A THEORY OF CIVILISATION A THEORY O CIVILISATION BY SHOLTO O. G. DOUGLAS NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1914 (All rights reserved) CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION ..... 7 PART I CHAPTER I. ANCIENT GREECE . . . -31 II. EARLY ROMAN CIVILISATION . . .60 III. THE AUGUSTAN AGE . . . .80 IV. THE DECADENCE OF ROMAN CIVILISATION . 93 V. THE DARK AGES . . . .112 VI. THE CHRISTIAN CIVILISATIONS . . -136 PART II I. ANCIENT EGYPT . . . . . 157 II. BUDDHISM . . . . .176 III. ISLAM . . . . . 192 IV. CONFUCIANISM ..... 206 V. ANCIENT MEXICO AND PERU . . .217 CONCLUSION . . . . .237 5 298680 A Theory of Civilisation INTRODUCTION WHY did the civilisation of ancient Greece and Rome decay and die ? That is a question which must occur to every mind that studies the history of classical civilisation^ Why did that former period of knowledge and culture, of vast intellectual and artistic achievement, fail to pass by a direct path of ascent into our modern civilisation ? We know that there were intel- lects at work in the world then which were not separated by any real gulf of difference from the intellects that have crowned our modern civilisation. In every purely intellectual point the great men of that period were not inferior to the great men of modern times or, at any rate, were not utterly inferior to them. In poetryepic, lyric, dramatic Greece and Rome have left us models which we have barely sur- passed. In sculpture we have never reached 8 : A THEORY OF CIVILISATION 'the perfection- bf 'Greece. Of classical painting we possess next to nothing, and we know so little that it would be rash to claim for the modern world an overwhelming superiority of craftsmanship. In architecture we may look proudly on Chartres or Ely ; but, with thoughts of the Parthenon and of the temples of Paestum, we dare not claim an intrinsic superiority for Christian architecture. And even in the latter days of the great epoch of Greco-Roman civilisation, Tacitus, that most perfect craftsman of prose literature, gave the world in his Annals a work that some of us may well think has never been equalled. Why did this civilisation collapse utterly, as though the superstructure was too heavy for the foundation? The advancing waves of barbarism, we are told, broke through the barriers, and spread like a rising tide of savagery over the Roman world. Yes, but why did that happen at this period? Have we any real reason a reason, that is, that we have not reached ex post facto tor supposing that barbarian Power was greater in the fourth and following centuries of our era than in the hundred years that centre round the principate of Augustus? We read of the irresistible stream of immigration pour- INTRODUCTION 9 ing in from the east, and beating upon the barriers of the Empire. Yet the Byzantine Empire, which might seem to have been more at the mercy of the barbarians, succeeded in keeping a tottering head above the waves for yet another thousand years. Indeed, every reader knows that this is not a sufficient and convincing answer. We all know that Roman civilisation was rotten to the core ; that the evil came from within, not from without ; that the Roman world was weakening all the time, and could at last do nothing against barbarians whom Caesar and his legions would have swept away like chaff. It has been the same with every civilisation that has been evolved in the countless ages of written and unwritten history. Greece and Rome only followed in the tracks of Nineveh and Babylon. Does the same fate lie before us in spite of the seeming strength and solidarity of the civilisation that to-day is en- compassing all the world? No doubt, to any unimportant provincial governor of classical Rome, the idea that Roman civilisation could pass away, and melt into the barbarism which we find, say, in the seventh century would have N seemed preposterous j in just the same way it would seem preposterous to a modern colonial 10 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION governor that the totality of modern civilisa- tion could fade within a few centuries into a soulless, unproductive savagery. Yet that is what happened to Rome, and that is what analogy tells us may happen to our own culture. Now can we form any notion however tentative and falsified by misconception why all the earlier civilisations have thus passed away, leaving only dead sepulchral fruits for antiquarian scholars of a later age? The answer to that question must be of interest to us, because from it we may hope to see whether the same forces of dissolution are working amongst us which dissolved those earlier civilisations. But the question cannot be answered in a few words of conclusive demonstration. If that were so, the answer would have been found, studied, discussed long ago in all its endless ramifications by the great intellects that have preceded us. For no philosopher, no biologist, no anthropologist could have failed to take an interest in the road up which mankind is toiling. If we look with a pervasive eye at the history of the European world during the last two thousand years, three things appear to stand INTRODUCTION 11 out as the central pivots round which the individual events may be grouped conveniently. First, the spread of the Greco -Roman power and civilisation, which, after reaching a climax, fell into decrepitude and death. Second, the birth, growth, and ultimate dis- semination of the Christian faith. Third, that renewal of civilisation whose commencement has by common consent been called the Renaissance : the term, of course, implies rightly or wrongly that our modern civilisation is essentially a re -birth of the Greco -Roman civilisation. Let us try to see whether any causal connec- tion can be traced between these three leading events. It is at once obvious that the birth and growth of Christianity synchronise to a remark- able degree with the climacteric point and the beginning of the decay of the Roman empire. We must be careful here not to let the wide range of our modern point of view mislead us. We have all heard in our childhood that Christ came into the world exactly at the moment when the events of Roman history were most singularly favourable to the dissemi- nation of the Christian faith. That is true. But, looking at this statement with the un- 12 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION prejudiced eye of logic, we can see that it is also possible to express the same truth from the other side, and say that when events became ripe for the promulgation of a new religion, a new religion arose which we happen to know by the name of Christianity. It seems easier to accept the latter statement, which is rational, than the former, which is ultra- rational. Darwinian philosophy has shown us that secular change is the necessary concomi- tant of individual life ; for every individual, from the highest man to the lowest zoophyte, varies from every other individual, and the resultant of countless variations must itself vary. Perhaps we may say that a higher type, therefore, necessarily continues to come into existence in aeternum. Changes in tempera- ture, in humidity, in the composition of the atmosphere, are so gradual from day to day, from year to year, from century to century, from aeon to aeon, that it may be that some type of life will evolve itself to meet the most extreme conditions that we can imagine : but such speculations must remain purely hypo- thetical for us. Coming back to that which concerns humanity more closely, let us try to see what it is that marks out the man of the INTRODUCTION 13 first century or of the twentieth century from the man of the seventh century. The distinc- tion, to which attention especially is called here, is the loss of religious faith. It is clear from the literature of the first century that then Rome no longer possessed the old faith in the old gods of Olympus. The Romans no longer possessed the psychic illusion of their ancestors. The result of this loss was a slackening of the obligations of morality. The man who in earlier days ha.d faith in the reality of the Olympian hierarchy necessarily was guided in his conduct by that faith ; and, so far as that Olympian faith taught a higher morality than that of obedience to physical appetite, thus far the gods of Olympus guided the individual believer in them to take his stand upon a higher plane ; and so we are not incorrect in using the expression analogic- ally that the soul of Ro'me was of a higher nature than the soul of Gaul or Britain. Is it not this psychic illusion which dis- tinguishes the progressive nation from that which we call the unprogressive-^unprogres- sive by comparison, that is because any progress that may be taking place in its development is so slow that we cannot trace its effects in historical action? As the loss of 14 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION this psychic illusion synchronises sufficiently closely with the apparent decay of Roman civilisation, we may accept the conclusion, not as proved but as probable, that the loss of faith was connected in some way with the failure of progress. With a decay of faith in the verity of the Olympian myths the Roman lost the guiding principle which had led him to stand upon a higher plane than his barbarous neighbours. There is no question here of claiming any supernatural spiritual truth for the myths of Greece and Rome : it is a mere statement of a materialistic evolutionary theory. With the loss of his psychic illusion each individual, in his own conduct, acted under influences of physical appetite, which were in no way superior to the influences that worked upon the neighbouring barbarian ; indeed, fre- quently the Roman was under inferior influ- ences, because, where the Roman had lost his old faith, and had no new faith to take its place, the barbarian had for the most part some psychic illusion, which, however inferior to the Olympian verities, was, at any rate, superior to the nullity of the new Roman atheism or agnosticism. Now, if there is any truth underlying these INTRODUCTION 15 theoretical possibilities^ before any group of human beings could rise from the dust and ashes of the dead Roman civilisation to a plane equal in height to that of the old civilisation, it was necessary for the soul of that group , to find faith in some psychic illusion which could give the individual as high a guidance as the old Olympian belief. The potentialities of such faith and of such psychic illusion existed then, as at other times, in the countless superstitions of uncivilised humanity. To use a convenient, but unscientific, analogy, the spirit of evolution had only to choose the best of these multitudinous superstitions and to educate it to play its part in the upward development of man. Evolu- tion was capable of making the choice. It had to choose, not merely that which was best per se, but that which was best relatively to the possibilities of its dissemination as far and as widely as might be, and especially with reference to the possibilities of working up the best material to be found in the world ; and this material lay in the old empire of Rome, because Rome under the old Olympian dis- pensation had risen to a height never rea'ched elsewhere, and that had left in the brain - material of the inhabitants the potentiality of a superior and speedier growth. 10 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION No doubt evolution made trial of many faiths before it found that which it sought, just as evolution may be said to make many trials before it finds the desirable variation in the animal that will lead to a higher species. It found the desirable faith in Judaea. From the almost elementary facts of the life of Christ was evolved the fabric of mediaeval Chris- tianity. In this new faith mankind found the new psychic illusion, which could take the place of the dead or moribund Olympian fables. But it was long before the descendants of the men of the outworn Roman world reached that lowly, unsophisticated condition of mind in which they could accept generally and un- reservedly the new psychic illusion. It was not till about three centuries after the death of Christ that the world found a Christian emperor in Constantine. And even then there were still sparks glowing in the embers ; Julian the Apostate, for instance, vainly sought to reinstate Olympian paganism. The new faith differed from the old in being essentially monotheistic ; to this extent it was possible for a thinking mind to accept the notion of a Christian theocracy. But mean- while the disruption of the Roman autocracy over Europe and the neighbouring shores of INTRODUCTION 17 the Mediterranean had let in the barbaric invaders. Goths and Mongols swelled the ranks of the sons of Romulus, and united themselves by the closest ties to the patrician families of Rome. So Roman intellectuality sank lower as the last tatters of the Olympian civilisation were disintegrated to dust, while the dawn of the new faith was beginning to spread its light upon mankind. Our fathers were not deep thinkers in the Dark Ages, the ages of faith ; that is why they were ages of faith ; that is why the new psychic illusion came to dominate European humanity. As the work of construction tends always to be slower than the work of destruction, the work of reconstructing the Roman civilisa- tion was a slower process than its dissolution. The accession of Hildebrand to the papacy sometimes is taken as a convenient date from which to count the birth of the modern world ; but it is only in the thirteenth century that we can trace with unhesitating certainty the arrival of the new civilisation, the Christian civilisation, which was soon to prove more glorious than the Olympian civilisation of earlier days. It was fitting, perhaps we may say inevit- able, that the Christian civilisation should first 2 18 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION come into prominence in Italy, the old home of its precursor, rather than in Judaea, the land of its birth, for on the principle that a prophet is not without honour save in his own country the Jews saw too much of the real Christ to accept His divinity ; it was only at a distance from the historical home of its founder that the great psychic illusion could find its necessary environment. And Judaea was farther from Rome then than it is now ; and the distance continued to increase as the means of com- munication became less efficient with the decrease of civilisation. After its long period of re-educating man- kind the Christian faith brought forth the new civilisation in the glories of the Renaissance. In Italy this brilliant epoch of the human soul reached its meridian splendour in the times of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Leo X. During the papacy of Clement VII we see the swiftly rising shades of a coming darkness. But outside Italy events had marched more slowly. We may take the death of Shakes- peare, in i 6 1 6, as marking the commencement of the decline in England. Then an interesting state of affairs arises ; for the decline is not continuous. Christian civilisation does not sink down again into the INTRODUCTION 19 depths. On the contrary, after a compara- tively brief period of decay it commences to rise again, and reaches that gorgeous point in which we find ourselves living at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the first glance this might seem to kill the theory of the causes of civilisation, which it is the purpose of this book to explain. But that is not so, for a very little thought shows us that at the moment when the first Christian civilisation, the Catholic civilisation, was in all the glory of its zenith, a new form of psychic illusion, which alone could regenerate man- kind, already was advancing to a prominent position in the thoughts of men. Protestantism was evolving itself into the new religion that was, by its new illusion, to lead humanity to higher heights than ever had been reached before. The Protestant civilisation, for reasons that we need not here discuss, took a scientific and mechanical turn. We need not suppose that contemporary mechanical ingenuity points to any superiority in contemporary brains over those of earlier civilised men. It would be, indeed, absurd to imagine that the men who appreciated Plato's Republic when it was first written were so stupid that some of them could not have been taught easily to run a motor-car 20 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION or a printing-machine. But the mechanical bias of Protestant civilisation had an interesting and important result in its application to loco- motion, for this caused a vast extension of its power of influence. It caused the Protestant civilisation to react with powerful effect upon the neighbouring moribund Catholic civilisa- tion and ultimately on the non-Christian communities, which otherwise would have been beyond its reach. The spirit of toleration has been in theory though not, of course, always in practice a distinctive characteristic of the Protestant rather than of the Catholic civilisation. And this, also, has led undoubtedly to an increase in its influence upon peoples external to it. It is of interest to note the results