical position promotes movement 
 and intercourse, while keeping them in touch with the older 
 civilizations. First third of their millennium a time of mari- 
 time expansion and settlement. Homer, the document of 
 their age, takes final shape towards its close. It arose in Ionia,
 
 Contents xi 
 
 PAGES 
 
 the first home of the Greek spirit. Here ' philosophy ' was 
 also born, and here the first stand took place against the power 
 of the East. The origin of exact science in the geometry of 
 Thales and Pythagoras. The first efforts of abstract thinking 
 completed at the time when Athens, after the defeat of Persia, 
 becomes leader of the Hellenic world. Athens in the fifth 
 century B. c. represents the culmination of the Greek spirit in 
 the second third of their millennium. Plato and Aristotle 
 come at the close of this and usher in the last period of review, 
 the completion of Greek science and the decay of Greek 
 nationality. The wider conception now appears of human 
 brotherhood and the ' Inhabited World ' as fatherland. But 
 the scientific evolution persists after Macedonia and Rome 
 have suppressed the independent Greek states. Greek science 
 culminates in the last century B.C. with the foundation 
 of trigonometry and the consequent first sketch of a scientific 
 astronomy, and with the completion of a consistent body of 
 geometrical truths, including the beginnings of mechanics. 
 Side by side with the kindred ideas of abstract or general 
 truth in science and ideal beauty in art goes the development 
 of humane feeling. Herein also the Greeks were pre-eminent, 
 but their scientific achievement gives the clearest measure of 
 their advance. 
 
 5 
 
 THE ROMANS 92-117 
 
 The Latin tribes akin to the Greeks. Their geographical 
 position, and especially that of the city of Rome, important 
 factors in determining the historical evolution. The great 
 words which we inherit from their language well describe their 
 national work and compare significantly with the scientific 
 terms derived from Greek. They are social, legal, and consti- 
 tutional. The Roman millennium may be dated somewhat 
 after that of the Greeks, from whom they derived much, both 
 in early and later days. It extends into the fifth century A. D.,
 
 xii Contents 
 
 and lasts transformed another millennium in the East. The 
 essential Roman movement begins at the close of the sixth 
 century B.C., when consular and senatorial government takes 
 the place of the primitive monarchy. Its development con- 
 sisted in the parallel extension of Roman power without and 
 equalization of civil rights within the city. This was com- 
 pleted early in the third century B. c. The second century 
 establishes their power in the Mediterranean : the last century 
 B.C. sees the old republican government crushed by the ex- 
 cessive weight of empire placed upon it. The five hundred 
 years of Empire were the consolidation of the Mediterranean 
 world and its gradual permeation by Greco-Roman ideas. Its 
 constructive effects were permanent and beneficial, though 
 the original organization wore out and fell into decay. Roman 
 laws the most striking embodiment of their genius and their 
 most valuable concrete legacy, comparable to the science of the 
 Greeks, and through Stoicism connected with Greek philosophy. 
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES . . . 120-137 
 
 Another millennium will cover the ' Middle Ages', from the 
 fifth century A. D., when the Western Empire breaks up, to the 
 fourteenth, when the Catholic-Feudal system falls into decay. 
 The centre of Western evolution during this period is to be 
 sought in the religious organization, and its achievement in 
 a further extension of the consolidation by Rome, and the 
 imposition of a uniform spiritual discipline on this larger area. 
 Around this new centre of spiritual life there is much disorder 
 in the political field. New nationalities forming on the ruins 
 of the old provinces, and general retrogression in science and 
 letters. The Papacy at Rome inherits some of the prestige of 
 the old Empire, and by the conversion of fresh nations extends 
 its power. At the middle point of the millennium the revival 
 of the Western Empire in alliance with the new spiritual chief 
 creates an ideal for mediaeval government. But the subse-
 
 Contents xiii 
 
 quent triumph of the spiritual power over the temporal showed 
 its greater strength. It corresponded with needs felt by the 
 best men of the age, and was the guiding influence in its 
 greatest movements the Crusades, the religious orders, the 
 universities, and scholastic philosophy. The thinkers of the 
 thirteenth century, and above all Dante, express the new 
 spirit as a discipline imposed by divine Love on all nations 
 and on the individual soul. 
 
 THE RENASCENCE AND THE NEW WORLD . . 140-166 
 By the end of the thirteenth century the Crusades and the 
 revival of study in the universities had set in motion new 
 currents of thought. The Papacy, by overstraining its au- 
 thority, fell in the fourteenth from its supremacy, and was 
 for a time in subjection. Meanwhile ancient literature and 
 thought were recovered first through Latin and later through 
 Greek authors. This discovery creates a fresh ideal for leading 
 thinkers outside the limits of church authority which had pre- 
 vailed for a thousand years. In the fifteenth century another 
 stimulus to mental and social movement comes from the ex- 
 ploration of new lands and new routes by the navigators, 
 culminating in the discovery of the New World at the close of 
 the century. The general ferment in men's minds assists the 
 break up of the old Catholic-Feudal system and the rise of 
 strongly organized national governments outside and some- 
 times opposed to the Papal order. The wealth flowing in from 
 the New World and the extension of commerce creates keen 
 rivalry between the rising Powers, but the general unity of 
 Western Europe and the similarity of moral and intellectual 
 ideas, induced by Roman and Catholic incorporation, still 
 persist. Shakespeare well represents this, leaning rather to 
 the older ways, while at the same moment the foundations are 
 being laid of the new science which is to transform the world.
 
 xiv Contents 
 
 THE RISE OF MODERN SCIENCE . . . 168-193 
 
 The pioneers of modern science, as of the revival of learning, 
 appeared in Italy, which played in the fifteenth century 
 something of the role of Greece in the ancient world. The 
 scene of the best painting and art, it was also the first meeting- 
 place of men of science. Galileo, at the beginning of the seven- 
 teenth century, founds modern mechanics and by his telescope 
 enlarges men's view of the universe and leads to the formation 
 of the first consistent account of the phenomena of the heavens 
 by Newton. Newton, completing the work of his predecessors, 
 establishes qn a rational basis the theory which Copernicus 
 had first launched. This is one of the two main currents of 
 seventeenth-century science. The other is the development 
 of mathematical method, in which Descartes, Newton, and 
 Leibnitz play the chief part. The Royal Society founded to 
 promote physico-mathematical research. Scientific method, 
 thus elaborated, is an extension of Greek ideas, and akin to 
 language in unifying men's minds, as well as correlating the 
 phenomena which it describes. It becomes the most potent 
 link in human society. 
 
 9 
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION . . . 196-216 
 
 Newton's death brings us to the beginning of the Industrial 
 Revolution. The new science is directly connected with the 
 new expansion of machinery through the steam-engine. A 
 series of improvements in the smelting of steel and iron also 
 take place about the same time. The decade 1760-70 saw the 
 first cotton-mill set up and the first feasible steam-engine. 
 The first Manchester steam-worked cotton-mill in 1789. Eng- 
 land becomes unquestioned leader in the new development, 
 largely through physical and geographical conditions. The 
 revolution means the factory as unit in industry in place of the 
 home. Much further specializing in labour goes with aggre-
 
 Contents xv 
 
 gation of labour in factories and towns. The enclosures in the 
 country increase the drift into the towns. The towns promote 
 social organization of all kinds, and are essential to subsequent 
 reform. Thus science organizing industry has its human 
 corresponding to its mechanical side. But on the human side " 
 grave, if inevitable, drawbacks. 
 
 IO 
 
 THE REVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND POLITICAL . 218-240 
 The industrial revolution incomplete and even disastrous if 
 not accompanied by a change in the general aim of government 
 and all collective action. What this should be was expressed 
 by leading thinkers, especially of France and Germany, in the 
 latter part of the eighteenth century. Human efforts should 
 be combined to secure a state of greater freedom, happiness, 
 and enlightenment for every individual. Such an aim had 
 never before been adopted or even conceived by any govern- 
 ment. Applied suddenly, without regard to her past history, 
 and by men unequal to their task, it led in France to a military 
 and aggressive despotism, and ultimately to reaction. The 
 change in the temper of revolutionary France from freedom- 
 loving to conquering, alienates the sympathies of her best 
 friends, and the resistance of England was necessary and bene- 
 ficial. The final issue of the Napoleonic war is an age of 
 tempered and constitutional progress rather on English lines. 
 But many abuses and ancient obstructions had been cleared 
 away in its course. Other aspects of the new spirit which 
 caused the Revolution were an attachment to Nature, a deeper 
 and more emotional music, and freer and simpler types of 
 literature. 
 
 II 
 
 PROGRESS AFTER REVOLUTION . . . 242-263 
 
 From the time of the settlement of 1815 to the present there 
 has been marked growth, especially on those sides of human 
 life which were set out at the commencement knowledge in
 
 xvi Contents 
 
 the form of specialized science, power over nature by engineer- 
 ing and the application of science, and social organization, both 
 within each country and between different nations throughout 
 the world. But behind these the new spirit of humanity and 
 progress, which appeared before the Revolution, is at work. It 
 becomes active in France and England before the middle of the 
 century, and after various hindrances is now generally domi- 
 nant. Science, vastly extended, has become more biological 
 than mechanical. The ideas of motion and of growth first 
 introduced into mechanics in the seventeenth century now 
 permeate the whole of science. Science begins to co-operate 
 with the spirit of social reform, and has already effected an im- 
 provement in public health and the conditions of life. This 
 work of scientific reform brings the nations together and is 
 the strongest safeguard against international strife. Science, 
 engineering, common ideas and common interests, have now 
 made the world one in new and real ways ; the three leading 
 nations of Western Europe actually much more united than 
 some past differences might let us think. The Concert. 
 
 12 
 
 LOOKING FORWARD 266-272 
 
 The Western World now enclosing the Atlantic, as once the 
 Mediterranean, has become the dominant influence on the 
 globe. Man's power has from that centre stretched further 
 and further, and become immensely stronger in face of Nature. 
 At the same time he has become more humane, and especially 
 more careful of the weakest human thing, the child. The 
 child embodies for him three of his strongest interests, his 
 sympathy and pity, his interest in origins and growth, and his 
 interest in the future. He is in our own day devoted to the 
 future and to the child as he never was before. 
 
 APPENDIX ON BOOKS 274 
 
 INDEX 283
 
 1 
 LOOKING BACKWARD 
 
 There are no dead. 
 
 MAETERLINCK. 
 
 1643
 
 THE pious Japanese believe that the spirit of an ancestor 
 is more powerful than that of his living representative 
 on earth. To realize and acknowledge the link that binds 
 you to him is a primary duty, to carry on and extend 
 his fame would be your greatest glory. 
 
 This attitude exemplifies in a personal, religious way 
 the true relation of each succeeding generation to all 
 its predecessors, a relation which every step in historical 
 research renders more indubitable and imposing. The 
 past has made the present, and we, who are alive, have 
 the future in our keeping ; not that we can form it at 
 will, but that it already exists in germ in us, and that 
 we shall put upon it some impress, great or small, which 
 will be traced back to us by the retrospect of the future. 
 To those who realize this, history becomes a matter of 
 high practical import as well as of theoretical interest. 
 
 Two striking facts arrest us at the threshold which 
 seem at first sight in contradiction. On the one hand, 
 the past gains constantly in force, for mankind is accu- 
 mulating a greater store of knowledge and organized 
 strength, which must determine the character of the 
 future. On the other hand, by studying the past and 
 coming to understand the laws of its evolution each 
 generation acquires greater power as well as more desire 
 to control the sequel. To follow out this apparent con- 
 tradiction would lead us to the unfathomable problem 
 of freewill. But the actual historical solution is evident 
 and encouraging to our purpose. Man seems to solve it 
 at the moment, and by the very act of realizing it. For, 
 just as he begins to acquire some accurate notion of the
 
 Looking Backward 3 
 
 infinite process which is gathering ever more and more 
 urgently behind, he first looks deliberately forward and 
 resolves to use his powers to modify the future according 
 to an ideal. Metaphysics apart, we know in fact that 
 ' thinking backward ' has accompanied and inspired a new 
 and passionate effort for ' living forward '. 
 
 Though this is true generally of European or Western 
 thought since the latter half of the eighteenth century, 
 we cannot ignore the sceptics and reactionaries who 
 question either the reality of a forward movement in 
 history, or the desirability of conforming ourselves to it. 
 Some of them write books, many more talk and think, of 
 ' civilization, its cause, and its cure '. But when we probe 
 the matter a little closely, we find that the paradoxes 
 are either partial or superficial, and that there is no 
 reason for doubting that general tendency towards human 
 betterment which is implied in the doctrine of ' thinking 
 backward and living forward '. 
 
 Note in the first place that such a general belief by 
 no means involves identifying ourselves with every feature 
 of the contemporary society which has issued from the 
 past. We may approve of the industrial revolution, and 
 work for its extension, while labouring to reform the 
 sordid and mechanical life imposed by it upon thousands 
 of our fellow men. We may be fighting the excesses of 
 a sensational press and yet defend the ' liberty of printing ' 
 as one of the most precious achievements and guarantees 
 of human freedom. Our moral judgement in short, 
 though itself arising from an immemorial evolution, will 
 and must at any moment rise superior to the concrete 
 result of the historical process. We judge and we select 
 
 B 2
 
 4 Looking Backward 
 
 among the fruits of civilization which time presents, but 
 we are ourselves part of that fruit, and our very judge- 
 ment is framed by a comparison of what man has done, 
 and of what we know him by his proved and inherited 
 powers to be capable. 
 
 With the moral ideal of society we are not here, except 
 indirectly, concerned ; but we need for our argument 
 some firm basis of admitted progress on which the threads 
 of the story may be spun. This is ready enough to hand ; 
 indeed, the nearness and simplicity of the facts in their 
 main outline are partly the reason why they are so 
 generally passed over by the professed historian. Take, 
 on the one hand, the state of primitive man as we know 
 him, from his earliest remains, from the study of the 
 savage and from biological analogy, and compare this 
 state with that of civilized man as we know him to-day, 
 and what are the most striking social and intellectual 
 differences ? 
 
 In the first place, civilized man we speak of him, of 
 course, collectively throughout has so vastly greater 
 a store of knowledge than the savage that the latter seems 
 by comparison to be as naked in mind as he is in body. 
 In the second place, the knowledge of the civilized man 
 is so organized arranged and applied that his power 
 is even greater in comparison with that of the savage 
 than is his knowledge. He weighs the planets and moves 
 mountains, while the savage throws stones and counts 
 to five. In the third place, whereas the savage lives in 
 small isolated communities, civilized mankind is organized 
 in closely-knit societies of considerable size, which for 
 many purposes form one great whole embracing the earth.
 
 Looking Backward 5 
 
 Knowledge, power, social unity and organization 
 here are three striking differences between the savage 
 and the civilized man, three differences in which pro- 
 gressive development can be easily traced, both in historic 
 and prehistoric times. It is not pretended that they 
 cover the field of history. Artistic development is touched 
 by them only incidentally. Law and government appear 
 as subordinate aspects of social organization. But if we 
 set out to establish and define the fact of human progress, 
 we are surely justified in giving the first place in our 
 treatment to those sides of human nature in which the 
 historic development is most marked. These will throw 
 light on the rest, which cannot, of course, be separated 
 or omitted except for the purpose of exposition. 
 
 Hitherto the political historian has practically appro- 
 priated the whole field, and one school of historians claims 
 the word ' history ' for political history alone. What 
 popular history of Greece gives any account of the work 
 of Archimedes, or even mentions Hipparchus ? Some of 
 the most approved histories of England allude to Newton 
 only as Master of the Mint. It is high time, especially 
 in England, for a determined effort to see and to present 
 the facts more nearly in their true proportions and, above 
 all, as a whole. If, as is obvious, the facts are too multi- 
 tudinous and complex to be comprised in any one formula, 
 we are only following the canons of any systematic study 
 in selecting those which give the clearest outline of the 
 whole to start with. History is the account of man's 
 achievements, and in particular of the achievements of 
 the Western leading branch of the human family which 
 now dominates the globe. Our measure of this achieve-
 
 6 Looking Backward 
 
 ment, imperfect as it must necessarily be, is to take the 
 primitive savage, from whom it is agreed the process 
 started, and to compare with him the civilized man of 
 the leading type. We have noted what appear to be 
 two or three of the most salient differences. To sketch 
 the story of the change in pictures of well-marked outline 
 blending into one another, as we know all secular changes 
 have blended, whether of the earth's surface or of the 
 societies which have dwelt upon it, this would be a task 
 worthy of the supreme artist-historian of the future. 
 Victor Hugo gave us glimpses of it. Shelley could hear 
 ' a great poem which all poets, like the co-operating 
 thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the 
 beginning of the world '. But no one has compassed the 
 idea in clear a'nd popular expression, basing it, as it must 
 be based, on the growth and application of organized 
 knowledge. There is a gulf not yet bridged between 
 the world of letters and of poetry in which Shelley, of 
 English poets, was the nearest to the conception, and 
 that of science and industry through which the trans- 
 formation of society has in our time been going on more 
 and more rapidly. Strange that the poets tarry in a world 
 full enough of wonders to make poets of us all ! The 
 steam-engine which ushered in our present age, and 
 marks it as surely as the polished axe marks neolithic 
 man, has already in little more than a century endowed 
 mankind with an obedient and inanimate force equal to 
 a thousand million men. No fact in history shows more 
 decisively the growth of human power and its connexion 
 with social organization and reform ; and it has taken 
 place in a moment. But it leads our thoughts backward
 
 Looking Backward j 
 
 through ages of accumulating skill and science, and for- 
 ward to a time when man may be master of himself and 
 his conditions in ways we can hardly yet dream of, and 
 when the magic of mechanical art may set free the latent 
 powers of all for a life of varied exercise and happiness. 
 
 The typical portent of an age of factory smoke and 
 monotonous toil, if thus seen through and lived through, 
 would become a symbol of progressive human activity 
 subduing the world.
 
 2 
 THE CHILDHOOD OF THE RACE 
 
 The Child is father of the Man : 
 And I could wish my days to be 
 Bound each to each by natural piety. 
 
 WORDSWORTH.
 
 FROM tool to tool, from flint axe to steam-engine, is 
 a striking, palpable measure of man's achievement from 
 his earliest beginnings to our own days. This must not 
 be understood to confine the idea of progress within the 
 limits of the mechanical arts or to suggest that mechanical 
 tools are the highest product of human intelligence. How 
 narrow such a view would be will appear before the end 
 of this chapter. But man's tool-making is so charac- 
 teristic and progressive, it brings together and exhibits 
 in working order so many of his powers, that if we were 
 isolating one aspect only of his activity, the series of his 
 tools would best display the growth of mind. His anti- 
 quity, his existence as man further back in geologic time 
 than had been dreamt of till a few years since, was first 
 suspected and then demonstrated by the discovery and 
 examination of his tools. 
 
 It had long been known that savage peoples, who had 
 not learnt the use of metals, made tools and weapons of 
 stone, and the Roman poet Lucretius two thousand years 
 ago made the sound and brilliant conjecture that man- 
 kind, advancing beyond the use of hands and nails and 
 teeth, had passed through the three ages of Stone, Bronze, 
 and Iron. But it was not till the middle of the last 
 century, coincidently with the establishment of a pro- 
 gressive geology and an evolutionary biology, that worked 
 flints and human remains embedded in caves and strata 
 revealed to mankind prehistoric ancestors fighting and 
 conquering tens and hundreds of thousands of years 
 before written history begins. LyelPs Principles of Geology
 
 The Childhood of the Race 1 1 
 
 began to appear in 1830. Darwin's Origin of Species was 
 published in 1859. ^ n tne interval a French antiquary, 
 M. Boucher de Perthes, had been speculating on the 
 origin of certain curiously shaped flints dug up with 
 remains of mammoth and rhinoceros in beds of gravel 
 on the slopes of the river Somme at Abbeville. He long 
 maintained the view that they were human tools, and 
 published an account of them as Antediluvian Anti- 
 quities in 1847; but it was discredited by the accepted 
 notions both of science and religion until the very year 
 of the Origin of Species, when an English deputation to 
 Abbeville returned fully convinced, and proclaimed the 
 discovery at a meeting of the Royal Society on May 19, 
 1859. 
 
 A scientific geology had opened the book of man's 
 earliest history : it remained for a world-wide study of 
 its pages, confirmed and corrected by the new biological 
 view of man's descent, to establish the fact that in many 
 and diverse regions, under similar conditions, there had 
 been living, in the remote though not the remotest past, 
 races of men who appear in its record soon after the 
 first of the apes, his nearest kin. Fortunately it is not 
 necessary for our purpose to enter into the question of 
 man's biological descent. The general conclusion is suffi- 
 ciently clear, though corroborating links and details are 
 still to seek. Much may, no doubt, remain concealed, 
 for our immediate pre-human ancestors, who would com- 
 plete the genealogical tree, may be embedded in strata 
 beneath the Indian Ocean, where some still look for 
 the true original of the garden of Eden. When we 
 consider, however, that the whole picture of man's
 
 1 2 
 
 'The Childhood of the Race 
 
 earliest childhood which we possess has been deciphered 
 by the researches of the last fifty years, it would be 
 absurd to set any limits to the results which future 
 inquiries, following the same lines, may produce. 
 
 What we already know is sufficient for our purpose 
 here, and is after all only an extension and a confirma- 
 tion of those visions of man's ascent from a lower state 
 which flashes of genius suggested to many thinkers from 
 Lucretius onwards. The new discoveries enable us to 
 plan out the vast tract of geologic time, compared with 
 which historic time is but a minute in a day, and in rough 
 outline to sketch the main features of human development 
 which were laid down for all the sequel in those un- 
 numbered millenniums of pre-history. 
 
 Man's first appearance presents us with another aspect 
 of the great problem of the passage from past to future 
 from which we started. He appears already surrounded 
 and distinguished by the typical marks of human reason 
 and activity of which our later civilization is the un- 
 folding. He has his tools of various kinds : by these he 
 was detected. He can make fire and uses it to cook his 
 food. This we know by the charred bones among the 
 remains. And though we can have no direct evidence 
 of spoken language in a cave or bed of gravel, yet we are 
 assured by a study of the lowest living savages that 
 language, often of a varied and abundant kind, always 
 co-exists with such conditions as have been unearthed 
 from prehistoric times. He is thus distinctly man, and 
 each of these marks of his humanity is something new 
 and unknown to the highest of the lower animals with 
 whom we are compelled on general grounds to assign
 
 The Childhood of the Race 13 
 
 him a common descent. Here, then, appears to be a sharp 
 breach in the continuity of past and present which sug- 
 gests a problem of surpassing interest. On the side of 
 bodily structure we passed it over, although this aspect 
 has received perhaps the closest approximation to a solu- 
 tion. On the intellectual side it is nearer to our subject 
 to consider what is really involved in the question. Can 
 we say that any one of those new and characteristically 
 human accomplishments, if analysed into its simplest 
 mental elements, contains a single trait or act not to be 
 paralleled among the animals ? Take tool-making. The 
 ape picks out the stone best fitted to break his nut : this 
 tool-using involves selection and the adaptation of an 
 external implement to carry out an imagined end. The 
 man notices that stones broken in a certain way will 
 cut as well as crush. He picks these out and then 
 begins to imitate the breakage by breaking others. Tools 
 of this simplest type have lately been discovered, to 
 which the name of Eolithic has been given. There 
 is nothing here different in kind from activities ad- 
 mittedly animal and found in various connexions among 
 the animals. Fire is no doubt an invention more difficult 
 to reconstruct with any certainty on any one theory : 
 probably it was arrived at by various routes. But in 
 a world much fuller of natural fires than now, it was 
 most likely to be reached early by a being whose wits 
 had been set working by his necessities and his success. 
 Language, of all problems the most intricate in detail, 
 seems in general principle the easiest to understand from 
 this point of view. All the latest researches have tended 
 to widen that basis of instinctive and imitative cries on
 
 14 The Childhood of the Race 
 
 which we may suppose articulate speech to have been 
 built. If these suggested probabilities are accepted 
 and we are in a region where certainty in detail seems 
 unattainable then man's creative powers, his highest 
 attribute, are seen to be, like all things else we know, 
 the issue of a slow and often imperceptible process of 
 combining new material and movement with the old. 
 He becomes a maker, not by a sudden leap or inspiration, 
 but by a gradual extension of familiar acts, and this first 
 great step, which now stands out in sharp relief against 
 the background of time, was not essentially different from 
 that daily process of past to future which we noticed at 
 starting, and which contains in itself a perennial problem. 
 Often at later moments of recorded history there have 
 been creative acts which have produced things in them- 
 selves more marvellous, more to all seeming like an Athena 
 from the head of Zeus. Such are Greek science or modern 
 music. But in these cases there are links to be found, 
 and we are not dealing with those unfathomable abysses 
 of time in which we now know that the earliest creative 
 acts of man took place. In those long ages of change 
 and growth when human thought and activity were 
 slowly knit together, no wonder if some of the intervening 
 generations and stages in development have sunk out of 
 sight, like subsiding strata in the ocean. In the higher 
 animals, as in the lower races, the civilized man can trace 
 features of his past, embodied and alive : but to the 
 animals he looks across a gulf. 
 
 Besides his upright frame, man had from the first one 
 physical advantage over his nearest of kin among the 
 animals, which, small in itself, has had an incalculable
 
 The Childhood of the Race iy 
 
 influence in promoting his advance : some have seen 
 in it the chief cause. Compared with the ape's, man's 
 feet and hands are so differentiated that the feet have 
 become a better basis for standing and the hands better 
 instruments for handling. The latter is the greater 
 difference and incomparably the more fruitful in results. 
 Man's hand is broader and most important point the 
 thumb is longer, more flexible and more opposable to 
 each of the ringers. He thus gains a means of grasping, 
 turning about, measuring and comparing, which is given 
 to no other being. He can handle and he becomes 
 handy. Looking at a series of stone implements, from 
 the rudely chipped flint of the gravel drift to the per- 
 fectly fashioned and finished axes of the Danish peat 
 moss, one might be content to sum up the prehistoric 
 evolution as a progress in handiness, and rest upon the 
 hand as the sufficient cause. Such a line of thought is 
 full of suggestion, especially for the right education of 
 the young human being, which should in broad outlines 
 represent the education of his kind. But as a complete 
 account of the actual process it would be one-sided to 
 the point of perversion. Hand and mind have worked 
 together from the beginning, and it would be at least as 
 probable to argue that advancing mind had occasioned 
 the selection of the fitter hand, as to conclude that the 
 developing hand brought with it an increase of mental 
 power. Both grew together, and one of the greatest 
 intellectual services that anthropology, or the study of 
 early man, can render, is to compel us, as it can in these 
 simpler times, to see the process of human evolution as 
 a whole, before it breaks up into the complexity of
 
 1 5 The Childhood of the Race 
 
 branches which bewilders us in later times. In the same 
 way it is misleading, as some have done, to attempt to 
 isolate one intellectual faculty as the primary cause of 
 man's advance ; to say, for instance, that it was his 
 memory which gave him the advantage. We cannot say 
 that it was specially in memory that the first man out- 
 stripped his fellows, for in strength of memory it would 
 be easy to match man's power by the animals', and the 
 higher races by the lower. What we are rather led to 
 infer is that a general mental readiness, including quicker 
 observation and a greater power of adapting an old means 
 to a new end, was then as now the most potent force, 
 and that this was assisted by, and in turn promoted, 
 those advantageous differences in bodily structure which 
 were developing simultaneously. This is no scientific 
 explanation, but simply a statement of the problem as 
 a whole, putting foremost those two aspects of it on 
 which most seems to depend. What we see before us 
 is, that, at the earliest stage of which we have authentic 
 remains, man had already won his way to a position of 
 superiority. He was originally, no doubt, mainly fru- 
 givorous, like the apes ; but when we find him, he has 
 begun a career of successful warfare by killing other and 
 larger animals, using their flesh for food and their bones 
 for tools. This is the achievement of the Cave or Palaeo- 
 lithic man whose stage is so remote, so far below that 
 of the Danish peat moss or the Swiss lake-dwelling, that 
 it is only the facts that both used stone implements and 
 neither have left written records, that lead us to speak 
 of them together. For us in England the gap between 
 the Old Stone Age and the New is marked in the most
 
 The Childhood of the Race 17 
 
 striking way by the fact that in the days of the Old 
 Stone men England was still a part of the continent of 
 Europe and the Ouse a tributary of the Rhine. This 
 Palaeolithic Age comprised the last glacial period in the 
 northern hemisphere, when glaciers extended over half 
 the continent of Europe and England had the present 
 temperature of Spitzbergen. The Old Stone men did 
 not first arise under such conditions as these : we know 
 them in our own country in far earlier times, when the 
 climate was more nearly tropical. But they lived through 
 the cold, the men with the least equipment of science or 
 external appliances facing and surviving the severest test 
 which nature has yet imposed upon the western world. 
 They had no arts but those of fashioning the weapons 
 of the chase, and those simple tools which would enable 
 them to flay the animals and sew their skins for coverings. 
 They could make a fire, but we have no evidence of the 
 rudest pottery. They could kill the wild animals, but 
 had not learnt to tame a single one as a companion in 
 the hunt. Among their remains there are no traces of 
 religious rites nor of the least respect paid to the dead. 
 There are no signs of any higher life, except their 
 marvellous drawings, some scratched on bones and horns, 
 which show the figures of men and animals with a charm 
 and truthfulness suggesting the artistic spirit of old China 
 and Japan. In this one point we know them to have 
 surpassed their successors of the Neolithic Age, and they 
 display that delight in reproducing their impressions, 
 that directness and completeness of perception which are 
 noticeable generally in children, and in such primitive 
 people as the Bushmen of our own day. 
 
 1543 C
 
 i 8 The Childhood of the Race 
 
 A culture such as this spread doubtless over all the 
 habitable globe and filled by far the longest stretch in 
 human existence. It was the age of the hunter, and, 
 limited though his activities were, we know enough of 
 the powers of endurance involved, the unexampled train- 
 ing of the senses, the ingenuity of the devices of the 
 chase, to realize that through all its slow course man 
 was advancing and receiving an education of the most 
 thorough and fundamental kind. Little as we can ever 
 know of it, from one point of view this period must 
 always impress the imagination as no other can. These 
 human figures, the least human of all and apparently the 
 weakest for the task, were conveying to the future, 
 through untold ages, often against the greatest odds of 
 nature, the germs of an activity and a world of thought, 
 of which they had not themselves the smallest inkling. 
 The thought has something of the same effect upon us 
 as the contemplation of the cosmic forces of light and 
 gravitation and electricity, acting over the abysses of 
 space. 
 
 We have now to turn sharply to the other end of the 
 Stone Age, that period which just preceded the use of 
 metals. And if we are to attempt a brief estimate in 
 one composite picture of the sum of human achievement 
 before recorded history begins, two general considerations 
 must be borne in mind. One is that the process of change 
 throughout the prehistoric ages was by gradual, almost 
 imperceptible steps, well shown by the close sequence of 
 any series of prehistoric tools. The further back we go, 
 the slower seems the movement, the more unbroken the 
 descent. The other, that, though the broad outlines of
 
 The Childhood of the Race 19 
 
 the evolution are similar throughout the world, and even 
 in detail we are often surprised by close resemblance, yet 
 great differences, both in the nature of the culture and 
 the speed of its development, were necessarily caused by 
 differences of natural environment. Eastern herdsmen 
 were tending their flocks on the plains, while Tierra del 
 Fuegians were heaping mussel-shells on their freezing 
 shores. How potent such external causes were we shall 
 have abundant evidence in later chapters. But coming 
 to Western Europe, we are able to realize with some 
 fullness the point which civilization had reached before 
 metals, on the scene which was to witness its highest 
 growth. It is really nearer to our own than to the 
 culture of the cave, and in point of time far nearer. 
 The continent had then taken its present shape. Great 
 Britain was an island and Europe severed from Africa. 
 The intercourse and influence of Asia on the western 
 world had been for some time vigorous. Grain and other 
 plants for food had been introduced from the East. All 
 the great fundamental arts, spinning, weaving, pottery, 
 as well as those connected with the tilling of the soil, 
 had long been practised. All the domestic animals which 
 we have since retained, but never increased, had been 
 tamed. It is but a step from this to the use of bronze 
 and iron, which, when first used, were fashioned closely 
 after the model of the tools of stone. How closely in 
 form may be seen by comparing an early bronze axe 
 with its prototype in stone. How closely in time is 
 shown in a vivid way by those peat-moss excavations 
 in Denmark, where three successive layers will be exposed 
 in one place, the top containing remains of beech-trees 
 
 c 2
 
 20 
 
 The Childhood of the Race 
 
 with the iron axes used for cutting them, the second 
 layer oak with bronze, and the lowest, pine with the 
 polished stone-axe, which is the typical tool of the Neo- 
 lithic Age. 
 
 This tool, which we put first of concrete symbols, 
 deserves some special notice. When you examine them 
 in hundreds together at the Copenhagen Museum you 
 wonder if accuracy and finish in manual work could go 
 further. In fact their perfection shows us how short a 
 distance mere manual dexterity can take us on the course 
 of human activity subduing the world. It reaches its 
 highest point in the settled communities just before the 
 dawn of history, especially in the great civilizations of 
 which we speak in the next chapter and of which the 
 people of the East now retain most traces. In fashion- 
 ing these tools of stone axes and hammer-heads and 
 arrows the New Stone men were carrying to its con- 
 clusion the primaeval tradition of the men of the cave. 
 
 Their own special contribution to civilization con- 
 sisted in developing inventions and arts which have gone 
 on spreading in countless varieties and ramifications ever 
 since, and largely form the framework of later civilized 
 life. It would be out of the scale and purpose of this 
 sketch to describe any of these in detail. But one may 
 say in general that most of the fruitful practical devices 
 of mankind had their origin in prehistoric times, many 
 of them existing then with little essential difference. 
 Any one of them affords a lesson in the gradual elabora- 
 tion of the simple. A step minute in itself leads on 
 and on, and so all the practical arts were built up, a 
 readier and more observant mind imitating and adapting
 
 The Childhood of the Race 
 
 21 
 
 the work of predecessors, as we imagined the first man 
 making his first flint axe. The history of the plough 
 goes back to the elongation of a bent stick. The wheel 
 would arise from cutting out the middle of a trunk used 
 as a roller. House architecture is the imitation with 
 logs and mud of the natural shelters of the rocks, and 
 begins its great development when men have learnt to 
 make square corners instead of a rough circle. And so 
 on with all the arts of life or pleasure, including clothing, 
 cooking, tilling, sailing, and fighting. 
 
 One or two reflections are suggested, which concern 
 the other aspects of the societies in which these things 
 took place and the ultimate tendency of human pro- 
 gress. One is the observation that this exuberant growth 
 in practical skill did not bring with it a corresponding 
 development in the artistic powers of expression which 
 were so remarkable in the more primitive man. There 
 is a marked comparative dearth of objects showing delight 
 and skill in representing external things : the artistic 
 impulse seems to have become absorbed in decorative 
 and formal work such as we find on the pottery in neo- 
 lithic remains. Such a diversion of interest and attention 
 is natural enough, and appears at many points in later 
 history. 
 
 Another more certain and far-reaching line of thought 
 concerns the positive implications of this advance in the 
 practical arts. What does it imply as to the general 
 social and intellectual level, how far does it take us on 
 the great highway ? It involves clearly a far higher 
 degree of social stability and organization. To build 
 a permanent dwelling and cultivate the soil implies the
 
 22 The Childhood of the Race 
 
 collection in one place of a larger number of people for 
 a longer time than would be possible to hunters. Hunting 
 no doubt goes on, but it gradually becomes one among 
 other occupations. Now every such aggregation of indi- 
 viduals involves some form of social order and govern- 
 ment. Even the lower animals have this, and men when 
 they have their flocks and crops to share, and all the 
 growing complexities of relationship and inheritance to 
 settle, soon develop an order and a code of rules, minute 
 in detail and rigidly enforced. This leads to the recogni- 
 tion of some centre or organ of authority, the head of the 
 clan or tribe. On the more strictly moral and intellectual 
 side, there must be too, under such conditions, a great 
 advance in social feelings, in sympathy, in patience and 
 forbearance. This is not to overlook the barbarous and 
 inhuman customs which disfigure nearly all savage life. 
 Much of this is survival, much is dictated by the inflexible 
 laws of honour and religion. But settled life with many 
 people, in close and constant intercourse, pursuing various 
 occupations, brings with it necessarily a training in toler- 
 ance, in fellow-feeling, in common interests amid diverse 
 pursuits. The domestication of animals in itself involves 
 a persistence in kindly treatment and a careful study of 
 the character of other creatures, which connote a moral 
 calibre immensely higher than that of the first men of 
 the cave. 
 
 In all this we may mark advance, general and indis- 
 putable. But we have to ask ourselves how far on such 
 lines as these we can imagine human societies progressing 
 towards the goal which we now see was set before them. 
 The transformation of the wild huntsmen into the settled
 
 The Childhood of the Race 23 
 
 village community, with varied arts, is a profound one, 
 and has given us much which is still part of the social 
 fibre. But it does not place man in a position from which 
 we can imagine those great steps forward which raise our 
 highest hopes. His march so far is pedestrian : it clings 
 to the needs of daily life and revolves in the routine. 
 He has to reach the stars and the future. Where in the 
 achievements hitherto described are we to look for the 
 impulse which is to carry him beyond the sphere of 
 practical interests into the region of world-embracing 
 and illimitable thought ? The roots of this later growth, 
 we may be sure, are to be found even in man's humblest 
 origins, for in no case can there be a full-blown flower 
 without a seed. 
 
 We turn back to the nature and history of language 
 which we saw reason to associate even with the scraping 
 of the reindeer's bones in the primaeval cave. Like all 
 his other activities, language is an art, which man de- 
 veloped slowly, advancing by minute steps in extension 
 and co-ordination from the crude and shapeless beginnings 
 which we can only imagine. But language has two quali- 
 ties which distinguish it from the other arts, and make 
 it the special instrument for carrying forward man's 
 organized activity beyond the working necessities of the 
 small community. These two qualities are of the essence 
 of language and of language alone, and their complete 
 comprehension fully defines it. It is social and at the 
 same time abstract. Each of these points demands some 
 illustration. In the first place language is social, the art 
 of communication. The cries of the animals and the 
 infant demonstrate this, and every advance in language
 
 24 The Childhood of the Race 
 
 implies not only that men have more to say to one 
 another, but also that a larger fund of agreed notions 
 has been arrived at which may be put into words. It 
 is thus social, both in its original purpose and in every 
 stage of its growth. It facilitates the progress of the 
 other arts, but itself aims far beyond them. We can 
 imagine the invention and gradual perfecting of the pre- 
 historic tool without the use of language, though no 
 doubt in practice language powerfully assisted the pro- 
 cess. But we cannot imagine the formation of a clearly 
 articulated social order with rules and traditions without 
 language ; still less can we imagine the appearance among 
 early men of that world of fancy and speculation which 
 was to them both science and religion. It is on this side 
 that the second quality of language becomes pre-eminent, 
 its power of abstraction. It is so closely allied to reasoning 
 that the same word has sometimes been used of both : 
 the two combined and indissoluble have given man that 
 power which has ultimately enabled him to distance not 
 only the animals but his own beginnings by a height 
 which seems from the lower steps quite inaccessible. 
 
 The question is of supreme importance and merits 
 careful thought. The first cry of the animals is no doubt 
 a sign, and so far resembles language. The wild goat 
 may have its special sound to arouse in the mind of its 
 fellows or its young the idea of the wolf or other ravening 
 enemy and lead to flight. As a sign or signal it performs 
 the part of language and implicitly brings two ideas 
 together, that of wolf and that of flight. But it goes 
 no further. Language, before we can properly speak of 
 it as such, has made this implication explicit. It has
 
 The Childhood of the Race 25- 
 
 become to mankind the instrument for analysing certain 
 common qualities from particular things and making 
 general statements about them. It conveys the general 
 fact in a compendious form that all animals of a certain 
 kind are ravening enemies, that all plants of certain colour 
 and shape are sweet or poisonous, and so on. There is 
 contact and comparison at both ends of the process, of 
 particular objects of sensation at one end, of many human 
 minds in social intercourse at the other. Language is 
 the conducting wire which effects the fusion and enables 
 the ideal world of thought to come into existence. 
 
 The savage first revelling in the powers of speech 
 herein again resembling the child uses it rather to 
 expand his fancy than closely to define his thought. 
 Thus we have all that wealth of legend and natural 
 poetry which is the glory of primitive people, the delight 
 of childhood. So it is that language gives form to 
 religious ideas and is the essence of a mythology. 
 
 We find also in this early growth of reasoning in 
 language the germs of that accurate thought, fitted to 
 the recurring impressions of sense, which develops later 
 into science, and here, as in so many other sides of life, 
 the study of early man throws light on the permanent 
 bearings and harmonies of our nature. The first general 
 conclusion expressed in language about the qualities con- 
 nected with a group of objects is in the direct ancestry 
 of all scientific thought. The savage, who concludes that 
 all plants of a certain form and colour possess a poison 
 of certain powers, may begin to reason deductively. He 
 has taken the longest and most important step towards 
 combining his perceptions in a form capable of indefinite
 
 2.6 The Childhood of the Race 
 
 extension and application. We can in theory advance 
 directly from such a primitive generalization to the 
 equation and the calculus. But this is in theory only, 
 reading backward into its simplest elements the elabora- 
 tion of later thought. In practice, however, the pre- 
 historic man comes nearer to science than he possibly 
 can in language or in theory. He knows how to lever 
 with a stick the stone he cannot raise in his hands. But 
 the world had to wait for Archimedes to give it the 
 theory. The Egyptians of the Third and Fourth Dynasty 
 could build with the utmost accuracy and solidity massive 
 and complicated buildings, while their manuals of geo- 
 metry would not satisfy a Seventh Standard. So practice 
 throughout precedes theory, but, before theory comes, 
 practice cannot advance towards the greatest issues for 
 which man is destined. And it is in language that reason, 
 which provides the theory, grows and finds its necessary 
 expression. 
 
 With the earlier man, however, as with the child, 
 expression in language was a luxuriant thing, an end and 
 a delight in itself, even more than a means to engineer 
 and economize thought. Well for us if we could have 
 secured the latter, without sacrificing the former with 
 all the pleasure and poetry that it implies ! In no other 
 respect does the childhood of the race seem to us now 
 so enviable as in its power of vivifying and weaving 
 myths round every object and event in nature. This gift 
 was pre-eminently the savage art, in this our primitive 
 ancestor was most the maker and the type of poets. All 
 nature was alive to him. In everything he saw a force 
 and a spirit like his own. And, like the child, man had
 
 The Childhood of the Race 27 
 
 to learn by measuring his powers against the powers 
 without. It was being against being, for everything 
 outside himself, trees, sticks, and stones, as well as 
 animals, might be possessed by a kindred spirit to 
 be conquered or cajoled. It was a world of universal 
 life and activity, of mingled and rapidly succeeding 
 pleasure and disaster, of abject fear and groping strength. 
 The course of ages, the growth of a collective, organizing 
 intelligence, has brought comparative order, and among 
 mankind a wider spirit of harmony and mutual aid. But 
 like most armies on a conquering march, we have spread 
 solitude as well as peace. We have been ruthless to the 
 lower natures whom our forefathers reverenced as their 
 kin and worshipped and fought in turn. Our success, 
 and our solidarity itself, have formed a barrier between 
 ourselves and them. 
 
 Perhaps in this age of history, when men's minds are 
 turning to their own origins and the origins of all they 
 see, one of our oldest instincts may live again. The 
 poets of nature and the cult they have aroused, the 
 greater love and care for animals among civilized people, 
 the reappearance of a delight in fairy tales of beasts 
 and birds and trees, the whole philosophy of evolu- 
 tion which links us up afresh with all animated things, 
 are signs of a reviving sense of universal kinship. In this, 
 as in some other aspects which our story may suggest, 
 man seems able, with maturer powers, to renew his 
 youth.
 
 THE EARLY EMPIRES 
 
 The art of measuring brings the world into subjection to man; 
 the art of writing prevents his knowledge from perishing with him. 
 
 MOMMSEN.
 
 WE pass from those hundreds of thousands of years 
 which must be allowed for man's existence on earth, and 
 the tens of thousands which may stand for the later 
 Stone Age, to the last millenniums during which great 
 communities have been formed and the records of history 
 begin. 
 
 All over the world the conditions of that early life, 
 which were described in the last chapter, have been dis- 
 covered, with the modifications which we should expect 
 from varieties in race and differences in geographical 
 position and climate. Such modifications persist and 
 extend, as we know, throughout historic time : it is 
 more significant for our purpose to note the wide- 
 spread similarities. From China to Peru, wherever the 
 physical conditions were favourable, great communi- 
 ties gradually arose, which present the same general 
 features of organization and appear to rest on similar 
 principles of order and belief. The geographical con- 
 ditions, which would favour such settlements, may be 
 readily understood. The settlement will need some easy 
 means of internal communication to facilitate the inter- 
 change of ideas, and enable a common government to' 
 be maintained. It must have a fertile soil which will 
 permit it to remain settled in the territory and acquire 
 some wealth. And it must be sufficiently isolated and 
 protected from external disturbance to allow the develop- 
 ment of civilizing pursuits. Mountains and desert, sea 
 and river-basins, combine in various parts of the world 
 to give mankind this opportunity. It is most perfectly
 
 The Early Empires 3 i 
 
 realized where, as in India, China, Mesopotamia, and 
 Egypt, you have large rivers irrigating their basins and 
 providing a constantly fertilized soil, and where moun- 
 tains and sea enclose the country, while permitting a 
 certain amount of foreign intercourse. 
 
 Many causes, largely geographical, combined to make 
 the Mediterranean countries the scene of the most rapid 
 advance in civilization. With our eye therefore on the 
 sequel, we concentrate our attention at this stage mainly 
 on the two great river-valley civilizations nearest to the 
 eastern side of the Mediterranean, from which the 
 ' classical ' world arose, and to which is now added, 
 as a third factor, the kindred culture of the Aegean, 
 centring in Crete. In thus limiting our view we are in 
 no sense belittling the achievements of other races in 
 other regions. In many points, more perhaps than we 
 are yet aware of, the East contributed to Mediterranean 
 culture : in some ways we have still to learn and to 
 assimilate its spirit. But the Mediterranean current has 
 conquered and pervades the world, and those who will 
 follow its progress must keep their eyes fixed on the 
 main stream, and treat all others either by way of supple- 
 ment or of comparison. 
 
 So far indeed and even later until the advent of the 
 Greeks it is the uniformities of human progress that 
 most impress us. Not till they appeared, the- chief 
 moving factor in the Mediterranean world, could that 
 sharp line be said to exist between the progressive and 
 the backward, the civilized and the barbarian, which has 
 divided the world ever since. East and West moved on 
 till then with fairly equal steps, and we concentrate our
 
 THE EARLY EMPIRES 
 
 The art of measuring brings the world into subjection to man; 
 the art of writing prevents his knowledge from perishing with him. 
 
 MOMMSEN.
 
 32 The Early Empires 
 
 attention on the great civilizations near the Mediter- 
 ranean, mainly because they are on the scene and provide 
 the material, for the quick-moving drama which was to 
 follow. 
 
 The civilizations of the two great river-basins, the Nile 
 and the Euphrates, are so much alike in their history 
 that a common origin has often been suggested for them, 
 and even if we assume, as is most likely, an original 
 independence, the mutual borrowings and intercourse 
 must have been both early and frequent. 
 
 The broad coincidences in their chronology are signi- 
 ficant, and lead on gradually from the first fixed point 
 in history, when at the end of the fifth millennium B.C. 
 the Egyptian calendar was settled, through the conquer- 
 ing, centralizing period which culminates early in the 
 second millennium, into that new life which begins to stir 
 with the movement of the Jewish and Hellenic tribes. 
 The first fixed point is an interesting and familiar one, 
 having been accepted for nearly 2,000 years as the date 
 of the ' Creation of the World '. We know it now not 
 only as the beginning of the Egyptian calendar, but also 
 as the first moment at which we can be confident that 
 the men, now called Sumerians, had settled in the lower 
 Euphrates valley, bringing with them the seed of a higher 
 culture and, above all, the elements of cuneiform writing. 
 
 In substance, too, the evolution of the two civilizations 
 is strikingly alike. Smaller communities of varied racial 
 origin are slowly welded together under conquering 
 chiefs, whose power is supported by a religious system, 
 also slowly elaborated, in which the divine and human 
 are so closely intertwined that ultimately in each case
 
 The Early Empires 3 3 
 
 the ruler and the leading deity are practically identified. 
 In each case a lower and an upper kingdom are finally 
 amalgamated round a central city, in the one case Mem- 
 phis, in the other Babylon, some way removed from the 
 river's mouth. In each case the priestly order, in close 
 alliance with the throne, devotes itself, in opulence and 
 leisure, to the elaboration of the theological system by 
 a study of the heavens. In each case these observations 
 give valuable material and stimulus to later science, and 
 especially in two spheres of their activity results are 
 achieved of the highest lasting service to mankind. To 
 their beginnings in measurement and calculation we owe 
 most of our common units of time and space, and to their 
 invention of writing probably the foundation of our own. 
 It is these written records which have revealed them to us, 
 and formed also to them one of the strongest links between 
 successive generations. In each case, too, we note in the 
 earliest periods an extraordinary freshness and fineness in 
 their artistic work, which is similarly marred later on in 
 both by the extravagances of conquest and the rigidity 
 of convention. 
 
 A curious analogy of another kind between the two great 
 river-empires is seen in the fact that on the frontier of each 
 there was another civilization, in contact with it and acting 
 as a channel to Greece. Egypt has the Minoan or Aegean 
 empire on its sea-front, and Babylonia has the Hittites on 
 the highlands of Asia Minor. Neither of these is as yet 
 so fully known as the culture of the Nile and of Mesopo- 
 tamia, and neither is so perfect a type of the civilization 
 which summed up the slow process of primaeval time. 
 
 Our discoveries in this third great stage of human 
 
 1543
 
 34 The Early Empires 
 
 progress (counting the Old and New Stone Age as distinct 
 periods) are far greater in detail and much more com- 
 plete and significant than those belonging to the earlier 
 stages : they constitute, in fact, one of our most signal 
 triumphs in patient research and imaginative reconstruc- 
 tion. Ancient tombs and the sites of ancient cities have 
 yielded their evidence, oftenest in the form of artistic 
 objects, fragments of sculpture or pottery, jewellery or 
 utensils of metal. Inscriptions and written records on 
 rock or clay or papyrus roll have been deciphered and 
 their data compared with the other evidence, with the 
 traditions handed down by the classical writers, especially 
 of Greece, with every reference which they make to 
 a tribe or a place or a person, mythical or real. It is 
 a strictly scientific process, analogous to that by which, 
 as we have seen, the evidence of caves and fossils has 
 been collated with that of living animal forms to com- 
 pose the record of man's biological history. And in 
 archaeology it is the written record which plays the part 
 of the living animal form in the history of species. For 
 in the written record we have before us what the men 
 of that age actually thought and were concerned with, as 
 in the living animal form we have the actual result of 
 one line of the evolutionary process ; and by the witness 
 in each case of the speaking document, whether of bygone 
 thought or bygone life, we may bring together and 
 interpret the other scattered and inarticulate remains. 
 
 The hieroglyphs of Egypt and the cuneiform writing 
 of Babylonia are a discovery of the last few decades, 
 and by that one achievement Champollion and Grote- 
 fend placed us really nearer to the ancient Egyptians
 
 The Early Fmpires 37 
 
 and Babylonians than were Herodotus and the other 
 Greek writers who first studied and wrote about them 
 more than two thousand years ago. But in one impor- 
 tant point the first Greek students of ancient Egypt 
 were not misled, and have left the right clue for under- 
 standing the structure and history both of Egypt and 
 all the other early communities at the same stage of 
 culture. This primitive writing which they saw engraved 
 on the walls of tombs and temples, but could not read, 
 was to them a ' hieroglyph ' or ' sacred writing ', devised 
 by the priests and used for religious purposes. Herein 
 they point back to the true origin of Egyptian unity, the 
 root of all the strength of theocratic civilization. ' The 
 Egyptians are exceedingly religious or god-fearing 
 beyond all other men ; ' so Herodotus wrote, before 
 entering on the details of their history. It was the 
 only such community he had personally investigated ; it 
 remains to us the most perfect type of the primitive 
 theocracy, the one most completely isolated in its early 
 stages from outside influence and interference. 
 