of the Catholic and Protestant civilisation in the settlement of America. The old moribund Catholic civilisation was planted throughout the Southern continent : the young, invigorating Protestant civilisation came to dominate the North. The natural advantages of the two continents are not very dissimilar ; the coast- lines correspond ; the river systems of both are extensive ; both extend practically from equatorial to polar regions. So we can con- tinue to draw parallels until we study the INTRODUCTION 21 political history of the inhabitants. There the contrast is conclusive. And why? Surely because the minds of the men who colonised the North were, for the most part, under the influence of the Protestant psychic illusion, the men of the Southern continent were under the influence of the decadent Catholicism. And now we may turn to the question of the immediate future, a most interesting question at all times, to all men. To what goal are we marching with the march of civilisation ? Are we indeed ascending or descending? In answering that question we must be closely on our guard against forming grand conclu- sions upon trivial and transient phenomena. Imagine a straw floating on the surface of the open sea while the tide is ebbing on a rough day. The straw rises again and again on countless waves, although it is still falling with the falling tide, and must descend inevitably to whatever level the water finally reaches. If that straw could think and speak, we may sup- pose that it would tell us, as it climbed some huge wave, that it was ascending, and would arrive ultimately at some unseen, unknown goal on high. It might well seem so to the straw, yet it would not be so in fact. Now we are in the position of that straw. We, as indi- 22 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION viduals, have no more effect on the trend of things, on the tide of human progress, than that straw. It has been suggested tentatively above that civilisation always has been connected insepar- ably with some antecedent psychic illusion ; it is further suggested that this is an inevitable law of the existence of civilisation. Thus civi- lisation only exists as the resultant of faith. From this it follows that the decay of faith leads to the decay of civilisation that civilisa- tion must fade, and die, and decay, if faith has previously faded, and died, and decayed. And so the all-important question for the prophet of the outcome of Christian civilisation is this : Is Christianity a living and growing faith, or is Christianity a system of extraordi- nary historic interest with regard to which men's faith is moribund, which all men will be content soon to class as a mere psychic illusion ? It would seem that our civilisation, too, must fade and fall. The size of our civilisation may make the dissolution slow, slower than that of the Olympian civilisation. The prophecy of dates is a most fantastic hypothesis. But perhaps we may picture our descendants of \.n. 3000 as down in INTRODUCTION 23 such depths as the sons of Rome reached in A.D. 1000. Then somewhere in the world the new psychic illusion must rise to power. Its coming is certain, because only from it can follow the new civilisation. And that new civilisation must come, as the result of those evolutionary laws which are older far than humanity itself. It is as inevitable as to- morrow's sunrise. To what height man ulti- mately may climb, in the illimitable vistas of endless civilisations following endless and ever higher psychic illusions, we cannot even faintly imagine in our wildest dreams. The theory, then, which this book seeks to elucidate, of the causation of civilisation and decivilisation, amounts to something of this sort. We will take as an accepted fact that, in the course of long ages, the almost primitive human animal has evolved for itself a certain degree of intelligence. With that intelligence comes a certain fear of the unseen, of the unknown, of inexplicable things : man comes to dread the thunder, the great winds and storms which so often bring discomfort, scar- city of food, death. He comes, too, to have apprehension of the unseen power of the dead, of the continuance of the authority of some 24 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION dead leader. The individual, or the com- munity, in whom such thoughts and fears are prevalent, is influenced in conduct by them. Here we have, then, a primitive psychic illusion. These influences may tend towards conduct which we now call superior, or they may tend towards conduct which we would now call inferior. Perhaps we may say that they would almost always tend in the former direction, and that for two reasons : firstly, because superiority of conduct would seem really to be only the name which we give to such conduct as these primitive ancestors of ours were led to pursue ; secondly, so far as there is reality in the superiority of a superior morality, so far there would always be a tendency towards the elimination of the inferior morality on the principle of the survival of the fittest. Ultimately, then, under either alter- native the outcome would tend to be always the survival of the superior morality. This superior morality would react hygi- enically both upon the individual and also, similarly, upon the community collectively, tending towards a higher grade of intelligence ; this implies also a higher standard of civilisa- tionif we use the word " civilisation " analogi- cally to include the primitive advance towards INTRODUCTION 25 the condition which we in later times can classify definitely as civilisation. This superior condition of relatively intelligent civilisation would be necessarily subsequent to the spread of a psychic illusion, and actually resultant from it. But the increase of intelligent reflection would then lead to disillusion that is, to the decay of faith in the psychic illusion. Thus the increase of civilisation would lead to the decay of that which inspired the increase of civilisation. This would seem to bring us back again to the starting-point. The position, however, would not be the same, although it would appear to be super- ficially similar. The difference would be in the potentiality of increased intelligence, which, by heredity, would be existent in the brains of the men who composed the community. This would be true whether we believe that evolu- tion had worked directly upon the mental capacity of individuals or indirectly by the elimination of inferior individuals or commu- nities. So, when a new psychic illusion began to operate upon men, it would find, so to speak, its work easier ; and therefore in an equal space of time, it would tend to lead to a higher state of civilisation than the resultant of the 26 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION previous illusion. Consequently there would be a tendency for a new civilisation to be on a higher plane thaji its parent civilisation. The collateral ramifications of the ascent of civilisation are so complex that we need feel no surprise when historical facts do not appear to tally exactly with the theoretical or ideal line of progress. But, as it happens, in our Western Civilisation to use Kidd's well- known, but not too happy, nomenclature we have a very normal example of this ideal pro- gression. This is one reason why it is useful to make a special study of this Western Civi- lisation. Another reason is that here in Eng- land we are apt to know more of the psychic illusion under which we were born and bred, and also of the history of the civilisation in which we live. So it is proposed now to enter in some detail into the consideration of the two psychic illu- sions which in the main have civilised Europe the Olympian illusion and the Christian illusion and with them to consider the evolu- tion of the two resultant civilisations to which reference has been made already as the Olym- pian civilisation and the Christian civilisation. To this will be added a few chapters explana- tory of the connection between some other INTRODUCTION 27 forms of psychic illusion and civilisation ; these, it is hoped, will illustrate the more detailed considerations of Roman and Christian civilisation. PART I CHAPTER I ANCIENT GREECE IN this book an attempt is made to trace the causes that have produced civilisation* It is evident that these causes must lie ultimately beyond the range of history, for, however far back we may trace the beginnings of that progress by which men have advanced from a primitive barbarism to a condition which by analogy we may call incipient civilisation, we can never find a state of human affairs which was not the resultant of a previous state of affairs. Thus we are compelled in our ignorance to choose by an artificial con- vention some definite period as a beginning, although we are well aware that the period chosen is not a real beginning in a philo- sophic sense of the word. It is clear enough that the civilisation in which we are living to-day may be traced back through the period of the Renaissance and the 31 32 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION Middle Ages to the Roman Empire. From Rome we may pass to Greece and the culture which seems to be allied so closely to that of Rome. So far, if we are content with wide generalities, there is no difficulty. But when we try to see what lay before the Greek civilisation the task is not so easy, the outlook is not so clear. In Egypt, in Phoe- nicia, in the various old civilisations of Asia we seem, indeed, to see a light that may guide us to a true knowledge of the parentage of Greek culture ; but it is a vague, uncertain light, and soon is lost in darkness and doubt,. We must, then, be content to say artificially that our civilisation begins on the shores of the Aegean, not because we believe that this is a true beginning but because it is in Greece that European civilisation certainly has its most primitive historical source. So many learned books have been written about Greek civilisation and Greek religion that it must seem presumptuous for a writer who assuredly is far from learned to step boldly towards a gap that was filled up long ago. Yet there are still a few points that seem to be deserving of a greater emphasis than usually has been laid upon them. Greek religion may be considered under two ANCIENT GREECE 33 aspects, the mythological and the eschato- logical. About Greek mythology there is nothing new to be said save by the most expert scholars, for, since the time of the revival of learning in the Italian Renaissance, there has been no lack of poets and students to keep the memories of the myths of Hellas fresh and vivid. But the eschatological problems have been considered with vigour only in our own day. It is just these latter problems that have the chief interest for us in our consideration of the causes of the evolution of Greek civi- lisation. As we glance over the course of early Greek history we may note one or two points which stand out with special distinction. We see that at some period not far distant from B.C. 1000 there were in existence several im- portant cities in Greece Proper, of which Mycenae is the most prominent. These were in a fairly advanced condition of civilisation. There was, also, in existence an important city, Ilium or Troy, in the north-west corner of Asia Minor, in a somewhat similar condition of civilisation . At some date certainly earlier than 700 B.C., probably earlier than 800 B.C., were composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, poems to which 3 34 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION reference may be made as " Homer," by the usual convention, without any implications as to their authorship. Homer entirely is con- cerned with the Trojan War and events that resulted from it. With Homer the literature of Greece com- mences : with him we connect closely the Homeric Hymns and the poems of Hesiod. But after these Greek literature practically is silent until we come to the time of Simonides (b. 556) and Anacreon (fl. 530); Alcaeus and Sappho may be a little earlier, but their work has come down to us in a quite frag- mentary condition. It is only with Pindar (b. circ. 522), Aeschylus (b. 525), and Herodotus (b. 484) that we come to the full glory of Greek literature. These few obvious facts with regard to early Greek litera- ture are given here because it seems that frequently too little stress is laid on the occur- rence of this silent period, between the finished artistic workmanship of Homer, on the one hand, and the equally artistic, but very different, work of the fifth century, on the other. Greek literature is treated as a simple identity, as though there was no difficulty at all in the fact that Homer and Hesiod could write with artistic finish, but that no worthy sue- ANCIENT GREECE 35 cessors appeared to carry on the Homeric tradition until, about three centuries later, the very diverse, and in some ways more archaic, Aeschylus gave to the world his consummate tragedies, whose beauty and grandeur fill us with wonder, while their exasperating difficulty fills us or some of us with despair. Now it appears fairly obvious that the Homeric poems somehow are connected with that older Mycenaean civilisation (we might call it also Pelasgian : it is said to form a bond of union between Neolithic times and our own civilisation) which in the main had passed away before the historic Hellas, with Athens as its chief glory, is revealed to us. The Mycenaeans are not the same as the Achaeans of Homer Professor Ramsay has shown this clearly in his Early Age of Greece. At what period and under what circumstances the Mycenaeans combined with the Achaeans to form a Mycenaean -Achaean civilisation we do not know for certain. But apparently it was such a combination that under Agamemnon fought in the Trojan war. It seems desirable to lay considerable emphasis on the existence of a gap between the civilisation of Homer and the civilisation of the fifth century, between Homeric litera- 36 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION ture and Athenian literature ; for by means of it we may come, perhaps, to a philosophic, generalised notion of the early history of these peoples round the Aegean Sea. We picture to ourselves, then, a civilisation growing up in Argolis and the Troad, which produced ultimately, as its chief literary fruit, the poems of Homer. It produced also, no doubt, other poetic fruits that are lost lost through the quite normal progress of this early civilisation into decadence. We can see clearly that some poems might be preserved, un- written, by rhapsodists, through a time when the civilisation that had produced them was decaying round them. As we shall see in a subsequent chapter when we are considering an analogous condition of affairs, even the complete decay of a civilisation would not bring the people who formed the population of the country into a position exactly similar to that which their ancestors occupied before the rise of the civilisation ; for they would bear now within them, through heredity, the potentiality of an increased degree of intellec- tuality. Thus, if an exciting stimulus, even of equal strength, could be brought to bear upon them, it would be likely to goad them to a height of civilisation to which their ancestors had not attained. ANCIENT GREECE 37 Leaving aside for the moment the nature of this stimulus, let us think of the way it would work, of the effects it would produce. We would expect it to come into operation somewhere on the outskirts of the previous civilisation, so as not to be cut off entirely from its civilising influence, and yet not to be involved fully in its disillusionment and decadence. Athens occupies such a position with regard to the Mycenaean -Achaean civili- sation. In Homer Athens is of no import- ance at all ; it is only in the later period of the fifth century that she appears as the leading city of Greece in point of civilisation. Historically, the stimulus that at length pro- duced the new period of Greek culture was, perhaps, the Dorian invasion. The Dorians, again, were a northern people, and, no doubt, akin in language and religion to the Achaeans of the earlier inroad. If their coming was the exciting cause of the new civilisation, it was quite normal that the new civilisation in the end should flourish rather in a people in close touch with the descendants of the previous Mycenaean -Achaeans, who, as has been said, held within them the potentiality of a greater intellectuality through the former civilisation of their ancestors. 38 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION According to the theory outlined in the Introduction, it is evident that we must presume that there was some considerable break in the religious history of the inhabitants of Greece, that one form of religion was the cause of the Mycenaean -Achaean civilisation, that this gave place to another form of religious belief which produced the Athenian civilisation it may be called Athenian for the sake of con- venience, although, of course, Athens was only the leading city in a civilisation that, in the end, involved the whole of the Greek world. Now we cannot say roundly that the Athenian religion was not the same thing as the Homeric religion ; for the Homeric pantheon very largely is made up of the same deities that were also so prominent in the later historic period ; Zeus is king of the gods in both, Hera is his wife, and so on. But there are points of difference, points of distinction that demand our close attention. Of these the most remarkable is that Dionysus is not a prominent figure in Homer, whereas he is a very prominent figure indeed in the historic pantheon, and actually figures more conspicu- ously in the Athenian religious calendar than Zeus, or Apollo, or even Athena. Demeter, again, is an unimportant character in Homer, ANCIENT GREECE 36 and, primordial though she seems, her per- sonality is much less fully developed than that of other goddesses whose names are so familiar. Hermes, also, occupies a secondary position in Homer ; but he becomes continually more influential towards the historic period, until, in the final days of Greek culture, no deity is invoked and worshipped more con- stantly. Apollo is another god that grew in importance in the interval between Homer and the fifth century. In Homer he is on the Trojan side, and only becomes truly Hellenic at a comparatively late date. On the other hand, Hera is the greatest of all the goddesses in Homeric times, whipping Artemis with her own bowstring, and jeering for ever at Aphro- dite ; but in the fifth century the worship of Hera by no means is very conspicuous. Now with these facts in our heads let us look once again at the course of Greek civi- lisation, and take first the causes of the Mycenaean -Achaean civilisation. We have no contemporaneous information of the religious beliefs that may have produced this civilisa- tion : we can ground our notions only upon the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, that were themselves a fruit of that civilisation ; and Homer only comes to us in the form in which 40 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION finally he was put together at Athens in the time of Pisistratus (b. 528); we are far from having any guarantee that Homer, as we read him, is literally Homer as he was composed. In poems handed down by word of mouth changes are made easily ; and such changes as brought Homeric theology into less flagrant contradiction with the current theology are just the changes that most obviously could be made before the time of the final Pisistratan edition. Still, we have no choice but to take the Homeric theology of the Iliad as a state- ment of the religious beliefs prevalent in the .Mycenaean-Achaean civilisation . But even so we have not any clear notion of the religious causes that may have produced that civilisation ; for the beliefs current during the height of that civilisation, as we see them in Homer, may have varied enormously from their primitive significance, all the more because Greek religion throughout is a natural religion not a positive religion like Islam and, therefore, is particularly apt to vary. Indeed, the Hellenic pantheon as a whole varies, even through the historic period, in a constantly quivering kaleidoscopic re- arrangement of its parts. Thus Zeus, who, in fact, does occupy the most stable position, is worshipped under the most diverse forms. ANCIENT GREECE 41 Homer and Hesiod, according to the well- known passage of Herodotus (bk. ii. c. 53), composed the Greek pantheon : that is to say, they crystallised the religious beliefs current in their times. At a quite early date in the Athenian civilisation Homer became the familiar textbook of Greek education ; thus every Greek of any pretensions to education was familiar with the theology to be found in Homer it was not uncommon for a well- educated Athenian to be able to repeat by heart the whole forty-eight books of Homer. This constant study of Homer must have tended to prevent the religious beliefs of the fifth century from developing into a condi- tion in which they contradicted the Homeric canon too directly. The position may be stated thus : Down to the time of the Pisis- tratan edition of Homer there were similarly composed editions in many other cities besides Athens there was a tendency, on the one hand, for the text of Homer to be altered into agree- ment with the theology of the fifth century ; on the other hand, after the Pisistratan edition had stereotyped the text, there was a tendency for the theology of the fifth century not to deviate completely from the Homeric model. Thus the Homeric theology, as we may study 42 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION it now, is perhaps a mean between the lost Mycenaean -Achaean faith and the historic Athenian faith. It is in this way that explana- tion may be found for the unexpected fact that, while the Homeric religion appears super- ficially to be not dissimilar to the later Hellenic religion, the resultant civilisations differ so widely. And yet, as we observed above, there are important points of difference between the Homeric pantheon and the Athenian pantheon. Dionysus in Homer is not an Olympian deity at all. Homer knows merely the story of Lycurgus and Dionysus given in the sixth book of the Iliad. Though Dionysus appears in an early list of the gods (found in an inscription at Olympia), for the ordinary Athenian he was hardly Olympian. He had existed, no doubt, before Homeric times as a local god, and seems to have come into Greece from the north ; for in Thrace, under the title of Sabazios, he had been " from early times the object of an enthusiastic cultus, celebrated with wild orgies and excesses of every kind." But, besides the Thracian Sabazios, there is a second southern source, from which the Greek Dionysus also is sprung, in the Cretan Zagreus. These two somewhat diverse divini- ANCIENT GREECE 43 ties are connected with each other as vine- gods. In his Cretan aspect there can be no doubt that Dionysus is a variant of the Egyptian Osiris. Now through Osiris Dionysus is a deity of personal immortality, and in this he is quite unlike the ordinary Olympian deities, who were most mundane, and gave no promise of life after death. Dionysus, by being torn to pieces in Thrace and coming back to life, does hold out such a hope to his worshippers. And the psychic illusion of immortality, as we shall see later, has an important civilising purpose. Dionysus appears to be one of the most important civilising factors in the culture of the fifth century. There is a tendency for us to think of Dionysus as a deteriorating agent, unworthy of the pure aesthetic appreciation that is so characteristically Greek, as though he were a sort of excuse for excessive drunkenness and sottish sensuality. But really nothing could be much farther from the truth. In the first place, Greek wine was not strong ; also, it was diluted almost always with water before being drunk ; its effect was not to make men brutal and coarse : on the contrary, " it cleared the mind, and diminished for the time the presence of the body." Dionysus, far from U A THEORY OF CIVILISATION being the god of heavy debauchery, was one " who set the soul free from the prison of the flesh," to use the expression of the Dionysiac votaries. (Gardner and Jevons: Manual of Greek Antiquities, book iii. chap, iv.) It was the influence of Zagreus-Osiris that was predominant rather than that of the somewhat beery Sabazios. Thus Dionysus led men to rise above the ordinary worries of daily life, and to turn from them not to mere revelry, but to the highest intellectual pleasures ; for it is to the Athenian Dionysia that we trace the source of tragedy and comedy, and an Attic tragedy is no mere entertainment to pass away a few idle hours ; its appreciation demands from us and must have demanded from its first hearers a strenuous intellectual alertness. Dionysus, apparently, was evolved to no small extent in order to stimulate the intellectuality of those who believed in him. We can see that it was desirable that psychic illusion in such a deity should stand, for the men of the fifth century, to some extent apart from the earlier stereotyped Homeric pantheon, because it could be developed thus on its own special lines without clashing discordantly with the Homeric mythology. So at Athens it is ANCIENT GREECE 45 Dionysus, rather than Apollo, who is the true culture-deity. We may see a similar purpose and effect of the Dionysiac cult in the fact that it was Dionysus who inspired such symposia as we read of so often in Athenian literature. In the best period these were not mere drink- ing parties, but rather gatherings at which subjects of the highest moral and philosophic interest were discussed. It is very difficult for us to put any reality into our conception of Dionysus, largely, it seems, because our thoughts are distorted by perverse Roman notions of Bacchus. We figure to ourselves, perhaps, some corpulent and very human old fellow, with a bottle or a wine-skin, at the head of a rout of drunken satyrs. Such a conception is false entirely to the civilising Dionysiac cult of the fifth century. Rather he is " a young, blooming, and aggres- sive deity, everywhere invading, and always in the end triumphant " (Gardner and Jevons, book ii. chap. vi). He is the ever-youthful mentality which so well may typify all that is " Greek and gracious." He is the young intel- ligence that leaps from hill to hill over the valleys of difficulty, and knows by intuition what is aesthetically right. A variation of the Dionysiac cult, a further 46 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION aspect of it, is to be seen in Orphism. In this we find marks of a belief that is of profound interest. Orpheus was not merely a great musician of Thrace ; to the Orphist he was much more : he was the man who had gone down alive to the lower world of shadows to look for his lost Eurydice, and had come back again to teach men a lesson of hope. It is this return of Orpheus from Hades, with the trust it gave of a similar return for his followers, that made Orphism so popular. It is of great interest to note in our consider- ation of the Dionysiac cult that, whereas the old Homeric deities are all local, tribal, all taking sides in that half -mythical Trojan war, Dionysus is not tied down by any such restric- tions. Dionysus is universal. Any person, male or female, bond or free, Athenian or Spartan, might join a Dionysiac tftWo?. They had only to pass quite a simple test, that they were ayvoi, euo-e/3ei9, and ayaBoi if we translate the words we may connote all sorts of implications that would be foreign to Greek thought. It is said that the "purity," " piety," and " goodness " were not exactly of a moral kind. But of what kind were they then? It seems almost perverse to say that they were simply ceremonial : finally the words ANCIENT GREECE 47 became so, no doubt, but originally they must have had surely some moral significance not necessarily the same as is implied in our obvious translations so that the Dionysiac psychic illusion must have tended originally to foster some particularity of moral or immoral, but not non-moral sentiment. The nature of that particularity we are not able to define exactly, but its existence appears indubitable. The essential purification thus connects again the Dionysiac cult with the Egyptian Osiri- anism and " the ultimate escape from evil by renewed purgation." Such a notion was quite alien to the Olympian faith, so that here we see that Dionysus brought an entirely new principle to bear upon the evolution of Greek civilisation, a conception of godhood that was unknown to Homer. This principle, it seems, was strong enough, in combination with the renewed, revised Olympian faith, to produce a civilisation in the fifth century that was quite another thing from the Mycenaean -Achaean resultant of the older Homeric faith. That the Dionysiac cult was widespread throughout the Athenian world is certain. Every Athenian, to some extent, was a votary of Dionysus ; for the Dionysiac festivals, along with the Greater and Lesser Panathenaea, and 48 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION the Eleusinian Mysteries, were the most impor- tant recurring events of Attic life. Now in several respects the thiasi were precursors of Christianity, and opened the door by which it entered (Gardner and Jevons, book iii. chap, iv.), for they were universal in their scope, and in no way peculiarly Athenian ; and this is one of the points in which they differ so markedly from the Athenaic festivals, whose special function it was to encourage Athenian patriotism. The psychic illusion in the existence of Athena was evolved in accordance with our theory into its final Athenian prominence more particularly for the purpose of emphasising the patriotic sentiments of the Athenians. The goddess Athena became, indeed, the " mytho- logical embodiment" of the city of Athens. The culminating point of the Panathenaea was the procession which conveyed the Arrephoric robe into the presence of the archaic wooden statue of the goddess. The chief point to be noticed with regard to this ceremony is that it fostered the illusion that the city in some pecu- liar way was the object of a divine interest and affection. It was a specially local illusion, in which the outsider had no lot or part. We can see easily enough that faith in the pyschic ANCIENT GREECE 49 illusion of Athena, the divine ally and pro- tectress, by its very narrowness and concentra- tion, must have been peculiarly inspiring to the citizens of Athens, have led them to act in such a way as tended to the glorification of Athens. The glorification of Athens was an object for which evolution could work, exactly as, in the biological analogy, it works for the " glorification " of the species through the advance of the individual. Ultimately evolu- tion, both politically and biologically, may be working for the individual, but practically it is working for the State and the species. And thus, then, we see that evolution would foster in the individual the psychic illusion in the reality of Athena, because that illusion tended to the advancement of Athens. In more general terms this psychic illusion tended towards the increase of civilisation. The scope of the illusion here became, in the end, remarkably limited, and therefore the explanation seems to be so facile that at first one is half inclined to doubt the veracity of it. But the explanation of truth is apt to be facile when it is correct one notices that in the greatest triumphs of scientific generalisation and therefore may be correct although it is facile. 4 50 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION Looking in a broader spirit at the Athenian civilisation, we can see, then, two great factors at work, two waves, as it were, of civilising influence generated by the psychic illusions in the divinity of Dionysus and in the divinity of Athena ; the former is a universal influence, the latter is intensely local. When the Diony- siac wave, spreading over the greater part of Greece, crosses the path of the narrow, but lofty, Athenaic wave, advancing obliquely on a course by no means parallel to that of the Dionysiac wave, we find the highest level reached by civilisation in Greece, at Athens towards the end of the fifth century. The Dionysiac wave, to keep the same simile, when it met with corresponding local waves elsewhere than in Athens, produced cor- responding high tides of civilisation with an Apolline wave, for instance, at Sparta, or with an Aphrodisiac wave at Corinth. But at Athens civilisation was a fuller, richer thing, and we may pick out one other illusion which helped to produce this result, the illusion of the Eleusinian Mysteries ; this must be con- nected closely with the Dionysiac illusion. There were other Mysteries existing in various parts of Greece, but the Mysteries of Eleusis, under Athenian influence, developed a unique ANCIENT GREECE 51 importance, an importance that tended to in- crease peculiarly the Dionysiac influence at Athens. Eleusis became " the great strong- hold in Hellas of the doctrine of a life beyond the grave" (Gardner and Jevons, book iii. chap. ix.). There can be little doubt that the mysteries originated in some agricultural ceremonies and illusions connected with the mysterious growth of the seed after it is sown. But that does not concern us very greatly, except in so far as it reflects the illusion of the equivalence of the resurrection of the sown corn in the new plant and of the dead human soul in a future life. Now it would be in full agreement with the principle of our theory that great stress here should be laid upon a psychic illusion in immortality. In the Phaedo of Plato (c. 69), we read that " whosoever goes uninitiated to Hades will lie in mud, but he who has been purified and is fully initiate, when he comes thither, will dwell with the gods." And again, Miss J. E. Harrison in her most stimulating " Religion of Ancient Greece," chap, iii., feels justified in declaring that " the Mysteries held out a hope and herein un- doubtedly lay the secret of their extraordinary influence of help and guidance, nay, even of certain and substantial bliss in the dim shadow- 52 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION land that lay beyond the grave." But we ought not to put very great confidence