 To us, as to him, the religious spirit and the religious 
 framework appear the most striking features of these 
 societies, when we compare them with the earlier civiliza- 
 tions of the cave or the lake-dwelling or the nomad tent. 
 We note of course their greater size, their more abundant 
 material resources, the exquisite fineness of their artistic 
 work, their massive architecture and their elaborated 
 codes of law. But beneath and surrounding this is the 
 religious structure which inspired and held it all to- 
 gether. It is this which marks them all unmistakably, 
 from East to West, and has gained for such civilizations 
 
 D 2
 
 3 6 The Early Empires 
 
 the name of ' Theocracies ', implying the union in their 
 system between the earthly ruler and the powers of the 
 other world, which to these early thinkers was as real 
 in the same sense as our own, and much more populous. 
 At no other stage in history are we so much impressed 
 by the conservative aspect of the human spirit. The 
 whole fabric of theocratic life and thought is found to 
 be built up of earlier elements of immemorial antiquity, 
 of those spontaneous beliefs in fetishes and spirits which 
 marked the earlier stages of culture. Primaeval custom 
 and belief, preserved, amalgamated, and transformed, 
 grew at length into a firm rich soil in which the new ideas 
 of the Greeks could take root and nourishment. In 
 thus preparing the soil for a progressive spirit to work 
 upon, we recognize a necessary and fundamental service 
 of the theocratic ages. But on the side of organization, 
 for bringing and holding together the largest societies 
 which had yet been upon the globe, our debt to these 
 communities is even greater. This the Greek spirit 
 would seem to have been incapable of achieving. They 
 might quite well have invented writing without the 
 aid of Egypt, and possibly did so in their disguise as 
 Cretans. They might, without the Babylonians, have 
 learnt to divide the circle into 360 parts and the year 
 into months. But for the task of building up a great 
 society round one centre of government, the scientific 
 intellect is of itself unsuited : it is a probe before it is 
 a link. This, by slow elaboration on a religious basis, 
 the men of the river-valleys accomplished, and handed 
 on as the goal of a practicable ambition to the Persians, 
 to Alexander, and to the Romans.
 
 The Early Empires 37 
 
 Hence at this point, in tracing the growth of an organ- 
 izing human activity in the world, we are bound to 
 give a larger space and greater weight to the religious 
 beliefs of the people than either in the ages before or 
 in those which immediately succeeded. 
 
 From the spontaneous worship and mythology of primi- 
 tive culture, elaborate and co-ordinated systems arose, 
 linked inextricably with the fortunes of the tribes and 
 rulers who had professed and carried them to victory. 
 It was an age-long process due to a multitude of causes 
 and not only, or even mainly, as certain eighteenth- 
 century philosophers believed, to the interested machin- 
 ations of the priests. The typical scheme which emerges 
 in the middle of the theocratic millenniums and is fami- 
 liar to us in the orthodox polytheism of Greece and 
 Rome, the scheme in which the sky, the sun, and the 
 planets hold high place and the deities of the earth 
 and daily life are under their control, is by no means the 
 primitive one. To the earliest philosopher the trees, 
 the rivers, and the teeming earth were the more potent 
 deities, and of the heavenly bodies the moon was the 
 first to arrest his awe and speculation. Its movements 
 are more readily calculable, and it reigns in the dark 
 night more obviously surrounded by a host of minor 
 lights. It was prolonged reflection and a more mature 
 intelligence which perceived the superior importance 
 of the sun and raised him to the high place which he 
 holds in all the later systems. This step the Egyptians 
 and Babylonians in their prime, like most corresponding 
 civilizations, had long taken. Among the host of local 
 and tribal gods which followed and assisted the fortunes
 
 3 8 The Early Empires 
 
 of their worshippers, one aspect of the Sun-god became 
 supreme in Egypt, and in time the Pharaoh was identified 
 with him. At first the deification followed death and 
 led to that sumptuous and stupendous provision for the 
 dead which is one of the wonders of the world and has 
 been the means of preserving the records of their early 
 history. In later times the living Pharaoh is divine and 
 the theocratic scheme is complete. Doubtless the cor- 
 porations or orders of the priesthood counted for a large 
 share in this evolution. In Egypt they are said at one 
 time to have owned a third part of all the land, in the 
 name of the gods whom they served. The self-interest, 
 which is obvious, the trickery, which must have been 
 frequent enough, are subordinate considerations in view 
 of the strength of the beliefs and of the social cohesion 
 which are implied in such a system. It is noticeable 
 that in Egypt, where the theocratic idea was most fully 
 realized, the social structure persisted the longest in the 
 least altered form. Their religion, by its practices and 
 institutions as well as its belief, held these societies 
 together in time as well as in space. 
 
 Order and consolidation, therefore, based on religion, 
 mark this stage of progress, with results varying in varied 
 circumstances. One feature was prominent in one civiliza- 
 tion, which was less marked in another. In the East caste is 
 a distinguishing feature of the system, and strengthens its 
 social conservatism. Now caste, as such, was unknown in 
 Egypt, though the principle of heredity had full sway in 
 the ruling and priestly families, and, speaking generally, 
 occupations followed the hereditary rule. The fellah's son 
 remained a fellah, just as the priest's became a priest. Such
 
 The Early Empires 39 
 
 is the simplest rule of social continuity, and it appears in 
 human evolution side by side with the worship of an- 
 cestors. Both are strong but crude expressions of the 
 awakening consciousness that the past is living with us, 
 that we are but the passing agents of an eternal spirit 
 to which we owe all we have and are. Egypt is here 
 also the most striking instance. China made a more 
 general and moralizing use of ancestor-worship. But no 
 other nation ever made so steady and supreme an effort 
 to protect their great dead and perpetuate their memory 
 as did the Egyptians throughout the long ages of pyra- 
 mids, rock-tombs, and embalming. They spent them- 
 selves upon it, and in return we have learnt more about 
 them than of any contemporary people. Their tombs are 
 storehouses of the art and literature of the time. Jewellery, 
 glass, furniture, objects of all kinds for the sustenance 
 and recreation of the dead, were placed there, with papyri 
 and inscriptions recording their titles and achievements. 
 The rocky hills which enclose the Nile basin are full of 
 such tombs, and the plains are studded with pyramids 
 great and small, built with the same end in view. These 
 structures, especially the Great Pyramids, which go back 
 to the beginning of the fourth millennium B.C. the date 
 of which we noted the curious fortune above are the 
 most eloquent stone documents in the world. They mark 
 the culmination of the political system based on religion 
 from which the Old Kingdom and civilization of Egypt 
 arose. They express in its most imposing concrete form 
 the spirit of sacrificing the present to the safeguard and 
 glorification of the past. They imply wholesale slavery and 
 the wholesale devotion of human life to a public though
 
 4o The Early Empires 
 
 extravagant purpose. For us they have the special value 
 of recording, as clearly and more permanently than any 
 book, the extent and the strength of the mental grasp and 
 practical skill of the men who planned and executed them. 
 
 A colossal building, of neatly-finished, closely-com- 
 pacted stones, of simple design and homogeneous in its 
 parts, heavy and stable, and without light or sense of 
 movement, the pyramid is no inapt image of the society 
 which erected it. It certainly stands as a fit symbol of 
 the country to which a universal ancient tradition ascribed 
 the origin of the science of measuring. 
 
 That the origin of science in the strict sense was due 
 to the Greeks will be seen in the next chapter : that 
 man from the earliest ages was accumulating the experi- 
 ence and the practical skill which are the raw material 
 of science, we have already seen. In the latter sense the 
 men of Egypt were treading in the path already worn 
 by generations of earlier workers, and which other people 
 were treading independently. But they had two advan- 
 tages. Their land was specially in need of measuring 
 after inundation, and specially easy to be measured. 
 And they had growing up among them a strong and 
 numerous body of priests, who were undoubtedly the 
 class, both here and elsewhere, who carried forward to 
 the furthest point before the advent of science, the 
 collection of observations and measurements on which 
 true science was to work. The strength of the Egyptians 
 in geometry must be judged rather by their works 
 than by the faulty theorizing to which allusion has 
 been made. The planning of such a building as one 
 of the greater pyramids, the perfect finish and fitting
 
 The Early Empires 41 
 
 of every stone, the mechanics of transport and elevation, 
 are clearly an achievement of the highest practical skill 
 as well as of commanding intellect, however limited the 
 analysis may have been of the principles involved in the 
 work. How far this had actually proceeded we cannot 
 with any certainty affirm. The extant treatise of the 
 second millennium B.C. may easily be the work of a careless 
 or unintelligent scribe or school. But it is certain that 
 there is no positive evidence that even the architects 
 and engineers of the pyramids had any comprehension 
 of the abstract laws either of figures or of motion. It 
 may be that they never advanced beyond the conception of 
 angle as slope and that the abstraction of angular distance 
 was the crucial step which they were never able to take. 
 This fundamental act of generalized measurement the 
 Greeks accomplished, and it is connected in the tradition 
 with Thales. The stories of the Egyptian methods of 
 astronomical measurement fit in with this conclusion ; 
 the hours of the night being determined by the passing 
 of certain fixed stars over different parts of the watch- 
 keeper's person, who was seated on the ground with 
 a plummet before him. The position of the stars would 
 then be noted on the tables as ' in the centre ', ' on 
 the left eye ', or ' the right shoulder ', and so on. 
 
 If the Egyptians were the pioneers of geometry, or 
 measurement as applied to the land and terrestrial 
 objects, the Babylonians were of greater force in 
 celestial measurement and observation. They had wider 
 plains for their star-gazing, and were more in touch 
 with the nomad tribes to whom star-gazing was an 
 immemorial and absorbing interest. The Babylonians
 
 42 The Early Empires 
 
 had from early days those temple-towers of seven stages, 
 which served as observatories and marked their knowledge 
 and reverence of the seven planets. To them, too, we 
 owe the week with its seven days, and the signs of the 
 zodiac, which did not make their way into Egypt until 
 much later times. But there is no more evidence in 
 Chaldaea than in Egypt of any scientific analysis of their 
 observations, or of rational inference as to the properties 
 of the bodies observed and the causes of events. On the 
 contrary, in both cases the study of the heavenly bodies 
 was closely connected with superstitious uses. The stars 
 were studied for their supposed influences on human life 
 and not as the basis of human science, and the Chaldean 
 priests must be reputed rather as the founders of astrology 
 than of astronomy. But in this case, as often later in the 
 history of thought, the by-products were more valuable 
 than the immediate purpose. 
 
 If, as was suggested above, order and consolidation 
 should be regarded as the special marks and contributions 
 of these civilizations to general progress, it is easy to 
 see how their achievements in measuring and calcu- 
 lation and writing arose from and assisted this main 
 purpose. The measurement of land was an essential 
 condition of the orderly co-operation of a large number 
 of individuals, or of corporations, cultivating a continuous 
 territory. The measurement of time was no less neces- 
 sary for the common performance of public functions, 
 especially the religious ceremonies for which the whole 
 calendar seems originally to have been devised. The 
 week, as is well known, was formed by assigning a day 
 in turn to each of the principal heavenly powers who was
 
 The Early Empires 43 
 
 supposed to preside over it. The months in Egypt were 
 in the same way named after the principal festivals 
 celebrated in them. The monarch, too, as in the course 
 of history he became more imposing and divine, de- 
 manded more careful and elaborate records of his life 
 and reign and deeds. His festivals had to be fixed by 
 the astronomical calendar. All these occasions, therefore, 
 which were an organic part of the whole social order, 
 necessitated the continual and accurate observation of 
 the heavens, and promoted the development of calcula- 
 tion and the invention of mechanical aids, such as the 
 sun-dial and the clepsydra, in which the Babylonians 
 appear to have made the most advance. It was they 
 who divided the circle of the heaven into 360 degrees, 
 and the day and hour into the parts we still employ. 
 The choice of these numbers involves a knowledge of the 
 advantages of the duodecimal as well as the decimal 
 system of numeration. In Egypt the latter was the 
 basis, though their methods of calculation appear to us 
 now intolerably cumbrous. 
 
 Great as were these services of the old theocracies in 
 the beginnings of measurement and calculation, perhaps 
 our alphabetic writing, which we also owe to them, was 
 a still greater debt. It emerges in recognizable form 
 at about the beginning of the last millennium, an example 
 of simplicity won after centuries of complicated and 
 competing signs and scripts. The point in history at 
 which this was achieved was, as we shall see, near the 
 time at which the spirit of the Greeks was to break through 
 the old fetters of custom and superstition. It is a memor- 
 able coincidence that the rock-hewn inscriptions, high
 
 44- The Early Empires 
 
 above the ground at Persepolis, which first aroused the 
 interest of scholars a hundred years ago and led to the 
 deciphering of cuneiform, commemorated the kings of 
 that widest, but least organic of the theocratic empires, 
 which the Greeks challenged in their immortal struggle 
 for national existence. This decipherment, carried on in 
 parallel lines for cuneiform and Egyptian, revealed far 
 more than the mere meaning of the texts. The prodigies 
 of toil and ingenuity which the complexities of the 
 problem evoked were rewarded by the confirmation of 
 many old truths, by the discovery of many new ones, 
 by the re-creation of a world of thought and action, such 
 as the one column of Hammurabi's laws in the Louvre 
 Museum, is sufficient, when interpreted, to establish. 
 The two scripts were closely similar in their origin, yet 
 in their diverse history they grew to be a perfect symbol 
 of the whole circumstances and character of the civiliza- 
 tion from which they sprang, and which they held 
 together. The Egyptian preserved more faithfully the 
 marks of its birth, and remained, like the people, more 
 secluded in its original home. The cuneiform passed 
 over a wider area, and was more worn away and altered 
 by the various nations which adopted it. At the time 
 when, in Hammurabi's column, it was used to express 
 the central document of Babylonian social order in 
 2000 B.C., it was also passing, in correspondence, over 
 Armenia and Asia Minor and even into Upper Egypt 
 itself. The Egyptian script also shows best the pictorial 
 origin of writing, and is at the same time the most com- 
 plex, for it employed at once signs at all stages of their 
 evolution, the picture of the thing, the conventionalized
 
 The Early Empires 45- 
 
 picture for the syllable, and the mere letter or dis- 
 tinguishing mark. Both systems bear evidence of their 
 religious origin, just as the Greeks had noticed their 
 religious use in the hands of the priests. The earliest 
 hieroglyphs were probably symbols of fetishes, pictures 
 of planets, birds, snakes, &c., drawn for the purposes 
 of magic or religion. 
 
 Before the scene changes from this slow-moving 
 culture of the Nile and Mesopotamia to the quick life 
 of Ionia and Hellas, another source of progress must 
 be noted, closer akin to the theocratic system, but 
 one which did not bear its full fruit till later in history. 
 As the Greeks were settling in the lands surrounding the 
 Aegean, another set of tribes, of Semitic birth, travelling 
 in the region between the two great river-basins, began 
 also to occupy the narrow strip of territory which was to 
 be associated with their fame. Each nation had one of 
 the narrowest and hardest areas of the Mediterranean 
 basin for its national birth ; each was to play a decisive 
 part in the history of the world. Each had been long 
 in contact with the ancient systems which it was des- 
 tined to supersede; each had a new element to com- 
 municate to human thought which would in the end 
 transform it and embrace the world. 
 
 The faith of Judaea has now, through its great book, 
 become a light for us to many of the recesses of the 
 ancient story. It was then a glow, small but intense, 
 hidden under the colossal forms of decadent empires. 
 It did not break out and kindle the West until Greece 
 and Rome had done their preliminary work.
 
 THE GREEKS 
 
 Primum Graius homo . . . 
 
 Irritat animi virtutem, confringere ut arcta 
 
 Naturae primus portarum claustra cupiret. 
 
 LUCRETIUS.
 
 WE noticed in the last chapter many striking coinci- 
 dences in culture, and two striking coincidences in date. 
 At about the same period, towards the end of the fifth 
 millennium B.C., the two great river- valley civilizations 
 which speak to us through Egyptian hieroglyphics and 
 Sumerian cuneiform, appeared in clearly ordered and 
 definite shape. And towards the end of the second mil- 
 lennium B.C. the migrations and settlements of the Jewish 
 and Hellenic tribes took place, which contained, both in 
 their likeness and unlikeness, so many germs of life, full 
 of moment for human progress. The parallel of the two 
 national movements has exercised a powerful fascination 
 on the philosophic mind reflecting on history. To Renan 
 there were two worthy objects for lifelong study and 
 exposition, the evolution of the Jews and of the Greeks. 
 Having given one life to the former, he longed for 
 a second to devote to the latter. In England we are 
 familiar with the elaborate contrast between the Hellenic 
 and the Hebraic elements which Matthew Arnold traced 
 in modern life and thought. In the field of literature 
 comparative studies have been made of the Hebrew sagas 
 and the Homeric poems with illuminating results. At 
 every point the parallel, and the contrast, teem with 
 suggestion, which is not, however, germane to our present 
 argument. The special contribution of the Hebrew genius 
 to human thought, though it appeared in curious simul- 
 taneity with that of Greece, did not enter the main 
 stream of progress till some time later. This last mil- 
 lennium B.C. is the age of Greece. At its beginning we
 
 The Greeks 49 
 
 see the Greek race and language and ideas slowly emerging 
 from the welter of wandering tribes and fighting barbar- 
 ism ; at its conclusion the foundations of science and art 
 and civilization, firmly laid on the broad lines where they 
 have rested ever since, had been adopted, enclosed and 
 fortified by the practical genius of Rome. Greece had 
 then done her work ; Rome was in the midst of hers, 
 and the moral and religious spirit, due originally to the 
 Hebrew prophets, found a spacious and well-defended 
 world for its expansion. 
 
 The millennium of Greece, then, must be regarded as 
 the turning-point in western history, and, through the 
 West, of all the world. It is of supreme importance and 
 unique, in three respects, of what it ends, of what it 
 achieves, of what it leads to. It ends the old primaeval 
 rule of tradition and authority. It achieves the most 
 beautiful and perfect creations in language and plastic 
 art which the world has seen, and within the shortest 
 time ever known for such an evolution. It leads directly 
 to the formation of modern science and the civilized 
 system in which we live : it is the decisive step in the 
 advance of man's power over nature. 
 
 The Greeks were a branch of that Aryan or Indo- 
 Germanic group of peoples to which we ourselves belong. 
 Amid the cloud of myth and conjecture in which the 
 primitive history of the group is surrounded, one point 
 stands out firm and clear : all branches of it use a speech, 
 similar in its structure, similar in its commonest and oldest 
 words ; identical therefore, so far as we can judge, in its 
 beginnings. They were all more northerly people than 
 those we have hitherto mentioned the Egyptians, the 
 
 1543 E
 
 yo The Greeks 
 
 Chaldaeans, the Hittites, the Jews and covered a long 
 stretch of land from northern India to southern Russia. 
 The Greeks did not call themselves by that name, which 
 they acquired much later in their settlements in southern 
 Italy. They had, in fact, no common name until the 
 seventh century B. c., when they adopted the name 
 ' Hellenes ', and referred its origin to a mythical ancestor 
 of all their tribes, called Hellen, just as the Jews called 
 themselves the sons of Israel. When the migrating tribes 
 of the Hellenes first appear in the dawn of history, 
 streaming from the north and covering gradually the 
 lands and islands of the Aegean, they come as Achaians, 
 Dorians, Aeolians, lonians, and many more. Each name 
 has its own story, the heroes of the earliest legends 
 and lays being often imaginary figures, personifying the 
 tribes, just as Hellen was later on adopted as the original 
 ancestor of the whole race, with its four main branches 
 as his sons. How far they found in these Aegean lands, 
 in Crete, in Attica or elsewhere, men akin to themselves 
 in blood or speech, we shall not here inquire. It seems 
 probable enough, both here and in other floodings of 
 prehistoric lands by the tumultuous waves of migrant 
 barbarism. What we need for our present purpose is to 
 note that historic Greece, the Greece which has formed 
 the thought and civilization of the western world, dates 
 its rise from after the time when these migrations from 
 the north had settled down, that in a thousand ways 
 historic Greece looks back to those northern lands where, 
 at Dodona, they had their oldest shrine, and on Mount 
 Olympus the family home of their official gods. 
 
 The lands thus overrun between the second and the
 
 The Greeks 5-1 
 
 last millennium B.C. contributed, by their own conforma- 
 tion, no small share to the direction which the evolution 
 of their invaders was to take. They contain the largest 
 amount of sea-coast in proportion to area which you 
 could find anywhere in the world. The coast through- 
 out is broken up by innumerable inlets both large and 
 small, and the archipelago is so closely studded with 
 islands that small boats can pass with ease from one to 
 another on a summer's afternoon, never out of sight of 
 land. The land itself is by no means fertile, and inter- 
 sected within by mountains as the coast is by sea. But 
 for the artist, for all to whom clear impressions are of 
 value, it has a quality of colour and of sharp-cut out- 
 lines, of mountain against sky and land against sea, unique 
 in Europe if not in the whole world. In the general 
 trend of its communications it is important to observe 
 that the whole peninsula, with its main inlets and its 
 fringe of connecting islands, looks towards the east, just 
 as markedly as the Italian peninsula looks towards the 
 west. So the northern settlers were led on into contact, 
 both peaceful and hostile, with the peoples of the East. 
 
 These geographical factors played their part in the 
 historic evolution, here as elsewhere. They are here very 
 clearly marked, but that they were the main determinants 
 of Greek life and thought we cannot say. We note them 
 only, and note also that, in the sequel, the Greeks 
 descending from an inland stock, where as yet no common 
 word for a ship had been in use, became in their new 
 Surroundings a seafaring and a trading people. The ' wet 
 ways of the sea ' became their highroads and knit their 
 world together, as paved roads did the Roman Empire. 
 
 2
 
 5" 2 The Greeks 
 
 There were no paved roads in Greece. The largest 
 political union which Greece in her days of freedom 
 succeeded for one short moment in holding together, 
 was the Athenian empire, a maritime league which took 
 the place of one which had grown up in the early 
 centuries of the millennium round Delos, the little central 
 island of the Aegean, market and forum and holy place 
 for Greek traders and travellers, especially of the Ionian 
 branch. 
 
 This maritime expansion is the capital fact in the first 
 third of their millennium. By the seventh century their 
 lands are settled ; they have sent out their colonies east 
 and west ; they have come in close touch with their 
 neighbours and are learning from them. The middle 
 third of the millennium is the time of mental expansion 
 and the climax of the national life. They have the 
 national poems of Homer nearly in their finished shape. 
 They fight and defeat the Persians. They face the 
 problems of the world as free and reasonable men : 
 abstract science and philosophy begin and their art 
 receives its perfect form. The last third is the period 
 of review : their ideas are absorbed and permeate the 
 world, while their own national spirit and initiative 
 decline and die away. 
 
 The first division of the Greek period cannot here be 
 more than mentioned. Essential as its study is for the 
 comprehension of Greek civilization as a whole, we are 
 in this sketch attempting something different. We are 
 trying roughly and very briefly to piece together, at the 
 places where they join, the main sections of that line of 
 human progress which has led to our present western
 
 The Greeks $ 3 
 
 civilization, especially in its aspect of a collective triumph 
 over natural forces. In this process the Greeks played 
 a leading part, but they did not appear as leaders until 
 they had emerged from their state of northern migratory 
 tribes, had met the more advanced peoples of the East, 
 and had learnt what they had to teach. For in their 
 wander-years they were as far behind the Egyptians, 
 Babylonians or Phoenicians in culture or achievements 
 as were the northern barbarians on the fringe of the 
 Roman Empire. Nothing is more significant of this than 
 the comparative lateness of the use of writing among the 
 Greeks. Egyptians and Cretans had been for ages using 
 it, and able to teach the Greeks at the time when their 
 traditional lays were being handed on from mouth to 
 mouth. But they appear finally to have adopted, with 
 ingenious modifications, the alphabet in a Phoenician 
 form, from those rival traders whose path they crossed in 
 the Aegean and whom they were to supplant as chief 
 merchants and channels of communication in the Medi- 
 terranean world. Hardly any Greek inscriptions date from 
 before the seventh century, when their intellectual leader- 
 ship begins. 
 
 The Homeric poems are the most precious relic of this 
 earlier period, though they were being altered and edited 
 well into the centuries of the zenith, when Athens had 
 become the centre and leader of Greek life and thought. 
 It is this continuous tradition and rehandling which 
 make Homer a document of such supreme value for 
 history as well as literature. We have in it the back- 
 ground of the older civilization of the Aegean, with its 
 highly developed order and its marvellous art, as revealed
 
 f4 The Greeks 
 
 in the diggings at Troy and Mycenae and, above all, in 
 Crete. And in front of this background the Greeks of 
 the migration carry on the action of the piece in the full 
 vigour of barbarous life, while everywhere their details of 
 later life and touches of more developed thought remind 
 us of the process of revision. This epic, more than any 
 other, grew up with the people which gave it birth, 
 born from the heart of their being and fed by their 
 life-blood. 
 
 Think of the circumstances which called the poems forth, 
 the round of festivals and public gatherings which the 
 wandering minstrels visited, where the lays, treasured 
 up and constantly revised and added to by the schools 
 of singers, were submitted afresh to the applause and 
 criticism of eager men, full of their local and personal 
 ambitions, in close touch with all the interests of that 
 young and thriving world, ready to respond to any touch 
 of fire or pathos or beauty. It was this open, common 
 public of sympathetic minds which made possible an art 
 of winged words, and shaped and polished them to the 
 general taste. No doubt, too, it was this environment 
 of their birth which gave point and vigour to the latent 
 idea in the poems, that the Greeks are the advance- 
 guard of a newer civilization assailing the forces of an 
 older and lower world. For Homer first strikes the key- 
 note of that conflict of West with East which held the 
 mind of the Greeks throughout. The tribal conflicts 
 enshrined in the legends of the Trojan war become the 
 first moving of the national spirit in its destined strife. 
 The Persian war is the later true epic on the same theme, 
 and it lasts all through the Greek centuries until the
 
 The Greeks 55 
 
 conquests of Alexander stretch it to breaking-point, and 
 with the advent of the Romans a greater western power 
 appears, which absorbs and converts to new ends the 
 achievements of the Greeks. 
 
 It was to an Ionic public that the Homeric, poems were 
 addressed, and it was in Ionia that the great outburst of 
 Greek intellectual genius took place in the seventh and 
 sixth centuries B.C., at the beginning, that is, of their 
 central period, the turning-point of human history. 
 It is another curious and significant coincidence in 
 chronology that this point corresponds closely with the 
 age of the Jewish prophets, who first enunciated that 
 system of morality based on religion, which in its later 
 development has encircled the globe. 
 
 Ionia is primarily that sea-coast fringe of Asia Minor 
 where the immigrant Greeks had settled, and where they 
 came in contact, both round the coast and over the inland 
 plateau, with the older and wealthier civilizations of the 
 nearer East. To all these people the lonians were the 
 Greeks, the lawan of Eastern literature. The Lydians 
 were their nearest neighbours ; behind lay Phrygian 
 highlands and the old trade routes leading on to Baby- 
 lonia ; and round the coast Greek ships would sail to 
 Cyprus, meet the Phoenicians in their own sphere of 
 influence, and reach Egypt without crossing the open 
 sea. From this sea-coast many of the islands were settled, 
 and some have held that the settlement of the Greek 
 mainland itself was by a reflux tide of immigration, which 
 had first passed into Asia Minor by the narrowest sea- 
 way, across the Bosphorus. Here, at any rate at this 
 period, was the scene of the most intense life in the
 
 5 6 fhe Greeks 
 
 f 
 
 Greek world. It was the centre of commerce, as well 
 as the birthplace of science, and the two went hand in 
 hand. Thales, the first name in Greek philosophy, was, 
 among his other activities, a salt merchant, just as Plato, 
 two hundred years later, dealt in oil. By the end of the 
 seventh century the Greeks of Ionia had become the 
 leading traders of the Mediterranean : they had distanced 
 their Phoenician rivals and learnt their secrets : they had 
 a settlement in Egypt and were on friendly terms with 
 the new Egyptian monarchy, which had lately established 
 itself in the Delta, and they were in alliance with the 
 active Lydian monarchs, whose dominions touched, and 
 in some places included, the Ionian settlements on the 
 central sea-coast of Asia Minor. Just here, where Greeks 
 and Lydians were in constant intercourse, and just at 
 this moment, before the advent of the first philosopher, 
 another of the great practical inventions in human history 
 made its appearance, the first coined money, which bears 
 a Lydian stamp. It bespeaks the need of a uniform, 
 acceptable and easily transported, medium of exchange, 
 in the busiest centre of commerce which the world had 
 yet seen. 
 
 Of the twelve associated Ionian cities the most impor- 
 tant was Miletus. It had already taken the lead in sending 
 out its colonists east and west and north. It was to fire 
 the train of the national rising against Persia later on. 
 Its harbour, now sanded up and idle, was the central 
 mart of the Ionian world, and sent out and received 
 voyagers from every quarter. Of these Milesian travellers 
 and merchants the most famous in the ancient world was 
 Thales, the first of the philosophers, of that new type
 
 The Greeks 5-7 
 
 of man who was to be the special organ of the Greek 
 spirit. 
 
 Now it is essential, before we speak of any definite 
 results, to realize what is implied by this term ' philo- 
 sopher ' when used of Thales and the early thinkers 
 of Greece. In later ages and often in our own day 
 the word ' philosophy ' is carefully defined to exclude 
 precisely those parts of the thinking of the early Greeks 
 which proved to be of most permanent value ; and this 
 definition, when carried back into the period when 
 4 philosophy ' was understood in a larger sense, has led 
 to the presentation of a singularly mutilated picture of 
 early Greek thought in most of the so-called ' histories 
 of philosophy '. The crude speculations about the origin 
 and nature of things in general, interesting as they are 
 as evidence of the new spirit of free inquiry, and not 
 without occasional flashes of brilliant insight, were neces- 
 sarily premature and bound to be superseded by fuller 
 knowledge. These are presented to us as the main results 
 of the thinking of Thales or Pythagoras, while their solid 
 achievements in the history of thought are passed over 
 as belonging to another department called ' science '. 
 The early thinker knew no such distinction, and we are 
 bound also to treat his work as a whole ' science ' and 
 ' philosophy ' and to consider it as an integral part of 
 the development which was going on simultaneously in 
 all parts of the Greek domain, commerce, art, philosophy, 
 and politics. 
 
 The Sophos or Wise Man, then, as the new type of 
 hero was first called, was a person of intellect above his 
 fellows, who applied his mind freely to the facts of the
 
 f8 The Greeks 
 
 world around him, not without the guidance of others, 
 but without subservience to tradition or authority, and 
 anxious to use his knowledge for the common good. 
 Such was the Thales of the legend, such was Herodotus 
 later on, as his own history reveals him. Thales was the 
 chief of the ' Seven Wise Men ' of Ionia, as his city 
 Miletus was the chief of the twelve Ionian cities. The 
 story attributes to him wisdom of every kind. He advised 
 his fellow-citizens to form a closer political union among 
 the Greek states of Ionia to resist aggression when the 
 day came. But this form of wisdom it was always most 
 difficult and finally impossible for the Greeks to practise. 
 Of speculative wisdom, whatever his actual personal 
 achievement may have been, he was the acknowledged 
 pioneer. He was regarded as the founder both of general 
 philosophy and of the abstract sciences of astronomy and 
 geometry. But the alleged facts of these theories and 
 discoveries are slender : that he found in water the origin 
 of things, that he predicted the solar eclipse of 585 B.C., 
 that he discovered some half a dozen geometrical truths. 
 The particulars in each case rest on scattered statements 
 in various authors, years, sometimes centuries, later in 
 date. It is impossible, therefore, to reconstruct a personal 
 history. There is less chance, in fact, of ever knowing 
 what the personal Thales did for science than of dis- 
 entangling the supreme and fundamental poem in the 
 Iliad. But as in so many cases what we really know is 
 the most important part of the story : and these points 
 appear certain. There had appeared by the end of the 
 seventh century B.C. a new type of mind among the most 
 advanced of the Greeks, the lonians of Asia Minor, the
 
 The Greeks 5-9 
 
 man who by dint of travel and comparing his own 
 observations with what he heard from others, arrived at 
 new conclusions which sometimes proved to be great 
 general truths, widening out into floods of light over 
 facts hitherto mistaken or unexplored. Thales was one 
 of these, who succeeded in thinking. out more than his 
 fellows, or in making a greater personal mark on his 
 contemporaries. He travelled, as all such men would 
 travel, in the land of the oldest culture and deepest 
 learning which they knew, and in Egypt studied what 
 the priests had to teach in medicine, in astronomy, and 
 in geometry. That more discoveries are ascribed to him 
 in geometry than in any other branch, agrees perfectly 
 with all the other evidence, and with the very nature of 
 exact science. No real progress could be made in scientific 
 astronomy or physics until a foundation had been laid 
 in mathematics, and into mathematics, and through 
 mathematics into the whole realm of exact science, ' no 
 one could enter who could not geometrise '. 
 
 Here, then, at the threshold, stands the inquiring 
 Greek, and no man can say how much in that first 
 crucial step was due to the Egyptian teacher, how much 
 to the quicker-witted learner, who was to carry out the 
 new and deeper conclusion into the world and help to 
 build up a structure of thought, of which there is cer- 
 tainly no trace before the Greeks. 
 
 It has been supposed that the first theorem in geometry 
 which was attributed to Thales was an observation 
 based on the drawing of squares in circles which had 
 been a common feature for ages in Egyptian ornament, 
 as no doubt elsewhere. A reflective mind observing the
 
 6o The Greeks 
 
 identity of the angle in the many positions in which the 
 square would be drawn could, one would think, in the 
 end not resist the conclusion that the ' angle in a semi- 
 circle is a right-angle '. Obvious as it seems when once 
 observed, the observers and the draughtsmen of ages had 
 avoided the conclusion, or rather had never formulated 
 in exact and general terms the truth which must have 
 been implicit in their minds. It was this exact and 
 general statement of a true relation which constituted 
 the beginning of abstract science. It was a momentous 
 step, one of the great turning-points in history, and due 
 entirely, so far as our knowledge goes, to the contact of 
 the new, vigorous, and inquiring spirit of the Greeks with 
 the old learning and art of the settled communities of 
 the East, especially of Egypt. But new and important 
 as it was, it concerns our general belief in the continuity 
 of human progress to consider how closely it followed 
 the line of thought linked with action, which we traced 
 from the time of the first maker of a tool onwards. 
 Language itself was, as we saw, the first expression of 
 a general observation, when the earliest hunters accepted 
 some common sounds to indicate the objects and actions 
 of the chase. So, when man came to name the circle, 
 he had already perceived in a vague, unanalysed way the 
 common quality of perfect roundness. We cannot believe 
 that any animal has this perception, and the lowest savage 
 has certainly not expressed it. The next step comes when 
 the drawing of the circle elicits the latent knowledge of 
 its most obvious property, that the circumference is the 
 locus of all the points touched by the end of a string or 
 stick revolving round the centre. So far pre-scientific
 
 The Greeks 61 
 
 man had gone : the first theorem of Thales is but another 
 step in the analysis. The perception itself of the right 
 angle in the semicircle does not appear much more dif- 
 ficult than that of the equality of the radii : its wider 
 scope arises from its formulation in exact and general 
 terms, and from the circumstance that the observation 
 brings together two distinct classes of figures, triangles and 
 circles, and sets up a universal relation between them. 
 
 This one theorem must serve as a type : it would only 
 distract attention from the main thread of our sketch to 
 multiply examples. The other philosophers of the time, 
 many no doubt who are not recorded, were engaged in 
 similar discoveries and speculations. Most of them con- 
 tribute some thoughts to astronomy or mathematics : all 
 of them theorize freely about the origin and nature of 
 the unknown universe, without regard to previous theo- 
 logical or mythological beliefs. This is the new temper 
 which is rising among the Greeks, and these two aspects 
 of it are to be traced together throughout the one 
 boldly critical and sceptical towards current dogma, the 
 other tentative, but steadily constructive of new truths. 
 And side by side with the abstract speculations of the 
 philosophers there was going on, through seafaring and 
 the widening relations of commerce, a real enlargement 
 of the world's horizon, not unlike that which two thou- 
 sand years later accompanied the Renascence, with similar 
 results on men's minds. 
 
 But one school of sixth-century philosophers stands 
 out above all the rest. The Pythagoreans were indeed 
 much more than a school of philosophers. They were 
 a brotherhood on a moral and religious basis, which
 
 62 The Greeks 
 
 for some time had a great political influence among 
 the Greek states of southern Italy. Their founder 
 was an Ionian, but of Samos, the rival state to Miletus. 
 The island of Samos lies across the entrance to the 
 gulf of Miletus, and commands its harbour. There 
 was naturally incessant rivalry and feud, and the Samians 
 were always allied with the Dorian cities of the 
 mainland, Corinth and Sparta, in their struggles with 
 the lonians. There was possibly some Dorian blood 
 in Samos ; at any rate their Dorian affinities are worth 
 remembering when we consider the general character 
 of the Pythagorean system. For the Dorians, especially 
 at Sparta, stood for the harder side of the Greek 
 character, for conservatism and rigid discipline and 
 self-repression. And the teaching of Pythagoras leant on 
 one side so much in the direction of the old religious 
 doctrines that there was some confusion between the 
 writings of his school and those of the Orphic adepts, 
 the leading mystic sect. In any case Pythagoras was 
 clearly concerned above all with the direction of life, 
 and regarded his scientific speculations as subordinate to 
 that end. As a general discipline, however, the doctrine 
 had no sufficient basis, either in theory or the facts of 
 the time, and was doomed to failure, though full of fine 
 and inspiring thoughts, anticipating the Stoics ; while 
 as a contribution to the growing body of scientific truth, 
 the teaching of the school was the most considerable 
 before the great age of Athens. The social discipline 
 had little scope beyond the limits of the brotherhood, 
 and that was soon dissolved, but, as a means of stimulating 
 their scientific studies, it must have had for the time
 
 The Greeks 6$ 
 
 a powerful influence. It brought into science that co- 
 operative spirit, tempered by public action and criticism, 
 which we saw at work in the rise of the epic. The story 
 was that Pythagoras, who had been born at Samos about 
 the year of Thales' eclipse of the sun, 585 B.C., was driven 
 away from his native town by the tyranny of Polycrates, 
 when he was between fifty and sixty years of age. He 
 had already travelled and absorbed what the old schools 
 of Egypt and the East, and the new philosophers of 
 Ionia had to teach. He must already have matured his 
 system and made his mark. He migrated, after his expul- 
 sion, to Crotona, a Dorian city in southern Italy, and 
 there the foundation of his brotherhood and his active 
 career took place. The order was dispersed by the middle 
 of the next century, but before that time they had put 
 together most of the geometrical truths which were 
 current in the time of Plato and are preserved to us in 
 Euclid. The fact is so easily stated that its magnitude 
 is likely to escape us. This body of mathematical truth 
 remained the bulk of what men had thought out on the 
 subject until after the Middle Ages, until in fact the 
 new analysis of Descartes and the calculus of Newton 
 and Leibnitz. It contained far more than the elementary 
 geometry now learned in schools, for there was as well 
 a good deal which we now regard as part of advanced 
 arithmetic, the theory of proportion and of the properties 
 of numbers, besides the beginnings of solid geometry and 
 the discovery of incommensurable quantities. The result 
 of this hundred years of early Greek thinking was the 
 mental discipline of the western mind up to our own 
 time, and the fixed keystone of all exact science. What
 
 most hindered the immediate application of the results 
 to practical uses, and the extension of the powers of 
 calculation which has taken place in recent centuries, 
 was the want of a convenient system of numeration. 
 Even for an alphabetic system men had to wait for the 
 Greeks of Alexandria, and for the little, all-important 
 device of the cipher, until the Arabs introduced it from 
 India in the Middle Ages. These were the happy 
 thoughts of smaller men, which made the machine work 
 smoothly. The great construction had been done by 
 Greeks in their prime and very largely by the school of 
 Pythagoras. It was said many years later, that in the 
 time of their troubles, ' when they had lost their money,' 
 the Pythagoreans decided to publish their geometry in 
 a book which was called The Tradition about Pythagoras. 
 The story fits the case so well and is so interesting, that 
 one would like to be allowed to believe it. It shows us 
 the brotherhood treasuring as their most valued possession 
 that part of the master's teaching which was to prove 
 his best, and doubtless adding to it so long as they 
 held together. It would fix the date of publication 
 towards the end of the first half of the fifth century 
 B.C., when the wars in southern Italy, which broke up 
 the school, had reached a climax. The wealth and glory 
 of Athens were then attracting the intellect of the world, 
 and ' philosophy ' itself began to find a price. The same 
 city would soon receive the first great book of science, 
 which had but lately seen the final edition of the first 
 great epic. 
 
 Of the other teachings of Pythagoras less need be said, 
 for, where they were not purely mystical, they had more
 
 The Greeks 65 
 
 the character of brilliant guesses and less of verified 
 truths. The predominant influence of numbers in the 
 universe, which was a leading tenet of the school, while 
 it led to much extravagant hypothesis, suggested also 
 some pregnant truths. They saw, for instance, that the 
 different pitch of musical notes followed a numerical 
 relation between the length of the strings. In astronomy 
 their contributions were striking, though less exact or 
 firmly based. They were the first thinkers on record to 
 have conceived the earth as a globe, revolving with the 
 other planets round a central fire. Not only the moon 
 but the sun also shone by reflected light from this central 
 source. Copernicus stated that this theory first suggested 
 to him the true explanation of planetary movement. 
 
 The paths of poetry and of philosophy lead us to Athens 
 and to the beginning of the fifth century B.C.: art and 
 politics tend to the same point, though we shall here 
 only indicate the convergence. At the same time that 
 men's minds were stirring towards free inquiry into the 
 causes and nature of things around them, they began to 
 claim their due share in ordering their own lives and 
 governing the communities to which they belonged. The 
 two impulses spring from the same or kindred roots, and 
 though we find from time to time a free philosophy 
 flourishing under tyrannical or alien rule, in the long run 
 the two are incompatible. Greece was approaching in 
 the sixth century the greatest of the crucial instances 
 in history. The Greeks of the earlier period had, like 
 the Homeric tribes, been ruled by kings. It was under 
 the kings that they had settled the lands of the Aegean 
 and founded their city-states. The city-state, or polis, 
 
 1543 F
 
 66 The Greeks 
 
 enclosed by its wall, was the greatest contribution of the 
 Greeks to the practice and theory of government, and 
 it arose in monarchical times from the grouping of a 
 number of villages together for purposes of defence. But 
 though due to the kings and probably in its origin impos- 
 sible without them, it tends invariably to a popular form 
 of government. By the seventh century the kingship had 
 almost universally disappeared, except for certain titular 
 or ceremonial posts, and the only real question in debate 
 was the extent and the form of popular control. The 
 rule of the nobles followed normally that of the kings, 
 but during thfe century in which we have traced the rise 
 of philosophy, there was a general movement towards 
 extending and equalizing the rights of the whole people. 
 Athens was to see the democratic principle carried to its 
 furthest point ; but before this was reached she passed 
 through certain changes which have a bearing on our 
 general argument. 
 
 In Athens, as elsewhere, the early monarchy had been 
 replaced by an aristocracy before the seventh century, 
 and by the end of that century the commonalty were 
 feeling in an acute way some of the effects of the new 
 movement in the Greek world. Economically, they were 
 enslaved by debt and by that accumulation of land in 
 the hands of the few rich : politically, they were no 
 longer willing to leave all power, judicial as well as 
 executive, in the keeping of a small aristocratic class. At 
 this point one of the noblest figures of antiquity appeared 
 in Athens Solon, himself belonging to the aristocracy, 
 but compelled by his father's impoverishment to travel 
 and trade abroad. Many stories are told of his sayings
 
 The Greeks 67 
 
 and doings in Ionia, in Lydia, in Egypt, and further east. 
 He was a leading example of the early Sophos, and was 
 included among the famous Seven. But in his case the 
 conditions in Athens and his personal position there 
 enabled him to carry his wisdom into practice. In middle 
 life, having done certain external services to his native 
 city, he was empowered to carry out a scheme of reform, 
 economic as well as constitutional, which laid the founda- 
 tion of the later commercial prosperity and popular 
 government of Athens. The details are obscure and 
 disputed, but the net result was the abolition of the 
 weight of debt, a large increase in the number of free- 
 holders, and the inclusion of a popular element into the 
 membership of the assembly and of a newly-formed law 
 court. A change in the system of weights and measures 
 was made, which facilitated Ionian trade : and so the 
 Sophos, experienced in the wisdom and travel of the 
 East, became a fresh link between Athens and the Ionian 
 world, and a source of social and political equality, as 
 well as enlightenment, to his native city. 
 
 The sixth century in Athens, as well as in many other 
 Greek states, saw the rise and fall of a number of rulers 
 called ' tyrants ', who relied usually upon popular support 
 as against the old aristocracies. Peisistratus and his sons, 
 who followed Solon in Athens, did a great deal to further 
 the interests of the city in art as well as in commerce. 
 These ' tyrants ' largely modelled themselves on the 
 example of the progressive Lydian monarchs, who had for 
 many years been on friendly terms with the Greeks, and 
 consulted the Greek oracles. But like everything political 
 in Greece, the ' tyrants ' had an unstable seat, and when 
 
 F 2
 
 58 The Greeks 
 
 Croesus, the last of the Lydian monarchs, was swept 
 away by the advancing tide from Persia, the Greek 
 ' tyrannies ' in most cases soon followed. Just before the 
 crucial impact of East and West at the beginning of the 
 fifth century, Athens, after dismissing her ' tyrants ', took 
 a long step further towards democracy. When the 
 moment arrived, she was the unquestioned leader in the 
 national struggle, and she was the state which had made 
 the boldest experiments in governing herself. 
 
 Step by step with the growing freedom which we have 
 traced in Greece freedom and new construction in 
 thought, freedom and experiment in government the 
 largest, but the least stable, of the empires on the old 
 theocratic basis was being built up round the warlike 
 tribes of the Persians. It was inevitable that some such 
 power should erect itself on the weakened remnants of 
 the Eastern kingdoms. Cyrus, who determined the leader- 
 ship in favour of the Persians, was a wise and tolerant 
 ruler as well as a successful commander. The state he 
 founded and organized had extended itself before the 
 end of the sixth century over Assyria, Babylon, Syria, 
 Phoenicia, Egypt, Lydia, and all Asia Minor. It was in 
 touch with the Greek states of the sea-fringe and had 
 stretched out a hand over some of the islands. It was 
 the greatest portent in government which the Greeks 
 or indeed the whole world had yet seen. For a time 
 most of them bowed the head. But the Great King at 
 Susa seemed immeasurably remote, and it was found that 
 at close quarters the well-armed and compact phalanx 
 of the Greeks could bear down a much larger number of 
 the archers and lighter-armed men from the East. The 
 first outbreak was on a local quarrel at Miletus. Even
 
 The Greeks 69 
 
 here at the first challenge, and before the magnitude of 
 the final issues had been thought out, the Athenians did 
 not hesitate to enter the fray. They marched up with 
 the Milesians and burnt Sardes, once the Lydian capital, 
 now a local centre of the Persian rule. This was in 
 498 B.C., two years within the century which was to see 
 Greek power and intellect at its height, with Athens at 
 the head. The burning of Sardes was but a signal and 
 an incident. The citadel never fell, and the Greek force, 
 as they marched back to the coast, were overtaken and 
 defeated. The revolt was crushed, but the Athenians 
 became marked men. 
 
 The immortal story which follows was handed on, and 
 adorned at every point, by the nation of the most gifted 
 story-tellers who have ever lived. It inspired the * father 
 of history '. It was sung by two of the greatest of Greek 
 poets, one of whom played his part in the greatest of the 
 battles. It was the critical stage in the salvation of the 
 Greek spirit of freedom from a levelling and deadening 
 hand which would have hindered for ages, if not killed, the 
 new life which had to flow unchecked in the veins of the 
 leading stock in the human family before man's com- 
 mand and unification of the world could effectually begin. 
 As landmarks in this movement the names of Marathon 
 and Salamis, of Miltiades and Themistocles, hold their 
 place for ever. To the Greeks of the time it was a terrify- 
 ing moment, and their success appeared the most mar- 
 vellous event which had ever happened, the gift of the gods. 
 We, who know the sequel, can see even greater issues, 
 of a kind and scope transcending altogether the outlook 
 contemporaries, and may well tremble when at so 
 
 my turns in the story the action seems to depend on
 
 7o The Greeks 
 
 one man's vote or one man's defection, some clever trick 
 or casual fatality. Such appearances are often the illusion 
 of distance, or the exaggeration of romance. But in the 
 case of Greece there was always a fundamental uncer- 
 tainty in the fatal disunion of the cities, and the frequent 
 instability of public men. At the height of the crisis 
 many Greek states were found on the side of the enemy, 
 and the union between Athens and Sparta, to which the 
 final success was due, hardly survived the return home 
 of the armies. Yet it was the golden opportunity for 
 union. Athens had been the moving spirit in the defence. 
 They had first taken up the challenge and at Marathon 
 had shown the Greeks how to win. In the interval 
 between the campaigns, by following Themistocles and 
 building the fleet, they had prepared for Salamis. In the 
 decisive campaign, though Sparta had led by land, Athens 
 had sacrificed her temples and her homes. But the oppor- 
 tunity was thrown away. Sparta refused the overtures 
 of Athens, and Athens, after a short attempt at concilia- 
 tion, preferred the path of aggrandizement and empire. 
 
 It was left then to Athens alone to exhibit to the 
 world the most brilliant fruits of the triumph of free allied 
 states over ill-compacted and reactionary despotism : she 
 had assuredly the best means of feeling and expressing 
 what it meant. Pindar and Aeschylus are the contem- 
 porary voices. Pindar, though a native of the hostile 
 town of Thebes, glorifies Athens as the ' brilliant, violet- 
 crowned and famous city, the support of Hellas', . . . ' the 
 city whose sons have laid the shining foundation of 
 freedom'. And Aeschylus, who fought at Salamis, and 
 has given us in the ' Persae ' a document unique in 
 history, a contemporary play describing one of the
 
 The Greeks 7 r 
 
 decisive battles of the world, by one of the greatest 
 poets, who himself took part in it, speaks of his fellow- 
 citizens as men who had ' never been called the subjects 
 or the slaves of any one '. 
 
 The war brought splendour to Athens, and fifty years 
 of empire ; but the lasting result for mankind was some- 
 thing deeper. It focussed in Athens, a more central 
 point for the whole Greek world than Ionia had been, 
 all the light in art, science, philosophy, and literature 
 that had been growing for two hundred years. Athens 
 became the acknowledged intellectual leader, the meeting- 
 place for philosophers, the school of learning and of 
 teaching, which, though eclipsed later on by Alexandria, 
 continued for nearly a thousand years. The men who left 
 their homes in 480 B. c. to be burnt by the Persians were 
 founding the first and greatest of all universities. 
 
 The outward sign was the rebuilding of the city in all 
 the glory and beauty which the greatest school of Greek 
 architects and sculptors could devise. The Parthenon, 
 the city's central shrine for Athena, its patron goddess, 
 became in its new form the most perfect building, most 
 beautifully adorned with sculpture, which the world has 
 ever seen. The material basis was the wealth of the 
 maritime federation which Athens had now grouped 
 round her : the informing spirit was the genius of Greek 
 art, which had been gathering strength and shape for 
 two hundred years and had now found its outlet : the 
 executive hand was Pericles, who sums up for us the 
 knowledge and power of Athens at her greatest moment. 
 