in arguments founded upon what ought to be an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Mysteries when we do not possess that intimate knowledge. They may have been a very important influence, but we do not know for certain that they were so. Really, not much is known of the details of me mystic initiation : perhaps there was not much to know. " Aristotle," says Synesius, 14 is of opinion that the initiated learned nothing precisely, but that they received impressions, that they were put into a certain frame of mind 1 " (quoted by Gardner and Jevons, book iii. chap. ix.). No doubt that is about the truth of the matter : it is safer for us to leave it so. There were certainly dramatic representations, concerned especially with the grief of Demeter at the abduction of Perse- phone and the subsequent rejoicing at her resurrection : and in this clearly we can see the teaching of a psychic illusion in the immor- tality of the soul. Almost every Athenian, we may be sure, was initiated into the Mysteries for Socrates was reproached because he almost alone had not tried to become tuVrs. But what from our ANCIENT GREECE 53 point of view is missing almost entirely in this Eleusinian illusion is the motive to urge men towards conduct that would differentiate them from other people. It seems that only unimportant ceremonial regulations were con- sidered essential for the admission of candi- dates, and it is hardly possible to trace therein any civilising force. Some such force may have existed, and be unknown to us, but, on the whole, it is more probable that it did not exist at all. Let us turn now to another most distinctive feature in Hellenic life, the public games. With our remembrance of English race-meetings and cricket-matches we are apt to look upon the Hellenic games in the wrong spirit. Primarily Hellenic games were not national athletic sports, but rather they were contests held in honour of various gods. It is in this light that the ordinary Greek must have regarded them, at any rate during any period before the close of the fifth century that is, during the time that Hellenic civilisation was growing to power. Their origin, beyond doubt, was religious, and we are justified historically in saying that any civilising effects produced by the games are due to the gods especially to Zeus and Apollo 54 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION in whose honour the games were held. The Greeks did not interrupt their national business, even their wars, in order to run races ; they did it in order to honour the gods in the way in which psychic illusion had taught them that the gods desired to be honoured. Can we see, then, why this unusual illusion should have been evolved, why the Greeks should have honoured their gods by athletic contests? To us Englishmen, for whom some- what similar contests are to-day an undoubted source of pleasure, it may seem unnecessary to suppose that psychic illusion can have had anything to do with the matter : but it seems that we would be wrong in presuming that a sense of pleasurable excitement, in itself, could have produced in Greece the very extraordinary national enthusiasm about the public games, especially if we remember that Greece was not a united country, like England, but a group of jealous and often hostile States, over all of whom the enthusiasm extended with remark- able vigour. The reason was deeper. The games rose to their peculiar prominence in Hellenic life because they fostered in each State the desire for that physical fitness which man is so apt to lose in cities, but which is so eminently desirable in the citizen-soldiers of a ANCIENT GREECE 55 community that is often at war with neigh- bouring communities. The prominence of the various games, it is suggested, was a leading feature in the move- ment which raised Greece far above the neighbouring barbarian countries, because the internecine feuds of Greece had made the Greek the best fighter of his time, and it was the games that led to the establishment in each Greek State of the racial stock which could be victorious in their internecine strife. There is no rational justification for supposing that the Greeks held public games merely because they enjoyed them. Such a supposition appears to be unscientific, because it is supported by no earlier analogies at all, and only by a few weak analogies in the later history of mankind. Surely it is a more rational hypothesis to say that the games were evolved in order to improve the fighting power of the members of rival communities. If we accept that suggestion, we can see that the problem which had to be evolved was the establishment of the fixed and final sanc- tion of the holding of public games. This sanction evolution was able to ratify through the psychic illusion that the gods the belief in whose existence was established already by 56 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION other forms of psychic illusion took honour and delight from the athletic contests. The games, then, would tend towards the physical superiority of the various Greek communities, and so would tend only secondarily towards a higher state of civilisation. That condition, however, would tend to be produced by the material security which the games were in- clined to secure : for we know historically that material security leads to an increase of civilisation, because the population then is inclined to grow towards the maximum that the available food-supply can support. There will be thus a keen rivalry within the community to secure the better positions, and these inevitably will fall to the higher intelligences in the long run : the rivalry will be keener than it would be where material insecurity was keeping the population sparse and scattered. The argument leads us to the conclusion that the public games of Greece were a cause of increased intelligence, and so were a civilising factor. Thus the games promoted an increase of civilisation in two ways, which correspond to the two factors that we noticed above at Athens, and spoke of as the Athenaic wave and the Dionysiac wave ; for the games led both to the glorification of each State though ANCIENT GREECE 57 not of Athens more than of other States in Greece and also, secondarily, to the advance- ment of intellectuality. We may sum up this brief sketch of the suggested causes of Greek civilisation in the following way. Any civilisation which, at some very early date, may have been evolved amongst the primitive " Mediterranean/' or Pelasgian, people on the northern coasts of the Aegean Sea can- not be called in any sense historic. But after the Achaean invaders had descended from the north, and coalesced with a group of these Pelasgians, the Olympian religion professed by this combination produced the Mycenaean- Achaean civilisation, of which Homer as we read him to-day gives us a graphic, but prob- ably unhistorical, picture. This represents the highest civilisation that the pure Olympian religion produced. The northern element in this civilisation is very strong. " The gods of Homer," says Miss Harrison (Religion oj Ancient Greece, chap, ii.), "are not Greek in the classical sense ; they are Teutonic and Norse." The Homeric Zeus, with his boisterous pranks and " Berserker " passions, above all things is not Hellenic in the conno- tation that usually we give to the term. 58 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION When this early civilisation sank into decay, new tribes, closely akin to the Achaeans, entered Greece from the north, the last to arrive being the Dorians. Amongst these new peoples the old Olympian religion in itself might have produced some civilisation, especi- ally since it would have been able to work upon the potentialities implanted by the Mycenaean -Achaean civilisation. But there would have been some difficulty in keeping clear of the infectious disillusion which, no doubt, marked and caused the decadence of Homeric Olympianism disillusion is to be observed even in Homer ; he " does not take his gods very seriously." To avoid this danger it was desirable that some new diverse influ- ences should be introduced. By far the most important of these influences was found in Dionysus. Dionysus came to Greece ultimately from Egypt, where, as Osiris, he was the most important deity of the psychic illusion of im- mortality. Osiris passed from the banks of the Nile to Crete Ra of Amenti made the same passage and became the Cretan Rha- damanthus ( Religion of Ancient Greece, chap, iii.) where he seems to have coalesced with a native deity of unknown origin, and ANCIENT GREECE 59 became known as Zagreus. From Crete Osiris-Zagreus passed into Asia Minor, and became Dionysus. He did not advance into Greece across the Aegean islands, but apparently by a northern route through Thrace. There he took to himself Sabazios who pos- sibly may have sprung originally from an Egyptian source also and from this coales- cence, no doubt, were born those unseemly characteristics which seem so inconsistent with the pure Dionysiac Osirianism, but which may have been necessary to insure the popularity of the cult. From the combination of the worship of Dionysus with the revised and intensely localised Olympian psychic illusions already predominant in Hellas sprang the Greek civilisation of the fifth century. CHAPTER II EARLY ROMAN CIVILISATION THE beginnings of the Roman religion are lost in the mists of a legendary antiquity. Indeed, original vagueness is part of the essential nature of religion. Without irrational legends the faith of the believer cannot exist as a psychic illusion. It is just this belief in the incredible, this spiritual sanction of the irrational, that enables a religion to raise its faithful sons to a higher condition of conduct and thought than that of the neighbouring unbelievers. It is, therefore, only in the comparatively cultured writers of a later period that we find an account of the primitive faiths of Rome. This makes it difficult for us to see clearly what it was in the doctrines and faith of the early Romans that made their religion superior to that of the other inhabitants of Europe excepting the Greeks. EARLY ROMAN CIVILISATION 61 And we are unable to contrast this early Roman faith with the contemporaneous beliefs of the barbarians, for we are even more ignorant of the esoteric principles of the bar- barian religions of Europe. We have, then, to be content to form theories on the unsatis- factory basis of sophisticated later accounts. We note, however, that the earliest Roman theology consists to a remarkable extent of the personification of conceptions and abstrac- tions. Such words as Saeturnus, Ops, Bellona, Terminus, Fides, Concordia occur as names of the earliest personal deities ; and philologic- ally there can be no doubt that they are personal conceptions figuring general actions of social importance. Saeturnus (sowing) and Ops (agricultural labour), for instance, deal with matters of consummate value to the con- sistent continuance of a primitive community ; for without them the community is exposed more severely to the effects of the vagaries of weather. The evolution of a psychic illusion, which influenced the individual members of a community to sow and labour in the field with consistent forethought, was, therefore, of deep importance to the con- tinuance of the community. Without the illusion the individual would be content with 62 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION such toil that he might be secure personally in matters of food supply for a comparatively brief time ahead. The illusion of spiritual service would influence him constantly towards that laborious perseverance which alone would guarantee the future food supply of himself and of the community of which he was a member. The psychic side of the stimulus alone could overcome the physical selfishness of the individual, the physical distaste for labour. If we put clearly before us these two factors, the natural love of ease which is in- herent in our animal nature on the one hand, and the need of constant provisional labour to guarantee the continuance of a superior con- dition of affairs on the other, we can see that a motive to overcome natural laziness and to secure perseverance in labour would be the objective for which the evolution of a superior community may be said necessarily to be aiming. And this object could be reached by the evolution of a psychic illusion in the members of the community, which would sub- ordinate in their minds the pleasures of the present to the labours for the future. Saeturnus and Ops thus assured the food supply of the members of the community. It was further necessary that the community EARLY ROMAN CIVILISATION 63 should be secured against the attacks of neighbours who envied the advantages that Saeturnus and Ops conferred upon their believers. Therefore we find a primitive faith in Bellona, the personification of the fighting spirit of the community. The individual who was to survive in the struggle of life was, of course, through simple biological evolution, ready to risk his life in order to obtain food, shelter, and the mate that was essential to the continuance of the species ; but this is insuffi- cient to urge the individual to risk his life for the ulterior advancement of the community. For this a psychic illusion was necessary. Amongst the Romans this illusion was evolved as a faith in Bellona and Mars. The form of this faith is entirely unimportant from an evolutionary standpoint, and even as a matter of interest for us it is subsidiary ; the all -important point with regard to the belief is that men having the faith were led thereby to fight, not from motives of selfishness but in accordance with the future interests of the community. In saying this we do not call into being a fantastic sort of personification of a spiritual guide for the principles of evolution ; it is merely the simple statement that in the in- 64 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION numerable possible variations of conduct the succeeding and surviving variation was that which induced men to act and fight to the advancement of the community ; for this a faith in the reality of Bellona was the necessary psychic illusion. It is only by such a faith that heroic self- sacrifice can be explained. When Decius Mus sacrificed his life for Rome in B.C. 340, and when his son, following his example, did the same at Sentinum in B.C. 295, they were acting under the influence of a psychic illusion. Their self-sacrifice was of no personal advantage to them, but it was of advantage to the com- munity. The psychic illusion which inspired it had been evolved as a desirable principle in the consummation of Roman hegemony. The cases of the Decii are given as examples of the action and reaction of irrational motives on Roman conduct. Care must be taken in praising or blaming such heroic self-sacrifices to remember that our ideas of goodness and badness are themselves evolved ideas. We estimate their value being ourselves under the influence of a similar group of psychic ideas, evolved in a similar manner ; while admitting that the action of the Decii was good, we must not forget that goodness EARLY ROMAN CIVILISATION 65 is not a thing per se, but is rather the con- ception of that which evolution has elected as the desirable conduct of the individuals in a community. Turning from the Bellonic virtues, we notice amongst the early deities of Rome the com- munal self-seeking abstractions Terminus, Fides, and Concordia. These three psychic illusions may be grouped together conveniently, because they all deal with the mutual relations of the members of the community. The reason why these three deities were evolved to take a prominent position in the early Roman hierarchy was that the virtues which they personified were found to be essential to the advancement of the community. This state- ment undoubtedly to a considerable extent begs the question ; indeed, the petitio principii is an essential part of the rational exegesis of the irrational. Terminus, the divine sanction of landed property, shows by his very existence the inti- mate importance to the community in early days of the continuance of territorial rights and restrictions. It is difficult, perhaps, for us to grasp the importance of this psychic illusion ; but in it there may be seen the prin- ciple of the restriction of growth in the size 5 66 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION both of personal and of communal territorial property, and this might be of importance in limiting the hereditary number of suitable men of prominence which it was the business of evolution (if the expression may be used) to place in control of the community. Terminus, also, by giving a psychic illusion to the religious sanctity of boundaries, would tend to produce notions of common honesty in the mutual relations of the members of the com- munity ; and such honesty would increase the co-operative efficiency of the community. On this score Terminus approaches closely to the illusions of Fides and Concordia. We have some difficulty in realising the personali- ties of Fides and Concordia, because, to us, faith and concord are commonplace imper- sonal abstractions. But to the early Romans each of them was a personality. Camillus built the well-known temple of Concordia in 367 B.C. Ennius (239-169 B.C.), quoted by Cicero (Opp 3, 29, 104), uses the word " Fides " with an indubitable sense of personi- fication ; and similar archaistic references might be given in large numbers to the writing of Vergil and Horace. It seems that the illusions of the personality of Fides and Concordia were of value in the EARLY ROMAN CIVILISATION 67 evolution of the Roman State, because it was this personification of abstractions that gave the necessary irrational impulse towards action in accordance with the principles of faith and concord ; and faith and concord, in the internal relations of the community, enabled its mem- bers to compose its communal economy in harmony with the object for which evolution may be said to have been striving. These six deities, besides inculcating their individual virtues, acted together in promoting intelligence, because the psychic illusion of their personalities, however illusory, was yet psychic. It is the psychic rather than the illusory side that here becomes of importance ; for a psychic conception is essentially intellec- tual. If the worship of the personal deities who personified the typical virtues of the primi- tive Roman led to an increased intellectual power, we can see how important from an evolutionary point of view such worship would be ; in fact, the insistence upon the personal entity of the abstractions underlying the virtues would be the immediate object of that evolu- tionary selection whose ultimate aim we may take to be the political supremacy of the Roman community. So far no mention has been made of Jupiter, 68 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION the deity to whom we are apt to look as the supreme god of the Roman hierarchy. Although the worship of Jupiter is undoubtedly of great antiquity in the Roman religion, it would seem that at first he did not occupy that position of dominant importance which afterwards he held at the beginning of the Augustan age. He was, perhaps, the titular father of gods and men at the earliest date at which we hear of him, but titular supre- macy does not necessarily imply supreme practical influence. The importance of Jupiter, indeed, increased under Hellenic influence. The Roman colony of Achaea was formed in 146 B.C., after the taking of Corinth by Mummius, and this date conveniently marks a large increase of Hellenic influence upon Roman ideas. But the same Hellenic influence had been then long acting upon Rome, although in a more subtle way. Rome was not in a highly civilised condition in 146 B.C. Ennius, that quite archaic poet, died in 169 B.C. Roman religion was still in a state of flux. At whatever anterior date we may place the commencement of direct Hellenic influence the Greek colonies in Southern Italy were really primordial in comparison with Roman civilisation at that EARLY ROMAN CIVILISATION 69 date may be placed the real beginning of Jovian power. It was, however, in the last century and a half before Christ that Jupiter came to exer- cise any influence comparable with his titular position. This he did by leading men towards a monotheistic theory of divinity that did not clash hopelessly with the philosophy that Rome so greedily swallowed at the hands of Greece. The Roman hierarchy, with which we are all roughly familiar, was not the natural de- scendant of the primitive Roman religion ; it was rather a son by adoption, and came into prominence as the imitation of Hellenic models. It would be interesting to know what form the Roman religion would have assumed if it had not come under the influence of the more sophisticated Hellenic civilisation ; but historically the influence of Greece was pre- potent in the evolution of Roman culture, as a decadent civilisation always is prepotent in settling the form of the offspring of super- imposed immature civilisation. It seems probable that the influence of Hellenic culture upon the Roman religion made possible the ultimate aggrandisement of Roman civilisation ; the less sophisticated intellect of Rome was able to receive in the Hellenic 70 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION deities that psychic illusion which Greece had outgrown . In the new and closely related illusions which Rome thus received from Greece, Rome found a new psychic source of life which enabled her to gain the hegemony of European civilisation. The fact that Romans and Greeks were connected phylogenetically made it a simple matter for Rome to accept the out- worn psychic illusions of Greece; : that was a mere question of nomenclature. Roman thought was young enough to rejuvenate the senility of Hellenic religion. Let us apply this to the particular cases of a few leading deities. Reference already has been made to Zeus and Jupiter. The Roman Mercurius was identified with the Greek Hermes, but Mercurius was philologic- ally the personified abstraction of commerce a mercibus est dictus (Paul ex Fest., p. 124, Miill.). As such his position is akin entirely to that of the other early Roman personified abstractions, Terminus, Fides, and the rest. A temple was built to his honour as early as 495 B - c - near the Circus Maximus. It is only under Hellenic influence that he gains the attributes which we associate usually with his name ; and this increased the definiteness of EARLY ROMAN CIVILISATION 71 his personality, which seems formerly to have been far from clear ; this increased definition led, in minds unsophisticated by Hellenic casuistry, to a rejuvenation of the psychic illusion in his Olympian existence. The Hellenic Hermes was not a trade -deity, but a speech -deity ; even to the ancients his identi- fication with Mercury was apparently rather difficult ; but the difficulty was overcome, because a renewal of the psychic illusion of the personality of Mercury was desirable for the evolution of the advancement of Rome. The case of Aphrodite and Venus, from our point of view, is less important. The work which Venus personifies is bound up so inti- mately by Nature with the continuance of the species that a psychic illusion in her personality seems unnecessary. So the early Roman religion looked upon her as one of the least important divinities. After her identification with Aphrodite she became more prominent. Probably this is only an example of analogous variation. A sort of speculative hedonism would tend, also, to accentuate her personality. Mommsen (book i. chap, xii.) speaks of Mars as the oldest and most national form of divinity in Italy. Perhaps it would have been safer to say, instead of " oldest," that he was 72 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION as old as any known form of divinity. The lust of fighting was entirely necessary in a community that was to get the better of its neighbours, so that we may feel sure that a psychic illusion personifying the abstraction of fighting would be evolved at an early period. A collateral reduplicated form of the name " Mars " occurs in the song of the Arval brothers, and an equivalent nomenclature is to be found in the Sabine and Oscan Mamers. He was a truly Italian deity whose personality was largely fixed apart from the influence of the Hellenic Ares, who, indeed, while no doubt increasing the pyschic illusion of his per- sonality, would seem to have detracted, at any rate in our estimation, from the dignity of his character. Under the title of Quirinus, however, he would gain evolutionary importance, from a purely Italian source, as personifying the patriotism of the Romans ; the increase of the power of the psychic illusion which came to him as to the other gods under Hellenic influ- ence would compensate from the evolutionary point of view for the influx of discreditable stories associated with his later worship. Apollo was Hellenic, not Roman. The mere name shows this philologically, apart from his- EARLY ROMAN CIVILISATION 73 torical statements, for the early Roman form of the name was " Aperta, the opener, an etymological perversion of the Doric Apellon, the antiquity of which is betrayed by its very barbarism," as Mommsen justly remarks. It is interesting, to observe that the god of art was absent entirely from the primitive Roman theology ; while Rome evolved for her- self the illusions of the personality of such abstractions as typified the virtues necessary for the promotion of her political ascendancy, evolution, working for this end, had no special need of a psychic illusion that dealt with the artistic side of man's nature ; indeed, we can see that economically Rome perhaps gained rather than lost, in the earliest times, by the omission to add the evolution of an Apolline personality to that of her already sufficiently numerous group of personified abstractions. However, at a very early date, under Hellenic influence, the worship of Apollo established itself in Rome, no doubt because the intellectual value of Apolline worship was great : such assistance would be taken up greedily by that evolutionary process which was leading Rome up the path to civilisation ; but we can see easily that it would be taken up only after the earlier deities had estab- 74 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION lished Rome firmly upon the path of progress. It is generally recognised that Roman art was always a parasitic growth, which betrayed at every moment its dependence upon Hellenic culture. It seems, indeed, that we cannot lay too much emphasis upon the necessity of the personification in the divinities of the abstract virtues which made ancient Rome the mistress of Europe. For there were two necessary factors in the situation : ( i ) that Rome should possess the practice of those abstract virtues which could lead her to predominance ; ( 2 ) that these abstractions should have individual personalities to give the psychic illusion, the religious sanction, which alone could enable Romans to persevere in the practice of them where they were opposed to rational selfishness. It is not necessary to assume that Rome possessed any innate superiority to the innu- merable communities of Europe outside the Hellenic empires. What, then, was it that led Rome to predominance in Latium, in Italy, in the Mediterranean orbis terrarum ? The city of Rome, in spite of the seven hills, was not situated in a position of commanding strength. We know that the peninsula contains numerous sites of greater natural strength, sites which EARLY ROMAN CIVILISATION 75 other cities used to their advantage in later ages Canossa, for instance, with its almost im- pregnable rock, or Orvieto. And outside Italy, of course, examples are endless. It is. true that Rome had the advantage of being near the commercial possibilities of the sea, with her convenient access to the Mediter- ranean in the navigable Tiber ; but Ostia has never been the leading port of Italy. Other ports have risen to greater naval importance, Venice, Ravenna, Genoa. It was rather in the brains of her people that the germs of Roman greatness must be sought. There were other communities of Oscan and Sabine stock whose intellectual capacities were not inferior to those of Rome. How few of the great names who represent Roman intelligence are purely Roman in origin ! Vergil came from Andes, near Mantua ; Horace was Apulian ; Cicero was born at Arpinum ; Livy at Padua ; Tacitus was, at any rate, not Roman. Other places than Rome undoubtedly possessed the poten- tiality of equal intelligence. There must, then, have been some point, or some concatenation of points, which enabled the early Roman to reach a higher plane than his neighbours. What this was we can only 76 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION hope to perceive ex post facto, for the beginnings of history lose themselves in the mists of antiquity. It is suggested here that the distinguishing feature is to be found in the religion of Rome. Rome possessed at an early period that group of personified abstrac- tions which embodied the virtues necessary for her advancement. Why these abstractions were especially predominant in Rome we are unable to say. We have to be content to accept the fact just as we have to accept the fact that a certain variation in an individual animal has induced its descendants eventually to occupy a new specific position. We cannot explain the cause of the particular variation. Out of countless variations the spirit of evolu- tion, so to speak, selects the desirable varia- tion, and through it produces the predominant species. Similarly the spirit of evolution, out of the many intellectual variations in otherwise suitable communities of Italy, selected the con- catenation of desirabilities which existed in Rome, and from it produced the predominance of Rome. We can see dimly that the physical con- ditions of Rome with its seven hills and its river were not unfavourable. We can see that Rome lay beyond, but in close proximity to, EARLY ROMAN CIVILISATION 77 the Italian limit of Hellenic political in- fluence. In Rome were evolved the psychic illusions of the personality of the deities personifying numerous useful virtues. We may suppose that, if the subsequent course of evolution had been clear of outside influence, the normal disillusion and disbelief would have followed the increased intellectual and efficient power ; but Hellenic culture intervened at the necessary stage in the history of Roman development. The close kinship of the Roman and Hellenic stocks made this intervention much simpler than would have been the case if the two stocks had been racially diverse. The result was that Rome accepted and adopted the deities of Greece, who could be identified verbally, for the most part, with kindred psychic illusions of her own. The Hellenic religion was exceptionally anthropo- morphic ; so that the accretions to the Roman theology were also exceptionally anthropo- morphic. The psychic illusions gained in humanity as well as in personality. Both Rome and Greece were profoundly in- fluenced by this amalgamation : Greece because her spiritual decadence received a rejuvenated vigour as a parasitical growth upon the Roman 78 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION stock ; Rome because her psychic illusions, instead of passing normally into disillusions, were transformed with facility into more subtle, because more human, forms of faith. Greece was unable to rejuvenate her faith for herself : evolution seems always to be un- able to rejuvenate religious faith without ex- traneous help, because, in spite of the obvious abundance of material constantly supplied by the less subtle intellects of the uneducated, the intelligence of the more highly developed classes will always be so far superior that it will crush out of existence the increase of illusion which alone can save the State. Hellenic civili- sation really died with Alexander of Macedon in 323 B.C. the history of Cherson occurs to one as demanding consideration under this head, but it falls rather into the history of that general parasitic rejuvenation known as the Byzantine Empire. Any rejuvenation of Hellenic culture at an early date could only take place outside the sphere of Greek political influence, and yet sufficiently near to that sphere not to be cut off utterly from its civilising influence. It could most easily happen in a community that was not racially altogether unrelated. Finally, it could only appear in a community which had EARLY ROMAN CIVILISATION 79 evolved independently the psychic illusions necessary to bring it into a position of local security. The very illusions which had led Rome so far were, it would seem, unable to lead her farther, because illusion in her primi- tive deities necessarily would have become dis- illusion, unless those deities were humanised by transformation. This humanisation of Roman theology was a chief part of the great work that Greece performed for Rome and the world. CHAPTER III THE AUGUSTAN AGE THE transformation of Roman religion under Hellenic influence, and the consequent con- firmation of psychic illusions enabled the Romans to make almost a new beginning in their religious life ; and they were thus able to reach a higher grade of intellectual development than apparently would have been possible under the old religious regime. From B.C. 197, when the two provinces of Spain were settled, until B.C. 49, when Julius Caesar completed the conquest of northern Gaul, Roman history externally is little more than a list of Roman advances towards European Hegemony. The Hellenisation of Roman religion precedes or synchronises with the first half of this period. The psychic illusions of Rome thus transformed were superior to those of any of the conquered peoples. It is difficult to imagine that this THE AUGUSTAN AGE 81 coincidence is fortuitous. Is it not simpler to assume that there is a causal connection, and that we may detect here the explanation of the facts? The renovated faith gave to each Roman believer the illusion which alone could induce him to master his selfish and rational impulses, and to act with that personal irrationality which was conducive to the com- munal progress. It is difficult to see any other satisfactory analysis of motives and results. Any student