 He held his place in the city by the direct will of the 
 people, a result of the rapid growth of democratic govern- 
 ment since the ' tyrants ' were dismissed, above all since
 
 72 The Greeks 
 
 the outbreak of war with Persia. Themistocles had built 
 his fleet and won Salamis by throwing himself on the 
 support of the whole people. Pericles in the same way 
 depended on his power of moving the popular assembly. 
 By this time all the old ' archonships ', and the smaller 
 offices as well, were filled by lot in accordance with the 
 democratic theory of the day. The post of one ' Strate- 
 gos ', or general, was still reserved for election, and this 
 Pericles held, becoming thereby, so long as he maintained 
 his hold on the assembly, a popular dictator, persuading 
 the people and expressing their will, forming their deci- 
 sions and enforcing them, from day to day. The Funeral 
 Oration, which Thucydides puts into his mouth, is the 
 best example of how this subtle process was accom- 
 plished in the hands of its greatest master. In such 
 a speech Pericles partly interpreted the feelings of those 
 around him, partly suggested to them the unique value, 
 the higher implicit purpose of the life they were living, 
 and of the city they were building around them. He 
 idealized it to them as the model of splendour and 
 moderation, just as the poets and artists were idealizing 
 their gods and legends in stone and verse. Pheidias, the 
 sculptor of the Parthenon, put the figure of Pericles on the 
 very shield of the goddess in her inmost shrine ; Sophocles, 
 the poet, was his friend, and from Anaxagoras, then 
 settled in Athens, he learnt the liberating and rationaliz- 
 ing philosophy of Ionia. Such teaching as that of Anaxa- 
 goras agreed perfectly with his own sense of harmony 
 and self-restraint, and produced a character which could 
 claim at the last as its highest merit that ' through Pericles 
 no Athenian citizen had been made to mourn '.
 
 The Greeks 73 
 
 This alliance at Athens, in the person of Pericles, of the 
 most advanced thought with the strongest political force 
 and centre of democracy in Hellas, was the capital fact 
 of the fifth century B.C. Hitherto the Ionian cities in 
 Asia Minor and the Pythagoreans in the west had stood 
 for the vanguard of thought. Now Athens becomes the 
 centre, and Anaxagoras, not himself one of the greatest 
 founders, gains through this fact a leading influence. He 
 was interested in mathematics and astronomy, and intro- 
 duced into the physical speculations of the lonians the 
 new idea of an element called ' Mind ', which, moving 
 about among the particles of other kinds, might in the 
 course of ages reduce them to order ; clearly an inspiring 
 thought, rather of moral than of scientific value, less based 
 in fact, less suggestive of scientific conclusions than the 
 atomic theory which the greater Democritus, his junior 
 by some thirty or forty years, handed on to Epicurus, 
 Lucretius, and the modern world. But Anaxagoras con- 
 tributed more to the intellectual growth of Athens, for, 
 calm and disinterested like all the greatest of the Greek 
 teachers, he used his powers and his philosophy of reason 
 to free his pupils from the terrors of superstition, and to 
 give them ' a religion of peace and good hope '. Such 
 teaching, like that of Socrates later on, was suspect to 
 the crowd of Athens, and only Pericles could save him 
 from a sentence of death. The whole story is full of 
 suggestion, most of all, perhaps, of the conservative 
 religious mind of the Athenian people, and of the distance 
 which still separated the mass from those whom we are 
 bound to regard as the mouthpiece of the best thought 
 of the age.
 
 74 The Greeks 
 
 So it is that those, like the artists of the Parthenon or 
 dramatists like Sophocles, who were acceptable to the whole 
 people, did not attempt to question or destroy the old 
 beliefs, but only to raise and purify them. In their work 
 the accepted legends and divine figures remain, idealized 
 by the new spirit of beauty which, with the spirit of 
 abstract and general truth, makes up the genius of Greece. 
 
 For the first time in the world's history men had 
 become conscious of their own gifts and powers, and were 
 endowed richly with the means of expressing their con- 
 sciousness. At the end of a period of awakening thought 
 had come a stroke of the most marvellous and successful 
 action. Those who had stood for free, strong manhood 
 had trampled on the mass of lower and invading force 
 which had threatened to overwhelm it. The exultation 
 was immeasurable, but it did not desert the home from 
 which it sprang, nor the gods who had assisted in the 
 triumph and would share the joys. It is because they 
 hold this central position, maintaining and transfiguring 
 the old religion with all the arts and in the full light of 
 a new day, that the Parthenon and Sophocles represent 
 most perfectly the Greek spirit at its zenith. The gods 
 became the strongest and most beautiful forms of men, 
 unlike the primitive gods of nature or the grotesque 
 animal forms and planetary forces of the theocracies. 
 And in the midst of the glory of the Periclean age we 
 have from Sophocles a paean of human power in the 
 famous chorus of the Antigone which might well be 
 taken as the motto for the whole Greek movement: 
 'Of air strong things none is more wonderfully strong 
 than Man. He can cross the wintry sea, and year by
 
 The Greeks 75- 
 
 year compels with his plough the unwearied strength of 
 Earth, the oldest of the immortal gods. He seizes for 
 his prey the aery birds and teeming fishes, and with his 
 wit has tamed the mountain-ranging beasts, the long- 
 maned horses and the tireless bull. Language is his, and 
 wind-swift thought and city-founding mind ; and he has 
 learnt to shelter him from cold and piercing rain : and 
 has devices to meet every ill, but Death alone. Even for 
 desperate sickness he has a cure, and with his boundless skill 
 he moves on, sometimes to evil, but then again to good.' 
 
 No one before the Greeks could have said that ; no 
 one since the Greeks has said it with the same simplicity 
 and confidence. It is indeed more than two thousand 
 years before we find another utterance at all comparable. 
 Shakespeare recalls it and, in the fuller light of modern 
 science, Shelley, in the ' Song of the Earth ' in Prometheus 
 Unbound. A comparison of the modern with the ancient 
 poet is singularly instructive, the new thoughts in 
 Shelley being as striking as the old, and marking several 
 stages which the human mind had traversed in the 
 interval. One point is specially relevant here and throws 
 light on the general intellectual state of this mid-fifth 
 century B. c. in Athens. The nineteenth-century poet 
 lays most stress on the power of collective human thought 
 in penetrating the secrets of the universe : Sophocles 
 dwells from first to last on man's practical skill in the 
 arts of life. It was this side which naturally first impressed 
 man's mind when he became self-conscious ; it was also 
 the aspect of intellectual activity most prominent in 
 Athens at the time of her expansion. 
 
 The greatest steps in abstract science were not made at
 
 76 The Greeks 
 
 this time, although it was the age of the widest popu- 
 larization of knowledge and the testing of new ideas. 
 The leading mathematicians were Pythagoreans, enlarging, 
 editing, and expounding the achievements of the school. 
 Physics and astronomy were still in the stage of conjecture, 
 while the large schemes of the origin and development of 
 things, promulgated by the lonians, were beginning to be 
 met by criticism and denial. But descriptions and practical 
 studies began to abound, and the concrete results of art 
 and science and persevering effort were dazzlingly evident. 
 The Parthenon was there, showing the utmost delicacy 
 and skill in its construction and a knowledge of curves, 
 of which the full properties could not yet have been 
 theoretically explored. Sculpture, too, admitted to be 
 unsurpassed and unsurpassable, not only in its execution, 
 but in the knowledge of anatomy, which makes the head 
 of a horse, as well as the human figure, a living, breathing 
 thing. We are prepared for the appearance at about 
 the same time of the first great name in medical science, 
 Hippocrates of Cos. 
 
 In medicine, as in geometry and astronomy, the Greeks 
 had first gone to school to the priests, and here, too, they 
 became pioneers of a new method, although their know- 
 ledge of the facts was never sufficient to put them on 
 the same high level which they reached in the more 
 deductive sciences. Hippocrates, who took the crucial 
 step, was a pupil of Democritus, who in his theory of the 
 atoms attained as much scientific truth as was possible in 
 primitive physical speculations before the advent of veri- 
 fied experiment. To the scientific spirit of Democritus 
 it was no doubt largely due that Hippocrates was able
 
 'The Greeks 77 
 
 to add to medicine a number of careful observations, and 
 above all a notion of the action of the whole environ- 
 ment of the patient on his state of health. The titles of 
 two of his works which survive indicate their method : 
 Prognostics, meaning a forecast of the natural course which 
 the disease would take ; Air, Water and Place, indicating 
 the three main factors which normally affect the health. 
 In each case we have the beginnings of sound method at 
 work amid the darkness which necessarily surrounded the 
 functioning of the organs before Harvey's discovery, and 
 when dissection was in itself an offence against the dead. 
 Under such conditions the achievement of Hippocrates, 
 definitely separating medicine from the old priestly tradi- 
 tion and assigning it to the realm of natural causes, was 
 perhaps the most notable step in the science of the fifth 
 century B.C. 1 His saying that the love of art, especially 
 the art of healing, was after all identical with the love of 
 man, may fitly stand beside the great chorus in Sophocles. 
 Another art, which arose and flourished at the same 
 time, had no small share in determining the direction of 
 philosophy. The profession of the Sophists enjoyed in 
 later days an entirely evil fame, partly owing to its own 
 perversion, partly to the highly-coloured picture which 
 Plato gives of it, outraged by the fate of his master, 
 Socrates. The Sophists appeared in the middle of the 
 
 1 ' Men considered a matter to be " divine " on account of their 
 inexperience and wonder that it was not like anything else ' . . . ' So 
 magicians and quacks alleged the divinity of this disease to cover up 
 their want of skill. If the patient recovered, their charms and quack 
 remedies were justified ; if he died, their excuse was complete ; they 
 were not responsible, but the gods." Hippocrates : ' On the Sacred 
 Disease '. (Wilamowitz-Mollendorffj Greek Reading Book, 270-1.)
 
 78 The Greeks 
 
 fifth century, prepared to give the youth of the leading 
 cities the sort of higher education which the rising demo- 
 cracies demanded and the knowledge of the day could 
 provide. The popular assemblies, which at Athens and 
 elsewhere had become all-powerful, could be ruled by 
 men who had acquired the gift of clear exposition 
 and persuasive speech. Thus it was that a training in 
 rhetoric, valuable in itself and leading to that perfect 
 prose which was another feature of the age, was liable 
 to uses dangerous to the state and pernicious to the 
 user. Triumph and not truth tended to become the 
 object of the Sophist's art. And the turn in the intel- 
 lectual movement of the age gave a still more profound 
 bias in the same direction. Just at the moment when 
 a new interest in moral, social, and political questions 
 was being aroused, there came a reaction against the 
 physical and cosmic speculations which had flourished so 
 richly in the early centuries. A deep unrest and scepti- 
 cism set in on matters about which the first philosophers 
 showed easy confidence. Perhaps after all there could be 
 no truth about these general questions, and victory in argu- 
 ment was not merely the best, but the only way. Mean- 
 while men had to live and the city to be governed, and it 
 was in this field of moral and political discussion that the 
 Sophists and Socrates were alike engaged. The difference 
 between these was rather in the spirit of the teacher. 
 The Sophists were a professional class living, and often 
 becoming rich, on their teaching. Socrates refused any 
 payment and died because his method and doctrines 
 offended too wide and powerful a public. 
 
 We noticed how the Greeks for the first time succeeded
 
 The Greeks 79 
 
 in giving their gods a human form and character. It is 
 still more striking that they are themselves the first real 
 human beings in history. This fifth century, distin- 
 guished for so many things for its new sense of pity 
 and humanity in literature is full of living men and 
 women, acting and speaking, as we can imagine ourselves 
 to see and hear them. Among them all we know Socrates 
 far the best, the first figure in history whom we know 
 intimately. For this we have to thank mainly the tran- 
 scendent interest of his character, but also in no small 
 share the new prose writing, which from this time onward 
 begins to come down to us in large quantities. Through 
 all these circumstances we know Socrates better than 
 many persons in our own recent history, far better, for 
 instance, than Shakespeare : and with Socrates we know 
 his circle, and feel that we might have joined in those 
 conversations with the rest. Doubtless it is the great 
 soul of the man his single-heartedness and sympathy 
 which draws us to him as it drew his contemporaries, 
 and created a world around him which is still alive. But 
 he was also very really the child of his age, and carried 
 out, to high purpose and with the insight of genius, 
 a similar task to that of the Sophists. Like them express- 
 ing the tendency of the time, he gave his thoughts to 
 social rather than physical questions, and roundly de- 
 nounced inquiries which had not a direct bearing on 
 human life. Like theirs, his method was oral questioning 
 and speaking. But in the purpose and result of his 
 teaching he achieved something which proved of decisive 
 value for the maturity of Greek thought, and hence for 
 all time. His questioning aimed at rousing the persons
 
 8o The Greeks 
 
 he taught to self-examination, to testing their vague 
 ideas and establishing truer definitions. In this he 
 challenges the scepticism of his own and later ages and 
 leads to the validity of clear, common, and tested opinion, 
 from which Aristotle starts in the next generation and 
 which is the basis of all science. And in the main thesis 
 to which he is always leading, he lays the foundation of 
 social science as both Plato and Aristotle were on varying 
 lines to develop it, that the individual lives only in and 
 through the community, which is both the source and 
 the test of his value. This, like many other weighty 
 truths, had been implicit in society from the beginning, 
 but it had never before been formulated and made a rule 
 of conduct. When Plato says that ' each of us is not put 
 into the world for himself alone ; at the call of the 
 fatherland it is impossible not to follow ', we know 
 that he is speaking his master's most cherished truth. 
 Socrates was its first prophet and it led him to death. 
 
 No time could seem more unpropitious for the doc- 
 trine ; or was it the very extremity of the case which 
 led to its first utterance ? The chance of a permanent 
 reconciliation between the rival heads of the Greek states 
 had been lost just after the brightest hopes of the Persian 
 war. Athens had used her place as head of the maritime 
 states for purposes of aggression and the exploitation of 
 her allies. She had paid the penalty in their revolt and 
 the general hostility of Hellas, and in the middle years 
 of Socrates' life had been passing through the long-drawn 
 agony of the Peloponnesian war. Before his death the 
 downfall had come, the surrender of the city, the destruc- 
 tion of the walls ; and while most hard-pressed from
 
 The Greeks 8 r 
 
 without, she had been most deeply torn within by con- 
 tending factions and vindictive passion. It was just then, 
 in the struggle of parties over the fate of their stricken 
 city, that the man fell who had preached and practised 
 the citizen's duty as the highest and most comprehensive 
 rule of life. 
 
 We are here within that last third of the Greek mil- 
 lennium which we distinguished at starting as the period 
 of review in philosophy and decline in national power and 
 spirit. This character is clearly true both of the work 
 and the lifetime of Plato and Aristotle, the greatest 
 Greek figures in the fourth century B.C., when the power 
 of Macedon was steadily preparing to engulf the petty 
 states of Greece exhausted by their internecine feuds, 
 before handing them over two hundred years later to 
 Rome, the final incorporator of the western world. In 
 exact science, the mechanical framework of modern 
 thought and life, it is difficult to assign a definite 
 share to either of the great philosophers, for the 
 reason that their work was so comprehensive and so 
 largely based on that of previous thinkers. In the case 
 of Aristotle, that part of his work in which he showed 
 most remarkably his own powers of observation and 
 originality of view his biology and politics and ethics 
 is precisely that on which his information was necessarily 
 the most incomplete and liable to correction as life and 
 society moved on. But on the social side, as summing 
 up the constructive elements in Greek moral and political 
 thought and putting out ideas of noble life, they have 
 been ever since among the most potent forces in the 
 world. Both had the good fortune to live through the 
 
 1543 G
 
 82 The Greeks 
 
 pagan Greco-Roman period and to be accepted in the 
 Middle Ages as Christian philosophers in disguise. They 
 have thus served in a special way, not open to any other 
 Greek thinker, to keep unbroken the thread of philosophic 
 thought in the western world. But their very vitality 
 and canonization entailed in the end a serious obstruction 
 to progress. For when at the Renascence men unearthed 
 the results of the Greeks in the exact sciences and went 
 on where they had left off, in the case of the philosophers, 
 whose work had been perpetuated, transformed, and hal- 
 lowed, their wildest fancies became gospel and their 
 obvious errors indisputable truth. 
 
 Plato, who was the friend and immediate follower of 
 Socrates, developed in the Dialogues his master's teaching 
 in the most glorious shape in which a disciple has ever 
 been able to clothe his master's ideas. They are prose 
 poems, full of fancy, enthusiasm, humour, and profound 
 thought, written in the most graceful and persuasive 
 language which was ever achieved even in Greek. Hence 
 their assured immortality, as a glowing picture of Greek 
 life and thought, as well as the strongest impulse in 
 literature to a spiritual vision. Of special sciences, Plato 
 was by his inward bent most interested in mathematics, 
 and especially in geometry. He gathered round him a 
 group of men engaged in mathematical research, and was 
 probably in part the cause of the advance in these studies 
 in the following hundred years. 
 
 Aristotle, who was forty years his junior, and first came 
 to Athens as a member of his school, was a mind of 
 another bent, positive and critical, keen on observation 
 and on building up a complete structure of objective
 
 The Greeks 83 
 
 knowledge, a biologist, while Plato was a mathematician. 
 The contrast is sharp enough, but it has been over- 
 pressed in the schools and histories of philosophy : it is 
 more to our purpose here to lay stress rather on the 
 two main issues in which they agree, and which lie at 
 the root of that co-operative human force subduing the 
 world, of which we are tracing the rise in this sketch. 
 
 Looking back, each of these two great theses may be seen 
 in the germ in the teaching of Socrates ; looking forward, 
 each extends far beyond the scope not only of what 
 Greek science had achieved in the fourth century B. c., 
 but of what is even yet accomplished two thousand three 
 hundred years later. 
 
 The first main thesis is this, that there is a body of 
 connected truth which men study, which leads up from 
 the simplest and most general laws to the highest and 
 most difficult to apprehend, that this knowledge is of 
 the first importance both for the individual soul and 
 for the society of which it is a part. Readers of the 
 Republic will remember the wonderful passage in which 
 Plato develops this thesis from the more disciplinary 
 point of view, nearer to his master's. The sciences, as 
 he elicits them in the conversation, are arithmetic, geo- 
 metry, with special commendation for solid figures, 
 astronomy, or solids in motion, harmony and dialectic. 
 They are the studies which make the most demand on 
 the deductive intellect, and they are presented in the 
 best order for drawing the learner's soul from the elusive 
 and conflicting details of sense to eternal and harmonious 
 truth. Aristotle's scheme of knowledge is more compre- 
 hensive and objective : he offers in different parts of his 
 
 C 2
 
 84 The Greeks 
 
 works matter relating to all the main branches of science, 
 and though he finds the mainspring of education in 
 a habit of mind rather than in knowledge, yet he too 
 would consider the discovery and contemplation of truth 
 as the highest employment for the individual, and know- 
 ledge as the guide of collective action. 
 
 The other main thesis on which the two philosophers 
 are agreed is that man is by nature, as Aristotle put it, 
 a ' political being ', that he can only develop his powers 
 in association with others, and that these associations 
 must follow accepted principles of justice and order. 
 Both philosophers devote their crowning treatises to 
 moral questions, as conditioned by life in an ordered 
 and civilized society. Plato in the Republic traces the 
 analogy of the individual soul with a society, showing 
 how each can only exist harmoniously and realize its 
 highest nature if it is governed by a principle of justice. 
 Aristotle, treating the same truth in a more practical and 
 concrete way, using the terms in the widest sense, presents 
 ethics as part of politics, for without a social environment 
 there can be no morality. He then studies in detail 
 the types of character and government which best serve 
 the end of happiness and good living. 
 
 In these treatises, and especially in those of Aristotle, 
 we have the ripest wisdom of Hellas on social and political 
 questions, so far as it was attainable under the specially 
 Hellenic conditions of civilized life in a limited sphere, 
 centred in the city-state. The limiting conditions were 
 serious but obvious : the student can hardly miss them 
 in making his application of the conclusions. There is 
 the limited citizenship within the city walls, the hordes
 
 of slaves, the undeveloped women, the mass of barbarians 
 beyond the gates. No doubt it was the narrow and 
 simplified problem which made a first approximate solu- 
 tion possible. But before the Romans came, or Chris- 
 tianity had breathed a world-wide spirit into the realm 
 of morality and religion, the conditions of the older 
 Hellas had themselves enlarged. Side by side with 
 Alexander's conquest of the East came a wider social 
 philosophy which had its roots also in the teaching of 
 Socrates, but did not reach its full growth until the 
 Romans had incorporated the whole civilized West. This 
 was the Stoic system, which had its origin with Zeno, 
 who took up one aspect of the Socratic teaching in 
 Athens in the generation following Plato. We shall see 
 its full development in the Roman world. Like Plato and 
 Aristotle, it rested on an ethical basis, but the sphere and 
 sanction of morality was to be sought in a universal law of 
 nature with equal rights and equal duties for all mankind. 
 This was the great stride in theory which was to follow the 
 strictly Hellenic view. Meanwhile the teaching of Plato 
 and Aristotle on moral and social questions, on education 
 and on government, continued and will always continue 
 of supreme interest, not only for its positive and per- 
 manent wisdom, but as representing the first reasoned 
 answers to the largest questions in life, from the most 
 gifted people in the world coming to them with an 
 open mind. 
 
 In the path of exact science some long steps further 
 were to be taken by the Greek genius before its light 
 died away at last in the alien atmosphere of Alexandria. 
 
 The two main lines on which the Greeks went furthest,
 
 8rf 'The Greeks 
 
 mathematics and astronomy, are closely connected 
 throughout : the former culminates with Archimedes in 
 the third century B.C., the latter with Hipparchus in the 
 second. Nothing more can be done here than give two 
 or three of the greatest names and indicate the general 
 scope of their achievement. 
 
 Up to the time of Plato Greek mathematics was mainly 
 the work of the Pythagorean school. He studied this, 
 and roused a wide interest in the further study. The 
 fourth century contains many distinguished names in 
 mathematics, of which Eudoxus is probably the greatest. 
 At its end comes Euclid, rather the compiler than the 
 discoverer. His Elements have the special interest of 
 being the first connected treatise which survives ; but 
 for the origin of its various parts we are at the mercy 
 of tradition, probabilities and chance quotations and 
 references to earlier mathematicians in later writers. The 
 quest is an exciting one, not unlike that of analysing 
 Homer, and the results in detail cannot be much more 
 certain. Eudoxus, who, after the Pythagoreans, probably 
 contributed most, was in relation with Plato in early life 
 and with Aristotle later on. He founded a school at 
 Cyzicus, near the sea of Marmora, where Miletus, the 
 birthplace of philosophy, had sent a colony four hundred 
 years before. It will be noted how Greek science, after 
 the concentration at Athens, again flourishes rather on 
 the circumference of the Hellenic world. 
 
 After the fourth century and the summary of Euclid 
 comes the greatest name in all Greek science, Archimedes, 
 whose life fills the greater part of the third century and 
 brings us in contact with the conquering Romans at his
 
 The Greeks 87 
 
 native city of Syracuse. The stories of his life, the golden 
 crown, the lever to lift ships, the terrifying engines of 
 war, his death while drawing diagrams in the sand, are 
 striking evidence that the struggles of mind with nature 
 need yield to no other part of history in dramatic interest. 
 He is the first pure man of science whose works have 
 come down to us, including not only his treatises on 
 geometry and mechanics, but also his letters. They show 
 a man of noble simplicity, full of appreciation for the 
 work of others. 1 He wishes his discoveries to be placed 
 by the side of those of Eudoxus, who had led the way to 
 his greatest triumphs, the quadrature of curves and the 
 comparison of solid volumes by the method of Exhaustions. 
 Eudoxus had proved that the cone was the third part of 
 the circumscribing cylinder : he showed the sphere to be 
 two-thirds. In the modern world, which can attack such 
 problems by means of an infinitely more expeditious 
 calculus, this part of his work will be rather studied as 
 a monument of mental force and ingenuity, and his fame 
 will remain attached to the sciences of mechanics and 
 hydrostatics of which on the statical side he is the undis- 
 puted founder. Another name to be associated with his 
 is Apollonius of Perga, ten years his junior, who on the 
 side of pure geometry carried the work of the Greeks 
 nearest to the conception of a generalized analytical 
 treatment which was established by Descartes. His 
 
 1 ' Conon (who was then dead) would have discovered and made 
 manifest all these things and would have enriched geometry by many 
 other discoveries besides. For I know well that it was no common 
 ability that he brought to bear on mathematics and that his industry 
 was extraordinary.' Heath's Archimedes, 151.
 
 88 The Greeks 
 
 extant work, from which we know this, is on the conic 
 sections to which he first assigned their general properties 
 and probably their names. 
 
 Slightly earlier than the two greatest of the Greek 
 geometers came the two pioneers in a scientific astronomy, 
 Aristarchus of Samos and Eratosthenes, both members 
 of the school of Alexandria. Both are famous for attempts 
 on sound geometrical principles to solve two astronomical 
 problems. Aristarchus, by calculations based on the 
 angular distances of sun, moon, and earth at the moment 
 of half-moon, arrived at the comparative distance of the 
 sun from the earth, vastly inferior to the truth but vastly 
 greater than had hitherto been supposed. Eratosthenes, 
 by comparing the height of the sun at zenith at the 
 same moment at Syene and Alexandria, and dividing 
 the result into the whole circumference of the sphere, 
 gave the first scientific approximation to the size of the 
 earth. In each case the idea of the method is the 
 important thing : there were no instruments sufficiently 
 accurate for the observations ; and above all there was 
 no trigonometry. 
 
 For this, and the consequent establishment of a 
 scientific astronomy, the world has now learnt that it 
 must look to Hipparchus, the greatest thinker in the 
 second century B. c. His work is known to us mainly 
 through the writings of Ptolemy, who in the second century 
 A. D. summed up both ancient astronomy and geography 
 in the book which the admiring Arabs afterwards named 
 Al Magest. As the Greeks had finally decided for 
 the geocentric theory, their system could, as astronomy, 
 have only a provisional value : but it was nevertheless
 
 The Greeks 89 
 
 scientific in so far as it rested on a mass of laborious 
 and faithful observations, gave a true account of many 
 phenomena, and made verified predictions about all the 
 commonest celestial events. Roman writers after Hip- 
 parchus have spoken of the effects of Greek astronomy 
 in allaying superstitious dread and implanting a sense of 
 universal order in the popular mind. This sense had 
 no doubt been growing ever since the Chaldean astrono- 
 mers had watched the stars from the plains of Babylon 
 and first taught the Greeks to observe them. But we 
 should perhaps now give even more weight to the stimulus 
 gained from astronomy for all kinds of scientific thinking, 
 and especially for mathematics, the first field of science. 
 It was the need of his astronomy that led Hipparchus to 
 trigonometry, and trigonometry permitted the first mathe- 
 matical tables to be drawn up and the first comprehensive 
 view to be obtained of the mechanics of the universe. 
 
 Hipparchus was still observing in the island of Rhodes 
 when Achaia had become a Roman province. The old 
 motto and boundary for the expansion of Greece was 
 from ' Achilles to Alexander ' ; it suggests movement 
 and conquest and the vigour of youth. From another 
 point of view, more cognate to our present purpose, from 
 ' Thales to Hipparchus ' would better describe the mental 
 progress to the Greeks. In taking this measure, we are 
 not limiting our view to the mechanics of intellect or 
 asserting that a mathematical lemma is in itself more 
 valuable than a play of Euripides. But, as with the 
 savage, we found that no better measure of their advance 
 was available than a comparison of their tools, so with 
 the Greeks their progress in science is the most charac-
 
 90 The Greeks 
 
 teristic thing, bound up with the rest of their achieve- 
 ments, but more clearly progressive and more persistent. 
 For their science was still growing, when literature and art 
 were reminiscent, philosophy stagnant, and freedom dead. 
 
 The scientific spirit, therefore, of the Greeks shall 
 stand first in their account. But with it and through 
 it we must try to read the other aspects of Greek 
 life and thought. Its kinship with the growth of 
 personal and political freedom is suggested by the story 
 of events. Its relation with their idealizing art is, on 
 the grounds of the common intellectual tendency, still 
 more certain ; each aims at rising above the particulars 
 of sense and attaining a general and perfect form. In 
 the sphere of social life and government, though the 
 means were wanting to great achievements, the same 
 spirit of analysis and ideal reconstruction has given to 
 later ages, through the great philosophers, the best pos- 
 sible sketches within their limits of the fundamental 
 conditions of success. 
 
 And there are throughout the Greek story traits of 
 character, not strictly intellectual, which yet have many 
 links with the same movement of the mind. They failed 
 to build lasting political unions, they fought violently 
 and sometimes treacherously among themselves, yet in 
 their literature, as in their life, there may be traced a 
 growing sense of human fellowship, a respect for others, 
 a delicacy of feeling and a care for immaterial things 
 to which neither the theocracies before nor the Romans 
 after could lay claim. These were considerable elements 
 to be infused into the coming world They are not 
 the least of our debts to Greece.
 
 THE ROMANS 
 
 Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento 
 (Hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem, 
 Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. 
 
 VIRGIL.
 
 THE Romans, who were to absorb and enforce the work 
 of Greece, and to form the strongest union yet seen 
 among the leading peoples of the world, were another 
 branch of the same Indo-Germanic or Aryan group. 
 They were indeed closely related to the Greeks in blood, 
 in language, and in early history. If Celts and Teutons 
 and Slavs are cousins to the Greeks, the Romans are 
 brothers. The number of terms common to the two 
 languages, beyond those going back to the common Aryan 
 stock, suggests that the two races had dwelt some time 
 together after the other branches had broken off. Thus 
 they have common words dealing with houses, agriculture, 
 boats, vines, clothing, the family, the gods, and primitive 
 government. The Romans, or Latins, came, like the 
 Greeks of the migration, from lands north of their historic 
 home, but unlike the Greeks, whose entry on the scene 
 was celebrated in splendid sagas going back to the time 
 of their migration, the Romans, when we first find them, 
 in the dim dawn of their history, are already settled in 
 the central Italian plain, and already by force and policy 
 binding the neighbouring communities to themselves, as 
 allies. 
 
 Their geographical position in Italy was as important 
 a factor in their evolution as the conformation of the 
 Aegean was to the Greeks. Rome is in the middle of 
 the west coast of Italy, in a fairly fertile plain and on the 
 banks of a navigable river^ some fifteen miles away from 
 the sea. Every point carried weight. Their soil, not 
 too fertile to deprive them of motives for expansion, was
 
 The Romans 93 
 
 fertile enough to repay cultivation and to leave some- 
 thing over for foreign trade. For commerce the settle- 
 ment was specially well placed. It was defensible, in 
 a central position, and not on the sea though easily 
 accessible from it. Being in the middle of the peninsula, 
 they had the best possible chance of stretching across it, 
 of barring north from south and ultimately of gaining 
 command of the whole. Above all, while early in touch 
 with the neighbouring Greeks, their own trend was as 
 markedly to the west as the Greeks' was eastward. It 
 was, as we shall see, their western expansion, giving them, 
 at the first great crisis in their history, Spain, and at the 
 second, Gaul, which built up the empire and enabled 
 them to bring together the whole Mediterranean world. 
 
 But powerful as these geographical influences must 
 have been, it would be an even greater mistake to rely 
 mainly upon them in the case of the Romans than in 
 that of the Greeks ; for, looking back as far as the eye 
 can penetrate the mists of early Rome, we see there in 
 language, national character, laws and religion, the germs 
 of those principles of action and policy to which at every 
 point in their triumphant progress their success was 
 demonstrably due. It was clearly a case of perfect suit- 
 ability between the developing organism and its environ- 
 ment. 
 
 The great words which we owe to the Latin language, 
 especially those which go back furthest in their history, 
 shed streams of light upon the causes of their national 
 success. ' Fas ' and ' Jus ', that which is right or binding, 
 the former from the religious, the latter from a more 
 social point of view, are two of the oldest and most
 
 94 The Romans 
 
 venerable. From ' Jus ' come ' justice ', ' jurisdiction ', 
 ' jurisprudence ', abstract and general terms of course, 
 but elaborated and embodied by the Romans in a system 
 so efficient that it has largely survived its authors, and 
 remains as an endowment to the modern world. ' Patres ', 
 ' Patria Potestas ', ' Familia ' are as characteristic of the 
 Roman as ' home ' of the English ; and though the word, 
 like other scientific terms, is Greek, Rome is the classical 
 example of the ' Patriarchal Theory ' as the typical 
 form and root of all complete political organization. 
 ' Social ', ' society ', and the newly coined ' socialism ' 
 and ' sociology ' all recall the Latin ' socii ', and with it 
 the successive steps and method of their expansion. And 
 ' religion ', the greatest word of all, is as characteristically 
 Roman as ' philosophy ' and ' mathematics ' are Greek. 
 Whether we trace 'its origin to the root which signifies 
 ' going over again ' and observing one's duties to the 
 gods, or to the root which means ' binding ' the individual 
 to something outside himself, in either case ' religion ' 
 reminds us rather of the Roman who veiled and bowed 
 his head in worship, than of the Greek who looked up 
 to Heaven when he sacrificed. 
 
 The force of their legal genius and social organization 
 appears at every turn in Roman history ; the special 
 qualities of their primitive religion, as compared with 
 that of the Greeks, are less obvious in the story, but 
 highly significant of the issue. Whereas the early Greek 
 was always weaving legends about his gods, connecting 
 them with his own national origins, and in the heyday 
 of his art figuring them in pictures and in marble as the 
 most beautiful imaginable forms of human beings, the
 
 The Romans 9^ 
 
 Roman wove no legends and made no images. His gods 
 were of the useful and practical order, presiding over 
 every act of his daily life, every operation of the fields. 
 There was a goddess of child-birth, a god of sowing and 
 of harvest, a divinity protecting every cross-road and 
 honoured at every hearth and every doorway. 
 
 A god presided over the march of the army, and in 
 another form gave it the victory and sanctified the faith 
 of the treaty that ended the war. 
 
 It was the religion of men who in the days of their 
 strength went as a duty from following the plough to 
 leading an army, and, whatever the enterprise, never 
 faltered or turned back. 
 
 The period covered by their national development 
 may, like that of the Greeks, be put roughly at a thousand 
 years; but the Roman millennium begins later and extends 
 well into the Christian era. If we reckon the Greek period 
 from the time when they had occupied the Aegean archi- 
 pelago and had begun to send out colonies, the Roman 
 must be dated from their consolidation of the Latin 
 communities at the beginning of the fifth century B. c. 
 It comes to its climax at the beginning of the Christian 
 era, when the light of Greece as a nation has gone out, 
 and it lasts into the fifth century A.D. when the Western 
 Empire is broken up and a barbarian king rules in Rome. 
 The Eastern Empire continues for another millennium the 
 ideas of both Greeks and Romans, but with substantial 
 changes. We shall only notice here a few of the most 
 salient points in this Roman evolution, those which best 
 illustrate the way in which they built up their marvellous 
 structure of law and government, and established the
 
 9<f The Romans 
 
 ideas of social order which are their bequest to mankind, 
 as science and philosophy are the gift of Greece. 
 
 Both aspects of human activity are closely intertwined ; 
 both are essential to the task of human co-operation in 
 subduing the world ; but whereas the Greeks contributed 
 most to arming man's mind for the struggle, the Romans 
 did most to enable men to work in an orderly sequence 
 and harmoniously one with another. 
 
 The material for the study of Roman origins is meagre, 
 compared with the wealth of legendary story in Greece. 
 The little community on the Tiber was at first governed 
 by kings of the heroic stamp, like those of Greece. North 
 of the Latins, in what is still called Tuscany, lived the 
 mysterious people, whose remains, so strikingly resembling 
 those of Mycenaean Greece, we are only now beginning 
 seriously to study, and whose language is still unread. 
 The later kings of Rome were of this race, Etruscans, 
 and to them the early city seems to have owed its military 
 organization and much of its defensive strength. The 
 Tarquins or Tarchons (Etruscan for a ruler) held sway 
 in Rome at the same epoch when the ' tyrants ' of Greece 
 were ruling their communities round the Aegean and in 
 southern Italy. Towards the close of the sixth century 
 B.C. the Tarquins were expelled from Rome by a move- 
 ment parallel to that which destroyed the tyrannies in 
 the Hellenic world. At this point the characteristic 
 Roman movement begins. It had a twofold aspect, con- 
 solidation and equality of rights within the state, exten- 
 sion of territory and organization without. 
 
 After the monarchy, the magistracies which took its 
 place were at first assumed without dispute by leading
 
 The Romans 97 
 
 men of the ' patrician ' order, i. e. the original clans 
 who founded the city. But there were besides these, 
 and soon to be set in sharpest opposition to them, 
 a mass of the non-patrician, or ' plebeian ' classes, who 
 are variously supposed to have arisen, either from a dis- 
 tinct subject race or, more probably, from the dependants 
 who gathered round the patrician houses. The internal 
 movement of the early centuries consisted in the adjusting 
 of the relations of the conflicting orders, and gradually 
 admitting the unprivileged to equality of rights with the 
 older tribes. In this the Romans showed the same con- 
 spicuous skill in practical affairs which guided them at 
 all later crises till decay set in. They faced each grievance 
 as it arose, and adjusted their laws and constitution to 
 meet the new necessity without discarding the old order. 
 Side by side with this went the external movement, by 
 which the power of the republic was gradually extended 
 till it first formed the central and strongest state in the 
 peninsula, then incorporated the whole, and finally em- 
 braced such large and varied territories that, in the last 
 century B.C., the old republican government at the centre 
 broke down, and, by another Roman adaptation, gave 
 place to the empire. The two movements, within and 
 without, were, as we shall see, linked closely and causally 
 throughout. 
 
 Two consuls elected for a year by the patrician assembly 
 assumed all the powers exercised by the kings, and like 
 them became the first of the Patres, the fathers of the 
 state. The ' fathers' power ' or ' patria potestas ' gave 
 them the priestly function of taking the auspices. They 
 led the armies and presided over the assembled fathers 
 
 1543
 
 y8 'The Romans 
 
 in the senate, which they consulted as their ' family 
 council '. They were the chief judges, and, like a father 
 in his family, had power of life and death. In an emer- 
 gency full powers the ' imperium ' might be conferred 
 on one man, the dictator, most often needed to lead the 
 army in a crisis. As the work of the state became more 
 complex and grew in bulk, this simple form of government 
 proved inadequate : it was but a duplication of the king 
 to checkmate a despot. Gradually the consuls' functions 
 were distributed among other magistrates, of whom the 
 praetor, or chief legal magistrate, came next in rank. 
 His title was, in fact, originally an alternative for the 
 consul's ; in later history he became the mouthpiece 
 for Roman genius in building law. Proconsuls and pre- 
 fects were added later to represent the consul and praetor 
 in colonies and other communities beyond the walls. 
 
 The internal movement, the fight of the plebeians, 
 was for defence against arbitrary power, for election to 
 the magistracies themselves, for recognition of their own 
 assemblies as well as those of the older clans or ' gentes ', 
 and for the gradual equalization of all civic and political 
 rights. The struggle was long and persistent, but it was 
 composed at every stage by some characteristic Roman 
 stroke, and ended before the crisis of the last century B.C. 
 in the complete assimilation of the plebeian classes. The 
 questions which were then at issue were on a wider plane, 
 but still had points of contact with the old class struggle, 
 and their treatment called for a still larger exercise of 
 the same gifts which gave the republic its unique and 
 immortal triumph in the earlier centuries. 
 
 In the first step of this internal movement we see its
 
 The Romans 99 
 
 intimate connexion with the growth of Roman power 
 without. The loyalty of the plebeians in the army was 
 in the first year of the republic secured by the grant 
 of an appeal to all the citizens, in their ' centuries ', 
 against any capital sentence, except that passed by a 
 dictator. And early in the fifth century, the first century 
 of republican history, the next great step was taken, 
 which proved still more decisive in the sequel, the con- 
 cession to the plebeians of a magistracy of their own, 
 the ' tribunes ', whose prerogative it was to protect any 
 plebeian against a patrician officer under a special oath 
 of sanctity for their persons. This institution, which 
 soon developed its unexampled powers, was due to the 
 demands of plebeian legionaries, just returned from a 
 successful campaign. Shortly after followed the first 
 step in the incorporation of Italy, the alliance with the 
 other Latin communities of the Campagna, which enabled 
 Rome to face with greater security both the Etruscans 
 to the north, whose yoke she had just thrown off, and 
 the rude hill tribes who surrounded the Latin plain to 
 the south and east, and were the next obstacle in the 
 way of her advance. Within a few years from this the 
 plebs had succeeded in getting promulgated the first 
 code of Roman law, the famous Twelve Tables, the 
 fountain from which the stream of written law flowed 
 on in widening courses through all the ten centuries of 
 Roman history, until the great jurists of the empire 
 reviewed and collected it for the use of all civilized men. 
 The Romans then, as the Greeks democracies just before, 
 were unwilling any longer to accept the oral traditional 
 judgements of patrician magistrates on matters of life 
 
 H2
 
 ioo The Romans 
 
 and death, person and property. The story ran that 
 a special mission was sent to Athens, before the Tables 
 were drawn up, to study the laws of Solon, which had 
 been in force there for over half a century. However 
 this may be, we know that Rome was deeply indebted 
 to Greece both early and late in her career. The differ- 
 ence in the result was due mainly to the greater practical 
 skill with which Rome developed her system, assimilating 
 as she went all that came to her from without. 
 
 The fourth century continues the parallel progress in 
 Rome's development. Within the state, citizens of all 
 classes were being gradually admitted to all the magis- 
 tracies. Without, Rome was steadily extending her sway 
 over the middle and southern parts of the peninsula, 
 a process broken only in this century by the startling 
 invasion and burning of the city by the Gauls, or Celts, 
 from the north. 
 
 The beginning of the third century sees perhaps the 
 most striking of all the coincidences between the outer 
 and the inner movements. In 287 B. c. a law was carried 
 giving measures passed by the plebeian assembly the force 
 of law, without the sanction of the Senate ; and twelve 
 years later we have the last decisive victory, which gave 
 the supremacy of all Italy, south of the Arno, to Rome. 
 Pyrrhus, the Macedonian adventurer, who attempted to 
 set up a Greek empire in the west without reckoning 
 with the Romans, was expelled, and the Greek states in 
 the south were finally brought into the Roman system, 
 with which they had been for the most part on friendly 
 terms. 
 
 Thus at the beginning of the third century the founda-
 
 The Romans 101 
 
 tions of the empire had been firmly laid by consolidation 
 within and without. As all citizens had been required 
 for the work of conquest, so all had been admitted to 
 full and equal rights : this is the short but adequate 
 formula for the whole process from within. Externally, 
 the subjugated and allied peoples were bound to Rome 
 by a system which forbade all external relations except 
 through the suzerain power, preserved as far as possible 
 local institutions, and rewarded the faithful by grants of 
 closer relationship, franchise, intermarriage, and com- 
 mercial privileges. 
 
 In the next period this consolidated and victorious 
 power proceeds, from the basis of an allied and firmly 
 united Italy, to incorporate the whole Mediterranean 
 world. 
 
 We can only notice the two critical points. The first 
 is the struggle with Carthage in the second century : the 
 second Caesar's conquest of Gaul and subversion of the 
 republic just before the Christian era. 
 
 In the first, Rome takes up and completes the tradi- 
 tional struggle of centuries before between the Greeks 
 and the Phoenicians. At the same moment that the 
 eastern Greeks were vanquishing the Persians at Salamis, 
 the Phoenicians from Carthage had been defeated by the 
 Greeks of Sicily. But the Greek victory was inconclusive : 
 Carthage had flourished still more in the two centuries 
 since, and now faced the Romans as an unavoidable 
 barrier to that western expansion on which their empire 
 depended. Rome or Carthage must rule Spain, and from 
 Spain Gaul and the whole west. Rome had the advantage 
 of her position, her national character, and her kinship
 
 102 The Romans 
 
 with the western people. Carthage had her wealth, her 
 trade, her ancient traditions, and the greatest military 
 genius of antiquity, bound by ancestral enmity to pursue 
 the war with Rome. In the second Punic war, when 
 Hannibal ranged undefeated over the whole of Italy and 
 marched up to the walls of the city, the Roman spirit 
 was seen at its best, strengthened by the republican 
 discipline of three hundred years. Senate and people 
 were united, and at the lowest moment of their fortunes 
 never dreamt of peace without victory. It was found 
 impossible to form any rival combination in Italy against 
 the Romans. Hannibal was never beaten, but Rome won. 
 
 At the second point Caesar's career the scene has 
 changed. Rome is triumphant. Carthage has disappeared, 
 and Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and northern Africa have come 
 under Roman rule. The East has been invaded, and 
 Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria brought into the 
 Roman sphere. Gaul and northern Europe still remain 
 untouched, and meanwhile such new social evils and 
 difficulties in government have arisen as only the strong 
 hand of one master can redress. 
 
 The old republican government was unable to cope 
 with the growing burden thrown upon it. New pro- 
 vinces, large permanent armies under successful generals, 
 masses of new wealth, new ideas and alien people were 
 flowing in. Neither the system nor the spirit of the 
 rising capital of the world was equal to its task. Imagine 
 a rough analogy, of course a House of Lords, not 
 hereditary, but composed for the most part of returned 
 proconsuls, enriched with the spoils of war and the 
 extortionate government of provinces, claiming control
 
 The Romans 103 
 
 of army, finance, and all foreign affairs. This was the 
 Senate, and it was faced by a popular House, which 
 had in theory the right of passing laws and appointing 
 magistrates, but which, through the pressure of the new 
 wealth and new nobility, had gradually in practice re- 
 linquished all real power. 
 
 Such were the conditions, which only awaited a suc- 
 cessful general, with sufficient political insight and 
 sufficient force, to overcome all his rivals and seize and 
 reorganize the state. Several returning generals had 
 attempted it, as the nominee of one party or the other. 
 Caesar was the first who combined all the needed qualities 
 and possessed them in such a degree, that, though the 
 jealousy of outraged nobles allowed him but a few months' 
 power, he was able to lay down the lines on which the 
 reconstruction was to proceed, and became in title, as 
 in reality, the founder of the Empire. A patrician by 
 birth, he was by family tradition on the popular side : 
 by genius he was able to rise above mere party differences, 
 and see the real needs of the state and the only means 
 of satisfying them under the conditions of the time. His 
 senior and rival, Pompey, had won his power by a com- 
 mand in the East, where he had cleared the seas of pirates 
 and settled the Roman provinces in Asia Minor. It was 
 left for Caesar to come back to Rome as the conqueror 
 of Gaul, the keystone of the West. The ' imperium ' of 
 the commander in the field became at last in his hands, 
 as Dictator, the supreme power in the city itself, and 
 the short five years between his return and his death, 
 interrupted by the war with Pompey, were used with 
 unflagging energy to carry out the most urgent reforms,
 
 104 The Romans 
 
 and lay the foundation of the imperial system of the 
 later half of Roman history. We shall notice only those 
 which illustrate our central theme. 
 
 The outlying parts of the Roman state, which were 
 ultimately to profit most by the Roman system, were at 
 this time the most impoverished by it. Governors, tax- 
 gatherers, and usurers had been for years battening upon 
 the provinces almost without restraint. Caesar checked 
 this by a system of * legates ', dependent upon himself, and 
 thus kept in his own hands the command of the armies and 
 the government of provinces. Italy, too, had suffered by 
 depopulation and the absorption of the old small farms in 
 large slave-worked estates owned by the new capitalists. 
 Caesar settled his own veterans and others on the land, 
 with as little disturbance as possible to existing rights, and 
 required owners to find employment for a certain number 
 of free labourers. New settlements, too, were made at 
 Carthage and Corinth and many decayed towns in Italy. 
 His government of Rome itself was equally wise and vigor- 
 ous, but the problem of how to fit the new imperial power 
 into the old republican forms he did not live to solve. It 
 was left for the lesser genius and greater tact of Augustus. 
 Julius himself was content, during his tenure of power, to 
 govern as Dictator. This office, frequently used before in 
 republican history, was now, in the last year of his life, 
 made for the first time ' perpetual '. 
 
 The murder of Caesar delayed the final settlement for 
 thirteen years, and imposed a long and desolating war 
 upon the Empire. When in 28 B. c. Augustus finally 
 overcame his rivals, he was able, at his leisure and in 
 the safety of general exhaustion, to elaborate a system
 
 The Romans 
 
 of absolute rule under republican forms, which is the 
 greatest triumph of Roman statecraft and the strongest 
 evidence of his own skill in management. All the 
 republican magistracies were retained and treated with 
 formal respect. The Senate was consulted and considered 
 in theory to be the source of all power and the arbiter in 
 all legislation. But the new Princeps sat among them, 
 ' primus inter pares ' by courtesy, but being armed with 
 both the ' imperium ' of the commander and the ' pote- 
 stas' of the old tribune, able in fact to do with the 
 Senate and with the whole government as he pleased. 
 
 At this moment we enter on the period of Rome's 
 greatest power, when having absorbed, so far as she was 
 able, the Greek results in philosophy and art, she pro- 
 ceeded to administer during the last half of her millennium 
 all the countries of the Mediterranean and the near 
 East. It was a profoundly important but a less critical 
 era than several which had passed. At the crisis of Greek 
 national life and thought against Persia, the onlooker 
 might well have been in doubt as to the issue ; and 
 when the rising power of Rome was pitted against the 
 greatest naval force of the Mediterranean, a different 
 result might have been predicted. Again, at the crisis 
 of the republic, it would have been a bold forecast that 
 in less than fifty years the whole Roman world would 
 be consolidated, enlarged and peaceably governed by one 
 undisputed master. But, after the work of Julius and 
 his nephew, there was so great a change, both on the 
 face and in the spirit of the western world, that uncer- 
 tainty gave place to unquestioning confidence and rest. 
 
 As in Athens after the Persian struggle so now the
 
 io 6 The Romans 
 
 greatest poets of Rome were inspired to celebrate the 
 triumph, but in a different tone. For whereas the Greeks 
 hailed a new wonder, the victory of allied bands of free- 
 men over an old-world foe, Virgil and Horace sang the 
 return of the golden age which had preceded all the 
 troubles and conflicts with which man's actual experience 
 was filled. Another race of gods had descended in the 
 emperors, who had restored the fabled peace and plenty 
 of prehistoric days and founded another age of virtue 
 and prosperity which would continue and increase for 
 evermore. Not freedom and conflict, but repose and 
 happiness were now the notes. Much courtly compli- 
 ment, no doubt, much natural relief and exultation at 
 the settlement ; but yet the wise observer might well 
 have thought that now at last a permanent centre of 
 government and civilization had been established from 
 which in time all the surrounding barbarism might be 
 transformed. And by devious paths and through many 
 apparent disasters, this has in substance taken place. 
 The Roman Empire was in essence the embryo of the 
 modern world, and Europe and the West to-day are Rome 
 enlarged. 
 
 The main elements from which this new world was 
 to arise had been growing together for many years. 
 From the earliest times, as we have seen, the Romans 
 had been indebted to Greece ; the City-State itself, 
 of which Rome was the triumphant example, was in 
 many essentials a Greek institution. In the second cea- 
 tury B.C., when Rome had finally defeated the common 
 eastern foe, and Roman armies had made their way into 
 Hellas, the study of Greek, its language, its art and its
 
 The Romans 107 
 
 philosophy, became the fashionable type of education ; 
 and in the age of Cicero, a hundred years later again, 
 the Greco-Roman spirit, of which the empire was the 
 administrative embodiment, was fully and consciously 
 developed. Cicero himself is the best type of it, for 
 with the studied impartiality of the compromising mind, 
 he combined a sincere attachment to old Roman virtues 
 and institutions with a keen and open-minded interest 
 in Greek philosophy and new ideas. Few passages in 
 ancient literature are more significant, or come home to 
 us with a more modern touch, than the familiar story 
 which Cicero tells of himself as commissioner in Sicily, 
 how he searched out the tomb of Archimedes and found 
 it at last all overgrown with brambles, and how he cleared 
 the cylinder and sphere, the symbols of Archimedes' 
 crowning theorem, and restored to Syracuse the memory 
 of her greatest citizen, which, says he, but for a man 
 from Arpinum the country town in Italy where he was 
 born they might have lost for ever. 
 