can note with ease the distinct difference in religious feeling at Rome between the beginning and the end of this period. At the beginning the illusions were young and vigorous. Scipio is the hero of it, a veritable hero of romantic illusion, as we see him in the pages of Livy. Julius Caesar is the protagonist of the end, and he is not a romantic figure governed by illusions, but rather the disillu- sioned practical man acting for his own interests a fact that becomes the clearer the more closely we study the accounts of his foreign arid civil wars. Psychic illusions had little influence upon Julius Caesar personally. We need feel no surprise that the effects of a dying faith long continued to be felt in spite of its apparently moribund condition. For our knowledge of Roman religion comes 6 82 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION to us directly from the writings of the most cultured and intellectual spirits of the age- that is, from the very men in whom disillu- sion first would be obvious ; so, in reading them only, without intimate knowledge of the intellectual conditions of the mass of the people around them, we are apt to imagine that the minds of our authors are typical of the age : we must be even more strongly on our guard against this fallacy in the study of ancient Roman history than we find it necessary to be in the consideration of modern times, where writing is so very easy and so general. The faith of Roman writers can never have failed to be ahead of the common faith of the Roman people, both in times of growth and of decay. In a lesser degree this will also be true of all the prominent Roman soldiers and states- men, who would tend to be men of exceptional vigour in their generation. No doubt the faith of Rome was always many decades behind the faith of the individual Romans of whom we read. But even more worthy of note is the impetus, as it were, under which the effects of an intel- lectual movement are observable long after their efficient cause has ceased to operate. Thus conquest became almost a habit with the THE AUGUSTAN AGE 83 Romans. In this way we can see how it was that the Roman State continued to increase Dacia was made a province in 106 A.D. long after the tide of decadence definitely had set in. In the Augustan age Roman civilisation seemed, no doubt, to the Romans to be estab- lished as securely as the seven hills themselves : it was impossible for contemporaries to detect the germs of the coming degeneration. But such germs certainly were being nourished by the fading of the psychic illusions of an earlier time. Meanwhile Rome was at the apex of her vigour ; at no time did her intellectual life reach a higher standard than in the princi- pate of Augustus. Augustus was a man of supreme practical ability, and so, like many other great rulers of mankind, he realised, by intuition or observation, no doubt, rather than by any intellectual process of deduction, that to secure indefinitely for himself and his heirs the position which he had come to hold in the State, it was desirable to invigorate the religion of his people. There can be little doubt that we should be wrong in supposing that Augustus had any personal faith in the deities whose cult he advocated. That, however, is a matter of opinion based on a balance of probabilities. 84 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION In any case we must admire the unerring instinct which led Augustus to see in the rejuvenation of her ancient religion the only hope that Rome could have of stemming the tide of decadence. Augustus was supremely right, but in actual fact he was attempting the impossible. Disillusion was coming to reign in the hearts of Romans with a sway that no imperial rescripts or examples could overcome. Vergil used all the magic of his verse vainly in the same cause ; the whole Aeneid is, in a sense, an attempt to reconstruct the Hellenised religion of Rome to reinspire the moribund faith of a disillusioned patriotism. For this purpose the purpose more especially of Augustus the Aeneid was a failure ; it could not be otherwise than a failure, for psychic illusions cannot be constructed artificially ; they are a natural growth, an inherent and necessary antecedent, according to our theory, of the organic evolution of civilisation. But if the Aeneid was a failure as an instru- ment of psychic regeneration, it remains, of course, a brilliant success as a work of art. I'rom this side, also, it has a peculiar interest for us in our present task of studying the development of Roman civilisation ; for in no other work can we see more clearly the trans- THE AUGUSTAN AGE 85 cendent influence of Hellenic culture upon Roman thought. The reference here is not so much to the more obvious imitations of Homeric and Alexandrian models, and the general affectation of Greek grammar and Greek syntax, as to the more subtle infiltration of Hellenic culture into the very life-blood of the poem. The Aeneld is not a typically Greek nor a typically Roman poem, but a typically Greco-Roman poem ; it is the fruit of the civi- lisation that resulted from the rejuvenation of Hellenic culture under the power of Roman vigour. Greece alone could not have produced such a poem at this stage, because her intellect if we look at it in theoretical isolation was far gone in the decay that resulted from her loss of psychic illusions a loss again that resulted from the increased intelligence pro- duced by these very psychic illusions. Rome alone could not have produced the Aeneid, for the whole scheme of its characterisation, both in the case of its divine and of its human dramatis personae, is saturated with Hellenic personal individualisation. It may be repeated once more that the writing of Vergil, and indeed the whole Augustan intellectual life, was in advance of the general scheme of Roman intelligence. 86 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION Vergil seems always to be writing down to the level of the previous literary generation, and the genius of the writer appears in the subtle way in which he could thus appeal to lower minds while retaining another artistic appeal, in the second intention, to the highest intellects among his contemporaries. It is just this bilateral appeal which makes it so difficult for us men of the twentieth century at first to endorse unreservedly the artistic estimate which the criticism of the ages has laid upon his works. The strength of the Augustan policy lay in its reactionary nature, and in nothing can we admire the marvellous cleverness of Augustus more than in his attempts to retain the tide of progression at the high level which it reached in his principate by the support which he gave consistently to all reactionary religious prin- ciples. Unconsciously, no doubt, he was seek- ing to re-establish the psychic illusions which were slipping away from the minds of the Romans. The attempt was useless because a psychic illusion is an organic growth, not a work of artificiality. But he was laying his finger upon the weak spot, and we must regard with admir- ation the intuition which was able to detect THE AUGUSTAN AGE 87 this spot. As Merivale says, in contrasting Augustus with Julius Caesar : " He was more inclined for his own part to lend all his weight to support the old National traditions " (Merivale: History of Rome, chap. 51). As a matter of fact they were Greco-Roman tra- ditions for the most part, and as such neither very old nor very national ; but the Romans never acknowledged their enormous debt to the Greeks, whether from patriotic pride or from mere inadvertence. The contrast between Julius Caesar and Augustus is interesting in the following respect. They were both, it seems, quite disillusioned, but where Julius in his conduct appeared to acquiesce in this fact, Augustus, on the con- trary, tried to act in opposition to it. Augustus was so far right in that he saw that the rein- vigoration of psychic illusion in religion was essential to the complete success of his policy ; but Julius, in a deeper sense, was right in ignor- ing this, because the reinvigoration of psychic illusion, at any rate apart from extraneous assistance, was impracticable. No doubt neither of the two had any very definite sense of these things, because their historic outlook was too limited for that ; we would hardly be justified in blaming Augustus for the lack of 88 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION success in his reactionary religious attempts, and probably we would have no more justifi- cation for praising Julius because- actually he chose the more sensible course ; it is very doubtful that he chose it because he knew that such a policy as Augustus afterwards adopted was foredoomed to failure. Julius, however, was a man of such extraordinary genius that it is by no means impossible that he recognised this. In working out his policy with regard to religion, Augustus found a useful lieutenant, after the death of Vergil, in Ovid. Ovid's Metamorphoses, and more especially his Fasti, were clearly part of the Augustan determina- tion to renovate as much as possible the power of Roman religion. The last poem of the Metamorphoses, which tells of the transformation of Julius Caesar into a star, was intended to give a religious sanction for the inauguration of imperial autocracy. The apotheosis of Julius was the first of a long series of imperial apotheoses. Many writers have been content to dismiss such things as trivial absurdities. It does not seem to be satisfactory thus to pass by them. We may look upon the Augustan apotheosis of Julius as part of the general Augustan policy, which THE AUGUSTAN AGE 89 aimed at a reconstruction of psychic illusions. A divine father even a father by adoption was an actual assistant in strengthening Augustus in his personal supremacy. An ele- mental Caesar, eternal in the heavens, was a continuous influence upon the actions of each man who believed in his divinity. It is hardly consonant with the character of Augustus that he was actuated merely by family pride. He had rather a definite prudential object in view in this attempt to rear a psychic illusion round the name of Caesar ; Vergil had already made a move in the same direction when he sought to connect the name of Julius with the demi- divine lulus. There is no difficulty in coming to the con- clusion that apotheosis reacted as a psychic illusion upon the authority of the living emperors, increasing its influence by giving a sort of antecedent divine sanction to their autocracy . We know how important the doctrine of the divine right of kings became in much later times, and something of the same divinity still hedges many of the monarchies of Asia. Certainly the readiness with which later Roman emperors paid the honour to their predecessors makes it appear to be fairly probable that the early attempt of Augustus was not without 90 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION practical result. As was pointed out before, such results would occur in the hearts of the uneducated many rather than in the brains and the writings of the educated few ; therefore we need hardly wonder that direct references to the success of the illusion are lacking to us in the classical histories. An indirect result, partly achieved in this manner, is to be seen in the uninterrupted course of autocracy that dates from Augustus. The illusion that thus began to surround the imperial household was in no way opposed to the general Augustan policy which advocated a renewed faith in the personalities of the older gods ; for the Greco-Roman faith had never looked upon its hierarchy as definitely complete ; it had introduced foreign deities with much the same readiness that the old Roman faith had shown in accepting the attri- butes of the Hellenic divinities. The worship of Isis, for example, was introduced from Egypt towards the end of the republic, and became exceedingly popular in the early period of the empire. We can see that such introduc- tions might tend towards an increased psychic illusion when the feeling towards older deities older, that is, in Rome was inclining towards disillusion. So we may surmise that THE AUGUSTAN AGE 91 evolutionary progress would favour the growth of new illusions in foreign deities. Similarly, then, the individual or the muni- cipality that accepted without hesitation the divine metamorphosis of a dead emperor would tend to be actuated in conduct by motives of an altruistic irrationality, and so advance in the social scale at the expense of unbelieving neighbours. Augustus and his poetical and political lieu- tenants almost certainly were actuated by no motives of personal piety in the attempt to reinvigorate the life of Olympianism. Look- ing back over nearly two thousand years, we can see the somewhat academic artificiality of their efforts ; but this artificiality was not so obvious to the contemporary masses of the Roman people. There is always a tendency in the unintel- lectual to accept as proved facts the definite statements of the intellectual. Certainly we cannot suppose that the ordinary Roman felt the philosophic scorn of a Tacitus towards the Augustan teaching. Indeed, if this had been so, the attempt would have been too obviously futile to have appealed to a man of the undeni- able intelligence of Augustus. His attempts to rejuvenate a personal faith in the divinities of Olympus show us that the faith was a living 92 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION factor in the lives of the majority of his subjects. The empire was no longer confined to the city of Rome ; it extended far beyond even the limits of Italy, beyond the limits of the shores of the Mediterranean. In the vast numbers who inhabited this empire the unedu- cated far exceeded in numbers those who, in the wildest sense of the word, could be called educated, and amongst the ignorant, psychic illusions, even of the most ingenuous kind, possess an extraordinary vitality and power. A sense of the vital and powerful personal existence of the Olympian divinities was, no doubt, a potent factor in influencing the conduct of the majority of the subjects of Augustus. And Augustus tried to work upon this sense as he found it still in existence around him. We need hardly suppose that decadence was productive of visible effects in the mass of the inhabitants of the empire at this period, although we can trace its existence in the intel- lectual work of the cultured. Augustus was one of the cultured few working upon the minds of the uncultured many ; to do so he made use of the psychic illusions which still dominated the majority of the people of the Roman world. CHAPTER IV THE DECADENCE OF ROMAN CIVILISATION THE decline and fall of faith in the Olympic religion is treated usually as an incidental fact in the general decline and fall of the Olympian civilisation. It is, indeed, looked upon as an aspect of that necessary decay of civilisation which comes about from some inexplicable cause inherent in the nature of man and his work. If we look upon the decline of faith as a loss of those illusions which are the essen- tial cause of civilisation, we may find in it perhaps a determinant cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. With the death of Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 1 80 we may note that this tide of decadence definitely had set in, and from this date until A.D. 330, at any rate, when Constantine moved the seat of empire from the banks of the Tiber to the shores of the Bosphorus we 93 94 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION see a continual decrease of the influence of Rome upon the world to the advantage of the barbarians. On the literary side we find only two writers of this period whose greatness is beyond ques- tion, Tacitus and Juvenal ; the dates of their deaths are unknown, but it is probable that they took place before A.D. 130. It is in agreement with a theory of the intellectual religious causes of civilisation that decadence should be noticeable in literary work at an earlier period than in political facts ; we have seen a similar consecution of affairs during the period of growth discussed in the last chapter. Tacitus and Juvenal are both decadent writers. They both lament the days that are gone, but they preach no faith that can renew the spirit of those days. They are thoroughly disillusioned, and have to the full that critical outlook which so definitely marks the decadent writer. They teach no psychic illusions to influence the minds of men towards an irra- tional faith. They are, indeed, most rational, and have only reminiscent and regretful hopes to offer of a return to republican freedom with its puritanical virtues. Juvenal, in spite of his avowed scorn of lubricity, is, in truth, one of the lewdest writers DECADENCE OF ROMAN CIVILISATION 95 who has won immortal glory, and it is difficult to suppose in reading him that he was not taking pleasure in discussing at length the obscene details of the vices which he denounces . No reader of the first book of the Annals of Tacitus can believe that the author was inferior in intellectuality to the great writers of the Augustan age. Yet all will agree that he is " silver " and not " golden." What, then, is this distinction which cuts him off indubitably from the earlier historians of Rome? Surely it is just the lack of faith in psychic illusion which marks the distinction. He has lost even the assumption of faith which is to be found in his predecessors. We know in our hearts that it is inconceivable to suppose that Tacitus was a faithful believer in the literal sense of the personal divinity of the various members of the Olympian hierarchy. He had lost all illusion, however much he may lament the loss entailed by this disillusion. His political desiderium for the republican form of government was really a desiderium for the irrational faith of an earlier age. With our wider outlook we can see the generality which for him was lost in particularity ; we can see that no mere change in political functions 96 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION could have reinstated the former majesty of Rome. Only a renewal of lost illusion could have brought about that ; and such a renewal was impossible in his time, because religion is born, not made, is an organic growth, not a work of art. Disillusioned men very seldom, perhaps never, come to be led a second time by the same illusion. And in the front rank of the disillusioned were the greatest intellects of their generation ; they were the men who guided the movements of Roman thought. They were rilled with the bright light of reason ; they could see their way clearly. But reason was taking men down the long slope, where only illusion could have induced them to scale the difficult heights, as illusion had led their ancestors to scale them. If we turn from the pages of Tacitus to those of the Augustan Histories, the decay of intel- lectual vigour is obvious I do not wish to deny that biographies such as those of Corn- modus or Heliogabalus by Aelius Lampridius have their fascination for us, but we have chiefly to consider here the religious side of the question. In this group of writers the whole religious spirit of paganism is dead, while we can hardly DECADENCE OF ROMAN CIVILISATION 97 trace the beginnings of the Christian spirit. There is no mention of the Olympian divinities as personally interfering in the affairs of men ; they are, at the most, impersonal abstractions, hardly more than verbal nonentities. The psychic illusions, even in writers of an inferior intellectuality, are entirely lost. During this period of decline each individual must have acted from rational prudential motives that had no ulterior reference to irra- tional illusions ; that is, he must have acted with reference to an almost personal selfishness we must not say purely personal selfishness because, of course, love still existed, and motives of affection must have had their con- tinual effects upon personal conduct ; without psychic illusions it seems impossible to see that a man could be actuated by other than selfish motives with only slight, though perhaps fre- quent, modifications. There can have been none of those grandly irrational actions which can be inspired alone by psychic illusions . Accordingly such irrational actions as are conducive to the communal advantage at the expense of the individual advantage disappear from the pages of history. We find no more of the early republican deeds of a romantic heroism. 7 98 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION It is true that it is hardly in accordance with sound philosophy to take the misdoings of certain tyrannical emperors as typical of the average lives of ordinary men. The emperors, with whose doings the chronicles especially are engaged, certainly were in an exceptional position, and their scheme of life was, no doubt, exceptional. Still, even the emperors must not be taken away from the spirit of their age. The world, in the words of the well-known saying, always has such government as it deserves, for otherwise government cannot endure, certainly not in the way that the imperial system endured in Rome. Looking not at particular conspicuous periods of tyranny, but at the general low and deteri- orating standard of government, we cannot but admit that the general rules of conduct amongst ordinary men must have been, also, low and deteriorating. The first apparent break in the continuance of the decline from the standard of the period of Augustus occurs in the time of the Antonines. The principate of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161-180) points to a reaction against the regular progress of decadence. In accordance with our theory we find the religious explana- tion of this in the increased vigour of philo- DECADENCE OF ROMAN CIVILISATION 99 sophical religious faith about this period. It was the first sign of that partial regeneration which became more clearly marked under Constantine (A.D. 306-339). A flash in the pan does not prove that light is not about to fail. This is true in application to the period of the Antonines, when the decadence was apparently arrested. However, the more philosophic explanation is this. We observed towards the end of the republic that Hellenic culture, in combination with Roman vigour, produced the Olympian civilisation that centres round Augustus. We must here trace the reaction of Roman vigour upon Hellenism ; the fruit of this reaction became apparent in the impersonal philosophic religion that flourished under Marcus Aurelius. Such impersonal faith is ill-suited to produce psychic illusion in the minds of the uncultured ; it is a religion essentially of culture. It pro- duced here no great results in popular action. Indeed, it did not even produce very great results in the case of the cultured classes. The story of the campaign of Aurelius against the Marcornmanni is lacking utterly in heroic episode the miracle of the Thundering Legion appears to be a later invention. The same reaction produced a more abiding 100 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION fruition under Constantine, and from it came the long and wearisome tale of the Greek and Byzantine empires down to A.D. 1453, when the Turks captured Constantinople. But this quickly becomes a Christian rather than an Olympian matter. Also it is left aside because we wish here to keep our attention fixed more closely upon the history of Western development . With the disillusion that accompanied the failure of the Olympian faith to influence man- kind any longer, civilisation decayed and intel- lectuality declined. One casual result of this increasing decadence is the poor supply of historic writings to chronicle the details of the period. Here again we have to leave Olympian ideals and turn to the Christian writers. If we presume that the decline and fall of the Roman empire was the result of a failure of psychic illusion caused by the natural evo- lution of disillusion resulting from increased intelligence, it then follows that a new period of intellectual progress could only occur as the result of a new form of psychic illusion pro- duced by a new faith. This psychic illusion could only become powerful when disillusion had carried men down the slope of decivilisa- tion until they were sufficiently unintellectual DECADENCE OF ROMAN CIVIIJSATION 50 to accept the new faith unreservedly. This state of affairs would, occur first amongst thfe less educated classes. In actual fact we find that new religions are grounded in the hearts of the uncultured many rather than in the brains of the cultured few. It was so with Christianity. Christ was born during the principate of Augustus that is, at the high-water mark of the Olympian civilisation. But the Christian faith did not become a potent factor in Roman politics until the Romans had sunk into a very lowly state of culture, because the men of the Roman world were not ready to accept the new illusions until they had passed right through a period of disillusion. The Olympian civilisation sank into decrepi- tude with rapidity. Five hundred years saw the utter ruin of the old order, while almost another thousand years had to elapse before the new civilisation had become the dominant factor in European existence. Dissolution is usually the speedier process. It is, indeed, very difficult to settle a date for the lowest point of civilisation between the two periods of culture whose existence we can see with such clearness. Civilisation, in fact, seemed to remain at its lowest level for a pro- tea A THEORY OF CIVILISATION tracted lapse of time ; for this we may account to some extent by the increased size of the area upon which evolution worked in building up the new structure. But this does not seem really to be a sufficient and satisfactory explan- ation, for there appears little reason that the new civilisation should have been larger than the old. The difference in size seems almost to be incidental. We may note, however, the tendency of civilisations to spread, by direct educational infection, over larger areas than those in which they originated, and so to operate on the intelligences always of larger numbers, whose descendants thus become more fitted to join in the advance of any smaller areas which subsequently may be influenced by evolution towards a renewed civilisation. Also, we must not ff all ; there is no need for us to consider the others in detail. But the psychic illusion of Quetzalcoatl, as contrasted with that of Huitzilopochtli, really is of peculiar interest, for it places in con- venient embryonic juxtaposition the two germs from which in combination a life of culture and high intelligence might have been formed if Columbus had not discovered America. Of course, speculations on the probable out- come of Mexican civilisation, if it had been left to develop itself in isolation, are idle enough. There were too many forces at work, whose power we cannot estimate. By analogy we may presume that disillusion soon would have made itself felt, and we may imagine, from what we know of the aim of evolution, that by some means disillusion would have proved especially deadly to Huitzilopochtli and his blood-stained compeers, because, in the meanwhile, they would have completed for the time their material task of making the Aztec empire practically invincible among its neigh- ANCIENT MEXICO AND PERU 227 hours. Then Quetzalcoatl, the culture-deity, might have become the leading god and have produced a brief period of real civilisation. But without the material support of Huitzilo- pochtli, Qftetzalcoatl probably would have fallen soon if, indeed, he could have escaped the contagion of that disillusion which killed Huitzilopochtli. Then the whole culture would have slipped back to barbarism. But bar- barism with a difference, barbarism with a potentiality of a new and greater growth just as there was potentiality in the barbarism of the ruined and disillusioned Roman empire, a potentiality which has given us the civilisation of Christendom to-day. But to return to Quetzalcoatl. There is quite a close analogy between him and Apollo. Both were sun -gods ; both were culture -gods. Also Apollo, as we noticed above, was not a true Roman deity, but an Hellenic deity, and rose to power in Rome after the indigenous Roman deities had finished their task of giving to Rome her commanding material position in Latium and Italy : similarly Quetzalcoatl was not a true Aztec deity, but seems rather to have been waiting to expand his influence until Huitzilopochtli had finished his work of making the Aztecs brave and hardy enough to 228 A THEORY OP CIVILISATION defy all resistance. Of course the analogy must not be pressed too far : the introduction of the Hellenic Apollo into Italy was in no way comparable to the apparent pre- Aztec dominance of Quetzalcoatl in Anahuac. But surely it is worthy of note that, in the two adolescent civilisations so widely sundered by the ocean, we find the primitive dominance of the psychic illusions in such gods as Mars and Huitzilopochtli, while, under their protec- tion as it were, the illusions of extraneous culture -deities, Apollo and Quetzalcoatl, were strengthening their own hold upon the minds of men. The dominance of Quetzalcoatl in Anahuac, though it was very far from being an absolute sovereignty over the intellects of the inhabi- tants, was not without influence. We can see this in the artistic craftsmanship of the Aztecs. Here, as usual, a comparatively high artistic power is coupled with polytheistic worship- that is a combination that recurs too often to be accidental. The priests undoubtedly were the most highly cultured class in Anahuac. We may find a similar state of affairs, indeed, in any adolescent condition of society anywhere ; for the priest is brought more continuously under ANCIENT MEXICO AND PERU 229 the influence of psychic illusion than the lay- man : we do not find it so often after the civilisation of a community is reaching maturity ; for the tide of disillusion by that time often has set in among the priesthood when we cannot detect its existence elsewhere. The priests of Anahuac, also, were very numerous, a fact that points to a widespread complete acceptance of psychic illusions. Con- sequently the whole educational system of Anahuac was in their hands, just as the educa- tional system of Europe was in the hands of the Catholic priesthood during the Middle Ages and the period of the Catholic civilisa- tion. Here, too, then, we may note the instruc- tive analogy by which evolution assists the growth of psychic illusion in secondary ways, by establishing such systems of sacerdotal education. The priests-had reached quite a high level of intelligence their astronomical knowledge was advanced and exact, so that their calendar would only err by one day in five hundred years (Prescott: Conquest of Mexico, book i. chap. iv.). Surprise often is felt that such knowledge, implying a not inconsiderable re- finement, should be found in conjunction with what seem to us to be the diabolic cruelty 230 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION and sanguinary horrors of human sacrifices and cannibalistic feasts. But is such surprise justifiable? After all, the most horrible cruelties were perpetrated in Europe under the Inquisition by men who at the very same time were rejoicing in all the glories of the Catholic civilisation. It seems rather that our modern unfailing sensibility in such matters largely is an outcome of Protestantism. But, if we remember that the principles of evolution are not affected in the slightest degree by senti- mental notions how strong are the animistic ideas in us which make it so easy to forget that at times ! we may realise that cruelty and cannibalism might be used incidentally by evolution, just as much as other practices that seem to us under modern influences to be virtuous or immoral, in order to strengthen psychic illusion and thus promote civilisation, quite apart from any personal notions we may have as to their virtue or their immorality. We know that Nature can be utterly cruel : we can see that in any country walk we may take : but it would be the idlest folly to say on that account that Nature is damnable. Our feel- ings in such matters have been evolved, for some reason or other, into a condition that clashes continually with the proceedings of ANCIENT MEXICO AND PERU 231 Nature. So with regard to these Mexican sacrifices, damnable though they may seem to us, it does not follow that they are damnable from a natural point of view. The truth is that we cannot free ourselves here for a moment from our own psychic illusions, which tell us that cruelty is a form of vice. The illusion, no doubt, is a desirable one for us, for it is fixed with undeniable tenacity in our minds. It seems not to have been a desirable illusion at all times in all men : certainly it was not so in the evolution of Mexican civilisa- tion at the period of the Spanish conquest. If we can accept this statement of the case, we can come to realise that what seems to us to be quite abominable cruelty may not be incom- patible with a degree of social development that certainly may be called civilisation. The civilisation which Pizarro found and destroyed in Peru, " although in many ways analogous to that of the Aztecs, was strangely dissimilar in some of its aspects" (S pence : The Mythologies of Ancient Mexico and Peru). There are ruins scattered through Peru which point clearly to some anterior civilisation in the same district just as there are similar prehistoric ruins in Yucatan telling of pre- Aztec 232 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION civilisation. Of this earlier civilisation we know nothing. We may conjecture naturally enough that the Peruvian civilisation, which the Spaniards found in existence, was evolved from the disintegration of this older social advance. The Peruvian civilisation of the sixteenth century of our era was theocratic. The emperor, the Inca, was looked upon as the divine representative of the sun. Psychic illu- sion thus had deified an ordinary man, so that the people unreservedly and generally accepted the belief in the ultimate difference between the Inca and themselves. The divinity of the Inca extended also to his kinsmen, though in a lesser degree. We have not here to consider the little-known details of the origin of this strange belief in the divinity of a living man. Let us try rather to