 The western world was thus preparing for the great 
 amalgamation of the Empire, and the last century B. c. 
 is full of such convergences. At its commencement we 
 have the preaching of Stoicism in Rome, that phase of 
 Greek philosophy which was the most congenial to the 
 Roman temper, and was to inspire the noblest rulers of 
 the Empire in its prime. In this movement also Cicero 
 played a leading part, presenting in his moral treatises 
 the Stoical ideas of the time, especially those of Panae- 
 tius, a leader of the school, who had divided his time 
 between teaching in Athens and in Rome. The full 
 results of the system appear two hundred years later,
 
 io8 The Romans 
 
 above all in the maturity of Roman law. We note it 
 here in this age of convergences, as a symptom and 
 a cause, not only of the union of Greece and Rome in 
 the Empire, but of the spread of a deeper and more real 
 sense of common humanity than the world had ever 
 known before. 
 
 And at the end of the same century comes that fire 
 from the East which was to burn up the remnants of 
 the old mythologies, and, partly combining with, partly 
 displacing, the old philosophies, to create in the later 
 centuries of the Empire a new spiritual force of quite 
 another order. 
 
 Geographically the Empire was, in spite of its size, 
 a political unit of remarkable symmetry and coherence. 
 It was practically all the land easily accessible,, from the 
 Mediterranean Sea, with its centre at Rome rather 
 inclining, as we have noted, to the West. Like higher 
 organisms in the animal kingdom, it had its two sides 
 roughly duplicating one another, in the eastern and the 
 western portions, which, when the vigour of the whole 
 body had decayed, fell asunder and formed the western 
 and the eastern empires of the Middle Ages. But for the 
 five hundred years of its official unity it remained, with 
 comparatively small changes of frontier, intact, and 
 demonstrated by its very existence the force of its 
 internal unity and the needs which the imperial system 
 was able to satisfy. One may consider and in the light 
 of subsequent events it is easy to be wise that there 
 was one serious omission in the ' rectification ' of the 
 frontier, and one or two mistaken attempts to expand 
 in a wrong direction. It certainly seems a mistake, and
 
 The Romans 109 
 
 was a grave misfortune, both to the Empire and to 
 Europe later on, that the repulse of Augustus in the 
 German forests prevented the frontier being carried 
 forward in that direction to include the Franks and the 
 Saxons in the Roman sphere, and make the Elbe the 
 boundary and not the Rhine. The failure to do this 
 postponed the conversion of Germany till the time of 
 St. Boniface and Charlemagne, in the eighth and ninth 
 centuries. It was a mistake of the opposite kind to force 
 the Roman standards, as Trajan did, on to the Persian 
 Gulf, and to attempt the incorporation of Parthia. 
 
 But the Roman world was in the main the Mediter- 
 ranean world, and it grew rapidly together, when at last 
 a conquering people arose in a central position, and with 
 a gift for organization. Once united under Julius and 
 Augustus, it remained in extent much as they had left 
 it, until the last emperor was deposed in Rome. From 
 many points of view the real unity persisted after its 
 external forms were worn out and thrown away. Nor 
 is it even now extinct, though an alien power, strange 
 in all respects to Greco-Roman ideas, has been for nearly 
 five hundred years occupying the last seat of empire on 
 the Bosphorus. 
 
 The five hundred years of the Empire fall naturally 
 into three periods. The first two hundred years, till 
 the death of Marcus Aurelius, were its era of greatest 
 prosperity, best government, of growing consolidation 
 and improvement of the system, especially on the legal 
 side. The intervals of misrule, the cruelties of Caligula 
 and Nero and the civil war ended by Vespasian, were 
 short and limited in their ill effect to a small area, and
 
 1 1 o The Romans 
 
 the five emperors who succeeded Domitian were the 
 ablest, most devoted, and most successful rulers into 
 whose hands the welfare of the leading portion of man- 
 kind has ever fallen. The age of the Antonines is rightly 
 proverbial as an illustration of how well the system could 
 work under the guidance of good men. 
 
 The hundred years which followed, between Marcus 
 Aurelius and Diocletian, showed the two capital weak- 
 nesses of the central government, the power of the army 
 and the difficulties and dangers which attended the suc- 
 cession of the emperors. The ablest of them would 
 yield to the temptation of appointing their own sons to 
 succeed them, however ill-fitted for the post, and steadily 
 throughout the period the real power fell more and more 
 into the hands of the armies, who put up and deposed 
 emperors at their will. 
 
 At the beginning of the last period, the two hundred 
 years from Diocletian to the extinction of the western 
 empire, a new form of organization was tried, to avoid 
 the evils of civil war and obtain a succession of experienced 
 rulers. The Empire was divided for administration into 
 two parts, East and West, with an Emperor Augustus 
 at the head of each and a Caesar under him in training 
 for supreme power. In the hands of Diocletian himself, 
 its founder, the system worked fairly well, but it marked 
 definitely the point at which Rome ceased to be the 
 centre of the civilized world. Diocletian fixed his own 
 residence in the East and that of his colleague at Milan, 
 and when, forty years later, Constantine for a time 
 reunited the whole, he placed the new centre at his own 
 city of Constantinople, built on the site of the ancient
 
 'The Romans 
 
 iii 
 
 Byzantium at the spot where Europe looks into Asia 
 across the famous straits. The seat of Empire at the old 
 centre was thus left vacant for the new spiritual power, 
 which Constantine at last recognized, and which was to 
 reincorporate the western provinces as they slipped 
 gradually from their political allegiance. 
 
 Two weighty facts appear in this last period of the 
 old Western Empire which shed the greatest light on 
 its ultimate disintegration. The surrounding barbarian 
 tribes were admitted in larger and larger numbers to 
 settle within the borders, to replenish its failing popula- 
 tion, recruit the army, and even hold positions of trust. 
 And to preserve order, administer justice, and extract 
 the ever-increasing burden of taxation, a civil service was 
 established, distinct from the army, but like it dependent 
 on the emperor himself. This burdensome bureaucracy 
 of Diocletian and the long and insufficiently guarded 
 frontiers were potent factors in the decline. 
 
 Such is a bald outline of the external facts ; beneath 
 these was proceeding throughout the unifying process 
 which, consciously or unconsciously, was the real task 
 which this government had to perform for the varied 
 elements which had come together under its control in 
 the central nucleus of western civilization. 
 
 It remains to indicate the main agencies by which this 
 unity was promoted in the Empire, and the main results, 
 both in organization and in thought, which have followed 
 and endure. The study of these is in effect the basis of all 
 modern history and is in no case yet completed. Of our 
 own country, for instance, no one has yet given us a full 
 and living picture as it was in the Roman Age, when for
 
 r 1 2 The Romans 
 
 the first time it came within the circle of civilized history. 
 But everywhere it seems true to say that the further the 
 inquiry is pressed, the more intimate and binding the 
 Roman influence is seen to be. It is more than a super- 
 ficial analogy when we speak of such a system as an 
 organism, as a body politic. It had its skeleton, or sub- 
 stantial framework, in the system of fortresses, linked by 
 paved roads and manned by legionaries, which held 
 together the diverse lands and multitudes of people from 
 Mesopotamia to Finisterre, and Hadrian's Wall to Upper 
 Egypt. Of these there are abundant remains everywhere, 
 substantial and ksting as all Roman building, and they 
 contrast significantly with the water-ways of the Greeks. 
 The centre of the system, controlling and moving the 
 whole, as the brain the nerves, was the emperor himself, 
 who united all the threads both of civil and military 
 administration. At the happiest moment, in the second 
 century, when the whole body was vigorous and the 
 mind of a Trajan or an Antoninus was in control, the 
 general prosperity of the populations affected would 
 probably have compared not unfavourably with that of 
 any other epoch before or since. Imperial rescripts, the 
 thanks of the governed communities, the public works 
 carried out, sometimes the private instructions of the 
 emperors, all attest both the humanity and the success 
 of their government. Of the last class of documents the 
 correspondence of Trajan with the younger Pliny, when 
 governor of Bithynia, is the most instructive as well as 
 pleasing. In these letters the emperor shows himself 
 to have been, as a man, kindly and laborious, conscientious 
 in detail, full of the responsibility of his position, as
 
 The Romans 113 
 
 a Roman, careful of law and precedent, zealous above 
 all for order and conciliation, and as an educated European 
 of the second century A.D., conscious of the rights of 
 common humanity, proud of the age in which he 
 lived. The reign of Antoninus Pius illustrated the 
 same principles with added stress on the need of peace 
 and economy, and in Marcus Aurelius the very spirit of 
 Stoicism, austere offspring of the Greco-Roman union, 
 was at the helm. 
 
 But while under such guidance the organized world 
 prospered and grew both more humane and more 
 united, the guidance itself was precarious and change- 
 able, and, even at its best, could not have arrested the 
 disease inevitable in a system where the principles of 
 individual and religious freedom were not yet under- 
 stood. The great emperors were a minority, and the 
 greatest could not have stayed the depopulation of the 
 Empire and the growing inroads of the barbarians. Some- 
 thing, however, which was independent of individuals 
 and could survive them, was being constantly produced 
 by the working of the system, and by the union in the 
 government of the world of the practical genius of the 
 Roman with a strain of Greek analysis and generalization. 
 This was Roman law, perfected under the best of the 
 emperors in the second century, and constituting, enact- 
 ments and principles together, the most precious definite 
 legacy of Rome to mankind. 
 
 The analogy of Greek science and philosophy is a sound 
 one. If we were justified in treating abstract thought, 
 shown both in science and in art, and best measured by 
 the intellectual evolution from Thales to Hipparchus, as 
 
 1543 I
 
 ii4 The Romans 
 
 the special characteristic of Greece, in the case of Rome, 
 the system and science of their laws is the most enduring 
 product, and the measure of their evolution from the 
 Twelve Tables to Gaius or Justinian. But as we might 
 expect of the greatest work of the eminently practical 
 people in history, we cannot detach it from their general 
 activity and treat it as a thing perfect and sufficient in 
 itself, as we can a Greek statue or Greek geometry. 
 Roman law is the special expression of Rome's practical 
 genius in widening precedents to meet new cases, in 
 building up new structures on old foundations, and using 
 every bit of the old material that would serve. So it 
 kept pace with the growth of their Empire and the 
 widening and humanizing of their ideas. In the earliest 
 stages, as we saw, its history was similar to that of the 
 early Greek states and of other youthful people. The 
 bulk of the citizens, after coming to live together in 
 a city-state, claimed the protection of a written code 
 against the violence and unequal rule of the old noble 
 and wealthier families. This movement created the 
 Twelve Tables in Rome, as it had led to Solon's legisla- 
 tion in Athens. Then followed the specially Roman 
 evolution. The Praetor, the magistrate in charge of the 
 administration of the laws, was called upon every year, 
 on entering his term of office, to issue an edict stating 
 the principles on which he intended to act, and any 
 modifications in the practice of the courts which he 
 proposed to introduce. In this way he was able to deal 
 with the constantly growing mass of new cases and 
 difficulties caused by the intercourse of Romans with 
 strangers of diverse customs. ' lus Gentium ' thus meant
 
 The Romans i 1 y 
 
 originally the law of these non-Roman peoples, the 
 common law, as some have said, of the Mediterranean 
 world, as distinguished from the lus Civile, the birth- 
 right of the Roman citizen ; and it was naturally at first 
 regarded as an inferior though necessary exception. But 
 the progress of reflection and the widening of the area 
 of comparison caused the jurists gradually to assign a 
 higher validity to those common notions which were 
 discovered at the basis of the laws of different nations. 
 This tended to what we have since called ' equity ', and 
 it was accompanied by a simplified process in the Roman 
 courts themselves, where more and more importance 
 came to be attached to the real purpose and essential 
 justice of an action, and less to the observance of the old 
 prescribed formulae. 
 
 At this point the influence of Stoicism began to work. 
 ' Living according to nature ' was the crowning precept 
 of this philosophy, and it had an obvious application to 
 law as well as morality. The old lus Gentium became 
 identified with this Law of Nature, and what the praetors 
 had been doing gradually from year to year through force 
 of circumstances, the jurists of the Empire began to do 
 more rapidly and on principle, in order to attain a new 
 philosophic ideal of simplicity, symmetry, and generaliza- 
 tion. It was under the Antonines, when Stoicism was 
 on the throne, that this extension and reform of the legal 
 system made most progress and Roman law became the 
 summary of Roman experience enlightened by Greek 
 philosophy, and the model for later codes. 
 
 Returning, then, to the main purpose of our sketch, 
 we see that among the agencies that have done most to 
 
 i 2
 
 n6 The Romans 
 
 build up the collective force of man for the conquest of 
 nature and the improvement of his lot, one of the highest 
 places must be assigned to Roman law. It was the leading 
 agent by which the Romans carried out their incorpora- 
 tion of the West and also their most notable bequest to 
 the nations who have since taken up the task of the van- 
 guard of mankind. In a thousand ways, sometimes out- 
 side the strictly legal sphere, it has worked in later years 
 to preserve those principles of order and continuity in 
 development, which the Roman genius first established 
 in the world. In the law and organization of the Catholic 
 Church, in methods of local and colonial administration, 
 even in the essentially diverse feudal system, large traces 
 may be found of Roman law and Roman procedure. In 
 matters of pure theory, the realms of moral philosophy 
 and theology, the same influence has been at work. The 
 very notion of an ordered progress in human affairs, of 
 which this book is an illustration, takes its rise in the 
 study of Roman law. It was in the school of law at 
 Naples, early in the eighteenth century, that Vico first 
 conceived and sketched the idea of the ' historic ' method 
 in studying the past, which has grown in force ever since, 
 and now dominates our view of history as completely as 
 Darwin's theory has revolutionized biology. For Vico, 
 inspired by the history of Roman law, was the first to 
 suggest that changes in civilization could be interpreted 
 according to an ordered sequence, which has its moving 
 force in the growth and change of the collective mind 
 of mankind from generation to generation. The Romans 
 had offered in their history the most unmistakable 
 instance of such a sequence. Their genius was as apt
 
 The Romans 117 
 
 for building up institutions and human law as the Greek 
 for discovering the abstract laws of thought and nature. 
 And the fact of progress was in the first place more easily 
 apprehended from the rules and conditions which man 
 had made to surround his own life, than from the less 
 visible, though more fundamental, changes in the general 
 ideas which form our science, philosophy, and religion. 
 Thus it is that ' progress ' is a Latin word, and that the 
 Romans first suggested the idea, while we have not even 
 yet fully realized what the Greeks did for the growth of 
 the human mind, nor the place which abstract thought 
 must take in a true view of historic evolution. 
 
 The next stage in Western history illustrates this con- 
 clusion in a striking and unexpected way. At first sight, 
 in mediaeval Europe Roman institutions seem to have 
 been completely shattered and the onward course of 
 science hopelessly obstructed. But in the end it will be 
 seen that, by a fresh direction of the intellect, the Roman 
 work of incorporation was being actually extended, and 
 in power and depth the collective mind strengthened, 
 though on other lines than the Greeks and Romans could 
 themselves have understood.
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 The Papal hierarchy constituted in the Middle Ages the main bond 
 between the various nations of Europe after the decline of the 
 Roman sway, and the Catholic influence should therefore be judged 
 not only by the visible good which it produced, but still more by the 
 imminent evils which it silently prevented. 
 
 AUGUSTE COMTE.
 
 IT was noticed in the last two chapters that two periods 
 of a thousand years, overlapping but not exactly coinci- 
 dent, would cover roughly the rise and flowering of the 
 Greek and Roman genius. Another millennium, following 
 on the break up of the Roman Empire, embraces what 
 are still commonly called the ' Middle Ages '. There is 
 another coincidence with a significant difference. Three 
 great poetic works have always and rightly been accepted 
 as signalizing the three great movements ; but they stand 
 at different points in the course of each. Homer, marking 
 the emergence of the Greeks from the barbarism of the 
 migrations and the sagas, comes near the beginning of 
 their evolution. Virgil, who celebrates the climax of 
 a work of conquest and incorporation, comes midway in 
 the Roman period. Dante, who expresses even more 
 perfectly the essence of mediaeval Catholicism, is almost 
 its last great voice. It will be seen, as we proceed, why 
 such a perfect expression of an age so difficult to grasp 
 could only come when it had nearly run its course. 
 Built up on the ruins of an ancient system and full of 
 new life seeking fresh forms and outlets for its vigour, 
 the mediaeval system impresses us at first more perhaps 
 by its wealth of contradictions than by any one of those 
 special features which have led men to call it, sometimes 
 the ' age of faith ', sometimes the ' dark ages ', sometimes the 
 ' age of chivalry ', sometimes the ' age of law '. It exhibits 
 elements which justify them all, kings celebrated for their 
 services to learning who had never learnt to write, orgies
 
 The Middle 
 
 121 
 
 of savage cruelty in the interests of the purest of religions, 
 loose lives and ecstatic aspirations, rough hands and 
 meticulous theory. Light on this, apparent tangle of 
 interests and motives will only come if we approach it 
 from the side of religion, the new spiritual life and 
 organization which was the inspiration of the East into 
 the old framework of the Greco-Roman world falling to 
 decay. No better image of the whole has ever been 
 given than by a recent writer, 1 who compares the spiritual 
 state of mediaeval Europe to an alpine range, on the 
 lower slopes of which the explorer finds himself entangled 
 in an undergrowth of pathless thicket, but as he ascends 
 discovers wide snowfields and soaring peaks, from which 
 he may survey the panorama of a new world in radiant 
 light and with majestic outlines stretching as far as the 
 eye can reach. How far and in what ways did this new 
 order work to strengthen the collective force of mankind 
 in its task of subduing the powers of nature and turning 
 them ultimately to the common good ? 
 
 Clearly in one way the loss was immense, if we compare 
 mediaeval Europe with the world under Trajan, when 
 cultivated men like Pliny were carrying out the wishes 
 of an enlightened master, conceived in the interests of 
 the whole population he commanded. But the imperial 
 system was in decline long before the Catholic hierarchy 
 had entered into its full powers. The ideal of the 
 empire, to embrace in one political orbit all communities 
 of civilized men, would have become an increasingly 
 impossible one, as the limits of discovery and human 
 intercourse were extended : its realization was a miracle 
 1 H. W. C. Davis, Mediaeval Europe. Home University Library.
 
 I 22 
 
 The Middle Ages 
 
 of organization in the days of the Antonines. With the 
 barbarization of the frontiers and the depletion of the old 
 governing class it broke down, and even before the next 
 extension of the area of civilization, new divisions had 
 been formed. In the fourth and fifth centuries, before 
 the extinction of the Western Empire, we see the nuclei 
 grouping themselves round the barbarian tribes who had 
 made good their footing. From these new groupings with- 
 in the old Roman framework the modern nations of Europe 
 arose towards the close of the mediaeval period. In 
 each of the old provinces of the Empire there was an 
 admixture of new barbarian blood with the old popula- 
 tion, and the varying blend has left in each case large 
 traces in the language, government, and general civiliza- 
 tion of the rising nation. In this infusion of new and 
 vigorous life into the old associations and organization 
 we find the germ of modern nationality ; and modern 
 nations inherit also from the Empire, surviving though 
 transformed, the notion of a greater whole, containing 
 and limiting the smaller units. 
 
 For the moment, in the early centuries of the Middle 
 Ages, we are faced by problems of a more rudimentary 
 kind. The barbarian settlements introduced a form of 
 social organization, a land tenure based on personal 
 service, which carried with it certain powers of juris- 
 diction, capable of almost indefinite extension, and con- 
 tradicting in essence the theory of civic duty which the 
 Greeks and Romans had laboured to construct. This 
 feudal system had its root in the notion of a personal tie 
 or contract which bound the free warriors of the Germanic 
 tribes to their leader in battle. The ' count ' or ' comes '
 
 The Middle 
 
 123 
 
 was one of a band of personal followers of the king or 
 duke, and after the occupation of the invaded territory 
 he became endowed with land, a fief of his own, on 
 condition of swearing the vassal's oath. This was the 
 origin and simplest form of the theory which in the 
 later Middle Ages was elaborated into a complete legal 
 system, embracing the whole society, towns, corpora- 
 tions, religious as well as secular, and assigning every one 
 his position in a minutely adjusted hierarchy of persons. 
 Obviously such a system represented in itself no higher 
 stage of social unity than the Greek or Roman republics, 
 or the equality of the Empire. Rather it broke up the 
 various unities which had been arrived at, and introduced 
 transverse divisions and interests, which honeycombed 
 the state. But indirectly it served a wider end. It 
 threw into stronger relief the unity of the ecclesiastical 
 order, in which the most characteristic elements of the 
 Middle Ages were embodied. Its very defects left free 
 play to the religious spirit and the religious organization 
 which for the first time in history was constituted as an 
 independent power, challenging in its own right the 
 power of the state, and able to advise, to criticize, and 
 sometimes to control. 
 
 How did this new religious power arise ? 
 
 We noticed towards the close of the philosophic evolu- 
 tion of Greece the appearance of a wider conception of 
 society than had been associated with the city-state of 
 Plato and Aristotle. The Stoics also were spiritual 
 descendants of Socrates, but, with the widening of 
 human intercourse during the last centuries B.C., they 
 had put forward a wider notion of human society itself.
 
 124 The Middle Ages 
 
 They talked of the ' Inhabited World ' as the natural 
 fatherland of the man who lived according to nature. 
 Citizens of this state would meet on equal terms, whether 
 rich or poor, bond or free. A moral system of this kind, 
 high-minded and severe, without hope and without mov- 
 ing passion, floated more or less vaguely in the minds of 
 the best and most cultivated men in the best years of the 
 Empire. Without any consistent doctrine or the sanction 
 of revelation, it inspired a simple humanity and taught 
 fortitude and -self-control to a larger number than had 
 ever attached themselves to the older philosophic schools. 
 The gods, too, of the old Olympian pantheon had long 
 been fading before the wider conceptions of a rationalizing 
 mind. The time was ripe therefore, and the seed, which 
 was to fructify in a well-tilled soil, was blown in from the 
 East, from the nation which, alike in so much of its early 
 fortunes to the Greeks, had, while the Greek mind was 
 busy with all the problems of the universe, cherished its 
 one treasure of an ethical religion, based on the authority 
 and direct revelation of one God. The second message 
 of the Jews, spoken this time to all mankind by the 
 Messiah whom they had been taught to expect, fell on 
 the western world, when the fusion of Greek and Roman 
 was complete, 'and their joint energy was running out, 
 when kindred ideas to the new gospel were already 
 current, when the one thing needed was a compelling 
 passion. Little wonder that to Augustine, to Dante, to 
 the orthodox philosophic historian of all ages the coinci- 
 dence meant the manifest hand of God. 
 
 To Dante the triumphant progress of the Roman 
 Eagle, which he describes in the sixth canto of the
 
 The Middle Ages i 2 y 
 
 Paradise, led all the way to the establishment of the 
 spiritual empire of the Eternal City, of which the pagan 
 power was but a prelude. Historically, when in the first 
 century A. D. the new religious organization sprang up, its 
 centre gravitated inevitably to Rome. It was the centre 
 of all communication, the city whose prestige was indis- 
 pensable for a Church which was to cover the civilized 
 world. Thither the chief of the apostles had gone to mar- 
 tyrdom. Later, when Rome lost its political prerogative, 
 and still more, when in the fifth century there ceased to be 
 an emperor in Rome at all, the Papacy continued to thrive, 
 and prospered by the removal of the temporal power. 
 
 It was just a century after the disappearance of the 
 last Emperor of the West when Gregory the Great estab- 
 lished the Papacy as a centre of European influence, 
 independent by virtue of its territorial possessions, 
 respected for the doctrine which it preached and for the 
 general wisdom and moderation of its judgement. The 
 Pope continued to profess submission to the surviving 
 Emperor of the East, and thus maintained the fiction 
 of a united empire, while by the conversion of England, 
 and through England of Germany, the area of the new 
 religious empire was actually extended. And here we 
 touch one of the main services which the Church rendered 
 to the world, which had not been, and could not be, 
 possible for an organization aiming at universal jurisdic- 
 tion and political control. The missionaries of Gregory 
 could penetrate where the legions of Augustus had been 
 destroyed, and thus the new spiritual power, starting 
 from the vantage-ground which Roman organizing skill 
 had prepared, was able speedily, by the less cumbrous
 
 126 The Middle Ages 
 
 machinery of persuasion, to enlarge the area of Roman 
 incorporation. 
 
 In countries, such as England and Germany, where 
 the Christianizing of the people was the direct result of 
 papal action, the authority of the Pope gained fresh 
 support. They helped powerfully to turn in his favour 
 the tide which for centuries was wavering all over 
 Europe, first between the local Churches, as represented 
 by their bishops, and the general religious authority 
 of the Roman See, and, later, between the spiritual 
 authority as a whole and the temporal power of kings 
 and emperors. The first movement was steadily and 
 surely determined in favour of the Roman See by the 
 logic of the system : the Pope became before long 
 supreme in his own sphere over all spiritual powers and 
 causes. The second case, the conflict between the rival 
 powers in Church and State, could not be logically 
 settled, and the stages in the struggle, its crisis, its 
 triumphs, its compromises, form landmarks in the history 
 of the Middle Ages. We shall only touch on them where 
 they appear to illustrate our main theme ; but their very 
 existence and the importance they are bound to assume 
 in any connected and general narrative are proof enough 
 that we are right in seeking in the religious spirit, and 
 the organization which embodied it, for the characteristic 
 and determining factors of the age. Another point 
 follows. It would be a grossly erroneous view to regard 
 these conflicts as merely or mainly the expression of 
 personal or political rivalry. Behind the popes as pro- 
 tagonists and well expressed by the best of them was 
 the force of a widespread conviction, a spiritual fervour,
 
 The Middle Ages 127 
 
 of quite another order than the struggle for aggrandize- 
 ment which was often the external mark of papal policy. 
 Here was the soul of the system, the element which it 
 added for all time to the minds of men. It inspired the 
 noblest voices through all these centuries, St. Bernard's, 
 who made popes and reproved them for their pomp and 
 pride, Dante's, the poet of Catholicism, who puts the 
 corrupt popes into the depths of hell. 
 
 From Gregory, the first great founder of the mediaeval 
 Church, to the crowning of Charlemagne, the story turns 
 mainly on the growing friendship between the rising 
 Papacy and the rising power of the Franks. The Franks 
 beat back the Mohammedan invaders of Europe and 
 defended the Pope in his own country. The Pope repaid 
 their service by crowning Charlemagne, the greatest of 
 the Franks, as a new Emperor of the West. This point, 
 though not the culmination of the Church's power, was 
 always the most attractive to mediaeval eyes, as realizing 
 most perfectly the ideal of theorists, the complete alliance 
 of God's two vicegerents on earth, the master of the 
 sword and the master of the soul. It was but a fleeting 
 glimpse of the ideal, for Charlemagne's empire, the fruit 
 of exceptional energy and genius, fell away with him, 
 and, though cherished for centuries as the most perfect 
 type of government, it was not, to a more far-seeing 
 vision, the order of things which Europe most needed 
 to establish. Unity in the general direction of men's 
 minds, but local concentration in their institutions and 
 customs, this was the task and labour of the age ; and 
 Charlemagne's exploit was chiefly valuable as helping 
 the Papacy to another stage in its progress towards
 
 128 The Middle Ages 
 
 the commanding position of the eleventh and twelfth 
 centuries. 
 
 Before this goal was reached the reforms which are 
 associated with the name of Hildebrand had to be 
 attempted, and we have to note the real purpose and 
 justification of these, and why they were supported by 
 the best men of the time. Hildebrand himself marred 
 his work by an excess of personal ambition and over- 
 reaching statecraft. 
 
 The question in the simplest terms was, to secure that 
 the agents of the spiritual power should be sufficiently 
 independent to carry out these functions which, as we 
 assume, were in that age of a high social and moral value. 
 The opposing princes contended that government would 
 be impossible if the most powerful and often the wealthiest 
 class in their realms were free from the ordinary rules of 
 order and allegiance to them. The question was incap- 
 able of any complete and logical solution, and the Papacy 
 used it constantly to push the most extravagant claims, 
 leading in the extreme form to the assertion of a universal 
 supreme sovereignty. But this should not blind us to 
 the real need which was the basis of the papal claim, 
 and gained for the popes the general following which 
 they so often had, as well as the advocacy of lead- 
 ing churchmen and thinkers, until the decay of the 
 fourteenth century. The Church was there to keep 
 before men's eyes another ideal of conduct and social 
 unity, in the midst of habitual warfare, rough living 
 and selfish aims. Corruption within was only too 
 easy and too frequent ; if besides it had become 
 entirely dependent on the very men whom it was
 
 The Middle 4ges 129 
 
 its business to correct, it would have dried up from 
 the roots. 
 
 The princes who succeeded Charlemagne in the eastern 
 part of his domains continually encroached upon the free- 
 dom and self-government of the Church. These were the 
 German emperors who kept alive the idea of an empire, 
 Holy as well as Roman ; but being weak politically, they 
 badly needed the support of their ecclesiastical vassals 
 at home. Holding the most eminent political office in 
 Europe, on the least stable basis of national strength and 
 unity, they were driven by every motive to assert their 
 rights against the Roman See as strongly as possible. Hence 
 the struggle which the mediaeval theory brought with it, 
 a titanic duel of centuries between Pope and Emperor. 
 
 Hildebrand was the most powerful leader whom the 
 Church party, in its earlier struggle for reform, produced. 
 Within the Church he carried out disciplinary measures 
 of the strictest kind, enforcing celibacy on the clergy and 
 pure elections to Church offices. And in the contest with 
 the temporal power he pushed the papal claims so far, 
 and for a time with so much success, that his position 
 at the end of the eleventh century became the standard 
 of the high papal party. A hundred years later, Innocent 
 the Third, following the same lines, succeeded in establish- 
 ing himself as actual suzerain over a large part of Europe, 
 including our own country. 
 
 The rise of this new strange form of domination had 
 been slower than that of empires won by the sword ; 
 but its fall was precipitous. Long before Luther broke 
 the Christian world in two, the Roman See had lost its 
 position as supreme arbiter of the states of Europe. 
 
 1543 K
 
 130 The Middle 
 
 A hundred years after its zenith under Innocent the 
 Pope was a prisoner in the hands of the French, and 
 when in the fifteenth century his outward prestige was 
 restored, decay had already set in beneath the throne. 
 The rise was slow, for the new power had to find fresh 
 channels for its influence and cover areas untouched by 
 the old Roman sway : its fall was rapid, for the doctrine 
 on which it rested absorbed, as we shall see, towards the 
 end of its evolution, elements that brought with them 
 the seed of decay ; and the non-spiritual power, the 
 personal authority in state affairs which the great popes 
 asserted, was in itself an overbearing and unnatural thing 
 which provoked a violent reaction. 
 
 All this is easy enough to see in the calm perspective 
 of seven centuries : it is more difficult, though more 
 necessary, to discern whatwas behind this papal autocracy, 
 the fresh factors in the general mind of Catholic countries 
 which were of permanent value in building up a collective 
 human purpose in the world. 
 
 It will be noticed at once that the four or five most strik- 
 ing products of the Middle Ages followed immediately 
 upon the Papacy attaining full self-consciousness. Imme- 
 diately after Hildebrand, before the eleventh century was 
 out, the Crusades had begun, at the instigation and under 
 the guidance of the Pope. The next century saw the be- 
 ginning of Gothic architecture and of the universities. 
 The early thirteenth, the preaching of the friars and the 
 formulation of the scholastic philosophy. Within a cen- 
 tury indeed after the height of the conflict between Hilde- 
 brand and the Emperor Henry, all these things, the most 
 characteristic fruits of mediaeval civilization, were in
 
 The Middle Ages 131 
 
 flower. They were all things of infinite value, both in 
 themselves and for what they left behind, and in every 
 case they were directly inspired by the religion of the 
 age and under the control of its chiefs. The point is 
 obvious. We will give the few words available to 
 pointing out how in each case the movement was the 
 result of this general tendency of the mediaeval mind, 
 the effort to bring all the world it knew into subordina- 
 tion to one supreme religious end. 
 
 The Crusades, marred as they were in so many cases 
 by greed and vice, ill-managed as they invariably were 
 and futile in their immediate purpose, exhibited the 
 nations of Europe acting together for a common end as 
 they had never done before. The Roman soldiery was 
 a paid profession, and long before the break-up of the 
 Empire it was impossible to find men enough within 
 its borders to serve in its defence. The Crusaders 
 were volunteers, and, while the religious fervour lasted, 
 they were ready, from every country, in unlimited num- 
 bers, to leave their homes and face undreamt-of hardships, 
 with but a faint hope of return and no certainty except 
 through faidi. Religious mania you may say, or the fear 
 of hell, playing on the minds of men accustomed to a life 
 of hardship and war. Partly, but very partially, true. 
 Many of the Crusaders were quite unwarlike, and many 
 were saints, and the crusading spirit lasted on through 
 various transformations, in the war against the Moors of 
 Spain, in the discovery of the New World, the wars with 
 the Turks, and the many social crusades of our days. 
 
 It has been often shown, that by the Crusades the mind 
 of Europe was also widened and aroused. Wealth and 
 
 K 2
 
 132 The Middle 
 
 knowledge of other men and countries flowed into western 
 lands, where the horizon had been for centuries dominated 
 by the baron's castle and the Church ; and men of 
 different ranks in the feudal hierarchy, who had charged 
 side by side in the service of the Cross, must have learnt 
 on returning home that doctrines of brotherhood which 
 before had often seemed to belong only to another world, 
 might have their applications in daily life. 
 
 Gothic churches, which are the chief visible witnesses 
 to mediaeval life and thought, followed the beginning of 
 the Crusades. They cover Catholic Europe and speak as 
 eloquently of the men who raised them as the pyramids do 
 of the Ancient Egyptians or the Parthenon of the Greeks. 
 Their art, with its infinite variety and loving care in 
 detail, its firm substructure and its soaring heights, teaches 
 us, more than all the books, of the character of architects 
 and builders, donors and worshippers. But we refer to 
 them here as another illustration of the depth and 
 wide extent of that new unity in men's minds which 
 the Catholic discipline had induced. From Ireland, 
 Scotland, Scandinavia, Germany, to the old strongholds 
 of Rome in the south, the evidence is the same, of 
 common ideas, of readiness to make vast sacrifice of toil 
 and money for a common worship, of agreement in all 
 great points of style and spirit. A map of Europe, in 
 fact, showing the area covered by Gothic churches, com- 
 pared with the area containing Roman aqueducts and 
 amphitheatres, would be a chart of the evolution of 
 modern Europe and the further consolidation of the West. 
 
 Let us see what light the new monastic orders throw 
 on the same point. Franciscans and Dominicans grew
 
 The Middle Ages 133 
 
 up side by side, and both were authorized by Innocent 
 in the height of his power. A comparison of these with 
 the old monasticism should give some measure of the 
 advance in Catholic thought and organization since the 
 first hermits of the Thebaid. St. Anthony, the earliest 
 type in the third century, St. Benedict, the Italian of 
 two hundred years later, St. Dominic, the Spaniard of the 
 thirteenth century, stand for the three great stages ; for 
 St. Francis, although his order became the most numerous 
 and famous of all, rose like a star apart. In each of the 
 three types there is the same root-idea of personal sacrifice, 
 of separation from the pleasures of the world, and the 
 devotion of all one's powers to something supreme, 
 beyond the world of sense. But see how a widening 
 social outlook transforms the solitary ascetic into the 
 missionary agent of a world-wide power. St. Benedict 
 suppressed bodily mortification and enforced life in a 
 common house and prayer and above all work ; and 
 from this type of monk came the first great pope, 
 Gregory the Great, in the sixth century. In the last 
 stage, to which in principle all later orders belong, the 
 monk became in name as well as in spirit a friar or 
 brother, and his order was approved by the head of the 
 whole Church. He was a soldier and an emissary, sent 
 east and west to spread the truth and gain adherents 
 to the greater society of which his own was but a branch. 
 His personal sacrifice becomes a part, and an infinitely small 
 one, of the purpose and order of an all-embracing scheme, 
 eternally planned and eternally efficient. His single lamp of 
 faith and love is merged in that ineffable glow of light and 
 happiness which radiates in Dante's circles of the blessed.
 
 134 The Mid file Ages 
 
 We are passing gradually in our illustrations from 
 the more concrete manifestations of the mediaeval 
 spirit to the more purely abstract and intellectual. The 
 universities, therefore, with their scholastic philosophy, 
 come last. In point of time, too, they are its latest and 
 most perfect fruit. In the history of thought indeed the 
 mediaeval period means the elaboration of scholasticism, 
 and St. Thomas Aquinas, whose life exactly fills the two 
 middle quarters of the thirteenth century, is the final 
 voice in Catholic philosophy. In this sphere he is 
 still authoritative, but we notice it here only so far as 
 it throws light on the nature of that further discipline 
 which Catholicism was imposing on Western Europe, 
 collectively and individually, while for the most part the 
 scientific spirit was lying dormant. 
 
 Two points are clear which bear directly on the main 
 thread of our argument. One, that at the close of the 
 Middle Ages man was not on the whole better equipped 
 by his knowledge of the laws of nature than he was in 
 the hey-day of Greek science. Isolated improvements had 
 been here and there effected by the Arabs and the Hindus 
 in numeration and the beginnings of algebra, and Roger 
 Bacon had made some marvellous anticipations of experi- 
 mental science. But, broadly speaking, the intellectual 
 standard of Europe at the end of the thirteenth century, 
 after the death of St. Thomas Aquinas and just before 
 Dante wrote, was not so high, on the purely scientific 
 side, as that of Alexandrian Greece in the second cen- 
 tury B.C. St. Thomas, the greatest of the schoolmen, 
 expounds and adapts the theories of Aristotle, so far as 
 they are consonant with the revelations of Scripture.
 
 The Middle Ages 1 3 5- 
 
 But on the other side of the picture, we see the 
 social force and unity of the vanguard of mankind 
 immensely strengthened by the process of these un- 
 scientific centuries ; and this development was no less 
 essential to the coming conquests of mankind than 
 scientific knowledge itself. When at the Renascence 
 the spirit of inquiry awoke again, it spread as rapidly 
 as it did, and won triumphs both in thought and action, 
 largely because in the interval a wide and compacted 
 social area had been prepared by mediaeval discipline, 
 compared with which the sphere available for Alexandrian 
 science was limited and feeble. And this strengthening 
 and binding discipline must be reckoned with, not only 
 as it affected society collectively, but also in its results 
 on individuals. May we not believe that, besides the 
 formation of a stronger and more homogeneous Western 
 Europe, a stronger and more harmonious type of 
 European character had been cultivated by the Catholic 
 regime ? As in the early Roman Empire historians have 
 misled us by lurid pictures of isolated acts of infamy and 
 misrule, so in the Middle Ages, especially when dealing 
 with the faults of prominent men and institutions, the 
 attention is apt to dwell unduly on the plague-spots and 
 the dirt. The great and widespread art of the cathe- 
 drals proclaims the contrary, and the strength of the 
 Renascence itself in art, discovery, and science. Both 
 the stimulus and the repression of the mediaeval doctrine 
 and discipline had borne fruit, whatever were its evils 
 and limitations. 
 
 We can best appreciate the nature of this stimulus and 
 this restraint from the writings of the systematic thinkers
 
 1 3 6 The Middle Ages 
 
 who came at the end of the evolution and summed up 
 its ideal tendencies, above all in Dante, who added the 
 insight of a poet and the force of a great character to 
 all the learning of the schoolmen. 
 
 Comparing it with the spiritual state of the Greco- 
 Roman world towards the end of paganism, the feature 
 which most impressed us in the Catholic order is the 
 unity of belief and religious practice which it imposed. 
 Where rival deities and cults had been contending 
 in rich variety and without restraint, the Church 
 substituted one system, slowly elaborated from the 
 simplest origin, admitting by degrees the metaphysics of 
 Plato and the logic of Aristotle, but always, until the 
 disruption of the sixteenth century, one in form, har- 
 monized by intellects, from St. Augustine onwards, fully 
 equal in acuteness and comprehensiveness to all except 
 the very greatest of the Greeks. As a work of organiza- 
 tion, proceeding with equal steps on the theoretical and 
 the practical side, it is unquestionably the masterpiece 
 of co-operative skill in history. As such it gives the key 
 to the greater compactness of the society where it reigned ; 
 and when we look at the body of doctrine itself we can 
 understand something of the strengthening and harmoniz- 
 ing power which sent men to die gladly at the ends of 
 the earth in order to bring in others to the realm of 
 certainty and love. 
 
 For in Christian theory there had been, from the 
 moment of the Redeemer's birth or death, another society 
 founded, in which the temporal distinctions of rank and 
 wealth were unknown, and which would ultimately redress 
 them, in which the bond was love and its basis the
 
 The Middle <dges 137 
 
 certainty of faith. The social unity of all mankind, the 
 common action and purpose of the universe, which had, 
 as we saw, been floating as vague ideas before the eyes 
 of the later Stoics, became articles of faith, guaranteed 
 by the most powerful organization in the world. Scrip- 
 ture and Aristotle combine in Dante's Paradise, as in 
 St. Thomas before him, to demonstrate that there is one 
 principle which rules the heavenly bodies in their certain 
 courses and by the same law the souls of men. As surely 
 as we see the former revolve in their orbits, so surely is 
 mankind created to work together for the salvation of 
 all. They go, St. Thomas tells us, to their appointed 
 end of good living,' as the arrows of a divine bowman 
 who cannot miss. His goal is distant and unseen by 
 mortal eye, but reason demands it and revelation has 
 made good the claim. 
 
 So much perhaps might have been possible to a pre- 
 Christian thinker. But in the highest heaven of Dante 
 we hear a closing note, which with the others makes 
 a full chord which had not sounded before the Christian 
 era. The same one Principle, he tells us, which governs 
 the spheres and guides men to salvation, is ' Love which 
 rules the sun and the other stars '. 
 
 To bring together the two realms of man and nature 
 under one Law of Love, this was the ideal purpose of 
 the new order and explains its force in spreading and 
 strengthening the social unity of Western Europe. In 
 spite of countless failures and constantly recurring errors, 
 much has already been built on this foundation, and the 
 future, while bringing fresh elements to the fabric, will 
 build still more.
 
 THE RENASCENCE AND THE 
 NEW WORLD 
 
 Next to the discovery of the New World, the recovery of the ancient 
 world is the second landmark that divides us from the Middle Ages 
 and marks the transition to modern life. 
 
 LORD ACTON.
 
 ALL through the silent centuries of the Middle Ages 
 there had been here and there, in monasteries and cathe- 
 dral schools, isolated students of pre-Christian books. 
 Being in the realm of the Roman Church, they 
 studied mainly Latin writers, and Virgil in particular 
 enjoyed a singular immortality. The Greeks, too, were 
 never quite forgotten, and in the capital of the Eastern 
 Empire there was throughout an active centre of Greek 
 speaking, Greek writing, and, in a debased form, of Greek 
 ideas. But the most vigorous intellectual life in the 
 West, until the thirteenth century, was undoubtedly that 
 sustained by the Mohammedan power in Spain, which 
 cultivated all the arts and sciences, and restored to Europe 
 something of the Greek philosophy which it had for- 
 gotten. To the Arabs of that period we owe not only 
 several advances in mathematics and medicine, but the 
 knowledge of Aristotle, which was to play so large a part 
 in the development of the scholastic philosophy and all 
 that it involved. 
 
 But towards the close of the Middle Ages, before 
 Dante's life at the opening of the fourteenth century, two 
 great movements had taken place which did much to 
 quicken these smouldering fires and arouse further study 
 and bolder thinking. These were the Crusades and the 
 universities. Each in a different way laid Europe under 
 a debt to the East, the universities for a large part of 
 their science, the Crusades for half their chivalry. And 
 each movement, while from one point of view a culmina- 
 tion of the Catholic-Feudal spirit, was in another aspect
 
 The Renascence and the New World 141 
 
 the beginning of a new age, for each brought with it the 
 seeds both of decay and of new growth. 
 
 The first step necessary for the Western mind, about 
 to enter on the period of its great expansion, was to 
 realize that there was a world of knowledge and activity, 
 a world in time and a world in space, outside the area 
 which the Church had guarded and cultivated for a 
 thousand years. The study of the ancients, which the 
 universities encouraged, revealed the world of history : 
 the Crusades were the first general step towards the 
 discovery of New Worlds, east and west. These were the 
 turning-points of the Renascence. One WQ} the method 
 of study, the other the method of travel, then, as now, 
 the two unequalled agents for widening the mind. 
 The progress of study dissipated the notion that 
 Aristotle and Plato were Christian apologists, born out 
 of due season : and other minds, weighing the pros and 
 cons of Catholic doctrine as conscientiously as St. Thomas, 
 could not always come down on the orthodox side of 
 the argument. In the world revealed by travel visitors 
 to the East discovered other views of religion than their 
 own, but consistent both with a civilized life a*nd a high 
 standard of thought and morality. Such was that strange 
 parliament of religion which Friar William addressed on 
 the steppes of Tartary in the middle of the thirteenth 
 century, and reported to St. Louis. 1 
 
 1 ' Mangu Cham, emperor of the Tartars, in the year of our Lord, 
 1253, when the lord King Louis of France sent Brother William to Tar- 
 tary, said to the Christians assembled before him in the presence of the 
 said friar : " We have a law from God delivered by our divines, and 
 we do all that they tell us. You Christians have a law from God 
 through your prophets,and you do not do it." ' See Bacon's Opus Majus 
 (ed. Bridges), i. 400. Also the report of William Rubruquis himself .
 
 142 
 
 From both these sources, then, the ferment grew 
 which, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, had 
 initiated that progressive movement which is marked in 
 our current histories by titles in crescendo, Revival, Renas- 
 cence, Reformation, Revolution, all words beginning with 
 the prefix implying change, until we come down to our 
 own days, when possibly we may discover that a name 
 with a deeper shade of meaning is becoming needed. 
 
 The Renascence recalls us to the main thread of our 
 story, and points clearly to the sequel. The contribution 
 of the Middle Ages was on lines so distinctive that they 
 have frequently been described as a period of retrogression, 
 and we have seen that there is some truth in this account ; 
 though on the other side of the picture the Catholic disci- 
 pline of the Middle Ages added to man's wealth and power 
 matter of infinite value which has still to work out its influ- 
 ence in the process of the world. Now, before a general 
 forward movement could take place, the side of man's 
 nature which had suffered under the mediaeval system 
 needed to be made good ; and it is this repairing task which 
 is shown as the Revival of Learning or the Renascence. 
 
 The former term properly describes the earlier stage ; 
 the later was the more general movement affecting all 
 sides of life. In this chapter we are glancing rapidly at 
 the whole the three centuries which followed Dante's 
 death, the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth. With the 
 seventeenth we reach the rise of modern science, as a 
 vigorous and independent growth. 
 
 Much of the movement of these three centuries takes 
 the form of violent conflict and destruction. It is easy 
 to allow one's mind to dwell too much on this aspect,
 
 The Renascence and the Nerv World 143 
 
 and to let the constructive work, more silent but incom- 
 parably more important, pass by unnoticed. This ten- 
 dency vitiates a good deal of the accustomed presentation 
 of history, which has offered us the wars of religion as 
 the main topic of an age when adventurers were adding 
 a New World to Western civilization, and Galileo's tele- 
 scope revealing a new universe to mankind. It is easy, 
 too, from the same cause to drop into the belief that the 
 destructive work accomplished in such a period went 
 further and deeper than it did, to imagine a tabula rasa 
 where there was really the erasure of a few figures, the 
 putting of an old picture in a new frame. The Pope's 
 authority was destroyed in England and a new Lutheran 
 Church established in Germany, but the moral discipline 
 and the intellectual habits fashioned by the incessant and 
 authoritative influences of a thousand years remained in 
 the mass untouched, and altered slowly, like the building 
 of the earth's strata or the change of species. 
 
 That the fourteenth century was a period of decay, 
 after the collective efforts and large construction of the 
 two previous centuries, is evident from many signs. The 
 Papacy had lost its eminence, and was for a large part 
 of the time in exile under the control of France. The 
 new religious orders which had arisen a hundred years 
 before to evangelize the world for Christ and his Vice- 
 gerent had yielded in many cases to the faults of the 
 world which they set out to correct. To this Dante is 
 our witness at the beginning of the century, and Wiclif 
 at its close. The Crusades of the earlier centuries, which 
 had united Christendom for a common religious end, had 
 given place to a Hundred Years' War between the two
 
 144 
 
 leading nations of the West, which devastated both coun- 
 tries for selfish and material ends, and left a legacy of waste 
 and suffering, of mercenary fighting and national enmity. 
 
 The ideal of a Christian comity of nations under the 
 joint aegis of Pope and emperor was thus, in fact as in 
 theory, receding from men's grasp. But at the same 
 moment the study of literature, which the universities 
 had fostered, was leading gradually to the reconstruction 
 in the minds of an elite, of an ancient world of art and 
 learning, of enjoyment and of government, outside the 
 pale of Catholic traditions and belief. 
 
 Latin was the first channel of this new culture. It 
 was the foundation of half the popular speech of the 
 West and all its religious rites. The starting-point in the 
 new movement was the discovery that under the con- 
 temporary superstructure of language there lay hidden 
 an earlier, more polished and perfect building, which 
 man's mind had fashioned many centuries before, and 
 where an ordered thought had lived and flourished, 
 untrammelled by the narrow limits of the mediaeval 
 dwelling. Virgil, the poet and prophet of ancient Rome, 
 lived again, instead of the mediaeval magician who had 
 usurped his name. Cicero became the standard of dic- 
 tion, instead of the Vulgate and the schoolmen. The 
 first stage in the Revival is that associated with the name 
 of Petrarch in the fourteenth century. But as in the 
 excavation of ancient sites the unearthing of the first 
 hidden city is often the prelude to the discovery of 
 larger and finer remains beneath, so the revival of classical 
 Latin was followed by the more potent renascence of 
 Greek. Beneath the Roman city a still more spacious
 
 The Renascence and the New World 145- 
 
 and beautiful dwelling-place for the human spirit was 
 gradually revealed, where Homer and Aeschylus, Thucy- 
 dides and Plato, had moulded the subtlest thoughts into 
 the most exquisite forms which the world has ever seen. 
 This was the second stage, the Renascence of the fifteenth 
 century, when the destruction of Constantinople hastened 
 the flow westward of Greek books and Greek scholars 
 which had been for some time in progress. And in the 
 latter part of the century the newly discovered printing 
 press sent out from Italy in their most glorious shape 
 most of the ancient authors, Greek as well as Latin. 
 
 But this work of restoration by itself tended to make a 
 pleasure-garden of what was once a busy city. It is not 
 therefore in the literary taste of the Renascence, nor in the 
 renewed enjoyment and expression of the beautiful in art 
 which quickly followed, that we should look for its chief 
 fruits. Precious as was the movement which gave the 
 world Raphael and Michelangelo, its wider and more 
 indirect results must count for most in our present 
 sketch. It gave men increased confidence in their native 
 powers and a determination to seek and inhabit worlds 
 of thought and action beyond the Church's sphere. It 
 inspired them not only to study and enjoy the structures 
 of ancient thought which had been revealed, but to build 
 new cities of their own on larger plans. 
 
 The return to Greece, which is the key-note of the 
 movement, suggests many interesting parallels and 
 touches many points of real indebtedness. In the new 
 movement Italy takes the place of ancient Greece. Again 
 an intellectual movement goes side by side with world- 
 activities, with adventures by sea, with geographical dis- 
 
 1543 L
 
 1 46 The Renascence and the New World 
 
 covery, with the eager political rivalry of independent 
 city-states. The north of Italy at the Renascence closely 
 recalls, as Freeman has shown us, the vigorous life of 
 the Hellenic cities in their prime. They have the same 
 intense local pride, the same dissensions, the same readi- 
 ness to recognize and reward beauty and effort in creative 
 thought. The art of the Renascence is primarily Italian 
 art, and the finest printed books, unequalled since, came 
 from the Venetian presses. The most original and con- 
 structive thinking, the work of Machiavelli, of Copernicus, 
 above all of Galileo, was done either by Italians or under 
 Italian influence. Columbus was a Genoese, and the 
 compass which guided him across the Atlantic had been 
 made a practicable instrument by Italian sailors early in 
 the fourteenth century. 
 
 Such many-sided activity, coupled with the similar 
 political conditions, takes the mind back inevitably to 
 Greece, and the comparison is a fruitful example of 
 historical analogy. We shall not follow it here, but 
 rather indicate the actual working of the old Greek leaven, 
 recovered and introduced into a new society, wider and 
 closer knit than the old, transformed as we have seen in 
 some essential points, but yet reproducing many features 
 of the old theocracies of Egypt and Asia from which 
 Greece sprang. 
 
 There was again, though in another shape and with 
 a nobler spirit latent within, the hardened crust 
 of religious forms and traditions, which, as of old, 
 awaited the irresistible impulse of free and consecutive 
 reason to break and give passage to fresh life. This was 
 the task of ancient Greece, and hence, when men began
 
 The Renascence and the New World 147 
 
 again at the Renascence to exercise freely their powers 
 of thought and action, they found themselves at every 
 point working where Greek workers had been before. 
 
 Church doctrine itself had of course been also moulded 
 largely by the ingenuity of Greek minds : but at the 
 Renascence men invoked the Greek spirit of an earlier age, 
 before philosophy had turned her back on nature, and the 
 Byzantine theologians had tied up affairs of state with the 
 finest threads they could spin from theological argument. 
 
 Examples of the debt to Greece abound in all the 
 special sciences which began to revive in the fifteenth 
 century ; we shall only notice here one or two aspects 
 of the indebtedness which have the widest bearing. The 
 name ' humanist ' itself which was borne by the scholars 
 of the Renascence, though a Latin word, has the ring 
 of Greek philosophy and training. Man's nature was 
 again to be considered in its completeness, its physical 
 and intellectual sides having due scope, as well as its 
 moral and religious needs. And on the moral side an 
 end was sought in the life of the citizen, sometimes also 
 in the life of individual pleasure, rather than in con- 
 formity to any formal religious rules, framed with an eye 
 on another world. Such a change in the direction of 
 discipline brought dangers and evil with it, but at its 
 best, as we see it in the educational system of Vittorino 
 da Feltre, it combined the strictness and reverence of 
 a sound Catholicism with the breadth of view and open- 
 mindedness of a new culture which was older than the 
 Church itself. Vittorino is a notable figure in the move- 
 ment, not for any originality in his ideas, but as a repre- 
 sentative man, combining both Latin and Greek culture 
 
 L 2
 
 148 The Renascence and the New World 
 
 and covering in his lifetime the later fourteenth and early 
 fifteenth centuries. He preserved in his school the old 
 knightly idea of physical training by hunting and martial 
 sports, but he added to it all that Greek and Latin letters 
 could at that time afford, and, by preferring mathematics 
 and astronomy to the schoolmen's logic, showed how 
 much nearer the humanists were to the Greek than to 
 the mediaeval scheme of knowledge. This was before 
 the printing press had spread the knowledge of Greek, 
 or the fugitives from a Mohammedan Constantinople had 
 increased the number of its apostles. The latter part 
 of the fifteenth century gives more abundant evidence, 
 in the nature of its art, in the spread of ' academies ', in 
 the translation and adaptation of Greek books. Johann 
 Miiller, a German who studied Greek in Italy, applied 
 his literary knowledge of Greek to the advancement of 
 science. He translated the works of Ptolemy and the 
 Conies of Apollonius into Latin, and returning to Nurem- 
 berg, founded an observatory, where he produced his 
 ' Ephemerides ', or nautical almanacs, based on Ptolemy, 
 which enabled the navigators of the succeeding years to 
 travel unknown seas. Later again than Miiller we have 
 Copernicus, the Pole, studying astronomy at Bologna, 
 and imbibing there the Pythagorean notions of the 
 sphericity and movement of the earth, to which he tells 
 us he owed the first glimpse of his own theory. 
 
 Thus by the end of the fifteenth century the reinfusion 
 of the old Greek spirit into Western Europe was in active 
 process, and we reach the year 1500, which, like so 
 many turning-points between the centuries, stands for 
 a real climax in human affairs. Gutenberg's printing
 
 The Renascence and the Nerv World 149 
 
 press, transferred to Italy and used in the service of the 
 humanist revival, had already, in the first fifty years of 
 its existence, issued all the leading classical authors, and 
 put in currency the vivifying ideas of Greek philosophers 
 and men of science. The work of the navigators had 
 achieved its crowning triumph, and Columbus had 
 brought back the news and some of the wealth of the 
 New World. Copernicus, teaching mathematics and 
 studying astronomy in Italy, had conceived his great idea, 
 which was to transform men's notion of the material 
 universe. And 1500 is midway in the life of Erasmus, 
 who more than any one embodies for us the views and 
 feelings of a wise, learned, and cautious man, surveying 
 the course of events at that critical moment with a heart 
 set on the progress of human happiness and knowledge. 
 The world was getting larger ; in extension, both East 
 and West were being brought into contact with Western 
 Europe, the old nursery of the highest civilization of the 
 globe, and, intensively, the growing mass of knowledge 
 was pressing on the shell in which the discipline of the 
 mediaeval church had encased both life and thought. 
 Cautious wisdom hoped that the old forms would yield 
 gradually and adapt themselves to the new growth. We 
 recognize now that larger forms were needed, and that 
 true continuity is to be found not in the history of any 
 political or religious organization, but in the strengthening 
 of the general social and spiritual force of mankind, in 
 the deepening of man's powers over nature, and in the 
 knitting closer of all the members and branches of man- 
 kind throughout the world. 
 
 But surveying the scene as Erasmus did, we too might
 
 1 5-0 Tht 
 
 well have hoped and worked for an issue free from the 
 loss and conflict of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
 turies, we might have thought that knowledge would 
 spread within the limits of the old order, and the world 
 be civilized according to the Catholic idea, with the 
 Pope as centre of spiritual and intellectual life, harmoniz- 
 ing the worldly ambitions of the temporal powers. Still 
 more, if any thinker in that age could have foreseen the 
 horrors of the religious wars, the rage for gold, the 
 devastation of the new lands in the West, he would 
 certainly have desired and striven to preserve some source 
 of moral and spiritual authority which might check the 
 evil. But when the evils happened, often in the worst 
 imaginable form, the check was found wanting. 
 
 It is fortunate for a ' progressive ' theory of history 
 that we are not required to believe that what happens 
 is always the best that could have happened. Looking 
 back now from an age when the whole planet has been 
 explored and knit together by steam and electricity, when 
 not the Church but its monopoly has been destroyed, 
 when a compact fabric of scientific knowledge stands 
 supreme in the intellectual world, we have not to ask 
 what might have been, nor how we might have desired 
 or forecast it, but what these three centuries of the 
 Renascence actually contributed to the results achieved. 
 
 Erasmus lived at the height of the crisis, on the high 
 dividing land from which the waters were flowing rapidly 
 into the ocean of modern life ; he could not discern all 
 the channels which that flood would take, though he 
 knew the main current and faced the future. If we take 
 another step forward, and ask what had been accomplished
 
 The Renascence and the New World ifi 
 
 by the beginning of the seventeenth century towards the 
 attainment of the modern goal, we may be able with 
 some clearness and certainty to distinguish a few large 
 features. We may put first, as Lord Acton does, the 
 discovery of the New World which preceded the out- 
 burst of science in modern times, as the colonies and trade 
 of the Greeks did in the ancient world. Next in order 
 of the results of the Renascence understood, of course, 
 in its widest sense would come the disruption of the 
 Church, accompanied, on the one hand, by a strong revival 
 of spiritual life, both in the dismembered Church and in 
 the new churches formed from it, and, on the other hand, 
 by an increase of national and state authority, especially 
 under the leadership of vigorous monarchs such as the 
 Tudor house in England. Last, but ultimately most 
 important of the results, would be the foundation, by the 
 beginning of the seventeenth century, of modern science, 
 achieved by recovering the work of the Greeks, and 
 adding to it a stricter and wider use of observation. 
 
 It will be seen that all these movements have a close 
 interrelation and common roots in the general awakening 
 of men's minds in Western Europe, and all of them tend, 
 though by various courses, to the common end of a united 
 human force, subduing and civilizing the world. 
 
 The voyages of discovery which led, with Columbus, 
 to a New World at the end of the fifteenth century, had 
 been proceeding with increased skill and daring for over 
 a hundred years. They began with the Crusades, and 
 had in the earlier stages much of the crusading spirit. 
 The north-west corner of Africa was the spot where the 
 navigators, who were afterwards to reach India and
 
 ij-2, The Renascence and the New World 
 
 America, first learnt their business. Here Genoese and 
 Portuguese seamen disputed with the Barbary Moors for 
 the glory of the Cross and the conquest of the Guinea 
 coast. This coast was to the Saracens the ' Bilad Ghana ', 
 or the Land of Wealth, and the wealth consisted in the 
 first instance of negro slaves, for whom the ships of Prince 
 Henry of Portugal pressed down the coast and watched 
 the shores. But behind the kidnapping of the blacks 
 there was in Prince Henry's mind the larger idea, partly 
 religious and partly political, of founding a great Christian 
 dependency for Portugal on the banks of the Senegal. 
 In 1445 his ships at last reached that point, the 
 furthest aimed at in the earlier period, discovered a great 
 river flowing from the east, and brought back a good 
 cargo of negroes to their master. It was just at the 
 moment when the Christians of Constantinople were 
 making their last desperate appeal to Western Europe 
 for help against the Turks, and Gutenberg's press was 
 issuing the first printed document we know of, an indul- 
 gence from the Pope for all who would volunteer for 
 service in the East. 
 
 But Prince Henry's more lucrative crusade had also 
 a religious link with the East. It was supposed that the 
 Senegal was a western branch of the same waters which 
 flowed to the Mediterranean by the Nile, and that by 
 this means communication might be set up with the 
 Christians of Abyssinia, and a great Christian kingdom 
 established in the south, to balance and hem in the 
 Mohammedans of the north of Africa. 
 
 So far the wider notion of circumnavigating Africa 
 and trading with India by sea had not occurred. But
 
 "The Renascence and the Nerv World 1^3 
 
 in the forty years which followed a great change came. 
 There was a continual extension of the trading spirit 
 and a growing boldness in navigation, and the study of 
 the Greeks, helped by the printing press, placed better 
 science at the service of seamen, who had by now acquired 
 sufficient confidence to make use of it. These forty years 
 saw the Portuguese push further and further south, adding 
 an ' Ivory ' and a ' Gold ' coast to their slave-raiding 
 centres, and varying their sources of wealth. At last, in 
 1485, Bartholomew Diaz, partly by accident, partly by 
 the bold facing of unknown seas, rounded the Cape and 
 looked across the Indian Ocean, just six years before 
 Columbus set sail from Palos. 
 
 All through the century which preceded the most 
 famous voyage in history, and especially in the latter 
 part of it, after the invention of printing, the science of 
 geography and the art of map-drawing had been develop- 
 ing rapidly, and the recovery of Ptolemy's works was the 
 most powerful stimulus. The knowledge of them in the 
 West began early in the century, and various translations 
 and adaptations, and extensions of the maps which they 
 contained, were made, until in 1474 Toscanelli produced 
 the chart which was to suggest and guide the voyage 
 across the Atlantic. Nothing could illustrate better the 
 difference which the restoration of Greek science effected 
 in mediaeval ideas, than to compare the projection of 
 Ptolemy, based on the measurements of Hipparchus, with 
 the maps of the Middle Ages, such as the very curious 
 and complete one preserved in Hereford Cathedral. In 
 the former, if we correct one serious mistake in the length 
 of a degree of longitude, we have a substantially accurate
 
 delineation of the world as known at the time, set out 
 on a consistent plan based on measurements of latitude 
 and longitude. Here are the essentials of a scientific 
 treatment of the subject. In the latter we have an 
 arrangement, partly ideal, partly picturesque, of all the 
 places and people whom the author happened to have 
 heard of, and to think of interest, circling round Jerusalem 
 as the divine centre of the world. It was not until the 
 positive had replaced the picturesque as the guide to 
 knowledge that the age of great discoveries could begin. 
 Columbus, as we know, accomplished his task and finished 
 his days in the firm belief that he had reached the eastern 
 shore of Asia : but the new truth that possessed him far 
 outweighed his error. He realized for the first time, and 
 lived in the belief, that the earth being a sphere, you 
 are bound to come at last to the east if you go far enough 
 west, and that the right direction is to follow the latitude 
 in which your goal is placed. 
 
 But the crusading spirit had still a large share in 
 Columbus. The Spanish sovereigns were reducing the 
 last stronghold of the Moors when Columbus was solicit- 
 ing the help of one European monarch after another, and 
 it was not till after Granada fell, in January 1492, that 
 Columbus received his commission. Then he went out 
 under the flag of a united and triumphant Catholic 
 Spain to subdue fresh lands and people to the faith. The 
 coincidence brought Spain into the field and broke the 
 monopoly of the Portuguese, who had been playing with 
 Columbus's plans and followed his expedition with jealous 
 eyes. Thus in another sense the voyage was a turning- 
 point, for it marks the change to exploration of which
 
 The Renascence and the New World 175- 
 
 the search for gold and competitive commerce were the 
 dominating motives. The wealth of the Spice Islands 
 in the East, and the flood of gold from Mexico and Peru, 
 weighed down the balance, and Columbus became the 
 last of the Crusaders as he was the first of the great 
 scientific seamen. In 1493 the Pope was asked to define 
 the new sphere of oceanic enterprise between the leading 
 competitors, Portugal and Spain, and the line drawn 
 gave Brazil and all east of it to Portugal, and the West 
 to Spa ; n. 
 
 The next century was to see another form of arbitra- 
 ment, a fight for power at sea between Christian nations, 
 fiercer than the old crusades. 
 
 After Columbus's first two voyages discoveries followed 
 in quick succession. Within four years the mainland had 
 been touched, and Cabot, another Genoese, who had 
 independently of Columbus conceived the idea of reaching 
 Asia by the Atlantic, had discovered Newfoundland. In 
 the same year as Cabot's voyage Vasco da Gama had 
 crossed the Indian Ocean and set up the Portuguese flag 
 at Calicut. In three years more Brazil was occupied, 
 and in 1516 the Pacific was sighted from a peak in Darien. 
 In 1521 Cortes entered Mexico, and in the following 
 year Francis the First, anxious that France should have 
 her share, commissioned an Italian seaman to survey the 
 coast of North America from Florida to Newfoundland 
 in his name. The rush was breathless, and the effect on 
 men's minds at home widespread and profound. In 
 1516, the year in which a European eye first looked on 
 the Pacific, Sir Thomas More published his Utopia, the 
 narrative of an imaginary traveller who had stayed behind
 
 i ?6 The Renascence and the New World 
 
 in America after Vespucci's voyage of a few years before? 
 and had made his way home by the western seas, as 
 Magellan actually did six years afterwards. On his way 
 home by this untraversed sea, More's Hythlodaeus dis- 
 covers an unknown island, where men were living a happy 
 communistic life, following learning and eschewing war, 
 free from the evils and superstitions of the Old World. 
 It is the spirit of the literary Renascence at its best, 
 critical and awake, stimulated by the new discoveries, 
 but rather looking back to Plato, as Bacon's Utopia of 
 a hundred years later looks forward to the future and the 
 triumph of modern science. 
 
 Before Bacon wrote, the great awakening had gone 
 much further, and had brought some results in its train 
 which would have surprised the men of 1500. The bulk 
 of the wealth derived from the new discoveries went, by 
 the accident of Columbus's commission and the Pope's 
 award, to Spain. Already, before the gold and silver 
 of Mexico and Peru had begun to flow into the Spanish 
 coffers, the disruption of the Church had taken place, 
 and the Spanish king, Charles V, who was at the head 
 of the largest domains in Europe, as well as Holy Roman 
 Emperor, became by conviction and position the cham- 
 pion of the old order. The spread of knowledge and 
 the peaceful reformation from within, which Erasmus 
 had worked for, had proved impracticable, and most of 
 northern Europe, with Luther as the national voice of 
 Germany, was arrayed outside and against the Church. 
 Such was the state of Europe when the wealth of the 
 New World was thrown into the scale. The position of 
 France and England was as yet undecided. It seemed
 
 The Renascence and the New World 1^7 
 
 as if the hand of God had blessed the last crusaders, and 
 was supporting with inexhaustible resources the cause 
 of the Holy Church and Holy Empire. But the event 
 was otherwise. The goal of a common human society, 
 working together for the conquest of nature and the 
 improvement of life, was not to be reached so easily : 
 for this voyage it was not sufficient to take a straight line 
 across the untravelled sea, sure that if the one direction 
 could be preserved, you would come to land at last. 
 
 Ultimately the New World was to prove one of the 
 strongest links of human unity, lying, as it does, geo- 
 graphically midway between Western Europe and the 
 oldest civilizations of the East, and affording in its wide 
 expanses opportunity for diverse races and religions to 
 shake off readily any traditions and prejudices which had 
 proved obnoxious in old surroundings, and to settle with 
 amicable freedom and sufficient space. But immediately 
 it added fresh matter for dispute to the rival powers 
 of the awakening and aggressive West. 
 
 Both France and England were inevitably drawn to 
 challenge the overbearing strength of Spain, and in 
 England the fight was more decisive, for her firmer stand 
 on the religious question made the issue appeal to every 
 element in the national spirit. The story fills the latter 
 part of the sixteenth century, and remains the most 
 stirring epoch in English annals, only surpassed by the 
 story of Holland, who made her own challenge and won 
 her own victory over the common foe of freedom in the 
 decade before the great Armada. In Holland the struggle 
 was more heroic, for a country no larger than Yorkshire 
 was in revolt against its hereditary masters, the masters
 
 iy8 The Renascence and the Nero World 
 
 also of the wealth of the New World. Philip the Second 
 who had succeeded Charles as head of the Spanish 
 dominions, just three years before Elizabeth came to the 
 throne of England, continued the policy of his father 
 with a smaller nature and blinder fanaticism. He had 
 less capacity for understanding the beliefs and ideals of 
 others, more unreasoning obstinacy and foolish confidence 
 in the power of mere money. The Dutch revolt under 
 William of Orange gave to the modern world the same 
 example of national freedom in government which the 
 Greeks had given to the ancients. It was indeed in some 
 ways a greater feat than the Greek repulse of Persia, 
 for the Persians had never been the acknowledged rulers 
 of Hellas and the Greeks were better able to defend 
 themselves at sea than the Dutch. It was a more dis- 
 interested fight than our own, for conquest to us meant 
 sea-power and a share of the Spanish trade, even more 
 than freedom, and Spanish galleons were first and fore- 
 most treasure-ships. 
 
 In 1584 William fell by the bullet of an assassin sent 
 out by Philip, but the freedom of Holland had been 
 won ; and four years later the defeat of the Spanish 
 Armada dealt the death-blow to Spanish power at sea. 
 
 France, under the ambitious leadership of Francis the 
 First, had been anxious to secure her share of the New 
 World. Francis had claimed the coast of North America, 
 which he had surveyed, and called the country New 
 France. French settlements were attempted on the 
 banks of the St. Lawrence, and by French Protestants 
 on the coast of Brazil. Frenchmen, too, had taken 
 a share in the plunder of Spanish treasure-ships. But
 
 The Renascence and the New World 1^9 
 
 the religious wars which fill the latter part of the century 
 in French history postponed her Elizabethan period for 
 another generation. It was not till after William of 
 Orange and Elizabeth had won power and national free- 
 dom for their countries that France found a ruler com- 
 parable to them in Henry the Fourth. Then at the end 
 of the century France took her due place in that balance, 
 or concert, of European states which was emerging from 
 the tumult of the last three centuries as the modern 
 equivalent for the mediaeval empire with its outworn 
 theory and shadowy chief. 
 
 This was the issue of the barbarian settlements which 
 had broken up the Roman Empire in the fourth and 
 fifth centuries. The Renascence, with its weakening 
 of the Church, its conflict of the national chiefs with 
 the Pope, the increase of trade and consequent rise of 
 a middle class, and the quickening of national rivalry by 
 the new wealth and settlement of new lands east and 
 west, had brought the slowly moving process to rapid 
 fruition. The change was equally marked in all the 
 leading nations of Western Europe, Germany and Italy 
 alone remaining for later consolidation. In them the 
 mediaeval conflict of Emperor and Pope had made rents 
 in the national life which took longer to repair. But 
 France, Spain, and England, however much they differed 
 on religion, agreed in rallying more closely than before 
 round their royal house, and constituting at that period 
 a real national unity which has never since been broken 
 up, and appears to us now to be a natural type of human 
 association, the model of those which have arisen in later 
 years.
 
 i do The Renascence and the New World 
 
 The fact is of great importance in tracing the growth 
 of human unity, equal perhaps to that of adding new 
 continents to European ken. For we cannot imagine 
 any firm and consistent relations between men over large 
 tracts of our planet, without stable compact groups in 
 smaller areas. It may seem a truism, but, like many 
 truisms of to-day, it has been established by ages of 
 struggle against manifold difficulties. The system of 
 nationalities, as we know it, is the result of all the historical 
 process of the past, and is still in course of change. But 
 the Renascence was a marked stage in the development. 
 Nothing had been thought of before or could have 
 been thought of comparable to the ' Great Design ' of 
 a Concert of independent States, a federal European 
 Republic, which was attributed to Henry the Fourth at 
 the beginning of the seventeenth century. It implied 
 the transformation of the mediaeval conception of one 
 empire and one church into something much more elastic, 
 offering more scope for variety, both in government and 
 religion. It arose directly from the revival of Greco- 
 Roman notions of government, in a world where the 
 Middle Ages had impressed a real unity of character and 
 purpose on populations now long settled and attached to 
 a definite fatherland. 
 
 The end of the fifteenth century and the sixteenth 
 produced in the three great Western states sovereigns of 
 remarkable vigour and force of character. This was, 
 of course, partly accidental, but largely also the working 
 out of feudal and mediaeval conditions, hastened by the 
 new factors which the Renascence introduced. The dis- 
 orders of the feudal system, illustrated at home by the
 
 The Renascence and the Nen> World idi 
 
 Wars of the Roses, and internationally by the Hundred 
 Years' War, came to a climax and a clearance towards 
 the end of the fifteenth century. In England the exhaus- 
 tion of the country and of the old nobility made the way 
 easy for the Tudors, and their burden light. In France 
 at the same moment Louis the Eleventh, a king of excep- 
 tional ability and astuteness, was subduing one by one 
 the insubordinate fiefs which had divided the country 
 and let in the English at the beginning of the century. 
 In Spain the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella united 
 Aragon and Castile, and the united kingdom added to 
 its prestige by expelling the last remnant of the nation's 
 traditional enemy. These events were synchronous in 
 the different countries, and, in each case and others like 
 them, were accompanied by an active advance in the 
 administration of justice and the foundation of a better 
 centralized and stronger government. 
 
 This was the general position when at the crisis of the 
 period, about 1500, the two dramatic events occurred 
 which reacted so powerfully on the sequel. The dis- 
 coveries East and West, and above all in the New World, 
 further stimulated the ambitions of the newly strength- 
 ened monarchs, and brought them fresh wealth and 
 territory. And in 1521, as Cortes was entering Mexico, 
 Luther burnt the Papal Bull and the Canon Law at 
 Wittenberg. 
 
 We noticed in the last chapter the doctrine of the 
 Church only in so far as it seemed to affect the discipline 
 and general direction of men's minds which the Middle 
 Ages were imposing on Western Europe. In the same 
 way the differences of doctrine which became acute at 
 
 1543 M
 
 1 6 z The Renascence and the New World 
 
 the Reformation will only concern us here as strengthen- 
 ing the working of the other conditions which we have 
 described, and giving added force to the revival of energy 
 which was breaking out at every point. 
 
 The story of the Dutch Republic and of Elizabethan 
 England shows how strongly reforming zeal fortified the 
 spirits of the rising nationalities ; the next century has 
 the shining example of Sweden, and we can hardly think 
 of Germany as a nation without Luther. But it would 
 be a serious error to limit the operation of this cause 
 to countries which championed the Protestant side when 
 the field was set. Like all great movements in a connected 
 environment it worked variously, but with a certain effect 
 on all parts of the area. France, which was for years in 
 the balance, though it found its place ultimately under 
 the politic Henry on the Catholic side, was no longer 
 Catholic in the same sense. The Church became more 
 national, the crown more powerful, and the national 
 spirit was heightened by the struggle. Even Spain, the 
 protagonist of the Catholic cause, became less dependent 
 on papal authority after the movement than before. In 
 this respect, then, we may trace a general effect, a 
 strengthening of the national units of the allied Europe 
 of our dreams. But this is not all. The Reformation, 
 regarded as a deepening of the religious life and a moral 
 and spiritual purification, touched Catholic and Protes- 
 tant alike. Despite the vices of a later day, the Restora- 
 tion in England and the Regency in France, there was, 
 after the outbreak of the Reformation, a new and purer 
 spiritual life, a more self-denying zeal in Catholic com- 
 munities, as well as Puritan, which has never died out
 
 The Renascence and the New World 163 
 
 since. The revival and unrest of the Renascence found 
 in this its proper check, in a revival of another kind ; 
 for Xavier and Borromeo, Fox and Bunyan, though 
 divided in name, belong essentially to one family, the 
 children of St. Bernard and St. Francis. 
 
 It was an age of conflict, to be long continued on 
 many fields. The greater is the need, therefore, to note 
 the common features, the continuity with the past, and 
 the new links forging for the future, for it is by these 
 elements that humanity will grow and gain in strength, 
 when the Thirty Years' War and the St. Bartholomews 
 of all parties and creeds have been expiated. And per- 
 haps of all the connecting and organic features in the 
 three centuries of the Renascence, the most remarkable 
 was the final rally and revival on the Catholic side, which 
 is commonly called the Counter-Reformation. This has 
 a twofold aspect, both implying a profound community 
 and continuity of feeling in spite of apparent divisions. 
 On the one hand, the Catholic reformation showed the 
 operation in both camps of a similar spirit, seeking a truer 
 moral and religious life. On the other hand, the mass 
 of the population, especially in the southern countries 
 which had been most completely Latinized by the Roman 
 Empire, demonstrated the real vitality of the old beliefs 
 and organization against the powerful motives which 
 drew both kings and nations away from Rome at the 
 beginning of the struggle. France, the central country, 
 was the crucial case. Whereas William and Elizabeth 
 needed a strong and definite Protestantism to gain the 
 full allegiance of their people, Henry was compelled to 
 win Paris by a Mass. In the next century, when, after 
 
 M 2
 
 i <*4 The Renascence and the New World 
 
 the devastating war in Germany, the balance of popula- 
 tion and territory was finally struck, it was found to be 
 in favour of the old religion. 
 
 The year 1600 serves very well for a pause and a 
 review, for by that time we can see something of the 
 accomplishment as well as the crisis of the Renascence. 
 The main lines of the political and religious settlement 
 had been by then determined, though half the population 
 of Germany were to be destroyed and her progress put 
 back for more than a century in adjusting the details. 
 By 1600, too, the Renascence had justified its special 
 task of setting again on foot the old creative spirit of the 
 Greeks in science and philosophy and all the arts of life 
 and beauty. The new vigour which had come into the 
 world had already revealed another unsuspected hemi- 
 sphere, and pointed to the true place of our planet in 
 the celestial system. It had already in art produced the 
 finest expressions of the ancient ideal working through 
 Christian minds. In ways of life and speech, the con- 
 fidence of action and the capacity to enjoy, it had already 
 wrought more change in the civilized world than any 
 period between the Greeks in their prime and the age 
 of inventions which was still to come. The definite 
 construction of modern science comes somewhat later, 
 when the men of the seventeenth century take up the 
 threads, and work out long trains of systematic reasoning 
 in physical science and philosophy. In 1600 Kepler and 
 Galileo had begun, but not completed, their discoveries, 
 and even thirty years later Galileo was compelled on 
 pain of death or imprisonment to adjure his belief in 
 the Copernican theory, And in 1600 it was still possible
 
 The Renascence and the Nen> World 16? 
 
 for Giordano Bruno to be burnt alive for proclaiming 
 a new philosophy, based on Copernicus, which would 
 sweep away the old scholasticism and build up another 
 conception of the universe, as philosophers have been 
 more slowly succeeding in doing ever since. The begin- 
 nings had been made ; Tycho's observations had laid 
 the foundation for Kepler ; Gilbert had given the first 
 scientific sketch of magnetism and electricity. But the 
 more comprehensive discoveries were yet to come, and 
 Bacon had still to sound the trumpet for a general 
 advance. 
 
 It was an age of new life and promise for the future. 
 The greatness of the old world had been discovered, and 
 new wealth, new continents, new ideas were crowding 
 in, which raised high hopes and pointed forward to 
 a modern world which might equal, and in power and 
 size must far surpass, the glory of the old. 
 
 The grandest figure, standing, as Dante did, at the 
 close of the period which he most perfectly exemplifies, 
 remains to find his due place here, before we pass to 
 consider the sequel of the great awakening in its more 
 far-reaching effects on society and thought. The year 
 1600 is a landmark in Shakespeare's life, nearer to his 
 maturity than to his youth, but midway in his richest 
 harvest-time. He, more than any. one, reflects all that 
 was best in that age of ardent feelings, vigorous life, 
 and agitating thought ; and he transmutes all into the 
 pure gold of immortal and universal art. He gives us 
 the enthusiasm without the party strife, movement and 
 action without destruction, a mind open to the new 
 advance, but with fullest sympathy for all the past. He
 
 1 66 The Renascence and the New World 
 
 sees the simple facts of life, hallowed and surrounded, 
 as men were used to see them, by kingly authority and 
 religious rites. The Church, the friars, the crown, the 
 sceptre, are as sacred to him as they were to all the 
 multitude who accepted them with affection and imme- 
 morial reverence. He is Catholic to the Catholics, patriot 
 in Elizabethan England, philosopher in his deep question- 
 ings on the nature and purpose of our being. 
 
 And above all there rises the characteristic note of the 
 Renascence, proclaiming the supremacy of that ' godlike 
 reason which looks before and after ' and must not ' fust 
 unused '....' What a piece of work is man ! how noble 
 in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form and moving 
 how express and admirable ! in action how like an angel ! 
 in apprehension how like a god ! the beauty of the 
 world ! the paragon of animals ! ' 
 
 It is a note which comes from a past two thousand 
 years away, and when we hear it, the famous chorus of 
 the Antigone rings again.
 
 8 
 THE RISE OF MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 If one were to endeavour to renew and enlarge the power and 
 empire of mankind over the universe, such ambition (if it may be 
 so termed) is both more sound and more noble than the other. Now 
 the empire of man over things is founded on the arts and sciences 
 alone, for nature is only to be commanded by obeying her. 
 
 LORD BACOX.
 
 SHAKESPEARE summed up for us the spirit of the 
 Renascence at its height ; Shakespeare's greatest English 
 contemporary is the best herald of the coming age. For 
 Bacon, too, stands exactly on the dividing line between 
 the centuries, and, while he shares to the full the en- 
 thusiasm and the sense of power which the age of dis- 
 covery had inspired in western Europe, he adds to these 
 the two fundamental traits which distinguish the great 
 founders of modern science in the seventeenth century. 
 One is the critical spirit, determined to sweep away the 
 false Aristotelianism and mere authority which obstructed 
 the progress of effective knowledge : the other, the new im- 
 pulse to turn to nature as the source and material of truth, 
 and on the truth of nature to build a system for the general 
 amelioration of mankind. Bacon's voice was a trumpet call 
 to both the destructive and constructive tasks, and, though 
 in power of thought and in definite contributions to science 
 he was far surpassed by many of his contemporaries and 
 successors, we may trace his influence in all the sequel. 
 
 The new movement, however, was to grow round 
 definite and constructive ideas, which would knit men's 
 minds together as the first discoveries of geometric truth 
 had built up the early structure of science in the minds 
 of the Greeks. Bacon, with all his prophetic zeal, was 
 too much distracted by other interests to take a share 
 in the actual building. He was distracted by his erudition 
 and his literary gifts, and still more fatally by the interests 
 of wealth and worldly success. The actual builders were 
 men of intense and unbroken devotion to the pursuit of
 
 The Rise of Modern Science 169 
 
 truth. Something had appeared again in the world like 
 that first passion for inquiry, that community of effort 
 in science, which bound together the sages of Ionia, and 
 formed the brotherhood of Pythagoras. From the six- 
 teenth century onwards there was again a class of men 
 in Europe nearer akin to the old Greek philosophers than 
 any who had been seen for nearly two thousand years, 
 men full of interest in the working of the world around 
 them, facing varied problems with equal zest, and accept- 
 ing no solution but such as their own intelligence could 
 approve. In their close relationship among themselves, 
 as well as in their openmindedness and breadth of interest, 
 these new philosophers recall the old. They corresponded 
 copiously, they issued intellectual challenges and scruti- 
 nized eagerly all new ideas. They sought out one another 
 and founded societies, and, with occasional quarrels and 
 disputes as to the priority or independence of their work, 
 they were united in the common hope that the new 
 fabric of knowledge, growing from their labours, would 
 increase after them and be of inestimable value to mankind. 
 The pioneers in this work, as in that of the revival 
 of learning, arose in Italy. For Italy, as we have seen, 
 offered the first theatre in the modern world for the 
 spirit of ancient Greece to reappear and play her part of 
 intellectual leader ; and the new science was historically, 
 in Bacon's phrase, a ' renewal and an enlargement ' of 
 the science of the Greeks. It was in Italy that Copernicus 
 had lived and studied and taught. There Leonardo da 
 Vinci had applied his insatiable genius to all branches of 
 art and science. Bruno had died there in expiation of 
 the boldness of his new philosophy, the first complete
 
 170 The Rise of Modern Science 
 
 scheme to dispute the sovereignty of Aristotle. And in 
 the first decades of the century of science Galileo had 
 laid in Italy the foundation stones of modern physics 
 and mechanics by adding a new experimental method 
 to correct and extend the ancient mathematics. But 
 when Italy had rekindled the beacon, there were many 
 heights around to take up and pass on the fire. This 
 the long process of the Roman and Catholic incorpora- 
 tion had secured. France, England, and Germany were 
 now ready, and Bacon and Descartes, Newton and Leib- 
 nitz were to spread the light world-wide. 
 
 It was an international work, within the area of that 
 smaller progressive world, which Greek intellect, sup- 
 ported by Roman power, had divided from the rest of 
 mankind. Within this area it was shared in common by 
 many minds in all the leading nations ; and at every 
 step forward, from Galileo's telescope to Darwin's theory 
 of evolution, it will be found that several were busy on 
 the same problem at the same time, and often the light 
 flashed on more than one independently and simul- 
 taneously. The joint effects, which we are now after 
 three hundred years beginning to realize, have given to 
 the west of Europe, and its off-shoots across the Atlantic, 
 the definite primacy among the nations of the earth. 
 In these countries, from the Renascence onwards, the 
 development of human knowledge, and the resulting 
 power and wealth, have proceeded with accelerating 
 speed. Every year the task has become more urgent of 
 holding together these growing forces, and subordinating 
 them to the common good. 
 
 The movement will appear, more directly than any
 
 The Rise of Modern Science 171 
 
 other part of our story, to fit into the evolution of that 
 collective human force which is growing and compassing 
 the conquest of the world. What can be said about it in 
 these few pages will deal with those aspects which have 
 a special interest from this point of view. It will be 
 seen how closely the different parts and actors in the 
 movement hang together, forming a model, as well as 
 a stimulus, to human co-operation, how firmly the whole 
 was rooted in the past, in spite of many outward symp- 
 toms of severance and revolt. The scientific method 
 which was now evolved will appear in its essence near 
 akin to that supreme social agent among earlier men, 
 language, of which this special value was noticed in the 
 second chapter. And the applications and concrete effects 
 of the new method will form a large element in all the 
 sequel, from the industrial revolution onwards, wherein 
 that mechanical phase of scientific knowledge which was 
 settled in the seventeenth century, has already enabled men 
 to utilize natural forces and modify their own way of living 
 to a degree unexampled and undreamt of in earlier ages. 
 The essential characteristics of this development of 
 science were sufficiently well understood by many of 
 those who were actually engaged in promoting it. In 
 the full swing of the movement, while Newton was 
 meditating as a youth on the geometry of Descartes and 
 the Arithmetica Infinitorum of Wallis, a meeting of men 
 of science, following on several in Oxford, was held in 
 London, at Gresham College, in 1660, which virtually 
 founded the Royal Society. In the first journal of the 
 Society there is a memorandum, dated November 28, 
 which states that ' amongst other matters that were
 
 172 The Rise of Modern Science 
 
 discoursed of, something was offered about a designe of 
 founding a Colledge for the promoting of Physico- 
 Mathematicall Experimentall Learning '. This expresses 
 exactly in three words the three essential qualities of 
 the first modern scientific movement, before biology had 
 arisen to claim separate treatment by the Society and 
 a dominant interest in the world of thought. The new 
 learning, or science, which the Society set out to en- 
 courage in the seventeenth century, was to rest on 
 experiment, but its main object was to connect the pro- 
 cesses of nature with mathematical law. In its object 
 it was following, extending, and improving the methods 
 of the Greeks ; by applying experiment it added that 
 necessary condition, for want of which the physics of 
 the Greeks had remained abortive, and they were limited 
 to geometry and the beginnings of statics and astronomy. 
 While the new scientific movement has this capital 
 advantage over the ancient in point of method, in point 
 of subject-matter it offers both a significant analogy and 
 a significant difference. For two hundred years, from the 
 Copernican controversy till after the death of Newton, 
 the elaboration of mathematics was the leading feature 
 of modern science and its conspicuous success. This was 
 in conjunction with astronomy and physics, which were 
 gradually brought within the scope of the improved 
 methods of measurement : and it was astronomy that 
 first attracted the inquirer in modern times and estab- 
 lished his mechanical laws, just as it had implanted the 
 first notions of ordered sequence in the primitive and 
 ancient world. The mechanics of the celestial bodies 
 have thus played the decisive part in the formation of
 
 The Rise of Modern Science 1 7 3 
 
 our scientific ideas ; and the progress of discovery has 
 been from the mass, those greatest masses which attract 
 and dominate our vision, to the infinitely small, the 
 particle of physics and chemistry, about which our real 
 knowledge seems only beginning in recent years. But 
 modern science, starting again with astronomy, advanced 
 at once to an entirely new position : it is here that it 
 differs so significantly from the ancient. The new 
 mechanics are dynamical and involve the reduction of 
 problems of movement and growth to mathematical law. 
 Ancient science, and, on the whole, ancient society, did 
 not advance beyond the beginnings of statics, the first 
 notions of balance in mechanics, and order in the state. 
 Modern science begins with a law of motion and is crowned 
 by the conception of an ordered progress in history. 
 
 We will begin our sketch, as the story began, with 
 astronomy. 
 
 It was remarked in Roman times l that the establish- 
 ment of astronomy by the Greeks had given a sense of 
 order and security to the public mind, and allayed super- 
 stitious fears. This process had been going on for 
 ages before the Greeks, above all in those millenniums 
 of Egyptian and Babylonian history, when the priests 
 began to record with some rough accuracy the regular 
 positions of the brightest of the heavenly bodies. It was 
 thus that the stars in their courses first gave man the idea 
 of seeking for other uniformities in the complex and chang- 
 ing tangle of the world below. They were the first great 
 instance which he observed of order in external nature 
 beyond man's will, and they impressed the lesson on him 
 1 See chapter iv, pp. 88 and 89.
 
 174 The Rise of Modern Science 
 
 in a hundred ways. They taught him on the plains of Chal- 
 daea to measure time, they led Hipparchus to trigonometry 
 and Ptolemy to geography. Now with the re-awakening of 
 the western mind they were to illustrate the reign of law 
 and the scope of a co-ordinating intellect on a scale tran- 
 scending all the known limits of magnitude and distance. 
 Newton, the greatest name in this co-ordinating work, 
 gained from his own rival Leibnitz the highest eulogy 
 ever paid to a man of science. ' Taking mathematics,' 
 said Leibnitz, ' from the beginning of the world to the 
 times when Newton lived, what he had done was much 
 the better half.' Even if we went as far as that, it would 
 still be necessary, from the historical point of view, which 
 is after all only the point of view of complete truth, 
 to recognize the fact, that Newton, the greatest founder 
 of mathematical mechanics, comes as the last of an 
 inseparable series of observers and speculators, who all 
 busied themselves mainly about the phenomena of the 
 heavens. Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, 
 Newton, not one of these names can be dissociated from 
 the discovery of the greatest of all laws. Copernicus, 
 starting, as he tells us, from an old Greek idea that the 
 earth itself, like all the heavenly bodies, revolved round 
 some central fire, set on foot one of the two most 
 momentous scientific controversies which have ever raged. 
 It lasted over a hundred years, and only disappeared at 
 last before the accumulation of evidence, binding together 
 terrestrial and celestial facts, which in the hands of 
 Galileo, Kepler, and Newton showed irresistibly one 
 great system, acting, broadly speaking, as Copernicus had 
 surmised, but on a far vaster scale and by virtue of a more
 
 The Rise of Modern Science 175- 
 
 universal principle than he had conceived. It is, indeed, 
 the coincidence of these proofs, the fact that Kepler, by 
 using the conic sections of the Greeks, was able to explain 
 the revolution of the planets, and that Newton combined 
 Galileo's law of falling bodies with the movement of the 
 spheres, that will appeal to us most in making this study 
 of the growth of human unity. It illustrates, as we shall 
 see later, the essence of scientific method as a whole. 
 The steps in the proof are of extraordinary interest, and 
 show the natural co-operation of several independent 
 minds, working consecutively to attain the one simplest 
 and most consistent explanation of a vast number of 
 hitherto uncorrelated facts. 
 
 Copernicus's hypothesis of a circle for the revolution of 
 the planets was doubtless the first rough approximation 
 which would occur to the mind : it had behind it the 
 unbroken tradition of every system of representing the 
 heavenly movements and was hallowed by the meta- 
 physical notion that the circle was the ' most perfect ' 
 of all lines. Kepler, who came to the problem fortified 
 by the exact discipline and rich stores of observation of 
 Tycho, discarded the circle, with all its epicycles and 
 eccentrics, and tried the ellipse. It was his first discovery 
 and the first real simplification of the problem, which 
 had been confused by artificial corrections of the original 
 inaccuracy. It led almost immediately to his second law, 
 that the straight line joining the planet to the sun sweeps 
 out equal areas in any two equal intervals of time. In 
 this second law he dealt with the variation in the 
 rate of motion of the planet, and, finding it move faster 
 when near the sun and more slowly when away from it,
 
 176 The Rise of Modern Science 
 
 brought us a long stage further towards the final solu- 
 tion which was to be reached by the joint labours of 
 Galileo and Newton. The two laws, with a full history 
 of his inquiry, were published by Kepler in 1609, just 
 at the moment when Galileo was making his first observa- 
 tions with the newly-discovered telescope. 
 
 The telescope, like so many capital inventions, was hit 
 on almost simultaneously by several minds : a spectacle- 
 maker in Holland first made the discovery effective. 
 Galileo was at the time professor of mathematics at 
 Padua. It was nearly twenty years since he gave his 
 crucial challenge to scholastic science at Pisa, and he had 
 become in the meantime the leading teacher and man 
 of science in Italy, With only a hint of the Dutch 
 invention to help him, he set to work at once and made 
 a telescope himself, magnifying to three diameters, and 
 had soon improved it to the extent of thirty-three. 
 Through this instrument he was the first inhabitant of 
 our planet to see the mountains and ' seas ' of the moon, 
 the phases of Venus, the spots on the sun, and the satel- 
 lites of Jupiter. The next year, 1610, he published his 
 results to the world in the Sidereus Nuntius, and became 
 the most famous man of science in Europe. Twenty- 
 eight years later, old and blind and still under the ban 
 of the Inquisition, he received in Florence a visit from 
 the poet of English Puritanism, himself to fall on ' evil 
 days and evil tongues '> and sit for years in darkness. 
 
 If thought is a battlefield, Galileo had made one of its 
 most decisive movements. It stirred the imagination 
 and extended the outlook more than any other discovery, 
 and it did not appeal to the lower or irrelevant passions
 
 The Rise of Modern Science 177 
 
 which the New Worlds of the navigators had aroused. 
 These new worlds offered only intellectual conquests. The 
 first victory was gained by a man, and in an age, capable of 
 pressing it home and deriving full benefit from the success. 
 Every point was shown to have a bearing on the Coper- 
 nican controversy, and though Galileo professed, in his 
 Two Chief Systems of the World, to offer an impartial 
 statement of both sides, his own side was quite obvious, 
 and the day was won. Later on, the same results, and 
 others which the telescope continued henceforth to yield, 
 gave material and confirmation at every turn to the 
 mechanical generalization which Newton was to build 
 up with the aid of the more abstract part of Galileo's 
 scientific work. 
 
 Galileo, as the founder of modern mechanical science, 
 added to the rudiments of statics which the ancients, 
 principally Archimedes, had handed down, an entirely 
 new idea of fundamental importance. This was the con- 
 ception of acceleration, which arose in the first instance 
 from his study of falling bodies, at Pisa and later, under 
 conditions which made fairly accurate measurement pos- 
 sible. From these experiments he gained the law of the 
 uniform downward acceleration of bodies falling to the 
 earth, of about thirty-two feet in the second added every 
 second. Newton, with the genius which perceives true 
 resemblances between remote and apparently discon- 
 nected facts, turned this conception of uniformly acce- 
 lerated motion to the phenomena of the heavens. Are 
 all the planets, he asked himself, falling towards the sun, 
 and all the satellites, our own and those of Jupiter, 
 towards their own planet, by the same law which Galileo 
 
 1543 N
 
 178 The Rise of Modern Science 
 
 had discovered to govern the fall of the stone ? This 
 was the supreme effort of his imagination, the most 
 fruitful instance in history of the unifying tendency of 
 thought, seen more or less in all its aspects, but above 
 all in mathematics, the ' art of giving the same name to 
 different things '. Following where the question led 
 him, he came to the other great conception, that of 
 ' mass ', which, with ' acceleration ', completed the quite 
 new elements in the modern mechanics then arising. The 
 rest consisted in defining in accurate relations, the equa- 
 tions of which the Greeks had the first notion, the mutual 
 influence of these ' masses ' on each other, producing 
 ' acceleration ' according to measurable circumstances of 
 space and time. Galileo's law for falling bodies was seen 
 to be a special case relative to the earth : looked at from 
 the celestial point of view, the same principle gave 
 Newton the law, that the acceleration of all the planets 
 towards their centre was inversely proportional to the 
 square of their distances from it. ' They are all falling 
 bodies, but going so fast and so far off that they fall 
 quite round to the other side, and so go on for ever.' l 
 
 Kepler's laws were thus completed and explained. We 
 noticed that his second law touched on the rate of motion 
 of the revolving planets, which moved more quickly when 
 nearer to their central, or focal body, in those elliptical 
 orbits which he had just discovered. This was in 1609. 
 Ten years later he had published his third law that there 
 is a fixed relation between the cubes of the distances of 
 the planets from the sun and the squares of the times of 
 their revolutions. They move more slowly the further 
 1 W. K. Clifford.
 
 The Rise of Modern Science 179 
 
 they are away, in that ratio. Both these laws were 
 shown by Newton to be only deductions from, or varied 
 expressions for, the same relation which Galileo had 
 detected in the falling stone. Both of them were essential 
 to the growth of his mind on the subject. In 1665, his 
 twenty-third year, he had a period of intense mental 
 activity which lasted into the following year. He dis- 
 covered at this time, as he tells us himself, among other 
 important theories, ' first the binomial theorem, then 
 the method of fluxions,' and then ' began to think of 
 gravity extending to the orb of the moon, and having 
 found out how to estimate the force with which a globe, 
 revolving within a sphere, presses the surface of the 
 sphere, from Kepler's rule (the third law) I deduced that 
 the forces which keep the planets in their orb must be 
 reciprocally as the squares of their distances from their 
 centres : and thereby compared the force requisite to 
 keep the moon' in her orb with the force of gravity at 
 the surface of the earth, and found them answer pretty 
 nearly. All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and 
 1666, for in those days I was in the prime of my age 
 for invention and minded Mathematicks and Philosophy 
 more than at any time since '. 
 
 It is a curious commentary on the popular view of 
 history, that, while any schoolboy could tell you that 
 the two years Newton refers to were the dates of the 
 Plague and the Fire, purely local accidents, not one 
 person in ten thousand, children or adults, would con- 
 nect them with two of the most profound and far-reaching 
 events in the history of the world, the invention of the 
 infinitesimal calculus and of the law of gravitation. 
 
 x 2
 
 i8o The Rise of Modern Science 
 
 It was inevitable to treat of Newton in connexion with 
 Galileo and Kepler, as their work in mechanics forms an 
 inseparable whole, but in doing so we passed over for 
 the moment the contribution of the man who was in 
 some respects the central figure in the new scientific and 
 philosophic movement of the century. In point of time, 
 Descartes comes between the earlier group of scientists, 
 Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, and many more, whose lives were 
 largely spent in the sixteenth century, and the later 
 group, Newton, Huyghens, Boyle, and the rest, who were 
 entirely children of the seventeenth century. Descartes' 
 life, begun just before the sixteenth century closed, filled 
 almost exactly the first half of the seventeenth. He was 
 considerably junior to Galileo, but lived as his con- 
 temporary for over forty years. He was studied with 
 respect by Newton, who was born in the year of Galileo's 
 death. In point of doctrine, too, he takes a middle 
 place ; looking as far and boldly to the future as any 
 in that age, he yet has many leanings and attachments 
 to older systems. The great iconoclast of scholasticism, 
 the immortal founder of a philosophy based on the simple 
 fact of self-consciousness, he yet never appreciated the 
 bearing of Galileo's work, nor admitted the motions of 
 the earth, and in his own theories, both physical and 
 physiological, was largely dominated by preconceived 
 ideas, as remote from the facts as the ' perfect line ' and 
 the ' perfect number '. With this side, however, we have 
 no concern here, nor with the validity of his metaphysics. 
 He plays a part in our sketch, as having anticipated in 
 so many ways the modern spirit, still more perhaps as 
 having initiated one of the greatest improvements in
 
 The Rise of Modern Science 1 8 1 
 
 mathematical method. His artificial physics and physi- 
 ology were due to the fact that his scientific interests 
 outstripped his powers of verification. He meant his life 
 to show that all knowledge could be brought within the 
 scope of one incontrovertible method, and all knowledge 
 was not quite ripe. 
 
 The one method was that of mathematics, which 
 Descartes conceived could be reduced to a series of 
 truths, so simple and self-evident that it was impossible 
 for the mind to entertain the opposite. Starting from 
 this point, he thought it would be found that all know- 
 ledge could be gradually brought into the same inter- 
 dependent and invincible system, and he attempted in 
 his own lifetime, the shortest of the great scientists of 
 the age, to give examples from all branches. His interest 
 in the ultimate utility of this well-founded and syste- 
 matic knowledge, especially in the parts affecting human 
 life and health, was equal to that of his great English 
 predecessor, ' Verulam ', to whom he several times refers 
 in his letters. His superiority to Bacon lay in the fact 
 of his much greater concentration. All his science and 
 he would apply the same rule to any one else desiring 
 to attain the same end arose from the intensive cultiva- 
 tion of his own spirit, which was enlarged, as he tells us, 
 by the unfolding of every new truth in surrounding 
 nature. But this individual culture was by no means to 
 stop at the individual ; for thus, he says, * we shall be 
 able to find an art, by which, knowing the force and 
 action of fire, water, air, stars, the heavens and all other 
 objects, as clearly as we know the various trades of our 
 artisans, we may be able to employ them in the same
 
 1 8 2 The Rise of Modern Science 
 
 way for their appropriate uses, and make ourselves the 
 masters and possessors of nature. And this will not be 
 solely for the pleasure of enjoying with ease and by 
 ingenious devices all the good things of the world, but 
 principally for the preservation and improvement of 
 human health, which is both the foundation of all other 
 goods and the means of strengthening and quickening 
 the spirit itself '. 
 
 To follow out the points of contact between the self- 
 evident method of Descartes and the scientific methods 
 of later days would take us too far afield, nor is it strictly 
 relevant to our purpose ; but the reconciliation, which 
 he was the first clearly to suggest, between the fullest 
 individual culture and the pursuit of a social end, is 
 a note which we shall need to keep in mind in all that 
 follows. As Descartes first strikes it, it leans strongly to 
 the side of the individual : the three centuries which 
 have succeeded him have done something to emphasize 
 his social undertone. 
 
 These general tendencies of a great thinker, invaluable 
 as they are, must also necessarily be incalculable. No 
 one can accurately estimate the influence of the con- 
 versations of Socrates or the dialogues of Plato. But we 
 have in the case of Descartes a definite discovery in 
 scientific method of the first importance, of which he 
 describes the genesis, in a fragment of his autobiography, 
 from the practice of his own rules of simplifying every 
 problem to the utmost, and co-ordinating all the common 
 points of every subject. He dates the discovery exactly, 
 as Newton does his, in the winter of 1619, when he was 
 serving in the Austrian Imperial army at Neuburg on
 
 The Rise of Modern Science \ 8 3 
 
 the Danube. It is one of the notable coincidences in 
 personal history that both Descartes and Newton were 
 twenty-three years of age when their minds were most 
 active and they made the greatest discoveries of their 
 lives. The passage in the Discourse on Method is a classic 
 in the history of thought. He had studied a little, he 
 tells us, in his earlier youth, parts of three arts or sciences 
 which he thought should help him in his newly formed 
 design, of arriving by a true method at the knowledge 
 of everything of which his mind was capable. These 
 three subjects were logic, geometry, and algebra. But 
 logic, as he had learnt it, seemed at best to be rather 
 a means of explaining to others what one already knows 
 than of extending one's knowledge. The geometry, or, 
 as he calls it, the analysis of the ancients, suffered from 
 being always restricted to the consideration of figures 
 and not of lines, their simplest element ; while the 
 algebra of the moderns is confused and obscure by the 
 particular rules and symbols in which it is expressed. 
 What was needed was a method which would combine 
 the advantages of all three without their defects, for it 
 seemed obvious that in philosophy as in government, the 
 fewer the rules the better. Analysing then still further 
 the ' analysis ' of the ancients into its simplest form, of 
 lines rather than figures, he turned to algebra for the 
 co-ordinating, synthetic part of his method. ' To hold 
 these lines together, or to express several in one form, 
 algebraical symbols were needed, the shortest possible : 
 and thus I borrowed the best of geometrical analysis and 
 of algebraical, and corrected the faults of one by the 
 other.'
 
 184 The Rise of Modern Science 
 
 The step forward in the art of thinking was a long 
 one ; it fully deserves to be commemorated side by side 
 with Newton's great discoveries nearly half a century later 
 in the years of the Plague and the Fire. In relation 
 to one of them, Newton's method of fluxions, Descartes' 
 discovery was as essential a part as Galileo's law of falling 
 bodies was of the law of gravitation. For Descartes' 
 analysis was in fact one stage in the continuous process 
 of integrating and simplifying mathematics which was 
 going on throughout the century, and of which the 
 calculus of Newton and Leibnitz was the supreme and 
 most fruitful effort. 
 
 The Geometry of Descartes was first published as 
 part of the Discourse on Method, of which it is the most 
 brilliant illustration. It also illustrates in the aptest way 
 that transformation of the persistent past which is the 
 subject of our study. Descartes starts from the geometry 
 of the Greeks. He has before him the summary of 
 Pappus and the Conic Sections of Apollonius. He takes 
 a linear problem of Pappus and shows how it can be more 
 simply solved and stated by his new method. He quotes 
 Apollonius, still the leading authority on the conies, and 
 then, in the light of his own new application of algebra 
 to geometry, arrives at the momentous discovery that 
 while any straight line may, by the use of his two co- 
 ordinates, be expressed as an equation of the first degree, 
 the conic sections are the geometrical expression of equa- 
 tions of the second degree, the circle being but a special 
 case of the ellipse. If the inward vision could affect us 
 with as strong emotions as things we actually see, we 
 should recognize here a wonder even greater than Galileo's
 
 The Rise of Modern Science 1 8 f 
 
 satellites of Jupiter and mountains on the moon. And 
 the way of reaching the result is of capital importance. 
 The great thinker uses the past, not only as all of us 
 are bound to do, unconsciously, as the air we breathe, 
 but deliberately, taking the old problems and the con- 
 clusions of his predecessors, thinking them out again 
 in the fresh light of a later day, and gaining at last 
 a new form, adapted to the growing unity and efficiency 
 of the human mind. 
 
 It was an age of mathematicians. Others were working 
 at kindred problems to that of Descartes, and he himself 
 effected many other improvements, inferior to that of 
 his great discovery, but comparable to those improve- 
 ments in our arithmetical notation which we noticed as 
 due to the Arabs and the Hindoos. Some apparently 
 very obvious simplifications in the notation of algebra, 
 due to Descartes, have probably been as effective in 
 mathematical research as the Hindoo cipher has been in 
 arithmetic. But the continuity of the main line of 
 advance must retain our attention, especially as the next 
 step brings us to the mathematical expression of that 
 fundamental conception in modern science which dis- 
 tinguishes it from the science of the Greeks, the idea 
 of movement and continuous growth. Compared with 
 this, even Descartes' geometrical analysis, essential as it 
 was, must take a subordinate place. 
 
 With the invention of the calculus in the seventeenth 
 century we reach the last stage yet known to us in that 
 art of measuring which brings the world into subjection 
 to man, and of which we traced the first accurate begin- 
 nings in the early settled communities which built the
 
 i 8 6 The Rise of Modern Science 
 
 pyramids and gave us the week. In view of the new 
 problems which modern science was now to solve, even 
 the Greeks, with their immensely more penetrating and 
 ingenious minds, must be classed rather with tlje pyramid- 
 builders than with the modern physicist. The new factors 
 in the problem of measurement which now emerged, 
 were the intimately connected questions of infinitesimal 
 quantities and continuous movement or growth. Of 
 these we may say that the Greek mind had faced them 
 only to be baffled and confused, while, before the Greeks, 
 they had not been realized at all. Yet when once thought 
 out, above all, when once expressed in convenient sym- 
 bols, it is now found possible to give a real grasp of the 
 potent instrument which has been elaborated for their 
 measurement, to boys at school before the end of their 
 sixteenth year. Descartes did not reach the solution, 
 but he pointed the way, and when he criticized the 
 Greeks for confining their geometry to figures, he put 
 his finger on the cause of their failure to advance. The 
 limited figure excludes the infinite, and the ' perfect ' 
 circle proved in more than one respect an impassable 
 barrier to the free development of ideas of magnitude 
 and direction. Archimedes, who in his method of 
 exhaustions, made the nearest approach in the ancient 
 world to an effective treatment of the problem involved, 
 did so by gradually approximating the curved figure 
 which he would measure to the nearest many-sided figures 
 of which the correct measurements were known. When 
 once Descartes had shown that any curved line could be 
 expressed in equations of such generality that they were 
 equally true for any points on the curve, the question
 
 The Rise of Modern Science 187 
 
 could be approached from quite another point of view. 
 Thus, whereas Archimedes, and all, including Kepler, 
 down to the age of Descartes, were endeavouring to find 
 curved areas by approximating them to rectangular 
 measurement what was called in the old days the 
 quadrature of the curve the new method approached 
 the problem from the side of the infinitesimal increment 
 in the measurement of the curve as it moved from point 
 to point. 
 
 This measurement, made possible by Descartes' method, 
 was, like other great discoveries, led up to by a multitude 
 of partial efforts, and actually made, independently and 
 with different notations, by Newton and Leibnitz. Leib- 
 nitz' notation, following more closely the system of equa- 
 tions which Descartes had introduced, has survived for 
 most purposes. Newton's, significantly enough, is still 
 used for increments of time. 
 
 Descartes' analytical method consisted in the reference 
 of every point in the line or curve studied, to an arbitrarily 
 fixed point or origin, by means of two varying perpen- 
 dicular lines or co-ordinates. Given the origin and 
 where we fix it does not matter, for every object observed 
 must have an observer we can by means of these co- 
 ordinates follow the changes in position of any point 
 whatever. Either of the co-ordinates, as they vary 
 together, is said to be a function of the other, and their 
 relation at any point is expressed in an equation with 
 two variable quantities. In this, its simplest form, the 
 idea has now become part of our common thought, and 
 even children in the elementary schools are plotting 
 their rule-of-three sums by Cartesian geometry. The
 
 1 8 8 The Rise of Modern Science 
 
 differential calculus starts here and goes further. Given 
 a curve of which we can by its equation lay down any 
 length or number of points that we desire, what is the 
 law of its growth or falling off, that is, the direction of 
 its movement at any point ? To solve this problem with 
 sufficient generality is to be able to describe in shorthand 
 any regular movement, for an electric current, the motion 
 of a train, the cooling of a molten mass can all be repre- 
 sented by a curve, as truly as the section of a cone. And 
 the solution is found by a process exactly similar to that 
 of determining what is the tangent or touching line to 
 the curve at any point. Solutions of this, the particular 
 case, were actually offered to Descartes by at least one 
 contemporary mathematician : they were the preliminary, 
 partial glimpses which have preceded every great advance. 
 It was left for the wider synthetic mind of Newton and 
 Leibnitz to take in the bearing of the question as a whole, 
 when it was ripe for solution thirty years later. Then, 
 when the differential question was solved, it was possible 
 to return to the original problems of summing up series, 
 or finding the areas enclosed by curves, which had first 
 exercised the earlier mathematicians. 
 
 Thus another link was forged in the connected method 
 of the physico-mathematical sciences which the Royal 
 Society was founded to promote : and the last link was 
 the strongest of all. For when the laws of physics and 
 mechanics have reached this degree of generality, they 
 are able to express on the physical side all changes in 
 the world of matter from moment to moment, and sub- 
 sequent laws can, as M. Poincare says, take their places 
 as fresh differential equations. The other inventions and
 
 The Rise of Modern Scien ce 189 
 
 discoveries of the age, the barometer and the microscope, 
 Mariotte's and Boyle's law of the pressure of gases, 
 Huyghens' theory of wave-movement, Descartes' and 
 Newton's work on the composition and refraction of light; 
 even Harvey's circulation of the blood, must take rank 
 after the physico-mathematical series which culminated 
 in the calculus. It will be noticed, too, that the other 
 scientific work of the age was mainly of a kindred nature, 
 centring round the great discoveries in mechanics, those 
 laws of movement which were its characteristic feature. 
 Even Harvey's was a mechanical one, and commended 
 itself as such to Descartes before he would accept the 
 true account of the movements of the earth. But it 
 was in fact premature, for chemistry was not yet founded, 
 and still less a knowledge of the chemical and other 
 functions of living bodies. 
 
 As Harvey by his great discovery anticipated in 1628 
 the foundation of biology, which in its main outlines falls 
 within the nineteenth century, so there were throughout 
 other occasional anticipations of later advances in the 
 more complex branches. Chemistry was not definitely 
 founded as a science till the eighteenth century ; but in 
 1674 John Mayow, another early member of the Royal 
 Society, alighted, by some ingenious experiments with 
 candles and small animals, on the existence and funda- 
 mental property of oxygen, a century before the fact 
 could find its place in a co-ordinated system. 
 
 Such instances bespeak the intimate similarity of all 
 scientific truth ; and their isolated position brings out 
 stih 1 more clearly the general trend of seventeenth-century 
 science. It was, as that early meeting in 1660 declared
 
 jpo The Rise of Modem Science 
 
 it, a physico-mathematical movement, and as such it ran 
 its course before the more complex sciences of life took 
 definite form. It has grown continuously ever since, and 
 by its connexion with other sides of life, especially with 
 industry and the practical arts, it has become the most 
 powerful and typical branch of science as the agent in 
 subduing the forces of nature to the use of man. Before 
 the end of Newton's life, who is the culminating figure 
 -in the movement, it had done its great preliminary work. 
 It had given men a new and incomparable instrument of 
 research, and had established in their minds a new and 
 consistent view of the mechanics of the universe. New- 
 ton, one of the longest-lived of the philosophers of his 
 day, as Descartes was one of the shortest, lived till 1727, 
 the year before the birth of Black, who was to give sub- 
 stantial help on the scientific side to Watt in the con- 
 struction of his steam-engine. His life thus brings the 
 modern scientific movement to the point where it touches 
 the industrial revolution which is its counterpart on the 
 practical side. 
 
 We have sometimes measured in previous chapters the 
 real advancement of a period by the comparison of an 
 earlier and a later figure on the same line of progress, 
 Thales and Hipparchus for the Greeks, the author of 
 the Twelve Tables and Gaius for the Romans, the flint- 
 axe and the steam-engine for the practical arts. The 
 publication in 1687 of Newton's Principia, the Magnum 
 Opus of seventeenth-century science, suggests a similar 
 comparison, more impressive perhaps than any other. It 
 was essentially the same human mind which had once 
 counted fingers and matched pebbles in the primaeval
 
 The Rise of Modern Science 191 
 
 cave, and was now reaching to the stars, measuring the 
 speed of light and reading its own riddles in" the un- 
 fathomed depths of space. On the one hand the savage, 
 struggling to five as the limit of his number ; on the 
 other, the astronomer studying the double stars, so 
 distant from us that our whole solar system, if seen at 
 all, would be but a speck, and finding in their motion 
 fresh illustration of the conic curves of which Apollonius, 
 Descartes, and Newton had expressed the law : and 
 between the two there is real identity as well as progress. 
 This journey, from the furthest bourne of human 
 thought to the threshold of triumphant science, might, 
 had we full knowledge, be mapped out completely in 
 similar consecutive steps, sometimes quicker, sometimes 
 halting, with stretches without apparent movement, but 
 all of kindred nature and tending to the same goal. 
 We have in previous pages had some glimpses of the 
 more critical passages on the way, and noticed points in 
 the movement specially germane to our general theme. 
 This growth of science is by no means the whole of 
 civilization, but it holds a commanding position in it, 
 and several features in the scientific evolution seem 
 identical with the conquering social spirit itself. Like 
 language, the method of exact science has a double 
 aspect, the external facts which it brings together and 
 arranges, and the human minds of which it correlates 
 and expresses the thought. Now on each side of this 
 double process the unifying action of scientific thought 
 is its most striking feature. On the objective side 
 it carries the generalizing process of language much 
 further and applies it exactly. Where language gives the
 
 192 The Rise of Modern Science 
 
 same name to like things, science, seeing deeper, can give 
 it to the superficially unlike, and express by the same 
 equation the fall of the stone and the revolution of the 
 planet. The first century of modern science has furnished 
 us with abundant instances, and the same tendency per- 
 sists throughout. It is the logical essence of the process, 
 though we are here not concerned with the logic but 
 with the social aspect of the fact. Just as the method 
 consists objectively in collecting resemblances from the 
 complex of phenomena and expressing them in the 
 simplest exact general statements or laws, so, on the side 
 of the human minds perceiving the resemblances and 
 formulating the statement, there is a corresponding pro- 
 cess of comparison and unification. The differential 
 equation, though Leibnitz suggested its precise form, 
 sums up the consensus of innumerable minds, the earliest 
 savages who noticed the likenesses of things around them, 
 the first measurers who agreed to lay out their fields and 
 decorate their buildings on a common scale, the Greeks 
 who formulated the similarities of figures in the first 
 equations, the Arabs who improved the notation, the 
 thinkers of the seventeenth century whose genius, co- 
 operating, through many minds, carried the idea of a 
 common law into the recesses of space, and expressed 
 it so concisely that it has become the universal and per- 
 manent intellectual currency of mankind. 
 
 The instrument thus forged in scientific method was 
 not yet able to knit up the globe, for minds sufficiently 
 advanced were still few and confined to a small area ; 
 nor was it yet in touch with the practical powers which 
 were to effect the industrial and social revolution of later
 
 The Rise of Modern Science 193 
 
 years ; but it was firmly established as the natural and 
 fundamental link of progressive human society. 
 
 It is the most perfect expression of human unity, and 
 the means best adapted to promote that unity. For it 
 arises from the simplest facts of common experience, and 
 grows by the co-operation of the mass of men with 
 human intellect at its highest. And when developed, 
 it returns again to widen and strengthen the common 
 intelligence and increase the common good. Above all, 
 more perfectly than any other form of thought, it 
 embodies the union of past and present in a conscious 
 and active force. 
 
 1543
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 A century has elapsed since the invention of the steam-engine 
 and we are only just beginning to feel the depths of the shock it gave 
 us. But the revolution it has effected in industry has nevertheless 
 upset human relations altogether. New ideas are arising, new 
 feelings are on the way to flower. In thousands of years, when, seen 
 from the distance, only broad lines of the present age will still be 
 visible, our wars and our revolutions will count for little, but the steam- 
 engine, and the procession of inventions that accompanied it, will 
 perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or chipped stone of 
 pre-historic times : it will serve to define an age. If we could rid 
 ourselves of all pride, if, to define our species, we kept strictly to 
 what the historic and pre-historic periods show us to be the constant 
 characteristics of man and of intelligence, we should perhaps not say 
 Homo Sapiens, but Homo Faber. BERGSON. 
 
 o 2
 
 SOON after the death of Newton, after the completion 
 of the first essay of modern science, man's new intellectual 
 instrument came in touch with his old practical, tool- 
 making and tool-using, instinct, which M. Bergson rightly 
 treats as a constant and progressive characteristic. These 
 two sides of his activity had been in necessary relation 
 from the first, but the seventeenth century had seen 
 an exceptional outburst of the abstract, generalizing 
 spirit. The purely intellectual instrument had now far 
 outstripped in fineness and power the concrete tools with 
 which man alters and fashions the world around him. 
 The eighteenth century was to witness such a sharpening 
 and strengthening of tools as the world had never seen 
 before. It was the historic meeting-place of Homo 
 Sapiens and Homo Faber, a capital step in the onward 
 march of mankind towards the conquest of nature. 
 Scientific intellect was now wedded to practical skill, the 
 old skill of the smith in engineering, of the weaver in 
 manufacturing, of the farmer in agriculture : and the 
 face of the world, almost everything we see and use, has 
 been changed as the result. But the meeting of Homo 
 Sapiens and Homo Faber was not only that of scientific 
 intellect and practical skill in the abstract. The small 
 band of thinkers and inventors came in touch with the 
 mass of the workers who were to be organized by the new 
 system, the new methods of production necessitated by 
 elaborate and intellectualized machinery. This is the 
 social side of the historic meeting-point, and ultimately 
 the most important : for it leads to the socializing of
 
 The Industrial Revolution 197 
 
 science which is involved in popular education, and the 
 socializing of the products of the improved machinery 
 by social reform, which became the increasingly pre- 
 dominant interest of the succeeding century. Of these 
 large and more remote consequences we shall only touch 
 the first fringe in this chapter, and shall leave the un- 
 finished edges in our last. The revolution was, like all 
 other events, the natural sequel of what had gone before, 
 but it was distinguished by its greatly accelerated rate 
 of movement, and by the profound changes in society 
 as a whole which it affected. 
 
 The changes in the western world from the latter part 
 of the eighteenth century onwards are essentially a part 
 of the same movement which began in the thirteenth 
 century, was quickened by the revival of learning, and 
 brought to a height by the meeting of the Man of 
 Science with the Man of Tools. It was the speed of 
 the changes in the later years which made them revolu- 
 tionary. And there is also a material difference in the 
 later years in point of depth. The revival of learning 
 was an aristocratic thing. A few fine people cultivated 
 the arts and re-discovered the ancient leaven which 
 was to leaven the lump. But the condition of the 
 mass was little altered, and where altered not always 
 improved, from the thirteenth century till after the 
 industrial revolution. Nor was the scientific movement 
 a popular one. It was developed by a small number of 
 distinguished persons, and patronized by kings and princes, 
 who sometimes, like Charles the Second, themselves 
 played with the new toys. It led to the efforts of the 
 enlightened and reforming monarchs of the eighteenth
 
 198 The Industrial Revolution 
 
 century, but it did not affect the whole of society, until 
 the sweeping changes in the life of the people, which 
 resulted from the union of science and industry, brought 
 men together in masses and made all men think. 
 
 We noticed in the last chapter the sequence of dates 
 which connects the life of Newton with Watt's steam- 
 engine, the decisive event in the industrial revolution. 
 Black, whose discoveries in latent heat helped Watt to 
 the invention of his condenser, was born in the year after 
 Newton's death, and made his discoveries about 1760 
 when he was just over thirty. Besides these discoveries 
 in the latent heat of steam which were of immediate 
 practical application, he became one of the founders of 
 scientific chemistry by establishing the fact, which Mayow 
 had surmised nearly a hundred years before, that bodies 
 lose by combustion a measurable quantity of some sub- 
 stance which he called ' fixed air '. Black's work has thus 
 a double or treble interest, as a connecting link between 
 science and industry, and a foundation stone of modern 
 chemistry by extending measurement to another order 
 of physical facts. Watt himself was a man of thorough 
 scientific training, based on mathematics, and kept in 
 touch with all the leading thought of the day. 
 
 The links are significant, but we must beware of 
 pressing them too far. The mechanical inventions which 
 revolutionized industry, followed the establishment of 
 modern science, and were increasingly aided by it, but 
 we cannot pass directly from one to the other, as from 
 cause to effect. Man's inventive and practical powers 
 develop constantly and spontaneously with the suitable 
 stimulus of opportunity. Inventions were being made
 
 The Industrial Revolution 199 
 
 in the ' dark ages ', and by unscientific people like the 
 Chinese. The most potent of all educational inventions, 
 the printing-press, was quite independent of abstract 
 science, and, side by side with the scientific evolution of 
 the seventeenth century, a series of inventors, such as 
 Denis Papin and the Marquis of Worcester, were making 
 ingenious sketches, which often anticipated the successful 
 inventions of a hundred years later. The genius of the 
 mechanical inventor is rather of the practical and organ- 
 izing kind, ' conceiving and arranging in space the various 
 mechanisms which are to produce a given effect, con- 
 trolling, distributing, and directing motive forces '.* The 
 historic meeting-point of the eighteenth century is really 
 another example of that integration of human powers of 
 which science by itself offered so many striking instances. 
 Just as mathematics, mechanics, and physics all gained 
 immeasurably by mutual aid, by discovering their identi- 
 ties and points of contact, so, in the distinct but related 
 spheres of theory and practice, the eighteenth century 
 established a closer relationship of the most fruitful kind. 
 In the steam-engine there was the first contact of 
 developed science and industrial practice of an imme- 
 diately and abundantly productive kind, and ever since 
 the union of powers has been more and more deliberately 
 pursued. 
 
 Converging on the same point, the invention of a 
 practicable steam-engine just after the middle of the 
 eighteenth century, came a series of improvements affect- 
 ing the smith's art itself, the typical craft of Homo Faber. 
 The manufacture of steel and iron was being revolution- 
 1 Condorcet.
 
 zoo The Industrial Revolution 
 
 ized by the application of coal to smelting, and by a series 
 of improvements in the process. By 1761, when Watt and 
 Black were in consultation, the blast-furnace had made 
 possible the large and cheap supply of iron without which 
 the steam-engine would have been abortive. 
 
 Here, then, begins the real age of Iron, not a degrada- 
 tion, as poets had fabled, but a stage in advance, difficult 
 indeed and crossed by terrible evils, but based on some 
 of the most solid and helpful facts in our environment. 
 Man awoke to find that he had beneath him in his 
 * iron-cored ' globe the greatest wealth in the commonest 
 metal. And it was a wealth unlike that which had given 
 the metals their order of worth. That was the value of 
 scarcity, this the value of use. The commonest and in 
 appearance the least attractive of metals was to perform 
 prodigies of strength. The finest cutting, the heaviest 
 hammering, were alike its work. It was to build the 
 highest structures and the largest ships, to link up 
 continents and pierce the earth. 
 
 This decade, between the Seven Years' War which 
 gave us Canada and India, and the war with the United 
 States which gave* the New World independence, was full 
 of consequences for mankind, and in the first place for 
 England. It was a decade of invention. In 1765 Watt 
 produced his first practicable steam-engine, with the 
 separate condenser. It was still only rectilinear in action 
 and used for pumping. Almost simultaneously the primi- 
 tive processes of spinning and weaving were being trans- 
 formed by the inventions of Hargreaves and Arkwright, 
 Crompton and Cartwright. Arkwright was the main 
 agent in producing mechanical spinning, as Cartwright
 
 The Industrial Revolution 201 
 
 later was the principal inventor ;of the power-loom to 
 work up the vast quantities of yarn produced. Ark- 
 wright's first mill for spinning cotton was set up in 1769, 
 and was worked at first by horses and then by water- 
 power. This water-worked mill survived in many cases 
 the introduction of steam, and its remains are a familiar 
 object in many a Lancashire and Yorkshire valley. By 
 1775 Arkwright's inventions were complete and ready for 
 the matured work of the greatest of the inventors. Watt's 
 engine still needed to be adapted to the regular circular 
 movement required in a mill. In the following ten years 
 the difficulties were overcome, and the first cotton-mill, 
 worked by steam, was started in Nottingham in 1785. 
 Nottingham and Derbyshire were chosen as the scenes 
 of the first mill experiments, to avoid the opposition of 
 the handworkers in the north who saw their livelihood 
 threatened by the new machinery. The first steam- 
 propelled cotton-spinning mill in Manchester dates from 
 the year of the opening of the Revolution in France, 
 four years later. 
 
 The coincidence is one of the most memorable in history. 
 
 Of the procession of mechanical inventions which 
 followed the mere concrete facts are stupendous. It is 
 said that the steam-engine alone has added to human 
 power the equivalent of a thousand million men. This 
 clearly is but a fraction of the mechanical advantage, 
 the brute force, which man has gained in little more 
 than a century since the steam-engine began. For we 
 must add to it the whole of the electrical energy now 
 employed, the extension of water-power by hydraulic and 
 other means, and, within the most recent times, the
 
 2O2, The Industrial Revolution 
 
 power generated by oil-engines, which alone has been 
 stated to be equal to two million additional human 
 hands. Suppose that by these and other mechanical 
 means man can actually multiply many times his motive 
 strength and freely organize and direct the result. This 
 is not far beyond the present problem, and it has been 
 reached on the lines which Bacon and Descartes advo- 
 cated three hundred years ago, of studying the ways of 
 nature so as to command by obeying her. But it may 
 be doubted whether, if one of the ardent pioneers of the 
 seventeenth century could awake and see the use that 
 mankind has made of its vast added powers, he would 
 be satisfied with the result. One of the wisest men 1 of 
 the last generation left unpublished among his papers an 
 essay in which he raised the question, ' whether the 
 steam-engine was not invented too soon ', and was inclined 
 to answer in the affirmative. It is a question in hypo- 
 thetical history, but it puts in an arresting way the 
 problem of the immense new resources of the last hundred 
 years, compared with the wisdom and public spirit shown 
 in their use. Most of us will sadly conclude that probably 
 no wisdom would have been learnt before the material 
 was at hand to be wasted in the learning. 
 
 The moment of the invention was marked out by 
 the concurrence of several lines of events. Better 
 pumping-engines for use in the mines were more and 
 more needed, as the demand for coal increased. Steel 
 and iron had been cheapened. Science had just become 
 able to give the necessary help to guide the inventor : 
 and the simultaneous inventions in the textile trade 
 
 1 Dr. J. H. Bridges.
 
 The Industrial Revolution 203 
 
 offered the widest possible field for the immediate use 
 of the improved engine in other work. The coinci- 
 dence with the beginning of the French Revolution is 
 a curious accident, which deserves to be set side by side 
 with the fact that the fundamental discovery of the 
 identity of lightning with electricity was made shortly 
 before by the same man, Benjamin Franklin, who in 
 1778 induced the French to form the alliance against 
 England which secured the success of the United States 
 in their war for independence. In a wider sense none 
 of the coincidences was accidental, for all the events 
 sprang from the same exuberant spirit of mental freedom 
 and confident activity which followed the creation of 
 modern science, and marked especially the years which 
 ushered in the Revolution. 
 
 In the stage which we are now discussing, England 
 indisputably took the lead of the world. In the rise of 
 the new science and philosophy of the seventeenth 
 century, France and England worked side by side, and 
 one of the greatest of all the builders, Leibnitz, was 
 a German ; but in the industrial development England 
 was easily chief. Many causes contributed to this ; the 
 geographical and physical deserve perhaps the first place. 
 Just as we saw in the ancient world the influence, first, 
 of the great eastern river-valleys, and then of the 
 Mediterranean and its encircling lands, so now, after 
 the discovery of the New World and the rise of a new 
 science and a new commerce, a fresh centre of human 
 intercourse began to grow around the shores of the 
 Atlantic. In this new grouping England and France 
 hold a favoured place, and especially England. Set in
 
 204 The Industrial Revolution 
 
 her own seas, clear of her neighbours on the continent 
 but within easy reach of them, England stretches out 
 her hands to the West. In years of life-and-death 
 conflict she had trained her sons to a more perfect 
 mastery of the seas than any other people, and when 
 the great streams of modern commerce began to flow, 
 they passed mainly through her ports. And within she was 
 as well equipped by nature for the coming development 
 as she was by position and training for external commerce. 
 She had large stores of coal and iron, the sinews of the 
 new war, conveniently placed. Her climate in the north 
 was peculiarly well fitted for the textile work, and her 
 population had for generations been engaged by more 
 primitive methods in the manufactures which were to 
 be expanded by the methods of science. The greatest 
 of the practical steps in industrial invention were first 
 taken by Englishmen, by Watt in the steam-engine, by 
 Arkwright and his fellows in textile machinery, by George 
 Stephenson in the locomotive. And England reaped the 
 main harvest, in wealth, in population, in territory and 
 international influence. Slowly, as we shall see later on, 
 other countries have followed England in this industrial 
 expansion, till she has lately been in some points over- 
 taken ; but not before the effects of the first transforma- 
 tion, at the turn of the centuries, have been impressed 
 for all time on every part of the history of the world. 
 
 The textile trades offered the first and most fruitful 
 experiments in machine production. Of the two main 
 branches cotton was first affected, which was produced 
 for the inexhaustible market of India and the East. The 
 woollen manufacture was transformed later, and has never
 
 The Industrial Revolution 207 
 
 reached the same pitch of organization. It was the oldest 
 and most indigenous of the textile trades, and could trace 
 its origin to more necessities and circumstances in the 
 life and history of the country than any other. The 
 wool of England had been in old days a great source of 
 wealth, and her main export. Wars with France had 
 been waged in the Middle Ages on the proceeds of an 
 export duty on wool, as the revolutionary war was soon 
 to be decided by the wealth produced by the new textile 
 manufactures. But for many years the wool, which had 
 once been exported, had been spun and woven in the 
 cottages of West Riding farmers and others, who would 
 themselves complete all the processes and go to market 
 with the product. It is little more than a hundred 
 years ago since the small grass-farmers near Leeds might 
 have been seen there twice a week on the bridge, selling 
 the rolls of cloth which they had themselves bought as 
 wool, worked up with their own wives and daughters at 
 home, and brought to market on their own horses. The 
 picture is a typical one and illustrates many aspects of 
 the industrial revolution. 
 
 Before the revolution, the family had been the unit 
 and the home was the workshop. Labour was little 
 divided up or specialized, and it was carried on in the 
 midst of the life and operations of the country. After, 
 the capitalist's business became the unit and the factory 
 was the workshop. Labour becomes more and more 
 specialized, each separate process becoming the work of 
 a separate class of workmen, and new classes of men were 
 called for, to organize the whole and do the buying 
 and selling. Lastly, the economy of the large factory,
 
 20 6 The Industrial Revolution 
 
 and the convenience of having kindred industries in close 
 proximity, have created the large towns and brought the 
 multitudes of workers together. This, from the social 
 point of view, was the most important part of the change : 
 since the end of the eighteenth century more than half 
 the population of the leading countries of the world has 
 become urban. One instance will suffice. Lancashire, the 
 home of the greatest of the highly organized industries, 
 advanced from a population of 166,000 in 1760 to nearly 
 4,500,000 in 1901, not far short of the whole population 
 of England two hundred years before. 
 
 The growth of the large town and the part which it 
 was to play in the later development of society, are points 
 of the first importance, and recall our minds to what 
 had been taking place on the country-side during the 
 years of critical change in manufacturing methods. Here, 
 too, the methods of science and the desire of improve- 
 ment had been active since the beginning of the 
 seventeenth century. The brave and indefatigable Dutch, 
 most stimulating to Western Europe of all the smaller 
 nationalities, had been the pioneers of improved gardening 
 and farming. In the sixteenth century they had shown 
 the world how to fight for freedom : in the seventeenth 
 they had invented the telescope, produced Grotius and 
 Spinoza, and given a home to Descartes. On the practical 
 side of life they were as effective as in intellectual matters. 
 Modern banking and finance, strong social and inter- 
 national bonds in later times, were largely of their 
 devising : and in the middle of the seventeenth century 
 their example began that transformation of English agri- 
 culture, which, by the time of the industrial revolution,
 
 The Industrial Revolution 207 
 
 had produced crops and animals three or fourfold finer 
 than they had been a hundred years before. Better 
 manuring and more constant use of the land, the intro- 
 duction of root crops and artificial grasses were some of 
 the principal means employed. Wealth was increasing 
 as rapidly among the land-owning class as it was soon 
 to do among the manufacturers. In the general passion 
 for productive improvement the policy of enclosures 
 found its strongest support. For two hundred years 
 landlords had been adding, where they could, pieces of 
 waste and common to their estates : in the eighteenth 
 century the process was carried on under Acts of Parlia- 
 ment, much more extensively, and with much more 
 suffering and loss to the cottagers and users of the 
 commons. 
 
 We are concerned here with the matter only so far as 
 it bears on that growth of the town population which is 
 an essential element in the closer organization of society 
 which followed. 
 
 The better tillage of the soil was not to prove the 
 rallying point of human industry, hope though we may 
 for a time when our great societies, organized and 
 strengthened by the discipline of the ' great industries ', 
 will return to the natural home of primitive men and all 
 children, made still more fertile and knit together by 
 the resources of science. The earliest achievements in 
 improved cultivation assuredly made no direct advance 
 towards this goal. The dispossessed and impoverished 
 cottagers and commoners made their way, some to the 
 New World, still more to the growing towns, where the 
 factories were ready to swallow men, women, and children,
 
 208 The Industrial Revolution 
 
 and cared little for the technical skill, either of the old 
 craftsmen or the farm hand. The country was no place 
 for the organization of labour. It bred quietness, a 
 leisurely routine, the acceptance of the orders of men 
 and nature without active complaint or feverish anxiety 
 to have them altered. That it does this bespeaks it 
 a natural home for men, for these things are of the spirit 
 of home. But for the work in hand in the world the 
 assimilation of the vast resources which the new science 
 and mechanical inventions had put in man's command, 
 and the organization of a society strong, keen, and united 
 enough to grasp and utilize them quick exchange of 
 ideas, vigorous combination of many minds and many 
 wills were needed. This is the gift of the town. 
 
 The gift must be studied with discernment and the eye 
 of faith. For round the newly forming cities, centres of 
 so much vital activity for the future, the want of wisdom, 
 the pre-occupation, the carelessness, the greed, of the 
 time allowed a cloud of misery and hideousness to gather 
 thicker than the smoke which enveloped the working of 
 its mechanical powers. It was a moment of grave external 
 crisis, added to the working of the greatest experiment 
 in home industry. How intimately the two were bound 
 up together, we shall see in the next chapter : with what 
 better issue we should have met the internal revolution 
 without the external distraction we can never know. 
 The main facts are beyond dispute. During the revolu- 
 tionary war, which followed closely on the general installa- 
 tion of the steam-engine, and for more than a decade 
 afterwards, the condition of the mass of the people of 
 England was probably worse than it had been at any
 
 The Industrial Revolution 209 
 
 previous period, while landlords, manufacturers, and 
 capitalists generally, were making larger profits than 
 ever. But if on one side of the account there is inhuman 
 wealth, the hovel and the game-laws in the country, and 
 the factory child in the town, on the other there is the 
 stern determination, the hundreds of millions of pounds, 
 the unnumbered lives of the war with France. 
 
 Our thread of science organizing industry, the stage 
 which the eighteenth century marks in the progress of 
 a collective human force in the world, will be found to 
 give some guidance through these amazing contrasts. It 
 led to the aggregation of workers in towns and large 
 centres. But the first aggregation took place in such 
 haste, with such strong inducements to amass wealth and 
 with so little knowledge of the laws of health or economics, 
 that evils of all kinds were allowed to flourish, which will 
 tax severely the more fully developed science and the 
 more even-handed policy of our own day to eradicate. It 
 is outside our scope here to attempt any sketch of the social 
 conditions of the time, and the accumulation of such 
 details would obscure the one point which it belongs to 
 our argument to make clear. But two or three steps 
 have so direct a bearing on the organization which was 
 to follow, that they must be mentioned. 
 
 Largely through the enclosures, poverty in the country 
 had increased, and the real wages of the labourers were 
 seriously reduced by bad harvests and the rise in the price 
 of corn. At last, in 1795, in face of widespread destitu- 
 tion, a pretty general decision was come to by the 
 magistrates of the country to supplement the inadequate 
 wages by allowances from the rates. This had the obvious 
 
 1643 P
 
 2i o 'The Industrial Revolution 
 
 result of keeping down and further depressing wages : 
 while, as additional allowances were made for additional 
 children, a stimulus was given to the production of 
 children to live on the starvation wages provided. It is 
 the classical instance of ill-judged benevolence attempt- 
 ing to remedy the evil consequences of ill-regulated and 
 precipitate money-making. 
 
 The town, attracting labour from the impoverished 
 country-side, paid it on the average but little more than 
 the country rates, while the gangs of children, imported 
 for factory work from the guardians of the poor, received 
 nothing but their miserable keep. In such a state, with 
 war and the corn-laws keeping food at famine prices, it 
 is hard indeed to detect the germ of social hope which 
 the factory system had within it. It was not till 1824 
 that, with the abrogation of the conspiracy laws which 
 forbade combinations of workmen, the natural ameliora- 
 tive tendencies of the system began to have some play. 
 The workers from that time onwards began to unite 
 openly to improve their lot, and the first and, from the 
 social point of view, the worst period of factory history 
 came to an end. 
 
 By this time a new principle of political action had in 
 fact gained the ascendant, the doctrine of laissez-faire., 
 of which Adam Smith was the greatest prophet. His 
 book on the Wealth of Nations had appeared in 1776, 
 with influence in far more directions than we can even 
 glance at. The doctrine is a part of the general spirit 
 of freedom which was to blow to so fierce a storm in 
 France. In England it was the instrument for removing 
 many of the old restrictions on work and wages, which
 
 The Industrial Revolution 
 
 211 
 
 could have no place in the new system of large industries 
 and mobile labour. In the first reaction against the old 
 regulations, men were apt to think that it was only 
 necessary to remove every check and let natural forces, 
 the free competition of workmen and capital, settle all 
 difficulties. Later experience has shown the narrow limits 
 of this doctrine, but there were then serious and inde- 
 fensible obstacles, only waiting for the first vigorous attack. 
 There was the law of settlements, by which labourers 
 were chargeable to the poor-law only in the parish where 
 they had a ' settlement ' ; there was the regulation of 
 wages by the justices at quarter sessions, the law of 
 apprenticeship, and the law preventing combinations 
 of workmen. All these had to be swept away, and the 
 doctrine of freedom found here an application in England, 
 while in France it was destroying more exalted and 
 imposing institutions. 
 
 With the removal of these restrictions, especially that 
 on combination, the organization of labour, which 
 naturally followed the aggregation of workmen in large 
 trades and in large centres of population, could proceed. 
 The century which follows, marvellous for so many things, 
 might indeed be called, among other names, the century 
 of organization. Of many causes, the factory and the 
 resulting town, with its large increase in the general 
 population, are among the chief. 
 
 Adam Smith, in his great book published before the 
 steam-engine had given its prodigious impulse in the 
 same direction, points out the importance of the division 
 of labour in cheap and efficient production. It is far 
 truer of factory than of agricultural labour, and every step 
 
 p 2
 
 212 
 
 The Industrial Revolution 
 
 in the development of machinery has intensified the 
 process for good and evil. It is fundamental to modern 
 industrial organization, so characteristic of it that all 
 previous labour seems by comparison as simple a thing 
 as the Leeds farmer-weaver selling his own cloth on the 
 bridge. In every branch of manufacture, every detail, 
 the eyelet, the edging, the turn of the screw, has become 
 the province of a special order of workpeople, manipulat- 
 ing a special machine, often forming a special organization 
 to defend their own interests. From one point of view, 
 narrowing, mechanical, monotonous ; from another, an 
 impressive lesson in the dependence of every particle in 
 the social organism on every other and on the whole. 
 To the countryman, to the workman in a simpler state, 
 the fact, equally true, is more remote ; the factory 
 worker is surrounded by his fellows and depends at every 
 step on what others send him. 
 
 With the growing specialization went a growing need 
 for special means to keep the whole together. This was 
 equally true of the workmen, the article produced, and 
 the market in which it was to be sold. Each sphere called 
 forth new and special organizing skill. The trade unions, 
 bringing together the workers and defending their 
 interests, have been the principal agents in developing 
 this faculty among them. They are, broadly speaking, 
 the outcome of the factory system and well represent it, 
 both in its specialized branches and its larger combina- 
 tions. Often, too, in the century which succeeds its 
 emancipation, labour is seen striving to attain, like science, 
 an international unity. 
 
 Other forms of organizing skill, arising from the new
 
 The Industrial Revolution 213 
 
 order, became prominent at an earlier date. Trade, town, 
 and government all afford abundant illustration. Each 
 trade in these conditions requires for its success the per- 
 fect co-operation of all its parts, just as the complicated 
 engine does, which provides the motive power. This 
 co-operation, which we take for granted in any running 
 concern or running engine, is really the expression in 
 concrete fact of a vast force of organizing mind, which 
 has itself grown up with the system, making and being 
 made by it together. Nor does it reside exclusively in 
 any one set of minds, though there must be special 
 organizers, such as foremen and directors. Every person 
 taking part in such a system has in some degree his spirit 
 of co-operation heightened. The town even more than 
 the trade encourages this tendency. It is a common- 
 place of our contemporary life, as common as the air we 
 have always breathed and of which till the eighteenth 
 century, not yet two hundred years ago, mankind was 
 entirely ignorant, both as to its nature and its operation. 
 For the business relations, which gave rise to the town, 
 become but a small part of all the forms of association 
 by which its members are developed in co-operative 
 activity : and it grows by its own growth. It is Aristotle's 
 city-state, writ large, in letter of steel. The necessities of 
 machine production made the modern town : its organiza- 
 tion offers to the citizens a larger and fuller life. Iron for 
 marble, smith's work for sculptor's and mason's much of 
 the difference between the modern state and its archetype 
 is expressed in that change both as a fact and as a 
 symbol. Less beauty, less individual work, less freshness 
 of thought mark the modern structure : but its material
 
 214 The Industrial Revolution 
 
 is more durable, the lines of the building are larger, and 
 the ties and stresses are arranged in the light of a higher 
 mechanical science. 
 
 The whole framework of government was in fact soon 
 affected by the new organization of industry. The full 
 effects were not reached till later years when the great 
 movement for freedom and humanity, which is the sub- 
 ject of the next chapter, had entered into men's minds. 
 But from the very beginning of the nineteenth century, 
 in the darkest period of factory life, there were signs 
 that the state would not be content to rest in the doctrine 
 of negative freedom, of non-intervention, with which it 
 first met the industrial changes. In 1802, prompted by 
 a memorial from a group of Manchester reformers, Sir 
 Robert Peel, himself a wealthy manufacturer, passed an 
 Act imposing some slight obligations in matters of health, 
 hours of work and instruction, on the mill-owners, in 
 the interests of the children employed, and introducing 
 inspection. It was the beginning of the elaborate net- 
 work of factory legislation, in which England, the pioneer 
 in factory invention, has again led the world in mitigating 
 the results. This is one branch of the multifarious state- 
 activity which has grown in succeeding years with acce- 
 lerating speed. It has already increased so much that, 
 though the groundplan of our law remains as it has been 
 kid down for centuries, by far the greater part of our 
 statutes and administrative machinery is subsequent to the 
 industrial revolution. It has grown with it, like our system 
 of national communications, which is another outward 
 sign of the working of the organizing mind, so powerfully 
 stimulated by the events of the period. Good highroads
 
 The Industrial Revolution 215- 
 
 with stage-coaches, posts, canals, railways, and telegraphs 
 the nervous system of our present society all is less 
 than two hundred years old, and most of it directly 
 connected with the mechanical discoveries. 
 
 Now it will be noticed that this organizing activity 
 is by no means identical with state action, although the 
 state has shared largely in the general stimulation. 
 Voluntary forms of co-operation, the organization of 
 independent enterprise, have been at least as active ; 
 and the freely formed links are some of the strongest. 
 This outburst of organizing and unifying activity in 
 society which followed the industrial revolution is clearly 
 one of the great stages in the growth of a collective 
 human force in the world, and intimately related to the 
 organizing skill implied in the machines themselves. We 
 may, as Helmholtz in his famous study of the formation 
 of the eye, find faults still more serious in the social 
 process. Yet, as it develops, we seem bound to recognize 
 in this organization of industry by science an indispensable 
 instrument for furthering the unity and efficiency of the 
 race : and, more happily than in the case of physical 
 defects, we have it largely in our own power to effect 
 a cure. 
 
 But the retrospect of the two evolutions, of science in 
 the seventeenth and industry in the eighteenth century, 
 must leave very different feelings in the mind. There is 
 no cloud on the fame of Galileo or Descartes or Newton, 
 but we cannot think of Watt or Arkwright or Stephenson 
 without a vision of the loss of life and beauty and happi- 
 ness which has marked every step in their achievement 
 and reduced the sum of the benefits which they have
 
 2i 6 The Industrial Revolution 
 
 conferred. The former find their goal in a closer and 
 more comprehensive unity of thought ; and both their 
 motive and reward are immediate and pure. The work 
 of the latter struggles to success through all the obstacles 
 of material difficulties and imperfect human wisdom and 
 wills. The rewards are mixed and ill-divided, like the 
 capacities of those through whom they must be reached. 
 And while the apprehension of a great law is given in 
 a moment of the individual's life who sees it, the realiza- 
 tion of great social changes must be measured by another 
 scale. A generation is a moment when all society is to 
 be changed. It is just a hundred years since the first 
 steamer left the Clyde and much less since the first 
 locomotive engine took persons still alive on a journey 
 by rail. The interval since is so crowded with events 
 that we rightly treat it as an epoch : yet in the life of 
 the species it is but an instant a flash from the anvil 
 in the forge of mankind.
 
 10 
 
 THE REVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND 
 POLITICAL 
 
 The destination of the human species as a whole is towards con- 
 tinued progress. We accomplish it by fixing our eyes on the goal, 
 which, though a pure ideal, is of the highest value in practice, for 
 it gives a direction to our efforts, conformable to the intentions of 
 Providence. 
 
 KANT, Criticism of Herder, 1785.
 
 WE isolated in the last chapter one aspect of the great 
 European movement which links the eighteenth and 
 nineteenth centuries together. It is the aspect in which 
 our own country was most prominent, which has made 
 most apparent difference in the face of the world and 
 seems most directly to bear on our main topic, the 
 growth of the collective force of mankind, conquering 
 and utilizing the forces of nature. But throughout our 
 sketch, throughout the rise both of modern science and 
 modern industry, the need constantly emerged of wider 
 and more human ideas to give purpose and motive power 
 to the movement as a whole. One can imagine a 
 supremely skilful industrial state, based on science and 
 organized by master minds, in which the whole purpose 
 was the pleasure and aggrandizement of the few, and 
 there was no thought of the community and common 
 ends of man. Such we know the modern system has 
 often appeared to its more hostile critics. It would be 
 a ship constructed and equipped with perfect art, but 
 wanting the guiding mind to take it on its appointed 
 journey, or, at best, making a pleasure-trip for the amuse- 
 ment of the upper-deck ; and all the omens tell us that 
 the voyage would be short. 
 
 The picture has value as a warning. But it would be 
 untrue even of the industrial revolution as we have 
 sketched it in England, and it entirely ignores the wider 
 and deeper ideas of human duty and destiny which were 
 gaining ground at the same time in the western world. 
 We must now enter on the larger field to complete our
 
 The Revolution, Social and Political 219 
 
 view, and in doing so return to that co-operative action 
 of the leading nations, especially of France, Germany, 
 and England, which we noted as the issue of the Middle 
 Ages. 
 
 While England was accumulating the wealth which 
 was to give her and her system the preponderance in 
 the conflict with revolutionary France, the lead in abstract 
 thinking, which she had held in the seventeenth century, 
 passed for the time to the Continent, and primarily to 
 France. It was France, and above all Lavoisier, who 
 first co-ordinated the results of the new discoveries in 
 chemistry and constituted it a science. It was France 
 that a little later laid the foundations of biology by the 
 labours of many great men, especially of Bichat and 
 Lamarck. They were French thinkers who proclaimed 
 most clearly the new principles of human progress and 
 unity. It was France who made those principles her 
 national gospel and staked her existence on teaching 
 them to the rest of mankind. Hence it followed that 
 the attempt to realize those principles immediately in 
 practice became identified with France, as the industrial 
 revolution was identified with England, though in the 
 former case it is easy to show that the movement was 
 really international and to cull similar thoughts from all 
 the nations of the West. Only the soil of France was 
 better prepared and her temper more fervid. 
 
 One might go back to the Stoical philosophy which 
 closed the Greco-Roman period, and find in that the 
 ' principles of the French Revolution '. Then, after ages 
 of local patriotism and tribal mythology, men had begun 
 to feel the reality of a larger whole, the ' Inhabited
 
 220 The Revolution, Social and Political 
 
 World ', where slave and emperor were naturally equal 
 and naturally bound to follow an equal law. Christianity 
 had built its first simple structure round the same corner- 
 stone, and the long discipline of the Catholic Church had 
 brought permanently together a large civilized nucleus 
 in the West. Then came the vast sense of power, the 
 illimitable vistas of possible improvement which entered 
 into the world with the discoveries of science. The spirit 
 generated by the whole process in leading minds of 
 Western Europe may be traced in many statesmen and 
 writers of the mid-eighteenth century, collectively and 
 conspicuously in the French group of ' philosophes ' 
 who circled round the Encyclopaedia, and most of all 
 in the purest and noblest victim of the Revolution, the 
 Marquis of Condorcet. He will best exemplify the new 
 spirit in its full strength and with its accidental and 
 superficial defects. There are three aspects of his social 
 and historical doctrine, as expounded in the Sketch of 
 Human Progress, which specially concern us. It is in the 
 first place a universal doctrine, herein like that of the 
 Stoics. Mankind is to be united, and ' wars will be 
 regarded as assassinations '. In the second place all men 
 are to be equal, at least in their opportunity for happi- 
 ness and improvement. Slavery is to be abolished, and 
 all the chains in which, like Rousseau, he saw men 
 fettered, are to be struck off. Herein the new doctrine, 
 starting from the same root-idea as the Stoics, is prepared 
 to give it a more immediate and practical application. 
 And lastly the most characteristically modern element 
 he taught that man individually, and society as a whole, 
 is capable of indefinite improvement. ' Nature has set
 
 The Revolution-) Social and Political 
 
 221 
 
 no limit to our hopes ', and the ' picture of the human 
 race, freed from its chains, and marching with a firm 
 tread on the road of truth and virtue and happiness, 
 offers to the philosopher a spectacle which consoles him 
 for the errors, the crimes, the injustice, which still pollute 
 and afflict the earth '. 
 
 Condorcet and his burning hopes, written in 1793 
 when he was bors la loi and hiding from his enemies in 
 the Convention, may well have the first place among 
 our witnesses to the new gospel. Though proscribed and 
 done to death, he was the spokesman of the most typical 
 and moving thoughts of his nation at the moment when 
 it was waving the banner of a new life and a new humanity 
 in the face of the world. But we may find the same 
 ideas, more deeply grounded in a general philosophy and 
 expressed with a more comprehensive wisdom, in the 
 greatest contemporary thinker of Germany. Kant, too, 
 was largely influenced on the social and political side by 
 Rousseau, but he was free from the animus against the 
 past, and especially the religious past, which perverted 
 so much of the work of the ' philosophes '. In 1784, ten 
 years before Condorcet's Sketch, five years before the 
 outbreak of the Revolution, he published his Ideas towards 
 a Universal History from a cosmopolitan point of view. 
 This is incomparably the most powerful and pregnant 
 statement of the views which we are discussing, before 
 the nineteenth century made them a commonplace. 
 Kant begins by showing how we can reconcile the freedom 
 of the individual will with the evolution of society accord- 
 ing to an ascertainable law. The solution is to be found 
 in the necessary dualism of the process. Man must
 
 222 The Revolution^ Social and Political 
 
 develop as an individual, yet the individual, only realizes 
 his full powers in a constantly developing society. It is 
 by regarding social movements in the mass that we 
 become conscious of their conforming to definite laws. 
 Of these laws the most important and comprehensive is 
 that of the growing cohesion of men in societies which 
 secure the justice and stability needed for individual and 
 social progress. The capital and most difficult step has 
 been already achieved in the foundation of well-ordered 
 political communities : this must give us confidence that 
 some day the natural issue will result, and a world- 
 community arise in which wars will disappear, as private 
 war has disappeared in the separate states. His later 
 work, Towards Perpetual Peace, appeared in 1795 when 
 Europe was on the eve of her struggle with Napoleon. 
 In this he develops the necessity for republican or repre- 
 sentative institutions, claims for each state the freedom 
 to control her own affairs, and pictures for the future 
 a world-federation of such free states. 
 
 The cynic may smile at both prophetic figures, Con- 
 dorcet, hymning an age of peace and truth before he 
 flees from the storm of fierce passions and viler calumnies 
 to die alone in a damp cell at Bourg-la-Reine ; Kant, 
 hailing the advent of a world-republic at the moment 
 when Napoleon was about to extinguish the liberties of 
 half a continent and drown Europe in blood. But we 
 may bear the smile. These men, in spite of seeming 
 contradiction, were truly the spokesmen of their time. 
 The conflicts and calumnies, the bloodshed and self- 
 aggrandizement belong to any age ; they have been 
 lessened by the lives of the great humanitarian leaders
 
 The Revolution^ Social and Political 223 
 
 of the eighteenth century. The really typical utterance 
 of any epoch is that which rises inevitably from ante- 
 cedent history, yet gives a new outlook to the new 
 generation, thoughts which are stirring in many minds, 
 and ring out in the voices of genius and insight. Of these 
 Kant and Condorcet were two, among a host so great and 
 varied that many names have been given to the period in 
 which they lived, besides that of the ' Revolution '. It was 
 the time of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the return 
 to Nature, and in somewhat later times the Romantic 
 movement. Through such a maze of interests we 
 must keep our eye fixed firmly on the leading thread 
 we have followed throughout, if we are to reach any 
 conclusion. 
 
 But there is one coincidence of dates so striking that 
 the narrowest summary could not pass it by. 
 
 In one year, 1776, in the midst of the crucial inventions 
 of industrial machinery, three men were born, all of the 
 first importance in forming the modern spirit from that 
 mass of eager, expectant life which filled the latter part 
 of the eighteenth century. They were Hegel at Stutt- 
 gart, Beethoven at Bonn, Wordsworth at Cockermouth. 1 
 The genius of each was proudly, even fiercely indepen- 
 dent, yet each combines with the others in that mysterious 
 unity of texture of which we are aware in subsequent 
 thought and feeling, and cannot understand without all 
 its diverse elements. 
 
 Hegel contributes to this unity, not the vast super- 
 
 1 J. M. W. Turner, the greatest exponent of Nature in colour, almost 
 exactly coincides with Wordsworth. He was born in 1775 and died 
 in 1851.
 
 224 The Revolution^ Social and Political 
 
 structure of his logic which has divided all those who 
 have applied their minds to compass it, but the simple 
 fundamental notion of his Philosophy of History, that 
 humanity is one progressive and perfectible being or 
 organism, which advances by becoming more complete 
 and reasonable. For Reason, as with Anaxagoras, rules 
 the world, not as an outside force moulding mechanically 
 the course of things, but Reason embodied in man, and 
 rinding in man's history its most perfect expression. It 
 is a fuller and more poetical presentation than Kant's of 
 the new doctrine of a united and progressive mankind : 
 it lacks the strictness of Kant's argument, but it colours 
 and commends its theme by many touches of imagination. 
 African civilization is the child-life of mankind, Indian 
 is based on a dream of life and the universe ; while it 
 is to Hegel that we owe the famous aphorism that the 
 history of Greece is the life of a glorious youth, typified 
 at its birth by Achilles and in its decay by Alexander. 
 
 Beethoven, as the master of modern music, may seem 
 at first sight removed from our main subject. Yet, in 
 music and life alike, he was bound up with all the move- 
 ments of the revolutionary storm. He was won over by 
 contact with the crusading armies of republican France, 
 and hailed Napoleon as the new Prometheus of human 
 liberty. He turned still more fiercely against him when 
 he assumed a crown and trampled on those whom he 
 had set out to free, wrote paeans of triumph for the war 
 of independence and altered the title of his Heroic 
 Symphony into one to celebrate ' the memory of a great 
 man '. His art shows that the relation between music 
 and social conditions rests on a wider and more permanent
 
 'The Revolution^ Social and Political 22? 
 
 basis than the inclinations of an individual. For modern 
 music, and Beethoven's above all, expresses more movingly 
 than any words the deepening of feeling, the mingled 
 cheerfulness and pathos, the straining to the further shore, 
 the heaven-storming shout of triumphant humanity, 
 which inspired the Revolution. Music was always social ; 
 this music, more than any other, bears clearly the im- 
 press of its origin and nature. No proof could be more 
 cogent of the reality of that growth of human sympathy 
 which is one aspect of our theme, than that music 
 has become, since the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, the characteristic and pre-eminent art of Western 
 Europe. 
 
 Wordsworth was the third of the great men of 1770, 
 and long outlived the others. He had the special mark 
 of greatness in combining intense national and local 
 feeling with universal sympathies which bound him to 
 the Revolution. It is the latter aspect which appeals 
 to us here. Two distinguished features in Words- 
 worth's teaching thus stand out and proclaim him a 
 fellow-pioneer with Lessing and Goethe in Germany 
 and Rousseau in France, of the new and simpler 
 order of thinking and writing which must form a part 
 of any world-movement including rich and poor, all 
 nations and colours, in one community of sentiment 
 and purpose. These are his preference and defence of 
 humble people, common themes and simple language ; 
 and his revelation of the latent feelings which we all have 
 in us towards the common facts and sights of nature 
 and which he proclaimed to be religious. In each respect 
 Wordsworth was the most powerful voice that turned 
 
 1643 Q 

 
 226 The Revolution^ Social and Political 
 
 men ' back to Nature ' at the close of the century. The 
 ' Prelude ' well describes how the two passions grew 
 together in his mind, the love of nature and the love of 
 man, and how the great drama enacted in France affected 
 at each stage the sympathies of one who viewed its com- 
 mencement with enthusiastic hopes, and felt it a ' bliss to 
 be alive ', ' with human nature seeming born again '. 
 
 We may well enter France in 1790 in Wordsworth's 
 company. She was standing ' on the top of golden 
 hours '. The Bastille had fallen and with it the whole 
 fabric of feudal privilege. The King had accepted the 
 Constitution, and, as Wordsworth landed at Calais on 
 the eve of the I4th of July, the whole country was 
 preparing to celebrate the first anniversary of the national 
 deliverance. On the Champs-de-Mars in Paris half 
 a million persons were assembled from aD the eighty- 
 three departments into which France had just been 
 divided, and there they witnessed the king swear to 
 their new charter of freedom and pledged their own 
 faith. Wordsworth saw only a reflection of the scene in 
 Calais and the towns and villages he passed on his way 
 to Paris, but even in * mean cities ' and among the few 
 he noted ' how bright a face is worn when joy of one 
 is joy for tens of millions '. 
 
 It was here that Wordsworth with a poet's insight 
 reached the heart of the movement. The Revolu- 
 tion, -which was to unfold itself in so many blood- 
 stained pages and end in national disaster and apparent 
 reaction, was essentially universal and rested on a growing 
 sense of the common rights and feelings and powers of 
 all mankind. No less a formula than this will fit the
 
 'The Revolution, Social and Political 2.2.7 
 
 facts, and it differentiates the Revolution sharply from the 
 previous movements, especially in England and the United 
 States, which many revolutionists used for comparison and 
 encouragement. The English Civil War and the succeed- 
 ing Revolution were essentially constitutional. There 
 were acts of war of many kinds, but both the war and the 
 political changes which followed it were carried out by 
 men whose first desire was to re-establish and make clear 
 what they believed to be the law and constitutional prac- 
 tice of the English state. Cromwell's work was national, 
 though the sequel in the hands of William III became 
 a dominant factor in European politics and the ultimate 
 result was the world-wide imitation of the English Consti- 
 tution. TheEnglish movement aimed primarily at widen- 
 ing and clearing the course of that stream of precedent 
 which brings us our freedom. The French Revolution 
 differed, both in the previous preparation of the country 
 which gave it birth, in the general state of men's minds 
 which stimulated it, and in the results to which it tended. 
 
 We shall see how in the end the general ideas on which 
 it rested were forced to realize themselves by the slower 
 and more ordered methods of which England was the 
 prototype, how Germany was at this crisis drawn into 
 the triple group of the really leading Powers of Western 
 Europe, and how after the turmoil of revolution the 
 commonalty of mankind became steadily a greater and 
 more substantial thing, drawing closer together, improv- 
 ing itself within and subduing with increased vigour the 
 powers of earth to its service. 
 
 How was it that, when, in the eighteenth century, the 
 great humanitarian ideas, born of science and the passion 
 
 Q2
 
 228 The Revolution^ Social and Political 
 
 for. reform, pressed to the front, they found their natural 
 home in France, and yet desolated it before they came to 
 years of discretion ? The answer, as always, is a historical 
 one, qualified by geography. As England was marked out 
 by national and physical characteristics to be the scene of 
 the industrial revolution, so France, the central country of 
 Western Europe, had long been the clearing-house for new 
 ideas, the exchange for the intellectual currency of Europe. 
 
 In no previous age was this so much the case as in the 
 eighteenth century, when Voltaire, the greatest sifter 
 of notions and popularizer of ideas, became master of 
 the exchange. He did more than sit at his central 
 office ; he travelled on his business, importing the ideas 
 of Newton from the rich but somewhat isolated 
 market of England and personally introducing them 
 to the barbarous court of Berlin. The currency of 
 French was indeed at that time so great that Gibbon 
 and many English writers were almost as much French 
 as English. France was the second fatherland of every 
 civilized man and gained for herself education from 
 the wealth of ideas that passed her doors. But while 
 thus intellectually stimulated and enriched, she was 
 not socially so strong or compact as England, nor so 
 ready to pass without a violent break from her feudal 
 state to the new conditions called for by the gospel of 
 equal rights, equal opportunities and the union of all. 
 
 France was more centralized and less united than 
 England. The paradox explains both the possibility and 
 violence of the Revolution, and its failure at the first 
 attempt. Just as the feudal system had been more 
 complete in France than in England, so the triumph of
 
 The Revolution^ Social and Political 229 
 
 the Crown in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
 had been more absolute. Whereas in England the Crown 
 had survived by making terms with the local nobility 
 who stood for the whole country, in France the Crown 
 had struck them down and drawn the remnant and their 
 successors into a separate world of its own, the noblesse, 
 ranged against, instead of at the head of, the rest of the 
 nation. In England the Petition of Right looks back to 
 Magna Carta and leads on to the settlement of 1689, 
 when the aristocracy is put in power. In France the 
 Crown establishes in the seventeenth century an absolute 
 authority by its ' intendants ', unchecked by Parliament, 
 and the nobility become the satellites of Versailles. At 
 the Revolution therefore the men who could seize the 
 central government had at their command a perfect 
 instrument of despotism, but not a homogeneous people. 
 Compare the history of the identical words ' gentleman ' 
 and ' gentilhomme '. The latter becomes restricted to 
 a caste, to those of ' gentle ' or noble birth. The former 
 gradually loses its connotation of blood, and is applied, 
 practically with the consent of all, to those whose manners 
 and general breeding evoke respect. England was held 
 together by her local liberties and by the local power of 
 that ' gentry ' which in France abdicated in favour of the 
 Crown, and fell with it. 
 
 This horizontal fissure in the social structure of France 
 before the Revolution accounts for the collapse of the 
 attempt to carry out the scheme of national reform with 
 the king at the head. New men, new ideas surged up 
 from below, captured the more active and intelligent 
 part of the population and coerced the king. But they
 
 230 The Revolution^ Social and Political 
 
 did not really possess him. He was surrounded and held 
 by the intervening layer of the privileged and obstructive 
 nobility, small in number but compact, and cut off by 
 generations of caste feeling from the mass of their fellow- 
 countrymen, righting, when at bay, with the tenacity 
 and personal courage of their order. Hence history 
 seems to have determined a violent issue to the movement, 
 and, as the inevitable sequel to violence, a temporary 
 reaction. 
 
 But though we are right to seek in the Old World, 
 and especially in France herself, for the main springs 
 of the revolutionary movement, the New World also 
 played a memorable part. The new communities had 
 been growing there for nearly two hundred years, in 
 ample space and free from the old ties of class and of 
 religion which were to make the transition to a new order 
 in Europe so difficult. Already, more than a century 
 before, the New World had given the first example to 
 Europe of perfect religious equality before the law, when 
 Roger Williams, a New England minister, educated at 
 Pembroke College, Cambridge, had founded in 1636 the . 
 settlement of Providence, on the new principle, still 
 thought dangerous in America, of complete separation 
 between religious and civil affairs. Even a hundred years 
 later Rousseau would have punished with death a citizen 
 who did not accept his new and simplified profession of 
 faith. In 1776 came the more telling example of the 
 Declaration of Independence, and the war in which the 
 French had given decisive help to the revolting colonies. 
 Franklin, the hero of the lightning discovery, arranged 
 the treaty between the States and France. Lafayette,
 
 The Revolution^ Social and Political 231 
 
 who served twice with the army of independence in 
 America, returned to command the National Guard in 
 the earlier stage of the Revolution. So the connexion 
 was close, and when the French constitution-makers sat 
 down to draw up the first of their documents, they 
 borrowed verbally the opening language of the States, 
 ' Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. 
 Social distinctions can only be based on social utility.' 
 But the United States were a new country in the hands 
 of careful and conservative men, while France was an 
 old one in the hands of revolutionists. 
 
 It was little more than two years since Wordsworth had 
 seen the general rejoicing and friendliness, the welcome 
 to all mankind, of 1790, before the dream had vanished 
 and France was in arms against the world. The invita- 
 tion had become a challenge and the gage of battle was 
 the head of a king. With all its horrors and the personal 
 littleness of many of the leading actors, the story will 
 always remain an immortal heritage of the human race, 
 ranking beside the defence of Athens against the Persians, 
 and of Holland against Spain, on the roll of those heroic 
 national forces that have stood victoriously against over- 
 whelming odds, in the interest of a cause greater than 
 themselves. For in spite of defections and revolt it was 
 the real France which answered to the call of Danton 
 and marched out to Valmy and Jemappes, as the real 
 Greece left Athens and met the foe at Salamis. There 
 were defaulters from both camps, and modern France 
 was to be made by the regrowth of its true though 
 mutilated national being, till it had put on again its full 
 strength and healed its wounds. The court and the
 
 232 The Revolution^ Social and Political 
 
 nobility had been now cast off and were in arms against 
 their country, while in the rear were Bretons, men of 
 La Vendee, faithful Royalists and Catholics everywhere, 
 who could not reconcile their old beliefs with the new 
 national crusade. But it was the true France, the France 
 of the future, that went forward ; and she carried with her 
 not only the national interests but an ideal of universal 
 good. 
 
 It is as essential to understand this as it is to under- 
 stand that later in the struggle England did right and 
 played an almost equally heroic part in resisting the 
 Revolution when it became oppressive. What then were 
 the precious gifts which France in arms was defending 
 for herself and offering to Europe ? And at what point 
 could it become lawful, even imperative, to oppose them 
 if they were the apostles of a new era in human progress ? 
 The second question may be best dealt with first : Words- 
 worth in his life-story and Kant in his penetrating view 
 of the conditions of human progress will indicate the 
 answer. 
 
 Wordsworth stood by the Republic, after the Septem- 
 ber massacres, after the death of Louis, until ' Frenchmen 
 became oppressors in their turn and changed a war of 
 self-defence for one of conquest ', losing sight of ' all 
 which they had struggled for '. The invasion of Switzer- 
 land, the suppression of national rights by Napoleon, till 
 ' to close and seal up all the gains of France a Pope is 
 summoned in to crown an Emperor ' ; these were the 
 catastrophe of freedom. Kant's principles would have 
 passed the same judgement, with an even further out- 
 look. For, while Wordsworth was thinking above all of
 
 The Revolution^ Social and Political 233 
 
 personal liberty and happiness, Kant was seeking the 
 pathway to a state of universal peace and unity, where 
 individual aims and characters, essentially different, would 
 be harmonized by common sentiments and interests. But 
 to secure a strong and healthy whole the parts must be 
 intact, and therefore he condemned all invasion of the 
 rights of one people by another. It must be a union of 
 free and independent nations that will form a world- 
 society. 
 
 Somewhere between the disinterested enthusiasm of 
 1790 and the end of the century the tide of French 
 action had become retrograde. The precise point need 
 not concern us. The new aggressive spirit which 
 swallowed up the humanitarian ideas of the Revolu- 
 tion, did not arise primarily from Napoleon, though he 
 personified it and gave it vigour. It sprang from 
 the intense national passion that challenged the world 
 at Valmy and marched on to unexpected triumphs. 
 That when it reached this phase, it was incumbent 
 on the threatened states to defend themselves, we 
 need not stay to argue ; and that the final issue was 
 then inevitably a temporary set-back to the early hopes 
 of freedom and progress is equally self-evident. The 
 stream of history had in its central course become a 
 raging torrent, and the flooded country-side strove 
 for a time ineffectually to check and dam it. 
 
 But for clearance the flood and the rapid are powerful 
 agents, and the destructive work of the Revolution was 
 in many points as useful as the slower construction which 
 followed and in which we are taking part. 
 
 We saw in England how the industrial revolution,
 
 234 'The Revolution^ Social and Political 
 
 aided by the new doctrine of laissez-faire, had gradually 
 removed the mediaeval restrictions on the free movement 
 and free organization of workmen and employers. In 
 France the clearing work of the Revolution was compar- 
 able, though it had a wider sweep. It carried away in 
 a moment a host of inequalities, o'f feudal privileges and 
 restrictions, of differences between province and province 
 and man and man, which Turgot and other reformers 
 'had laboured in vain to remove. The feudal dues and 
 rights of the seigneurs were surrendered in one famous 
 night, within two months of the assembly of the States- 
 General. The relics of actual serfdom which still lingered 
 in certain places soon followed in the torrent. New 
 ' departments ', of similar constitution and with no 
 barriers of customs, took the place of the old ' provinces '. 
 In all this the Revolution was but completing at a stroke 
 a natural progress which all enlightened men had wished 
 to hasten. It was essential that obstacles to the free 
 union and activity of citizens, which had descended from 
 an age before the modern state had been conceived, 
 should be removed, in order that the nation should 
 combine strongly on a new basis, and take its place in 
 the coming world-society of vigorous and independent 
 states. The conquering armies of Napoleon did some- 
 thing of the same work in many corners of the Continent, 
 sweeping out obstructive and effete abuses and preparing 
 the foundations for future building. In Germany serf- 
 dom was abolished and the ghost of the old Holy Roman 
 Empire laid at last. 
 
 In another and a wider sphere the leaders of the 
 Revolution did their part to remove the greatest of dis-
 
 The Revolution^ Social ana Political 235- 
 
 abilities to the free union of human beings over the 
 whole planet, by attacking the institution of slavery. On 
 this the French leaders were by no means the first to 
 speak. The Quakers in England, following their founder, 
 George Fox, had been the first united body to denounce 
 it. Thirty years before the Convention they had decided 
 to excommunicate from their society any one concerned 
 in the trade, and before the Revolution began they had 
 formed "an association for the ' relief and liberation of 
 the Negroes in the West Indies '. Nationally, however, 
 the French anticipated us by their society called the 
 ' Friends of the Blacks ', which, with Condorcet at its 
 head, was working for the abolition of slavery itself, while 
 the general English movement under Wilberforce was 
 still concerned only with stopping the trade. In 1794 
 the Convention freed all the slaves of Haiti, but, through 
 the reaction in France, England attained the final goal 
 of general emancipation in 1833, twelve years before her 
 revolutionary neighbour. 
 
 These things, and many more, might in the broad 
 sense be classed among the destructive activities of the 
 Revolution, in removing obstacles to free individual and 
 national development. Looking at Europe as a whole, 
 and limiting ourselves for this purpose to the period 
 ending in 1830, a useful date, it might perhaps be said 
 that it was on the destructive side that the Revolution 
 was most effective. Yet even in the height of the party 
 struggle and the utmost stress of the fight for national 
 life against the invader, the Convention succeeded in 
 launching schemes of constructive reform which have 
 occupied generations since to carry fully into effect. The
 
 2 3 6 The Revolution^ Social and Political 
 
 ' principles of the Revolution ', therefore, were not empty 
 formulae, though of ten transcending the executive powers 
 of the men who enounced them, or the age that first 
 saw them written on the orders of the day. The Con- 
 vention which sat for three years, from 1792 to 1795, 
 did the constructive work of the first French Republic. 
 It not only defended the country successfully abroad and 
 welded the nation together at home, but in numerous 
 committees took up great subjects that called for 
 reform, and in each case left fertile suggestions or large 
 masses of work done and only needing completion or 
 application. We can only mention two here of special 
 magnitude and importance. They touch on our main 
 theme, one looking back to the Romans, the other forward 
 to the still greater work of raising the whole mass of the 
 population to a state of full citizenship, which is one of 
 the first tasks of the succeeding century. 
 
 The first is what is commonly known as the Code 
 Napoleon. It was a commission of the Convention which 
 first seriously undertook the task, long needed, of codify- 
 ing French law and bringing it up to date. It handed on 
 the draft to be completed under the Directory and issued 
 by Napoleon. It looks back to Roman law in the sense that 
 the old French law which was its basis was derived from 
 Roman, and also in the fact that when revised in the 
 light of the Revolution, it became another complete 
 code, like that of the Roman Empire, which could be, 
 and was, largely adopted by other countries both in 
 Europe and in Central and South America. 
 
 The second great undertaking of the Convention was 
 its scheme of national education, in which Condorcet
 
 The Revolution, Social and Political 237 
 
 had been the moving spirit. In this, as in its distribution 
 of State property and the institution of a popular public 
 debt, it aimed directly at equalizing opportunity as well 
 as means, and enlisting all possible talent and interest in 
 the service of a united and efficient state. The universal 
 popular schools, though planned, were not at this time 
 carried out. They waited for general introduction till 
 almost the same moment as in England, the decade of 
 our first Reform Bill. But many of the higher and 
 central schools in Paris were actually established by the 
 Convention. 
 
 The mere fact, however, that the Convention stood 
 for the nation and did these things, and all else that it 
 attempted, in the name and interests of the whole people, 
 was in itself more important than any particular law or 
 institution. It was the embodiment of popular sove- 
 reignty, the first assembly in any great European state 
 elected by all citizens over twenty-five (later twenty-one) 
 years of a.ge, domiciled for a year and living by their own 
 labour. Standing as such before France and before the 
 world, and standing successfully at such a time, its 
 influence can hardly be exaggerated. It was a potent 
 stimulus both to nationality and democracy, two guiding 
 stars in the succeeding century. 
 
 Slightly as they have been touched on, we have yet in 
 this chapter given more details of a few years' history of 
 one country than will appear in any other. The impulse 
 to do this is irresistible. The revolt against the Church, 
 the recovery of the ancient world and the appearance 
 of a new one, the undreamt-of expanse of human powers 
 by science and invention, the limitless hopes of further
 
 238 The Revolution, Social and Political 
 
 advance and general happiness, all converged in men's 
 minds about the mid-eighteenth century and created 
 a reasoned passion which in its higher form was a new 
 religion. We see the country in which this was most 
 deeply felt, suddenly awake and begin with feverish haste 
 to apply its enthusiasm to mending the faults in its own 
 state and preaching amendment to all its neighbours. The 
 excitement is breathless. We follow the fortunes of every 
 actor, and of the whole country labouring in the great 
 experiment, with closer interest than any other period 
 of history can evoke. In the thrill of the conflict, under 
 the fascination of the play of personal character, we are 
 apt to overlook for the moment the onward march of 
 the same causes which led to the upheaval in France and 
 have continued to transform society down to our own 
 time. Industrial development in England, abstract philo- 
 sophy and literature in Germany, ideas of progress and 
 reform in France, these were the most active general 
 forces in the three greatest western nations at the end 
 of the century, and the Revolution altered the balance 
 of each. 
 
 In Germany the shock aroused the national spirit 
 which had been sleeping in the midst of the most brilliant 
 intellectual development which Germany has ever seen. 
 The conquering armies of Napoleon kindled a flame which 
 Goethe had never cared to light. Prussia on land, and 
 England by sea, had finally subdued Napoleon and driven 
 France back to her old boundaries and, for a time, to 
 something like her old regime. In the process the founda- 
 tions of modern Germany were laid and Prussia estab- 
 lished in the hegemony of the Teutonic people. The
 
 The Revolution , Social and Political 239 
 
 greatness of Germany in the century which follows is 
 due, partly no doubt to the intellectual giants of Goethe's 
 age, but still more to the stern discipline of the War of 
 Liberation and the faithful service of those who en- 
 lightened and built up the Prussian state at the lowest 
 ebb of its external fortunes. 
 
 The relations with England were, however, the most 
 important external aspect of the Revolution. While the 
 honours of Waterloo are divided, the leading share of 
 England in the whole war is incontestable. It was our 
 greatest national effort. Except for just over a year 
 after the Treaty of Amiens, we were continuously at war 
 with France for over' twenty years from the execution 
 of Louis in 1793 till 1814 and Waterloo. The cost 
 was mainly paid by English money, and we accumu- 
 lated debt about equal to the whole of our present 
 National Debt. But since 1815, when -British trade 
 and British perseverance secured their reward, the peace 
 with France has been unbroken, and now (1913) the 
 understanding between France and England seems the 
 most powerful and stable factor in international politics. 
 Thus, when 1915 is reached, another record century 
 will have been passed, fit to be commemorated with 
 the century of Anglo-Saxon peace. 
 
 This friendship, following so many conflicts and one 
 last determined struggle, must have deep causes. Our 
 next chapter will suggest some of them. But looking 
 back now over the hundred years since the two coun- 
 tries emerged from the fight, we shall probably feel 
 that the chief result attained was the establishment, 
 by the hard facts of life, by the persistence of national
 
 240 The Revolution^ Social and Political 
 
 tradition and the power of wealth, of the supreme 
 social truths that progress must be subordinate to order, 
 that violent changes will bring violent nemesis, that 
 every country, while advancing towards the common 
 goal of general prosperity and happiness, must do so on 
 lines marked out by its own genius and history. England, 
 strong on this side, was weaker in her appreciation of 
 general ideas, in daring obedience to the dictates of 
 reason. France wanted the stability and continuity, 
 the tenacity and self-restraint in which England was 
 superior. 
 
 A new epoch seems to open when men arise who aim 
 at reconciling both ideals, and nations settle down to 
 social reform without revolution, to moulding the future 
 without breaking with the past. Progress after the Revo- 
 lution, the work of the nineteenth and later centuries, 
 unites the spirit of Burke and Condorcet in a common 
 purpose.
 
 II 
 
 PROGRESS AFTER REVOLUTION 
 
 All the great sources of human suffering are in a great degree, 
 many of them entirely, conquerable by human care and effort. 
 
 JOHN STUART MILL. 
 
 1543
 
 NEARLY a century has passed since the settlement of 
 1815. The main features of this period have left a clear 
 and universal impression on the popular mind of the 
 western world. It has been an age of progress, of big 
 things, of vast increase in knowledge and wealth and 
 human power. The size of our wonders alone is over- 
 powering, and that is in truth the least part of the marvel. 
 Ships now cross the Atlantic which could have carried 
 Columbus's caravel as one of their life-boats. Single 
 buildings scrape the sky which would have covered the 
 whole site of Cnossos and shot above the Tower of Babel. 
 Many a financier owns to-day more wealth than any 
 government could have commanded before the age of 
 progress began. ' England was then a mere nothing,' 
 wrote a little girl the other day, moralizing on the effects 
 of the industrial revolution. Judging by any table of 
 weights and measures, we should have to agree with her : 
 and some would add that, compared with the ' wonderful 
 century ', science and human power and ingenuity were 
 a mere nothing also. The popular view is by no means 
 to be despised, as many of the greatest thinkers have 
 told us from Aristotle downwards ; and in this case the 
 belief itself that progress is the mark of the age, is one 
 of the most powerful factors in producing the movement. 
 But it is not quite new in the world. The prevalent 
 tone of recent decades, the talk of the ' wondrous age ' 
 and the ' wonderful century ', takes the mind back to 
 the glowing dreams of Condorcet and the pre-revolu- 
 tionary days. It descends indeed directly from them ;
 
 Progress after Revolution 243 
 
 but when we begin to look more closely, we shall find 
 some interesting and significant differences. There was 
 in the earlier paeans more call for destruction, the break- 
 ing of chains and the freeing of slaves : the later are full 
 of things accomplished, the triumphs of engineering and 
 the wonders of science. There is more construction to 
 record, and evils and necessary changes are not so pro- 
 minent in the picture. If this is to the good, another 
 difference is less satisfactory. The older visions dealt 
 more with the coming improvement in human nature, 
 the infinite possibilities of goodness as well as knowledge. 
 The later are more material, and celebrate the conquests 
 of nature, the accumulation of power, and the increase 
 of comfort. 
 
 These are but vague impressions. We will analyse 
 a little further and see where the maze of modern 
 events follows the working of those main threads of pro- 
 gress which we are tracing throughout. The popular 
 view, though largely justified, is crude and external ; the 
 facts themselves increasingly complex and multitudinous. 
 Perhaps we may find in the continued development of 
 certain leading features of the past both a guide and an 
 encouragement in the perplexities of the present. 
 
 The striking things, which seem to symbolize the age, 
 are great works of construction and organization, implying 
 both a high degree of mechanical skill and the command 
 of vast masses of capital and labour ; the Railway and 
 Shipping Company which spans a continent and encircles 
 the globe with its steamers ; the giant ship which carries 
 a complete town of toil and pleasure across the ocean ; 
 the gun which can annihilate a fortress and a company of 
 
 R 2
 
 244 Progress after Revolution 
 
 men miles away with unerring precision. All these rest 
 ultimately on the powers of which we sketched the earlier 
 stages in the eighth and ninth chapters mechanical 
 science, inventive and constructive skill, and the organiza- 
 tion, or working together, of large businesses and bodies 
 of men. Each factor, the calculating science, the con- 
 structive skill, the combination of men, appears now, in 
 the last stage of our sketch, as the developed form of 
 some simple element which we noted for study in our 
 opening chapter. Each has grown like the tree from the 
 seed. 
 
 But we need a correction in the popular, concrete idea 
 of progress, which we should gain from such a symbol as an 
 ocean liner. The science is obvious, and the mechanical 
 skill, the brute force and the control of natural powers, even 
 the co-operation of myriads of men, is clearly seen in the 
 voyage itself and the successful working of the ship. But 
 what are the terms of this co-operation, the motives and 
 feelings of the voyagers, the human aspect of the whole 
 venture ? It was on this side, as we saw, that the men 
 of the Revolution were most set, and we should expect 
 to find, if there is truly life in the past, that when the 
 reaction of 1815 was over, the effort to secure more equal 
 and humane treatment for the whole population and 
 greater social union among all, would be resumed and 
 take its place as one, perhaps the foremost, of the de- 
 liberate aims of mankind. 
 
 It has been so ; but it is not surprising that this human 
 movement, of which we are ourselves a part, does not in 
 a casual glance so much impress the mind as those impos- 
 ing external objects which appear as symbols of the power
 
 Progress after Revolution 245- 
 
 and progress of the age. But it is equally fundamental, 
 and closely allied with the science by which the conquests 
 of nature have been secured. 
 
 We will say here first the few words that are possible 
 on social reform, then pass on to the extension of science, 
 especially in its relation to the conditions of life, and 
 conclude by showing the intimate connexion of both 
 social reform and science with the growing unity of the 
 human race. 
 
 The reaction which followed the downfall of Napoleon 
 wore itself out in the succeeding decade. Signs of rest- 
 lessness soon began to show themselves in France, and 
 in several smaller countries of Europe and America the 
 rising spirit of nationality was active in the decade be- 
 tween 1820 and 1830. Before 1830 arrived the Belgians 
 had broken away from Holland, the Greeks from Turkey, 
 and England, at Canning's instigation, had recognized 
 the South American republics revolted from Spain, thus 
 ' calling into existence a New World to redress the 
 balance of the Old '. But 1830 is the year from which 
 our present period of constitutional and progressive 
 reform may be best dated. 
 
 In France in that year the Revolution of July set up 
 a middle-class limited monarchy on something like the 
 English model, and in England the Duke of Wellington 
 ceased to be Prime Minister, to be succeeded by Lord 
 Grey with a pledge that parliamentary reform should at 
 last be passed. 1830, too, is memorable as the year in 
 which the first railway for passenger traffic was opened 
 between Liverpool and Manchester. The immediate and 
 abundant fruits of the Reform Bill, and the quickening
 
 24<* Progress after Revolution 
 
 current of democratic feeling in France, showed that the 
 humanitarian ideas which gave rise to the first Republic 
 were now to resume a tempered sway. Before the middle 
 of the century both France and England had emancipated 
 their slaves abroad and begun to organize with public 
 money a state education for all their citizens at home ; 
 England had carried Factory Acts which extended much 
 further the protection of the workers begun in 1802, and 
 by repealing the corn-laws had thrown open to her 
 growing population the granaries of the world. 
 
 The Reform Bill in England and the Revolution of 
 1830 in France thus nearly coincide as a useful chrono- 
 logical point whence may be dated a parallel series of 
 popular reforms in both countries. It has also a strong 
 personal interest for Englishmen as the meeting-point of 
 the life-work of our two most powerful and represen- 
 tative figures on the roll of humanitarian feeling and 
 reform. Bentham died in 1832 and Dickens published 
 his first book of stories in 1833. The former, trained 
 on pre-revolutionary literature, combined French culture 
 with English conservatism and common sense, and 
 brought eighteenth-century ideas into the Victorian 
 era. The latter was to become the great exponent 
 of English humanity in the nineteenth century, the 
 apostle in imaginative literature of universal kindliness 
 and social and educational reform. Both are of capital 
 importance to our theme. 
 
 Bentham is by common consent the moving spirit in the 
 group of philosophical reformers in England which became 
 active when the reaction of the war began to pass away. 
 But his work and ideas have far more than this temporary
 
 Progress after Revolution 247 
 
 fitness : they express in a luminous and precise way prac- 
 tical principles which were to mould public action during 
 the succeeding period. A singularly clear and ordered 
 mind enabled him to arrange a confused mass of legal and 
 political practice in the light of simple principles which 
 he adopted from others. The ' sensational ' school of 
 eighteenth-century thinkers, especially Helvetius, gave 
 him the root-idea that pleasure must be the object of 
 all individual action. He generalized this and deduced 
 the simple and practically beneficial conclusion that the 
 pleasure of all, or ' the greatest happiness of the greatest 
 number ' should be the aim of all public action and the 
 test of private morality. The great phrase came probably 
 from Priestley, but Bentham gave it application and 
 currency. He had a happy knack of coining useful words, 
 such as ' international ' and ' utilitarian ', the latter of 
 which soon became the designation of a school of thinkers. 
 His most important book, the Principles of Morals and, 
 Legislation, was published in the revolutionary year 1789, 
 and on the strength of it he was made a French citizen 
 by the National Assembly in 1792. His immediate fame 
 and influence were greater abroad than at home. But 
 in his later years he gathered round him in London that 
 group of philosophical radicals, James Mill, Brougham, 
 Romilly, Francis Place, whose influence was perhaps the 
 most powerful factor in mid-nineteenth century England. 
 Bentham's own chief contribution to progress was the 
 reform of the law on lines of greater simplicity, and what 
 he called ' utility ', which we should now better under- 
 stand as ' humanity '. He had in himself a humanity which 
 commended his principles and endeared his person to all
 
 248 Progress after Revolution 
 
 who knew him. With the truest characteristic of humane 
 feeling it went beyond mankind and embraced the lower 
 animals. He was a pioneer in the crusade for including 
 cruelty to animals among offences cognizable by law. It 
 was a new idea in his time and only gained admission to 
 the Statute Book in his old age. But it is largely due 
 to him that, though still imperfect after many amending 
 Acts, our own law in this matter is in advance of many 
 other countries, and that other countries have followed 
 where he led the way. He, too, and his disciples, had the 
 main share in mitigating the ferocity of our criminal 
 law which up to 1832 was still hanging persons, even 
 youths of fifteen, for thefts of over five shillings in 
 value. 
 
 In the year before his death he wrote in an autograph 
 for a friend, * The way to be comfortable is to make 
 others comfortable : the way to make others comfortable 
 is to appear to love them : the way to appear to love 
 them is to love them in reality. Probatur ab experientia 
 per Jeremy Bentham, Queen's Square Place, Westminster. 
 Born Feb. 15 : anno 1748. Written 24 Oct. 1831.' 
 
 Through James Mill the succession of reforming opinion 
 is complete from Bentham to John Stuart Mill and many 
 men who are still alive and active among us. The root 
 is there ; the tree has become so many-branched and so 
 widespreading that no one can compass the whole, and 
 we are inclined to forget the slim but sturdy sapling that 
 was planted in days when men still discussed and believed 
 in general principles. But though we can trace back the 
 contemporary social movement to its historical antece- 
 dents, two changes in spirit and method have taken place
 
 Progress after Revolution 249 
 
 which would almost remove it from the ken if not the 
 approval of the men of 1832. It has become in the first 
 place incomparably more detailed and scientific. This 
 they would probably have recognized as an advance. 
 And in the second place it constantly invokes the authority 
 of the state in a way which they certainly did not foresee 
 and would probably not have welcomed. Each of these 
 changes assists the main process which We are tracing in 
 these chapters, but in diverse ways. That social reform 
 the improvement of health, of education, and of the 
 conditions of labour should become a more and more 
 detailed and specialized business is the condition of its 
 closer connexion with science ; and science justifies 
 itself most completely when it is able to enlighten and 
 ameliorate the lives of all. No natural laws can be more 
 imperative or, bind us more closely and permanently 
 together, than those which science reveals to us as the 
 basis of our own life. But that the application of these 
 laws should be enforced by state-control is clearly a matter 
 of expediency from time to time. 
 
 In our own day the intervention of the State has no 
 doubt had the effect of consolidating both the nation at 
 home and nations among themselves. Next to conferences 
 on purely scientific topics, no recent movement tends so 
 directly to bring the nations together as international 
 meetings for the discussion of similar social problems 
 between different countries. And at home the strong 
 hand of the State, compelling us all to common action 
 in the common interest, has been a wholesome corrective 
 to the anarchy of feudalism and the individualism of the 
 Renascence and the Revolution. But whereas the unity
 
 Progress after Revolution 
 
 of thought and action which science imposes is unavoid- 
 able, and soon becomes a part of our common nature as 
 human beings, none of the regulations of the State have 
 this inevitable character. A whole society will submit 
 to them and even demand their imposition : but men 
 alter them constantly and in some cases grow out of them 
 altogether. It requires no law now to compel the vast 
 majority of any civilized community to give their children 
 the elements of education. And so while some of us are 
 thinking that all this state-regulation must end in a society 
 where the State is universal owner and lord, it is open 
 to those of another temper to hold that the State is but 
 a schoolmaster to bring us to Love the ' enthusiastic 
 love of the general good '.* 
 
 It would only confuse our argument to give details 
 of the progress of social reform in the past century. 
 With a certain ebb and flow, the stream has gone on 
 broadening and deepening, especially in the last few years. 
 Is it not written in libraries of blue-books and specialist 
 treatises ? But one of the three main branches, that of 
 national health, illustrates in a curiously complete way 
 that co-operation of different nations and various depart- 
 ments of human activity which it is our special business 
 to point out. Among the most certain and important 
 facts in the social history of the time, facts which find 
 no place in the ordinary text-book and teaching of 
 history, is the enormous advance in public health and the 
 average expectation of life, in our own and other civilized 
 communities of the West. Some diseases, such as typhus, 
 have almost disappeared and nearly all show a notable 
 1 J. S. Mill.
 
 Progress after Revolution 271 
 
 decline. The one striking exception is cancer. Now the 
 whole of the statistics of health, on which this conclusion 
 is based, which justify experiment and direct public 
 action in the matter, date from the decade which we 
 noticed as the beginning of serious and continued effort 
 at reform. The Registrar-General's records of the death- 
 rate and its causes date in England from 1836, just four 
 years after the death of Bentham and the passing of the 
 first Reform Bill. The records kept have constantly 
 become more extensive and scientific ever since, until 
 quite recently, on the initiative of France, an international 
 Nomenclature of Diseases has been drawn up, which has 
 already been accepted by about a score of different 
 nations or communities. Here is a case of the direct 
 application of scientific knowledge to the amelioration of 
 life with immediate and palpable advantage ; and neither 
 one science, nor one nation, marches alone. Statistics 
 involve high mathematical capacity, and sanitation, with 
 all the mechanics, physics, and chemistry it contains, has 
 contributed probably as largely as pure medicine to the 
 improvement in public health which has been attained. 
 And all civilized peoples are engaged in alliance on the 
 same task ; West aiding East in those heroic and successful 
 attacks on tropical diseases, in which many great lives 
 have been already spent. 
 
 Other branches of social reform would furnish similar 
 instances, education, the hours and remuneration of 
 labour, and the art of social legislation itself. Those 
 will be most effective which rest most clearly on the best 
 established science, and in the case of health we are 
 brought in touch with that branch of science, biology,
 
 2 y 2 Progress after Revolution 
 
 in which the characteristic development of the nineteenth 
 century took place. 
 
 We noticed that in the seventeenth century, when the 
 first great construction of modern science was made, 
 the attention of all the leading minds was concentrated 
 on attaining a consistent account of the mechanics of 
 the known universe, the inclusion of the physical pro- 
 perties of matter in enlarged and corrected mathematical 
 formulae. The Royal Society was founded to promote 
 * Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning ', and 
 this remained for long the prevalent drift of scientific 
 studies. In the eighteenth century chemical discoveries 
 and classification were the prominent feature. Cavendish 
 and Priestley, while continuing the advance of physics 
 on mathematical lines, laid also the foundations of a new 
 and independent science by the analysis of air and water, 
 and Lavoisier brought the newly discovered chemical 
 facts together and gave them scientific classification and 
 co-ordination. The nineteenth century constituted bio- 
 logy. As with most crucial steps in the progress of 
 knowledge, the name and the root-idea appeared inde- 
 pendently at the same moment in different countries. 
 A French thinker, Lamarck, and a German, Treviranus, 
 published, within a few months of the beginning of the 
 century, works containing the same new term ' biology ' 
 which was to describe the new science, and the same 
 fundamental notion of descent with modification. The 
 question of priority is trivial. The fact of simultaneous 
 and independent discovery is the best proof of the great- 
 ness and opportunity of the event. It was, as we shall 
 see, connected intimately with the general doctrine of
 
 Progress after Revolution 
 
 the continued progress of all human things by small and 
 regular changes. But biology was to demonstrate this 
 vague conception of the philosophers by concrete examples 
 of forms which could be seen and recovered from the 
 rocks, which could be connected in an unbroken series, 
 submitted to the eye, and traced and measured by the 
 hand. The idea was to become for the sciences of life 
 what Newton's law had been for the sciences of matter. 
 But, though its first enunciation in the first decade of 
 the nineteenth century is a striking fact, we have to wait 
 till the middle of the century for cumulative evidence, 
 a working hypothesis, and popular acceptance. The half 
 century passed : here and there a thinker would again 
 affirm the principles of Lamarck and Treviranus ; at last, 
 in 1858, another double and independent discovery took 
 place, and Darwin and Wallace announced Natural Selec- 
 tion as the vera causa of the changes in species which 
 the earlier biologists had proclaimed in vain. 
 
 However Darwin's theory is finally modified, it remains 
 the dominating influence in all the sciences of life. It 
 transferred the centre of interest from the life of the 
 individual to the growth of the species, and made a 
 similar change in biology to that which the seventeenth 
 century made in ancient mechanics by introducing laws 
 of motion. Questions of origin and growth, which had 
 begun increasingly to interest historians from the time 
 of Vico onwards, now invaded the whole realm of animate 
 nature ; and for a time there was a danger that human 
 progress itself might be explained by a law of struggle 
 such as Darwin postulated for the survival of the fittest. 
 * Sociology,' the term introduced by Comte in 1830 to
 
 Progress after Revolution 
 
 indicate the laws of human, as distinct from animal, 
 evolution, suggests the truer line of approach for human 
 problems. The same law of struggle must, at times and 
 places, act between human individuals and even com- 
 munities, as it has been shown to act in modifying species. 
 But with mankind the higher law prevails, of development 
 by co-operation. 1 
 
 Darwin's law, moreover, becomes itself another and 
 potent link in the unification of mankind, for like all 
 science it brings together the co-operating and consent- 
 ing minds, and also gives us an objective unity among 
 things outside us which were before regarded as separate 
 beings. In the light of a general law of evolving life, all 
 animal and vegetable species appear as branches and twigs 
 and flowers of one great tree springing from a common 
 root. Earlier thinkers, from the Greeks onwards, had 
 partial and fleeting glimpses of this conception. The 
 capital achievement of the last century in science was to 
 formulate it in a fully articulated shape, adequate to the 
 facts, and to suggest causes which might be imagined 
 collectively to account for the process of development. 
 In this case, as often in studies of such infinite com- 
 plexity as the phenomena of life, the plan was the thing. 
 Particular questions of cause and effect will in countless 
 instances remain perhaps for ever unsettled. But a good 
 plan has brought order into chaos, and ranked the 
 battalions of workers in marching array. 
 
 Since the Origin of Species, the two most prominent 
 moments in the history of science have been, first, the 
 analysis of sidereal light by the spectrum with all its 
 1 Pliny's ' Deus est mortal! iuvare mortalem '.
 
 Progress after Revolution 
 
 consequences, and, second, the revolution in our ideas 
 of matter by the new discoveries in electricity of quite 
 recent years. Each case illustrates, as did the law of 
 biological evolution, the essential quality of science in 
 bringing together things previously thought unconnected, 
 in shaking our mental composure with the ultimate result 
 of inducing a more profound and intimate unity. To 
 this power we owe the two correlated contemporary 
 facts, a vast and unprecedented increase in the volume 
 of knowledge, and a growing harmony and simplicity in 
 its arrangement. Such principles of settled order in the 
 best-instructed minds must gradually produce harmonious 
 developments in the world-society of which they are 
 a growing part. So one would conclude a priori : it is 
 hoped that this chapter may conclude with some evidence 
 of fact. 
 
 The Origin of Species was published in 1858. The 
 science of astrophysics was at that time unknown, and 
 as some thought unknowable. Within the next decade 
 the chemical constitution of the sun and stars had been 
 revealed by the spectrum, and especially by the use of 
 it by Kirchhoff, who interpreted the black lines which 
 Frauenhofer and earlier investigators had studied. They 
 were now found to be the means of identifying particular 
 chemical elements in the luminous body. All matter in 
 the universe thus came under a set of laws hitherto 
 known only to be true of terrestrial matter. It was 
 another extension of the intelligible order which man's 
 collective mind had achieved, comparable to that of 
 Newtonian gravitation, though without the comprehen- 
 sive sweep which the latter owes to its greater simplicity.
 
 2f<5 Progress after Revolution 
 
 It is a link between chemistry and astronomy, as Newton's 
 was between astronomy and mechanics. 
 
 Of the last great moment in science, which now largely 
 fills the public mind, it must be sufficient to say that, 
 while it seems at first sight to conflict with the accepted 
 mechanics of over two centuries, the latest writers assure 
 us that reconciliation is possible. Again we see a new 
 form of unification arise in the midst of a new world of 
 unexpected forces and infinitesimal motions. Electricity, 
 first roughly apprehended in two of its manifestations 
 by Franklin, the new motive power of the nineteenth 
 century, now appears at last as the basis of all matter, 
 or rather matter seen from another point of view. The 
 subject is too vast and still too inchoate to have the 
 social bearing which we are seeking. But it is clearly 
 on one side a further instance of the identification of 
 the previously distinct. 
 
 Meanwhile the great structures of science as we knew 
 them at the end of the nineteenth century remain for 
 practical purposes intact, the calculus and Newtonian 
 mechanics on the one hand, and evolutionary biology on 
 the other. 
 
 In face of the most recent marvels, the electron in 
 physics, the aeroplane in engineering, the idea of evolu- 
 tion, as applied to life at large, is still seen to be the 
 weightiest fact which the last century of science has 
 thrown into the scales of philosophy and progress. It 
 alone can be compared for social influence with the dis- 
 coveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
 
 Just as we then saw the new theory of Copernicus 
 taken up by thinkers like Giordano Bruno and woven
 
 Progress after Revolution 25-7 
 
 into a world-embracing scheme which aimed at super- 
 seding the older views of life, so now the new tendency 
 and the new discoveries in biological evolution combined 
 yet more readily with current notions in philosophy to 
 produce great schemes of thought and religion such as 
 those of Comte and Spencer. 
 
 They stand here in illustration of the two leading ideas 
 which marked the age and impress contemporary thought 
 the idea of unity and the idea of growth. Of these the 
 former has been the constant aim of all ideal effort, since 
 man began to speculate on the world and his own place 
 in it. The latter was enforced in a novel way by the 
 new views in biology which showed all creation labouring 
 together in one perpetual birth, each type producing 
 others slightly differing from itself, but all connected by 
 ties of true relationship, and leading to a supreme type 
 which could dominate the others and incorporate their 
 best qualities in itself. In the growth of each human 
 embryo man could even see reproduced before him all 
 the earlier stages of his animal history. This miniature 
 being confirmed the vaguer philosophic notions which 
 had long prevailed, of a continued progress from the 
 weak and savage to the strong and wise. 
 
 Thus science and philosophy both said, Growth and 
 Unity in thought ; and history and humanity answered, 
 Growth and Unity in action. 
 
 We turn to see how far the course of international 
 politics bears out the idea of a strengthening common 
 force in mankind. Between ourselves and France, and 
 throughout the Anglo-Saxon world, there has been already 
 a century of unbroken peace ; and it would be easy to 
 
 1543 S
 
 2 5" 8 Progress after Revolution 
 
 extend the cheerful prospect. We have had no war 
 with any German-speaking power for an even longer 
 period. And in Europe as a whole, if we except the 
 wars of Bismarck and Louis Napoleon, the peace of the 
 western portion, the more truly European, has been but 
 little disturbed in the last hundred years. Yet we are 
 all conscious that this peaceful state does not appear 
 a stable one. We are uneasy in our dreams. The world 
 is all more heavily armed than ever, and it seems an 
 effort of the highest statesmanship to restrain ourselves 
 and others from flying at a neighbour's throat. The 
 situation therefore calls for more careful review than 
 the mere summary of the years in which war has not 
 taken place. We need to trace the causes which have 
 provoked disturbance, as well as the forces which, in 
 spite of recurring danger, are steadily at work, welding 
 a solid whole which may resist the momentary impulse 
 to disunion. 
 
 A seeming paradox is sometimes the most enlightening 
 of truths. The very causes which have in this period 
 led to war and the threat of war are some of those on 
 which we may ultimately most rely for a state of peace. 
 Mere restlessness, the habit of fighting, the greed of the 
 individual conqueror, most of the causes, in fact, which 
 made earlier ages habitually warlike, have been in 
 modern times rapidly diminishing all over the globe. 
 Whatever faults we may justly find with our civilized 
 contemporaries, these are not among them. Nearly all 
 recent wars have been due mainly to two causes, nation- 
 ality and commercial rivalry, and these are factors con- 
 ducive in the end to peace. They have been often
 
 Progress after Revolution 25-9 
 
 complicated and masked by other issues, as the Italian 
 cause was mixed up with the personal weakness and ambi- 
 tion of Napoleon III. But the consolidation of national 
 existence was then at the root in Italy, as it is now 
 (1913) in the Balkans. The new Italy, the new Germany 
 which arose in 1870, if made by war, are not thereby 
 made permanently warlike. Holland and Switzerland, 
 which won their national existence by arms, are now the 
 most peaceful members of the western world. The 
 strengthened Greece and Servia and Bulgaria, the new 
 nationality which is being born in Albania, will become 
 at last pledges of peace rather than the spoil of war. 
 
 It was as such pledges that Kant postulated strong 
 national units for the basis of his world-society, and, with 
 certain obvious dangers and misfortunes, the true view 
 would seem to be that the modern world is sensibly nearer 
 to that state than when Kant wrote before the Revolution. 
 
 Commercial rivalry as a cause of war goes back, of 
 course, to a time far anterior to our present chapter. It 
 has been pressed so hard as a motive in history that one 
 school of writers would make it the leading interest, and 
 show us the eighteenth century as primarily the period 
 of the contest between France and England for the 
 markets of India and America. No one, remembering 
 the conflict of Spain and England in the sixteenth, or of 
 Holland and England in the seventeenth centuries, will 
 underrate its importance. But even then it was by no 
 means the leading motive. It played a prominent part, 
 too, in the eighteenth century, though inferior to the 
 other causes which were guiding events before the Revolu- 
 tion. In the nineteenth it has again been present, but the 
 
 s 2
 
 2.6 o Progress after Revolution 
 
 curative effects of commerce have been at work even 
 more vigorously. Rivalry for markets has entered largely 
 into nineteenth - century wars, especially those the 
 majority which have been waged by stronger on weaker 
 and less civilized people. But now more and more 
 men are ready to assert that almost any war, at least 
 between fairly equal powers, would cost more, dislocate 
 more, prevent more commerce, than it could possibly 
 recoup by conquest or indemnity. This conviction would 
 not prevent war, but it accounts for the strictly defensive 
 tone which is almost universal. We all arm to the teeth, 
 but purely to avoid the terrible calamity of any one 
 attacking us. 
 
 The links of commerce were always stronger than its 
 jealousies. It thrives on intercourse and goodwill. In 
 the last century of our sketch the ties on which it has 
 been always based have been immensely strengthened by 
 inventive and scientific skill. The globe is knit up by 
 steamships and railroads, and still more closely by elec- 
 tricity, on wires without. People are fed, and all our 
 comforts guaranteed, by international links, forged by the 
 engineers. The markets of Calcutta and New York are 
 almost momentarily in touch with London, and the whole 
 world-wide fabric of finance responds throughout to the 
 first breath of alarm. Such sensitiveness and the certainty 
 of heavy, perhaps irreparable, loss, if war once begins, 
 are clearly safeguards of peace. They have demonstrably 
 so acted in recent crises. Yet for the surest guarantees, 
 the course of this sketch will have prepared us to look in 
 another, though a connected, quarter. A common activity 
 is a better defence than a common alarm ; and those
 
 Progress after Revolution 261 
 
 activities are most easily internationalized which contain 
 most science. 
 
 Music has sometimes been described as the universal 
 language, but it cannot, and should not, ever entirely 
 throw off its local spirit. It must, however universalized, 
 always express the soul of one man, or at most one society, 
 at a particular epoch. Science is man's true universal 
 language, and attains its end the better, the more its 
 ideas and terms are unified throughout the world. 
 This process we have seen to be constantly going on, 
 and in the last few years the international character of 
 science, and work based upon it, has taken a concrete 
 form. So many international associations, meeting regu- 
 larly for scientific purposes, theoretical and practical, 
 have come into existence, that centres have been formed 
 to bring such bodies into touch. There can be no 
 finality about such an organization ; it will change and 
 move, serving different aspects of international unity. 
 But at least two such centres have already begun 
 in places both well situated for the balance of Western 
 civilization at the beginning of the twentieth century. 
 At the Hague, in the home of Grotius, father of inter- 
 national law, and near the seat of international arbi- 
 tration, offices have been opened for an association of 
 international societies, and Brussels has followed suit. 
 It is easy to imagine many useful ways in which the 
 field might be divided between the two, if both survive. 
 Both have arisen at a spot equidistant from the three 
 great Powers which have contributed most to the 
 civilization of the West, since Italy gave the signal for 
 a Renascence four hundred years ago.
 
 2.62 Progress after Revolution 
 
 The New World has taught us much, encouraged us 
 still more. It has made the Atlantic for the modern 
 world what the Mediterranean was to the ancients. But 
 it has not yet become the general centre of civilized life. 
 That remains, so far as it can be said to exist at all in 
 a world so closely knit, on the eastern side of the Atlantic, 
 and in the midst of the French, Teutonic, and English- 
 speaking peoples. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and 
 eighteenth centuries the French and the English filled 
 a larger space on the stage, and their names would each 
 exceed those of the Germans on the roll of the great. 
 But from the latter half of the eighteenth century, the 
 part of Germany grows ; and if the nineteenth is the 
 age of steady progress, of profound research and wide 
 speculation, hers will be the leading name. 
 
 Here, in tracing our final thread of international unity, 
 one feature in German work and temper attracts especial 
 notice. They were, at the opening of this last epoch, the 
 nation of the West with the largest gift of abstract thinking 
 and the smallest proportion of national self-consciousness. 
 They gave the world the most commanding universal 
 figure of the age, Goethe, who living, with supreme calm 
 and a certain indifference, through the storm of the 
 Revolution and the distress of his own country, has won 
 an increasing sway over the minds of a later and less 
 impassioned day. Of his contemporaries and friends, one, 
 Alexander von Humboldt, became, through international 
 friendship combined with scientific eminence, the actual 
 founder of that co-operation in useful research which 
 now encircles the globe. It was he who, in making 
 experiments on terrestrial magnetism in our first decade
 
 Progress after Revolution 26$ 
 
 of reform, persuaded first the Russian and then the 
 English governments to give him a series of points for 
 simultaneous observation throughout their dominions. 
 
 Thus science became in fact as well as in idea inter- 
 national, largely through the genius and action of Ger- 
 many. She remains, as she was, the mother of Goethe 
 and Humboldt and Helmholtz as well as of Stein and 
 Bismarck. Thirty years after Humboldt's work, the 
 Franco-Prussian war inflicted the sorest and deepest 
 wound of the century in Western unity. Time and the 
 power of common work and common thought can heal 
 even this. It grows together as science and social action 
 grow. Already the unity of the great triple bulwark of 
 Western progress is more secure than those imagine who 
 would make Sedan, Fashoda, and Agadir our landmarks 
 for the period. 
 
 Even as this is being written the growing unity shows 
 itself effectively in overcoming the most dangerous crisis 
 of recent times, the Balkan difficulty of 1913. It is by 
 such wise and patient action that the Western ' Concert ' 
 comes into being, and will increasingly assert itself 
 strong, far-seeing, and united for the common weal.
 
 12 
 
 LOOKING FORWARD 
 
 Is it not strange that a little child should be heir to the whole 
 world ? 
 
 THOMAS TRAHERNE.
 
 WE used to be told that the word ' Europe ' was given 
 to our continent by Greeks who looked across at it from 
 Asia Minor and thought the coast offered a ' Wide Pro- 
 spect ' compared with their own ' muddy fens '. The 
 derivation seems now to have gone the way of attractive 
 myths. But the fact remains that the land they looked 
 at, the smallest of the great land-masses always called 
 ' continents ', a mere peninsula of Asia, was to give man- 
 kind the wide prospect over his destiny and powers which 
 we have seen broadening at each great step in history. 
 The little world of the Aegean, which the Greeks, passing 
 back from Ionia, made the cradle of civilization, was 
 enlarged by Roman hands into the world of the Medi- 
 terranean, still a mere speck on the surface of the globe. 
 But it contained the germs of wider expansion, borne 
 into it both from Judaea and from Greece. The modern 
 world is the sequel. The same circle of ideas, of know- 
 ledge, of activity, of human unity, has for three hundred 
 years embraced the Atlantic, and in our own time is 
 continued round the world in the oldest centres of culture 
 in the East and the newest settlements of Europeans in 
 the southern seas. 
 
 Heaven defend that we should think it final or all- 
 sufficient, because it is all-embracing ! All that we learn 
 of the Eastern mind, and the newest philosophies of our 
 own, combine to show us the limitations of the Western, 
 scientific, outlook and to suggest the sides on which it 
 can be deepened and extended. But the Western mind 
 dominates the world. It has built up the fabric of science
 
 Looking Forward 167 
 
 and invention which is justified by success. It has formed 
 the loose but very real alliance of the great material and 
 intellectual Powers which can impose their will, when 
 united, on the rest of mankind. It is, in fact, only by 
 modifying this general will, by making it at once firmer 
 and kinder, clearer and more enlightened in its main 
 purpose, more considerate of the weaker things that cross 
 its path, that any one people or individual can affect the 
 destinies of the whole. Hence it must be the first 
 intellectual duty of every Western to seek to understand 
 the genesis and nature of this collective mind by which 
 he is surrounded and controlled as his body is by the air. 
 He breathes it willy-nilly ; if he is to fly in it or use it 
 consciously for his own purposes, he must first learn its 
 laws. 
 
 With the possibilities of future action it is not within 
 our scope to deal. There is to be no chapter on Utopias. 
 But there is one window on the future through which we 
 must glance, though the view it gives us will vary with 
 every gazer, and suggests quite other trains of thought 
 than those which we have followed hitherto. 
 
 Our passage from age to age has revealed a continually 
 widening expanse, not only of the earth-space that man 
 unitedly controls, but of the scope of his collective thought, 
 till, in our own day, he knows by personal visit nearly the 
 whole globe and encircles it with his activities, while his 
 thought has gone further than Newton or Galileo would 
 have ventured, and analyses the stars, as well as describes 
 the dance of the infinitesimal. Note, then, one of the 
 most striking of those apparent contradictions which 
 often meet us and make us almost ready, with Hegel,
 
 26% Looking Forward 
 
 to believe in the identity of opposites. It is precisely 
 this man, with his most developed powers, with his scope 
 of vision transcending the boldest fiction, with his know- 
 ledge and force embracing the world, who is for the first 
 time in history profoundly interested and passionately 
 attached to the smallest and weakest embodiment of the 
 human spirit, the child in the earlier moments of his life. 
 The facts are eloquent. Our own is without question 
 the age in which man's collective force and knowledge 
 have reached their highest point. It is also that in which 
 the care and love of children have taken their place as 
 the first general solicitude of all civilized societies. No 
 age before our own could have painted the picture 
 of ' the innumerable children all round the world, 
 trooping, morning by morning, to school, along the 
 lanes of quiet villages, the streets of noisy cities, on sea- 
 shore and lake-side, under the burning sun, and through 
 the mists, in boats on canals, on horseback on the plains, 
 in sledges on the snow, by hill and valley, through bush 
 and stream, by lonely mountain path, singly, in pairs, 
 in groups, in files, dressed in a thousand fashions, speaking 
 a thousand tongues '. l No age before our own attempted 
 the provision of public money which we have just made, 
 which Germany and others have done before us, to assist 
 the mother of a new-born child in giving it the best 
 nurture and best reception in the world. No age before 
 our own could have said, or understood the saying, 
 ' Let us live for our children '. We have passed in some 
 two thousand years from a time when the child was 
 regarded as the creature, the chattel of his parents, and 
 1 De Amicis.
 
 Looking Forward 269 
 
 might be abandoned, sold, or exposed to death, to a state 
 of mind in which the child, dear in himself and full of 
 possibilities, becomes of priceless value to the whole 
 community, the flower and promise of the world. Just 
 as he now appears the sum of all the past, the possession 
 and hope of all as well as of his own kin, so we are prizing 
 him more and more for himself, and looking in his own 
 nature for the seeds of power and goodness. A higher 
 individualism accompanies a fuller social conception of 
 origin and use. 
 
 Let no one shrink from the conclusion for fear of 
 illicit optimism. To recognize a new standard and 
 a new achievement is not to ignore the multitude 
 of glaring cases which fail to attain it. And there can 
 be no more doubt of the new attitude towards child life 
 than there is of the new linking up of the world by steam- 
 ships and electricity. There are stagnant pools of bar- 
 barism still untouched by the main current of civilization, 
 and cruelty and callousness to children still linger, with 
 ther defects from the normal standard of conduct 
 and feeling. The significant point is that a new 
 standard in the matter of children has arisen which 
 sums up with singular harmony the leading traits in our 
 sketch of progress and turns them towards the future in 
 a way with which no other feature of our age can compare. 
 
 The child, then, in his measure sums up the millenniums 
 of the growing power and unity of mankind in the past. 
 This is no doctrine of transcendental mysticism, but 
 a simple fact, plain to a moment's thought. The great 
 fabric of science and social organization into which each 
 child is born stands firm around us, independent as
 
 270 Looking Forward 
 
 a whole of the action or volition of any individual, or 
 even of any individual generation. Yet every individual 
 is formed by it and carries it on ; at the worst he may 
 injure or retard its growth ; at the best he will add 
 a mite to the infinite sum from which his own powers 
 arise. 
 
 Substantially, though not uniformly or exactly, this 
 has been always the case. In our own day, science, the 
 closer organization induced by industry, the conscious- 
 ness of a common humanity, have knit together the 
 social whole. The child's inheritance has become con- 
 solidated, and the spirit of its administration has changed 
 with the change in the property. 
 
 All great consolidations of mankind have rested 
 necessarily on some elements of justice and well-being. 
 Principles of humanity, and not of tyranny and exploita- 
 tion, bound together the Hellenic world, the Roman 
 Empire at its widest, the Catholic Church, the com- 
 munities of Buddha and Confucius in the East. And 
 now, of all consolidators, science is showing its supreme 
 fitness and its kinship with the sense of a common 
 humanity. It would be a fascinating and untrodden 
 path, to follow in the ancient world the extension of 
 scientific knowledge and note its coincidence with the 
 growth of a more humane spirit in religion, in poetry, 
 and in law. We believe the agreement would be close 
 and that it is more than a mere coincidence. But here 
 the evidence would be slighter and less conclusive : in 
 the modern world the case is clear. Side by side with the 
 growth of science, which is also the basis of the material 
 prosperity and unification of the world, has come a steady
 
 Looking Forward 271 
 
 deepening of human sympathy, and the extension of 
 it to all weak and suffering things. The seventeenth 
 century, which saw modern science adolescent, ended 
 judicial torture and religious barbarities for England. 
 The eighteenth, which carried science further, saw France 
 abandon torture, and England and France begin to free 
 their slaves and protect their women and children by 
 law. The nineteenth, which completed the triumph of 
 science in. the intellectual sphere, humanized the law and 
 began the systematic raising of the poor and, above all, 
 the systematic training of the young. Science, founding 
 a firmer basis for the co-operation of mankind, goes 
 widening down the centuries, and sympathy and pity 
 bind the courses together. At the end of this process, 
 where both human strength and human sympathy are 
 at their height, comes the child, fit object for both the 
 tenderest affection and the profoundest knowledge, at 
 once the weakest and the richest, the most tearful and 
 the happiest, the most helpless and the most hopeful of 
 all created things. 
 
 The child stands, too, at the end of another avenue 
 of thought. We remarked, in treating of the rise of 
 modern science, that the ancients did not advance on 
 the whole beyond the simple notions of balance and 
 proportion, either in mathematics or in social science. 
 The laws of motion, and still more of organic growth, 
 were beyond their ken. Galileo inaugurated a new era 
 with the first true law of motion which man discovered. 
 The history of modern science, following this, is the his- 
 tory of the reduction of all kinds of motion and change to 
 law. First, in the inanimate world curves and equations
 
 272 Looking Forward 
 
 were devised, capable of summing up and expressing all 
 orderly motion : then, within the last century, the 
 laws of organic growth were investigated and certain 
 approximations reached. The study of growth carried 
 the mind further and further back. What has been always 
 an object of man's untutored curiosity, now becomes 
 the dominant interest of the latest stage of science. It 
 craves to know the earliest history of everything, above 
 all of human institutions and ideas. Here again the child 
 meets us, the living embodiment of human origins. His 
 growth unfolds the broad outlines of the past : his 
 capacities contain the future. He is the epitome of all 
 the laws of evolution, in the form most nearly touching 
 our intellectual curiosity, our affection and our hope. 
 
 And with the study of the past in all its forms, our 
 interest in the future has been immeasurably enhanced. 
 We know that the stream which bears us on from the 
 infinite behind us will not slack its course, and we begin 
 to recognize a regular movement and a certain goal. The 
 stream is unbroken, and the past lives on. But while we 
 look back with reverence, the heart goes out to those 
 who are to travel furthest and see the fuller light.
 
 APPENDIX ON BOOKS 
 
 1643
 
 IT may be useful to give the names of a few books which 
 illustrate the argument of the foregoing chapters. The choice 
 has been guided by three chief considerations. It is, in the 
 first place, mainly a personal list, books found of use and plea- 
 sure, and fitting in with the theme of the preceding chapters. 
 They are, secondly, for the most part easily accessible books, 
 each section containing some of the primers which provide for 
 the present age in rich abundance all what Moliere considered 
 the ideal of a feminine education ' les clartes de tout '. The 
 third test has been that, as far as possible, the books selected 
 should aim at giving a synthetic point of view, looking at all 
 sides of their subject and seeing it in relation to man's evolu- 
 tion as a whole. In seeking books of this sort we must turn 
 to France and Germany, especially the former. To read 
 easily the languages of the other two members of the real 
 triple alliance of culture is increasingly useful for us, though 
 unfortunately not increasingly common. In respect of synthetic 
 books on history, both nations long anticipated us ; and the 
 French have acquired a special talent, unmatched in the world, 
 for clear and attractive exposition of complicated matters. 
 
 It will be noticed that works of poetry and fiction are not 
 included. The great poets, however, have a large share in 
 earlier pages, and it is almost unnecessary to point out the 
 value of such books as Scott's Talisman and Ivanhoe for 
 chapter 6 and Reade's Cloister and the Hearth for chapter 7. 
 
 CHAPTER 2. THE CHILDHOOD OF THE RACE 
 
 Tylor's Manual of Anthropology (Macmillan) and Primitive 
 Culture, still the leading books in English. 
 
 R. R. Marett's Anthropology (Home University Library)^ 
 a brilliant, short sketch, sane and free from fallacious bias 
 on the great topics such as race, religion, &c.
 
 Appendix on Books 27 f 
 
 Darwin's Descent of Man, and 
 
 Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, &c. (Eversley Series), classics 
 in the history of the subject, the latter interesting on the 
 controversial stages. 
 
 Durkheim's La Methode sociologique (Felix Alcan), the best 
 short statement of what facts and ' laws ' in sociology really 
 mean. The volumes of the Annee Sociologique contain 
 masses of material on special questions, e.g. ' Les Formes 
 elementaires de la vie religieuse ' in the vol. for 1912. 
 
 Rauber's Urgeschichte is a good, general survey of the primi- 
 tive history of man, with especial reference to geographical 
 distribution. 
 
 On the early history of religion : 
 
 Robertson Smith's Religion of the Semites, and 
 
 F. B. Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion. 
 
 CHAPTER 3. THE EARLY EMPIRES 
 
 The Modern Reader's Bible (Moulton published Macmillan). 
 
 Sir Gaston Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, the best 
 general account of the early civilization of Egypt and 
 Chaldaea, a beautiful and interesting book (translation 
 published by S.J.C.K.). 
 
 J. H. Breasted, 'History of the Ancient Egyptians (Smith, 
 Elder, & Co.), short, reliable, and complete. 
 
 A. H. Sayce, Ancient Empires of the East (Macmillan), short 
 and general ; and, on their religious aspects, Hibbert Lec- 
 tures, 1893, followed by The Religions of Ancient Egypt and 
 Babylonia. 
 
 Flinders Petrie, Religion of Egypt, and many other works. 
 
 On the Minoan Age in Crete : 
 
 R. M. Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete (Murray). 
 
 Baikie, The Sea Kings of Crete, an excellent, short, popular 
 book (Black). 
 
 T ^
 
 276 Appendix on Books 
 
 CHAPTER 4. GREECE 
 
 Ed. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, the best general history 
 of antiquity, including both the early empires and the 
 beginnings of Rome, but mainly on Greece. 
 Grote.- An abridgement has recently been made by Messrs. 
 Mitchell and Caspari, omitting the earlier part, which is 
 mostly superseded, and concentrating on the Athenian 
 Democracy (Routledge). 
 
 Bury, History of Greece, and History of Greece for Beginners 
 (Macmillan), the best modern political history in English. 
 Gilbert Murray,' The Rise of the Greek Epic and Four Stages 
 of Greek Religion (Clarendon Press), full of charm, sugges- 
 tion, and learning. 
 
 Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth (Clarendon Press), a vivid 
 modern sociological study, largely a commentary on Pericles' 
 FuneraJ Oration in Thucydides. 
 
 Mahaffy,' Alexander's Empire (Story of the Nations Series). 
 Of the primers we are awaiting Professor Murray's volume 
 on Greece in the Home University Library and have at present 
 Fyffe's Primer on Greece and Jebb's on Homer in Macmillan's 
 series. 
 
 On Greek science we are fortunate in having the exhaustive 
 labours in English of 
 
 Sir T. L. Heath, The Works of Archimedes, with the recently 
 discovered Method of Archimedes (Cambridge Press), Apol- 
 lonius of Perga (now acquired by the Clarendon Press), and 
 Aristarchus of Samos (Clarendon Press), practically a history 
 of Greek astronomy. 
 
 Allman, A Greek Geometry from T hales to Euclid (Dublin Press). 
 
 Of the Greek philosophers generally the best account now 
 
 available in English is probably the translation of Gomperz' 
 
 Greek Thinkers in 4 vols. (Murray, first vol. most useful on 
 
 the early thinkers down to the Sophists).
 
 Appendix on Books 277 
 
 Of the Greek classics in translation the following have some 
 special connexion with the matter of the chapter : 
 
 Herodotus, Story of the Persian War (Tancock published 
 Murray). 
 
 Plato, The Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito (translation pub- 
 lished by Dent, with a unique and very curious portrait 
 of Socrates from an almost contemporary gem). The 
 Republic (Davies and Vaughan), 
 
 Aristotle, Ethics and Politics, and first book of the Metaphysics 
 (translation Ross and J. A. Smith. Oxford Press). 
 
 Xenophon, Education of Cyrus (translation by Dakyns, Every- 
 man's Library). 
 
 For Greek sculpture, only slightly touched on in the chapter : 
 
 P. Gardner, Handbook of Greek Sculpture (Macmillan). 
 
 CHAPTER 5. ROME 
 
 Mommsen's History of Rome (now in Everyman's Library), 
 
 with the volume on the Provinces. 
 Maine's Ancient Law, far the best sketch of the main stages 
 
 in the evolution of Roman Law. 
 
 Warde Fowler's Julius Caesar (Heroes of the Nations). 
 Fustel de Coulanges, La Cite antique, a brilliant study of 
 
 the City-State with special (and undue) stress on its 
 
 religious basis. 
 
 Mackail's Latin Literature (Murray). 
 Plutarch, Select Lives and Select Essays (Clarendon Press). 
 On the Empire : 
 Gibbon's Decline and Fall (Bury's edition). A selection of 
 
 the most important chapters is given in Frederic Harrison's 
 
 Choice of Books. 
 
 Dill; Roman Society in the Early Empire. 
 Gvr&Hdn,- Early Church History (especially for Diocletian). 
 Bury, Later Roman Empire and Students Roman Empire.
 
 278 Appendix on Books 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Long's translation). 
 
 Stuart Jones, Roman Empire (Story of the Nations Series), 
 
 Of the primers : 
 
 Creighton's Rome (Macmillan). 
 
 Warde Fowler's Rome (Home University Library). 
 
 CHAPTER 6. THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 Dr. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders ; Charles the Great ; 
 
 Dynasty of Theodosius and Theodoric (Clarendon Press). 
 Bryce, Holy Roman Empire. 
 Milman, Latin Christianity, 
 Renan, History of Israel and Origins of Christianity, the greatest 
 
 complete treatment of the subject, from an obvious point of 
 
 view ; the volume on Marc-Aurele especially noteworthy. 
 Foakes Jackson, Biblical History of the Hebrews (Arnold), 
 
 a useful summary t of a neutral kind. 
 T. Cotter Morison, Life of St. Bernard, the best biography 
 
 of a leading mediaeval spiritual figure. 
 H. W. C. Davis, 'Mediaeval Europe (Home University 
 
 Library), one of the best volumes in the series. 
 For mediaeval thinkers : 
 The Introduction to 
 
 Dr. Bridges' Opus Majus of Roger Bacon is enlightening. 
 Dante (Dent's Edition, translated by Wicksteed) and Essays 
 
 by Dean Church and J. A. Symonds. 
 Thomas Carlyle on Dante, in Heroes and Hero Worship ; 
 
 Past and Present, for the life of the monks. The latter 
 
 is now further illustrated by the volume on Jocelyn of 
 
 Brokeland in the ' King's Classics '. 
 Joinville's Crusades and 
 Froissart's Chronicles. 
 D. Murray's Jeanne d'Arc (Heinemann), the documents of 
 
 her Trial.
 
 Appendix on Books 279 
 
 CHAPTER 7. THE RENASCENCE 
 
 Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History (Macmillan). 
 
 J. A. Symonds, *Ihe Italian Renaissance, also an abridgement 
 in one volume, and Life of Michelangelo. 
 
 Cambridge Modern History, the chapter on the Age of Dis- 
 covery. 
 
 Washington Irving, Life of Columbus, and of his companions 
 (in separate volumes). 
 
 Ranke's Popes, the standard book on the later Papacy. 
 
 On the political side : 
 
 Dr. Bridges, France under Richelieu and Colbert (new edition, 
 with introduction by A. J. Grant. Macmillan). 
 
 Biographies : Elizabeth and Cromwell in English Statesmen 
 (Macmillan) ; William the Silent, Foreign Statesmen (Mac- 
 millan) ; Richelieu (Heroes of the Nations). 
 
 Carlyle's Cromwell. 
 
 On English History generally in the seventeenth century : 
 
 G. M. Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts (Methuen), 
 a brilliantly written account of the most critical period 
 in our national history, scrupulously fair to individuals, 
 though with strong views as to the main issues. 
 
 Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, the classic on the greatest 
 war of national independence. 
 
 On Shakespeare : 
 
 Jusserand's third volume of his History of English Literature, 
 perhaps the best general account. 
 
 Milton's Tractate on Education, the best summary of the 
 humanist ideal. 
 
 On the Reformation : 
 
 Dr. Lindsay's History of the Reformation (T. & T. Clark). 
 CHAPTER 8. THE RISE OF MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 Bacon, Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum. 
 
 Descartes, Discours sur la Methode.
 
 280 Appendix on Books 
 
 Mach, History of Mechanics (translation, Kegan Paul & Co., 
 London), the best short study of the historical development 
 of a fundamental branch of science. 
 
 Oliver Lodge, Pioneers of Science, a more popular account of 
 Galilei, Kepler, &c. (Macmillan). 
 
 Berry, Short History of Astronomy (Murray) . 
 
 Dr. Bridges, Harveian Oration on ' Harvey and his Suc- 
 cessors ' in Essays and Addresses (Chapman & Hall). 
 
 Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (Home University 
 Library), a most suggestive essay, which should be accom- 
 panied by some knowledge of the Calculus. On this several 
 elementary works have lately appeared, among them a very 
 clever little volume called Calculus made Easy (Macmillan), 
 
 CHAPTER 9. INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 Mantoux, La Revolution industrielle en Angleterre, much the 
 best book, with full bibliography ; unfortunately was sold 
 out within two years of publication (1908) and can now 
 only be seen at libraries. A reissue or translation is much 
 needed. /r 
 
 / Industrial Revolution, the smaller pioneer work, 
 
 interesting historically (new edition 1901, with life by Lord 
 
 Milner). 
 
 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations. 
 Smiles, Lives of the Engineers and Industrial Biography 
 
 (Murray). 
 A. H. Johnson, Disappearance of Small Landowners in England 
 
 (with the quite recent special treatises of Tawnay and 
 
 Hammond on the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries 
 
 respectively). 
 Hutchins and Harrison, History of Factory Legislation (King 
 
 & Co.). 
 Townsend Warner, Tillage, Trade, and Invention (Blackie), 
 
 a small useful book.
 
 Appendix on Books 281 
 
 CHAPTER 10. REVOLUTION 
 
 Mrs. Gardiner," French Revolution (Longmans), best short 
 
 sketch. 
 Carlyle, French Revolution (Dent's edition, taken with Maz- 
 
 zini's criticisms in the 4th volume of his Life and Writings). 
 Wordsworth, The Prelude. 
 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. 
 Condorcet, Tableau historique des progres de I' 'esprit humain 
 
 (Paris, Sjejnheil). 
 Rousseauj fContrat social. 
 Kant, Principles of Politics (edited and translated by Hastie, 
 
 1891), contains the smaller works on Universal History, 
 
 Perpetual Peace, and the Principle of Progress, which are 
 
 of high importance. 
 H. A. L. Fisher, Napoleon (Home University Library), latest 
 
 account, impartial, and masterly. 
 Romain Rolland,' Beethoven (Paris, Ed. Pelletan), a moving 
 
 account of the composer's life-work from its personal 
 
 aspect. 
 Ruskin, Modern Painters, gives the new spirit towards nature, 
 
 especially as expressed by Turner. 
 
 CHAPTER n. PROGRESS AFTER REVOLUTION 
 
 McCann, Six Radical Thinkers (Arnold). 
 
 Bentham, Theory of Legislation (a new edition by C. M. 
 Atkinson promised by the Clarendon Press). 
 
 Graham Wallas, Francis Place (Longmans). 
 
 Mill, ]. S., Autobiography, Liberty, and Representative Govern- 
 ment. 
 
 Comte, Historical Philosophy in vol. iii of Harriet Mar- 
 tineau's Comte' s Positive Philosophy (Bell). 
 
 Darwin, Origin of Species. 
 
 H. Poincare, La Valeur de la Science ; Science et Hypothesg ;
 
 282 Appendix on Books 
 
 Dernier es Pensees (Flammarion Bibliotheque de Philosophic 
 
 Scientifique an excellent series). 
 Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (now in the 3rd edition 
 
 represents in England the attitude of Mach in Germany 
 
 and Poincare in France). 
 On the political side : 
 G. Lowes Dickinson, Revolution and Reaction in Modern France 
 
 (George Allen). 
 Germany in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester University 
 
 Press) . Essays by Holland Rose, Herf ord, Sadler and Conner. 
 J. W. Headlam, Bismarck (Heroes of the Nations). 
 E. Martinengo Cesaresco, The Liberation of Italy, by a member 
 
 of one of the great liberating families. 
 Driault et Monod, L 1 Evolution du Monde moderne : Histoire 
 
 politique et sociale, 1815-1909 (Felix Alcan), the best 
 
 general short sketch of the nineteenth century, giving due 
 
 place to the different nations and the different sides of 
 
 the revolution. 
 
 SOME USEFUL GENERAL BOOKS 
 
 t 
 ' The New Calendar of Great Men (Macmillan). Biographies 
 
 of over five hundred worthies before the mid-nineteenth 
 century, arranged according to their historical import. 
 On a larger scale the biographies in the new edition of the 
 Encyclopaedia Britannica are generally excellent. 
 
 The History of Western Europe (Robinson : published Ginn), 
 a good example of a type of book which the Americans 
 have hitherto cared more about than we have. Two 
 volumes of text and two of illustrative authorities. 
 (Useful hints for arranging facts and dates in an orderly 
 time-chart may be had, either from Professor Beesly's Charts 
 (id. each, Reeves, 83 Charing Cross Road, W.C.) or, in book- 
 form, from Tillard's Date Book (Rivingtons, is. 6J.).)
 
 INDEX 
 
 MAINLY OF PROPER NAMES 
 
 Acton, Lord, 151. 
 
 Aegean civilization, 50, 53 seq., 
 
 266. 
 
 Aeschylus, 70, 145. 
 Africa, and the navigators, 1 5 1-2. 
 
 civilization of, and Hegel, 
 
 224. 
 Alexander the Great, 36, 55, 85, 
 
 224. 
 
 Alexandria, 64, 71, 85. 
 Al Magest, 88. 
 Anaxagoras, 72, 73, 224. 
 Ancestor-worship, 2, 39. 
 Anthony, St., 133. 
 Anthropology, unifies study of 
 
 human evolution, 15-16. 
 Antigone, the, 75, 166. 
 Antonines, the, no, 115, 121. 
 Antoninus Pius, 112-13. 
 Apollonius of Perga, 87, 148, 184, 
 
 191. 
 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 134, 137, 
 
 141. 
 Arabs, the, 64, 88, 134, 140, 
 
 185. 
 Archimedes, 86-7, 107, 177, 
 
 186-7. 
 
 Aristarchus of Samos, 88. 
 Aristotle, 80-5, 134, 136, 140-1, 
 
 1 68, 242. 
 
 Arkwright, 200-1, 204. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 48. 
 Aryans, 49, 92. 
 Athens, 53, 65 seq., 100, 105, 
 
 107, 231. 
 Atlantic Ocean, the, analogy to 
 
 the Mediterranean, 203, 262, 
 
 266. 
 
 Augustine, St., 124, 136. 
 Augustus, see Caesar. 
 
 Babylonians, means of measure- 
 ment, 43. 
 chapter 3 passim, 89. 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 156, 165, 168, 
 170, 1 80 seq., 202. 
 
 Bacon, Roger, 135, 141 note. 
 
 Balkan States, the, 259. 
 
 Bastille, fall of the, 226. 
 
 Beethoven, 223 seq. 
 
 Belgians, the, 245. 
 
 Benedict, St., 133. 
 
 Bentham, Jeremy, 246-8. 
 
 Bergson, 196. 
 
 Bernard, St., 127. 
 
 Bichat, 219. 
 
 Bismarck, 258, 263. 
 
 Black, Joseph, 190, 198. 
 
 Boniface, St., 109. 
 
 Borromeo, St., 163. 
 
 Bosphorus, the Turks on the, 109. 
 
 Boucher de Perthes and ante- 
 diluvian antiquities, n. 
 
 Boyle, 1 80, 189. 
 
 Brougham, 247. 
 
 Bruno, Giordano, 165, 169, 256. 
 
 Buddha, 270. 
 
 Bunyan, 163. 
 
 Burke, 240. 
 
 Cabot and Newfoundland, 155. 
 
 Caesar, Augustus, 104-5, 109. 
 
 Caesar, Julius, 101-5, IO 9- 
 
 Canada, 200. 
 
 Canning, 245. 
 
 Carthage, 101-2. 104. 
 
 Cartwright, 200. 
 
 Caste, 38. 
 
 Catholic Church, the, 116, 
 
 chapters 6 and 7 passim, 220, 
 
 270.
 
 284 
 
 Index 
 
 Cavendish, 252. 
 
 Celts, the, 92, 100. 
 
 Chaldaea, 42, 50, 89, 174 ; and see 
 
 Babylonians. 
 Champollion, 34. 
 Charlemagne, 109, 127, 129. 
 Charles II of England, 197. 
 Charles V, Emperor, 156. 
 China, 31, 39, 199. 
 Cicero, 107, 144. 
 City-State, the, 65, 84, 106, 123, 
 
 213. 
 Clyde, first steamer on the, 
 
 216. 
 
 Code Napoleon, the, 236. 
 Columbus, 146, 149, 151, 154, 
 
 242. 
 Commercial rivalry as a cause of 
 
 war, 259. 
 
 Comte, Auguste, 253, 257. 
 Condorcet, 199, 220 seq., 235-6. 
 
 240, 242. 
 Confucius, 270. 
 Conon, 87, note. 
 Constantine, no-n. 
 Constantinople, in, 140, 145. 
 
 Mohammedan, 148, 152. 
 Convention, the French, 221, 
 
 235 seq. 
 Copenhagen Museum, collection 
 
 of primitive tools, 20. 
 Copernicus, 65, 146, 148-9, 164, 
 
 169, 172, 174 seq., 256. 
 Corinth, 62, 104. 
 Cortes, 155, 161. 
 Cretans, the, 31, 36, 53. 
 Croesus, 68. 
 Crompton, 200. 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 227. 
 Crotona, scene of work of Pytha- 
 goras, 63. 
 
 Crusades, the, 130-2, 140-1. 
 Cuneiform writing, 34, 44-5. 
 Cyprus, 55. 
 Cyrus, 68. 
 
 Dante, 120, 124-5, 12 7> '33> '34. 
 
 136-7, 140, 143, 165. 
 Danton, 231. 
 
 Darwin, u, 116, 170, 253 seq. 
 De Amicis, 268. 
 Declaration of Independence, 
 
 the, 230. 
 Delos, 52. 
 Democritus, 73, 77. 
 Descartes, 63, 87, 170-1, 1 80 seq., 
 
 202, 206. 
 
 Diaz, Bartholomew, 153. 
 Dickens, 246. 
 Diocletian, no-n. 
 Dodona, 50. 
 Dominicans, the, 132. 
 Dorians, the, 50, 62. 
 Dutch, the, see Holland. 
 
 Egyptian calendar, 32, 49. 
 Egyptians, the, chapter 3 
 
 passim. 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 158-9, 163. 
 Encyclopaedists, the, 220. 
 England, 125-6, 151, 157, 162, 
 
 chapter 9 passim, 218-19. 
 English Revolution, 227-8 seq., 
 
 233 seq., 271. 
 Epicurus, 73. 
 Erasmus, 149, 150, 156. 
 Eratosthenes, 88. 
 Etruscans, the, 96, 99. 
 Euclid, 63, 86. 
 Eudoxus, 86-7. 
 Euripides, 89. 
 ' Europe ', meaning of the word, 
 
 266. 
 
 Factory Acts, the, 214, 246. 
 
 Feudal system, the, 122, 160, 
 228. 
 
 Fox, George, 163, 235. 
 
 France and the French, 130, 143, 
 T 55 5 *S7-9i' l6 3> 2 3, chapter 10 
 passim, 245-6, 257, 271.
 
 Index 
 
 28 
 
 Francis I, 155, 158. 
 
 Francis, St., and the Franciscans, 
 
 '33-. 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 203, 230, 
 
 256. 
 
 Franks, the, 109, 127. 
 Frauenhofer, 255. 
 Freeman, comparison of Greece 
 
 and Italy at the Renascence, 
 
 146. 
 French Revolution, the, 203, 211. 
 
 Gaius, 114, 190. 
 
 Galileo, 143, 146, 164, 170, 174 
 seq., 267, 271. 
 
 Gaul, 93, 100-3. 
 
 Genoa and discovery, 146, 152. 
 
 Germany, 109, 122, 125-6, 129, 
 143, 162, 164, 203, 221, 225, 
 227, 234, 238, 258-9, 262-3, 
 268. 
 
 Gibbon, 228. 
 
 Gilbert, 165. 
 
 Goethe, 225, 238-9, 262-3. 
 
 Gothic architecture, 130, 132. 
 
 Greece, geography of, 51 ; com- 
 pared with Italy, 92-3. 
 See also Parthenon, &c. 
 
 Greek language and ideas at 
 Renascence, 145 seq. 
 
 Greeks, the, chapter 4 passim. 
 
 Gregory the Great, 125, 127,133. 
 
 Gresham College and the Royal 
 Society, 171. 
 
 Grey, Lord, 245. 
 
 Grotefend, 34. 
 
 Grotius, 206, 261. 
 
 Gutenberg, 148-9, 152. 
 
 Hague, the, and arbitration, 261. 
 
 Hammurabi, 44. 
 
 Hannibal, 102. 
 
 Hargreaves, 200. 
 
 Harvey, 77, 189. 
 
 Hebrews, the, see Jews. 
 
 Hegel, 223 seq., 267. 
 Helmholtz, 215, 263. 
 Helvetius, 247. 
 Henry IV, Emperor, 130. 
 Henry, Prince, of Portugal, 152. 
 Henry IV of France, 159; his 
 
 ' Great Design ', 160, 162-3. 
 Herodotus, 35, 58, 69. 
 Hieroglyphics, 34-5, 44-5. 
 Hildebrand, 128, 130. 
 Hipparchus, 5, 86, 88-9, 113, 
 
 . I 53> i74> 19- 
 Hippocrates, 76, 77. 
 Hittites, the, 33, 50. 
 Holland, 157-8, 162, 176, 206, 
 
 231,259. 
 Holy Roman Empire, chapter 4, 
 
 and 157, 234. 
 
 Homer, 48, 52, 53-5, 120, 145. 
 Horace, 106. 
 Humboldt, Alexander von, 
 
 262-3. 
 Huyghens, 180, 189. 
 
 Iliad, the, 58 ; and see Homer. 
 
 India, its contribution to mathe- 
 matics, 64, 134, 185. 
 and the navigators, 151-2, 
 200, 204, 224. 
 
 Indo-Germanic peoples, see 
 Aryans. 
 
 Innocent III, 129, 130, 133. 
 
 lonians, the, 50, 55-8, 62, 67, 71, 
 73, 76, 266. 
 
 Italy, geography of, 92-3 ; 
 chapter 7 passim, 169, 259. 
 
 Japan, 2, 17. 
 
 Jews, the, and Judaea, 32, 45, 
 
 48-50, 124, 266. 
 Jus Civile, 114, 115. See Roman 
 
 Law. 
 Jus Gentium, 114, 115. See 
 
 Roman Law. 
 Justinian, 114.
 
 28* 
 
 Index 
 
 Kant, 221-4, 259. 
 Kepler, 164, 174 seq. 
 Kirchhoff, 255. 
 
 Lafayette, 230. 
 
 Lamarck, 219, 252-3. 
 
 Lancashire, 201, 206. 
 
 Latin language, words character- 
 istic of Roman culture, 93, 94, 
 117. 
 
 at the revival of learning, 
 144. 
 
 La Vendee, 232. 
 
 Lavoisier, 219, 252. 
 
 Leeds, 205, 212. 
 
 Leibnitz, 63, 170, 174, 203. 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci, 169. 
 
 Lessing, 225. 
 
 Liverpool, 246. 
 
 London, markets and finance, 
 
 260. 
 
 Louis, St., 141. 
 Louis XI, 161. 
 Louis XVI, 226, 229, 232. 
 Lucretius, on stages in culture, 
 
 IO-I2, 73. 
 
 Luther, 129, 143, 156, 161. 
 Lydians, 55-6, 67. 
 Lyell, Principles of Geology, 10. 
 
 Macedon, 81. 
 
 Machiavelli, 146. 
 
 Magellan, 156. 
 
 Manchester, 201, 214. 
 
 Mangu Cham, Emperor of Tar- 
 
 tary, 141, note. 
 Marathon, 69, 70. 
 Marcus Aurelius, 109, 113. 
 Mariotte, 189. 
 Mayow, John, 189, 198. 
 Mediterranean, culture, 31. 
 
 as centre of Roman world, 
 105, 108, 266. 
 
 Memphis, 33. 
 Mesopotamia, 33. 
 
 Michelangelo, 145. 
 
 Middle Ages, the, 82, 108, and 
 
 chapters 6 and 7 passim. 
 Miletus, 56, 58, 69, 86. 
 Mill, James, 247. 
 Mill, John Stuart, 248, 250. 
 Miltiades, 69, 70. 
 Milton, 176. 
 Minoan Empire and culture, 
 
 33, 96 ; and see Cretan and 
 
 Aegean. 
 
 More's Utopia, 155. 
 Miiller, Johann, 148. 
 Mycenae, 54. 
 Mycenaean Greece, see Minoan 
 
 Empire. 
 
 Napoleon I, 222, 224, 232-3, 238, 
 
 245. 
 
 Napoleon III, 258-9. 
 Negroes and slavery, 152, 235. 
 New World, the, 143 seq., 230, 
 
 262. 
 Newton, 5, 63, 170-2, 174 seq., 
 
 198, 228, 253, 255-6, 267. 
 Nile basin as affecting Egyptian 
 
 culture, 5, 32-3. 
 Nuremberg, observatory at, 148. 
 
 Olympus, 50, 124. 
 Oxford and the Royal Society, 
 171. 
 
 Panaetius, 107. 
 
 Papacy, the, and the Pope, 125- 
 
 6 seq. and chapters 6 and 7. 
 Papin, Denis, 199. 
 Pappus, 184. 
 
 Parthenon, the, 71, 74, 76, 132. 
 Peel, Sir Robert, 214. 
 Peisistratus, 67. 
 Peloponnesian War, the, 80. 
 Pericles, 72-3. 
 ' Persae ', the, 71. 
 Persepolis, inscriptions at, 44.
 
 Index 
 
 287 
 
 Persians, the, 52, 54, 68, 71-2, 101. 
 
 Petrarch, 144. 
 
 Pharaoh, the deification of, 38. 
 
 Pheidias, 72. 
 
 Philip II of Spain, 158. 
 
 Phoenicians, 53, 55-6, 101. 
 
 Pindar, 70. 
 
 Place, Francis, 247. 
 
 Plato, 56, 63, 77, 80-5, 136, 141, 
 
 145, 182. 
 
 his Republic, 83-4. 
 Pliny the younger, 1 12, 121, 254. 
 Poincare, Henri, 188. 
 Polycrates, 63. 
 Pompey, 103. 
 Portugal and discovery, 152, 
 
 154-5- 
 
 Praetors' Edict, the, 114. 
 
 Priestley, 247, 252. 
 
 Protestantism, see Reformation. 
 
 Prussia, 238-9. 
 
 Ptolemy, 88, 148, 153, 174. 
 
 Punic wars, the, 102. 
 
 Pyramids, the, 39, 40, 132. 
 
 Pyrrhus, 100. 
 
 Pythagoras and the Pytha- 
 goreans, 57, 61-5, 73, 76, 86, 
 148, 169. 
 
 Quakers, the, 235. See also Fox. 
 
 Raphael, 145. 
 Reform Bill, the, 237, 246. 
 Reformation, the, 162-6. 
 Renan, 48. 
 
 Renascence, the, 82, 135, chap- 
 ter 7 passim, 
 Roman building, 112, 132. 
 
 eagle, in Dante, 124. 
 
 law, chapter 5 and 236. 
 Roman Empire, 106. 
 
 Division of, 1 10. 
 
 Geography of, 108. 
 
 Provinces of, chapter 5 and 
 
 Roman Empire, Eastern, 95, 
 no, 125, 140; theology of, 
 147. 
 
 Western, 95, iio-n. 
 Rome, chapter 5 and passim. 
 Romilly, 247. 
 
 Rousseau, 220-1, 225, 230. 
 Royal Society, the, n, 171-2,252. 
 
 Salamis, 69, 70-2, 101, 231. 
 
 Samos, 62. 
 
 Sardes, 69. 
 
 Saxons, the, 109. 
 
 Scholastic philosophy, 130, 134. 
 
 Senate, the Roman, 98, 102, 103, 
 
 105. 
 
 Seven Sages, the, 58, 67, 169. 
 Shakespeare, 75, 79, 165, 168. 
 Shelley, 6, 75. 
 Sicily, 10 1, 107. 
 Slavs, the, 92. 
 Smith, Adam, 210-11. 
 Socrates, 73, 77-9, 82-3, 123, 
 
 182. 
 
 Solon, 66-7, 100, 1 14. 
 Sophists, the, 77-8. 
 Sophocles, 72, 74-7, 80. 
 Sophos, 57, 67. 
 South American Republics, the, 
 
 236, 245. 
 Spain, 93, 101 ; Moors in, 131, 
 
 140, 154,259. 
 
 andthe New World, 156, 162. 
 
 and monarchy, 161. 
 Sparta, 62, 70. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 257. 
 Spinoza, 206. 
 Stephenson, George, 204. 
 Stern, work of, 239, 263. 
 Stoics, the, and Stoicism, 62, 85, 
 
 107,113,115,123,137,219,220. 
 'Strategos', the, 72. 
 Sumerians, the, 32. 
 Sweden, 162. 
 Switzerland, 232, 259.
 
 288 
 
 Index 
 
 Syracuse, home of Archimedes, 
 87, 107. 
 
 Tarquins, the, 96. 
 
 Teutons, the, 92. 
 
 Thales, 41, 56-9, 61, 89, 113, 190. 
 
 Themistocles, 69, 70, 72. 
 
 Theocracies, 36, 146. 
 
 Thomas Aquinas, St., 1 34, 1 37, 141 . 
 
 Thucydides the funeral oration 
 
 of Pericles, 72, 145. 
 Toscanelli, his chart, compared 
 
 with mediaeval, 153. 
 Trajan, 109, 112, 121. 
 Treviranus, 252-3. 
 Troy, 54. 
 Tudors, the, 151, 161. See also 
 
 Elizabeth. 
 Turgot, 234. 
 
 Turks, the, 131, 152, 245. 
 Turner, J. M. W., 223. 
 Tuscany, see Etruscans. 
 Twelve Tables, the, 99, 114, 190. 
 Tycho Brahe, 165, 174 seq. 
 
 United States, the, 157, 200, 203, 
 
 227, 23?- 1 - 
 Universities, mediaeval, 130, 
 
 140 ; and ' academies ', 148. 
 
 Valmy, 231, 233. 
 
 Vasco da Gama, 155. 
 
 Venetian printing, 146. 
 
 Vespasian, 109. 
 
 Vespucci, 156. 
 
 Vico, 116, 253. 
 
 Virgil, 106, 120, 140, 144. 
 
 Vittorino da Feltre, 147-8. 
 Voltaire, 228. 
 
 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 253. 
 
 Wallis, 171. 
 
 Wars, Peloponnesian, 80. 
 
 Punic, 102. 
 
 Hundred Years', 143, 161. 
 
 of Roses, 161. 
 
 Thirty Years', 163-4. 
 
 English Civil War, 227. 
 
 Seven Years', 200. 
 
 American War of Independ- 
 ence, 200, 230. 
 
 England and France (Revolu- 
 tionary and Napoleonic), 
 205, 209, 239. 
 
 War of Liberation, 239. 
 
 Franco-Prussian, 263. 
 Waterloo, 239. 
 
 Watt, James, 190, 198, 200-1,204. 
 Wellington, the Duke of, 245. 
 Wiclif, 143. 
 Wilberforce, 235. 
 William, Friar, Rubruquis, 141. 
 William of Orange, 158-9, 163. 
 William III of England, 227. 
 Williams, Roger, 230. 
 Worcester, the Marquis of, 199. 
 Wordsworth, 223 seq. 
 Writing, the art of, 36, 43-4. 
 
 Xavier, 163. 
 Yorkshire, 157, 201. 
 Zeno, 85. 
 
 Oxford: Horace Hart M.A., Printer to the University
 
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