see theoretically how such a psychic illusion would affect communally those who had faith in it. If the community clearly could gain by it, even such an utterly irrational illusion certainly could have been evolved. We are compelled here, as so often elsewhere, to study the effects, and from them to deduce the causes. We may note first that the Peruvian empire, from its isolated position between the moun- ANCIENT MEXICO AND PERU 233 tains and the ocean, was quite remarkably secure from the danger of invasion. Conse- quently the evolution of Peruvian civilisation was directed towards internal improvements rather than towards means of external offence and defence. Thus no great war -god, like Huitzilopochtli, dominates Peruvian mythology, which at the time of the Spanish conquest happened to have been tending from an older polytheism towards a monotheism that sanc- tioned only a worship of the sun in the person of the Inca. We need not suppose that the Peruvians never had to fight for their empire, although they were not a distinctively warlike and aggressive people like the Aztecs. The illusion of the divinity of the Inca was suffi- cient in itself to give the necessary irrational stimulus. Still, the spirit of Peruvian evolu- tion was curiously introspective at the period when it becomes known to us. The result of this is that the internal economy of Peruvian government has a special interest. The political arrangements of Peru were very highly organised : indeed, psychic illusion seems to have been used here chiefly for the increase of the efficiency of their organisation. We may see that any psychic illusion in Peru the illusion of the divinity of the Inca which 234: A THEORY OF CIVILISATION tended to improve the internal economy of the State, would be favoured by evolution through the improved conditions of life which such illusions would bring about amongst those people who accepted it. Thus in the cultiva- tion of the ground a highly organised society would compel people to labour with more effective diligence than an ill -organised society. This would increase the supply of food pro- duced by the country. Thus the population of a highly organised society would increase in numbers owing to the increased means of livelihood resulting from the increased supply of food : for the numerical strength of a population varies with the increase and decrease of the food-supply. Thus the psychic illusion of the divinity of the Inca would tend to enlarge the population of Peru to a greater number than it would have reached otherwise. The empire of the Inca thus would gain greatly in power, as contrasted with savage and barbarous tribes round about. However, these tribes, as we have noted above, were apparently neither sufficiently numerous nor sufficiently strong thus to affect conclusively the internal form of Peruvian economy. We must seek, then, an auxiliary internal cause : and this we find in the local ANCIENT MEXICO AND PERU 235 internal variations which must have become prominent in an empire so large and so moun- tainous as that of the Inca, especially where intercommunication, though apparently well arranged, was conducted entirely on foot, for the Peruvians had no beasts of burden. These local internal variations would tend to set one province of the empire above another ulti- mately as the result of variations in the strength of the psychic illusion. The imperial organisa- tion then would favour the district that varied advantageously for the government, though stern, was fatherly at the expense of the district which varied disadvantageously : and thus the local variations would tend always to increase the efficiency of the organising force behind the whole empire. On the other hand, the disfavour of an Americind government would be a drastic thing. To manage such a highly organised State as Peru it was necessary that a very efficient body of men should be in control of the government. Such a body was found in the Inca caste, which possessed by birth the hereditary sanc- tion of a divine origin ; for it shared with the Inca himself the glory of an accepted racial descent from the sun. The efficient power here was founded directly upon psychic illusion. 236 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION The actual organisation of this remarkable form of government really was bureaucratic- bureaucratic without a bureau. It is quite instructive to observe that this was the form of political control evolved in a country that was peculiarly free from foreign invasion and the accidents of war. For a bureaucracy is the worst form of government conceivable for the management of war. Is that the reason why, with a general increase of pacific prin- ciples in Europe at the present time, the forms of European government all are tending to become more and more bureaucratic? CONCLUSION ACCORDING to the theory so feebly adumbrated in the preceding pages, we are living at the present time in a civilisation that is in direct relation to the Protestant form of Christianity. Our civilisation is the result of the religion that preceded it or synchronised with its earlier stages, just as we have seen that previous civi- lisations in Europe resulted from previous forms of psychic illusion. The Hellenic culture was the outcome of faith in the religion of Hellas, the Roman culture the out- come of faith, in the Hellenised religion of Rome, the Catholic culture of the Renaissance the outcome of faith in the Catholic form of Christianity ; similarly our modern civilisation in England is the outcome of faith in the Pro- testant form of Christianity. What, then, is to be the outcome of the future ? There is a charm in prophecy because, if we make the realisation sufficiently distant, we cannot be proved to be wrong by facts that 237 238 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION defeat the prognostication. The whole ques- tion of the future history of civilisation is indeed so complex that the problem is in a sense insoluble insoluble, that is, if we seek to enter into details ; it is only in the vaguest of generalities that we can hope to plot out the course of the future. It is evident in this matter of prophecy that we ought first to try to detect in what direction the lines of progress have been leading in the past ; only then can we hope to discover the direction that they are likely to take in the coming time. It seems, then, most essential to find out upon what general principle civilisa- tion has been evolved. Such a principle must exist, if only we can detect it, because all Nature works under definite laws which cannot be broken. If civilisation has been evolved up to the present time upon a certain prin- ciple, it will continue to be evolved upon the same principle as long as humanity possesses any kind of culture that can be called civili- sation. The attempt has been made in the previous pages of this book to show that the civilisations of Western Europe and other localities have resulted from certain psychic illusions which have dominated the minds of men from time to time, and to which we give CONCLUSION 239- the name of religion. If this be true, if religion be the cause of civilisation^ it follows that it is in the .study of religion that we must hope to find the guiding lines which will show us whither our civilisation is taking us. As other periods of civilisation have grown, have reached a climax, and have then declined, so too our present civilisation must surely decline when it has lost the driving force that has raised it to its greatest possible height* There seems to be ;io sufficient reason to suppose that our present civilisation is different in kind from earlier civilisations. It is easy to look in a complacent way at the wonders of civilised life around us, and to point out particular facts that appear to foreshadow a permanent solidarity in the present state of human culture ; but, if we agree that the source of fuel for the engine is coming to an end, we cannot but see that the end of the working power of the engine is not far off ; and that is quite independent of the fact that the present horse-power of the engine is higher than ever. The question, then, seems to simplify itself. Is the psychic illusion of Protestantism/ or, rather, is the psychic illusion of Christianity, a living, growing force in the minds of men? Or is it a spent or moribund force? As we 240 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION answer that alternative so it seems we must answer the question of the future of European civilisation. Two points at once occur to the mind. The universality of modern civilisation, spread practically over all the world, makes its position different from that of any former civilisation. But does it indeed make so much difference? Surely a quantitative distinction of this kind can never make that qualitative distinction which is implied in the statement. A quantitative distinction may lead to a greatly protracted delay in the course of dissolution, but it cannot per se become the qualitative distinction which alone could alter dissolution into a rejuvenated growth. The carcass of an elephant will take longer to decay than the carcass of a mouse, but the process is the same, and the final result is the same. Quan- tity and quality are in different planes ; at the most they can affect each other only accident- ally, not essentially. The conclusion surely must be that increased size does not make for real permanence in our civilisation, but rather for a protraction of the period of decadence, and only for that. This conclusion is very different from that reached by many acute thinkers from whom it is rash to differ. But CONCLUSION 241 even the paltry thoughts of a poor thinker, such as are given here to the reader, may have a value if they goad greater minds into taking the trouble of crushing them. The second point which occurs in this con- nection is of a different nature, qualita- tive rather than quantitative. Even if psychic illusion has been the exciting cause of civili- sation, or an exciting cause, cannot civilisation come to occupy such a position that it no longer has need of this cause to enable it to retain the position to which it has attained? This is really a much more subtle objection because it rests upon a hypothesis which, evidently, we are unable either to verify or to refute. We do not know that we have attained or are attaining to such a position ; it is true, also, that we do not know that such a position is unattainable. The answer to this question, then, can rest only upon probabilities. Ultimately it appears that it can rest only upon the his- torical analysis of earlier civilisations. If earlier civilisations can be shown to have come into existence, and, having reached a climax, to have entered upon a period of decadence, which always has been arrested only by the power of a new psychic illusion, is there not a probability that our present civilisation, in 16 242 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION the same way, having reached its climax, must enter upon a period of decadence, which only can be arrested by the establishment of a new psychic illusion ? Our present theory can give no further answer to the question. To the present writer personally it seems that the answer implied must be accepted, that the only hope of arresting the inevitable decadence is the establishment of a new psychic illusion, which must be of such a kind that it can sway the minds of men with the practical universality of the previous great psychic illusions. This raises the further question of the nature of this potential psychic illusion of the future. One is inclined to think that the new illusion cannot be yet another form of Christianity ; it hardly appears conceivable that any new version of the Christian faith can come to dominate the modern civilised world with the unquestioned sway which is demanded. It seems, too, that the new religion must be founded on irrationality, so that rational self- seeking motives may have the least possible influence upon conduct. In order to reach this condition our present civilisation must enter upon a long period of decadence to reduce the present intellectuality to a level at CONCLUSION 243 which men can accept the irrational universally and unreservedly. Analogy would incline us to localise the new religion on the outskirts of the Christian civi- lisation, and therefore necessarily in Asia or Africa. The spirit of evolution will have no sentimental prejudices about the colour of skin. Apparently we should exclude from our choice of probable localities any non-Christian coun- tries that have accepted the Christian civili- sation, and have thus been Christianised in everything but nominal faith. As to the date of the beginning of the Protestant disillusion and decadence, or again as to the date of the coming of the new religion, men can say nothing with certainty until they, look back upon the Christian civilisation as we look back upon the Olympian civilisation. That they will look back so, analogy seems to leave no doubt. Even as we look back from the height of our civilisation to Greece and Rome, so they will look back to us from some far greater height which we cannot even dimly foreshadow. It is important for us to try to realise that civilisation is a natural growth, not the artificial work of a personal deity ; it is natural just as the specific growth of the human animal is 244 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION natural. Civilisation represents the specific variation by which humanity, at any time, in any place, has secured the superior variant strain through which it has been evolved into a position higher than that occupied by those who did not secure such a variant. That the variation is mental, rather than physical, makes no difference to the reality of its subjection to natural laws ; for brains are subject to the same evolutionary laws as the rest of our animal nature. It is easy to neglect that truth, to think of thought as if it had some sort of independent reality. There is no evidence to show that intellectual progress is not evolved on the same general principles as corporal progress. But thought has difficulty in theorising upon thought, civilisation has difficulty in theorising upon civilisation ; for one is misled easily into mistaking unimportant particularities for im- portant generalities. We see shadow-figures mingling with real figures, and it is difficult to distinguish shadow from reality ; for often they are much alike. But if we follow a shadow, keep it under constant observation even for no very long time, we find that it becomes attenuated, and at last is lost in the darkness. It is not so when we follow reality. CONCLUSION 245 Reality cannot be lost if we keep our gaze fixed upon it. Well, then, if our theory is false, it melts away like a shadow, and is seen no more. But if it is true, it cannot be lost to sight ; it only waits for him who surely will come and may he come soon to turn upon it the light of knowledge. But at any rate in this way we can see dimly a solution to the problem which must occur both to the religious man and to the agnostic, the problem of the practical universality of religious feelings and beliefs throughout the past history of mankind. The Christian must wonder at the widespread acceptance of faiths which he holds to be untrue, must wonder that his God has permitted this vast extension and dominance of error. The agnostic, too, must marvel at the completeness of the sway which religion in its various forms has held over the minds of men. The belief, indeed, in the continuance of the life of the soul after death has become by secular insistence upon its truth a difficult thing to deny. But if religion is taken to have been evolved in order that human progress in civilisation might be evolved, the difficulty finds a solution. Religious belief becomes the stepping-stone by means of which animality advances to humanity. 246 A THEORY OF CIVILISATION Without doubt it is a difficult matter to study our personal religion from an impersonal point of view. Yet evidently an explanation is de- manded, both by Christian and non-Christian, of the universality of various forms of faith. If religion, apart from any substratum of literal truth in its dogmas, has evolved itself as a means to the evolution of that higher mentality which finds its expression in civilisation, it is evident that its universality finds an explana- tion in our theory that is quasi-biological. No advance in a biological evolutionary pro-^ cess can be final. On the contrary, it is essen- tial that such advance lead either to a further advance or to retrogression. But the advance may be indirect, the retrogression direct. It seems to follow here from what has been said that civilisation, as we find it around us now, must soon enter upon a course where movement will be directly retrogressive, but also upon a course wherein some indirect path will be found leading ultimately to an advance far beyond the point we have reached to-day. Ube (3re0bam press UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED WOKING AND LONDON t CEN _.-T-n-LlE. -== ==:=:=::=: ^ YB ?l>5 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY