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The Unity of Western Civilization

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Title: The Unity of Western Civilization

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THE UNITY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Essays Arranged and Edited by

F. S. MARVIN

Sometime Senior Scholar of St. John's College, Oxford
Author of _The Living Past_

Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
London Edinburgh Glasgow New York
Toronto Melbourne Bombay

1915







PREFACE


The following essays are the substance of a course of lectures delivered
at a Summer School at the Woodbrooke Settlement, near Birmingham, in
August 1915. The general purpose of the course will be apparent from the
essays themselves. No forced or mechanical uniformity of view was aimed
at. The writers will be found, very naturally and properly, to differ in
detail and in the stress they lay on different aspects of the case. But
they agree in thinking that while our country's cause and the cause of
our Allies is just and necessary and must be prosecuted with the utmost
vigour, it is not inopportune to reflect on those common and
ineradicable elements in the civilization of the West which tend to form
a real commonwealth of nations and will survive even the most shattering
of conflicts. That we on the Allied side stand fundamentally for this
ideal is one of our most valuable assets.

The fact that the lectures were delivered at a settlement for training
persons for social work in a religious spirit, suggested to more than
one of those who took part in the course, how similar is the task which
now lies before us in international affairs to that which Canon Barnett
initiated thirty years ago for the treatment of the social question at
home. We need in both cases to associate ourselves mentally with others
in order to realize the common elements which underlie the seeming
diversity in the civilization of the West.

The method of the course was primarily historical, though certain essays
have been added of a more idealist type. It is hoped that the point of
view suggested, though prompted by current events, may be found to have
some permanent value. It could obviously be applied to many other
aspects of European life, e.g. morality and politics, to which
conditions of space have only permitted indirect reference to be made in
this volume.

F.S.M.




CONTENTS


   I. INTRODUCTORY: THE GROUNDS OF UNITY
      By F. S. MARVIN.

  II. UNITY IN PREHISTORIC TIMES
      By J. L. MYRES, Wykeham Professor of Ancient History, Oxford.

 III. THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME
      By J. A. SMITH, Waynflete Professor of Mental and Moral
      Philosophy, Oxford.

  IV. UNITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES
      By ERNEST BARKER, Fellow of New College, Oxford.

   V. UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LAW
      By W. M. GELDART, Vinerian Professor of English Law, Oxford.

  VI. THE COMMON ELEMENTS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ART
      By the Rev. Dr. A. J. CARLYLE, University College, Oxford.

 VII. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS UNIFYING FORCES
      By L. T. HOBHOUSE, White Professor of Sociology,
      University of London.

VIII. THE UNITY OF WESTERN EDUCATION
      By J. W. HEADLAM, late Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.

  IX. COMMERCE AND FINANCE AS INTERNATIONAL FORCES
      By HARTLEY WITHERS.

   X. INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION
      By CONSTANCE SMITH, sometime British Delegate on International
      Bureau for Industrial Legislation.

  XI. COMMON IDEALS OF SOCIAL REFORM
      By C. DELISLE BURNS.

 XII. THE POLITICAL BASES OF A WORLD-STATE
      By J. A. HOBSON.

XIII. RELIGION AS A UNIFYING INFLUENCE IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION
      By H. G. WOOD, late Fellow of Jesus College,
      Cambridge.

 XIV. THE GROWTH OF HUMANITY
      By F. S. MARVIN.




ANALYSIS


CHAPTER I. THE GROUNDS OF UNITY

The appeal to history. Previous great schisms in Europe which have been
surmounted give hope for the present. The Reformation. The Napoleonic
Wars.

The two points of view, (1) Man's nature itself tending to unity through
conflict. (2) The stages in the process developed in history.

In pre-history conflict and diversity are predominant, though the
necessities of life prescribe certain uniformities. Consolidation comes
in favoured physical conditions, especially great river-basins like the
Nile and the Euphrates.

The possibility of a world-unity first consciously envisaged in the
Greco-Roman world. Greece gives unity in thought, Rome in practice.
Order with a solid intellectual foundation established with the Roman
Empire. In the mediaeval world a unity mainly spiritual is reached in
the same framework. The position of Germany in this development. The
break-up of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. The enlargement of the
known world and the growth of wealth and knowledge. This crisis still
continues and has been recently accentuated by the birth-throes of
nationalities. The supreme problem for international unity is now the
reconciliation of national units with the interests of the whole.
Underneath the superficial turmoil the great unifying forces of science
and of common sentiments continue to grow and will ultimately prevail.


CHAPTER II. UNITY IN PREHISTORIC TIMES

Retrospect of the search for unity in man's affairs, in its political
and scientific bearings.

The Unity of Man as an Animal Species. Ancient beliefs, doubts suggested
by the practice of slavery, their solution, and the modern conception of
a 'Human Family'.

The unity of man as a rational animal struggling against nature for
subsistence. Archaeological evidence as to the reasonableness of
primitive culture on its material side; doubts raised by man's
irrational 'barbarities' on the social plane. Lévy Bruhl's hypothesis of
a 'savage logic' and the Greek analysis of wrongdoing as rooted in
ignorance.

Man's struggle with Nature in the N.W. Quadrant of the Old World. Unity
here not to be found in the Food Quest. Prehistoric Europe shows variety
of regimens, hoe-agriculture, pastoral nomadism. The wheel and the
plough and the composite bread and cheese culture.

Race, Language, and Culture as Factors of Unity. The spread of the
European Bread Culture is earlier than that of Indo-European Speech and
probably than that of the 'Alpine' type of man. Race in Europe has led
not to unity but to discord, and linguistic affinity does not ensure
mutual intelligibility.


CHAPTER III. THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME

Contemporary history is the only genuine and important history, the
present is the only object of historical knowledge; what the present is
and how, properly conceived, it gives history its unity and justifies
the study of what is past (ancient history); all history is _our_
history, and otherwise without meaning or value to us. The history of
classical antiquity is the history of the youth of the modern world, of
the formation of the now latent but still potent hopes, fears, designs
and thoughts which constitute the substratum of the European mind; how
this still unites a divided Europe and affords a ground of hope for a
restored and deepened union. Our debt to the Greeks: (_a_) the very
notion of civilization, (_b_) the idea of its realization through
knowledge, (_c_) the ideal of freedom as the inner spirit of true
civilization. How the Greeks failed to work all this out in both theory
and practice, and how nevertheless they taught their lesson to the
world; the services of Greece to the world in the creation of Art, the
Sciences, and Philosophy; the Greek ideal of a life beyond 'civilized'
life, but rendered possible by it, and thus giving to civilized life a
new and higher value; defects and merits of this ideal.

The Romans are inheritors of all this; how, while making it more
prosaic, they rendered it more practical and more effectually realized
it. All this most visible in the Imperial period. The Roman ideal:
(_a_) world-wide peace, (_b_) secured and maintained by a centralized
system of laws issuing from and enforced by a single power. Influence of
this ideal on later and modern thought and practice. Causes of its
decline and fall: (_a_) ignorance of the economic substructure of
civilized life, (_b_) neglect of opportunities to extend and defend it,
(_c_) the rise of the idea of nationality. The Revolution as the last
great attempt to reinstate the full Roman ideal in its outworn form.

Lessons still to be learned by us from the study of both the success and
the failure of Greco-Roman civilization; how the consideration of these
may at once sober our expectations and inspire us with hope in the
present. The forces which created it still maintain it and show no signs
of exhaustion. But that they may continue in effect we must study these
forces and learn the lessons the ancient experience of their working
conveys, exerting ourselves first to understand Greco-Roman thought and
practice and then to better their instruction.


CHAPTER IV. THE MIDDLE AGES

I. The mediaeval world. Geographical extent. Economic structure: its
features of uniformity and isolation: the effect of the rise of a
national economy on mediaeval society. Linguistic basis. Mediaeval
scheme that of a general European system of estates rather than of a
balance of powers.

II. The unity of mediaeval civilization in its great period (1050-1300)
ecclesiastical. The attempt of the Church to achieve a general synthesis
of human life by the application of Christian principle. (1) The control
of war and peace and the feudal world: the Truce of God and the
Crusades: the papacy as an international authority: the mediaeval
conception of war. (2) The control of trade and commerce and the
economic world: just wages and prices: the mediaeval town. (3) The
control of learning and education and the world of thought:
reconciliation of Greek science and the Christian faith: allegorical
interpretation of the world and its effects on natural science.

III. The mediaeval theory of society. The organic conception of society:
mediaeval thought _naturaliter Platonica_. The one society of mankind.
Hence (1) little conception of the State or sovereignty or State law;
but the universal society has nevertheless to be reconciled in some way
with the existence of different kingdoms. Hence, again, (2) no
distinction of Church and State as two separate societies: these are
two separate authorities, _regnum_ and _sacerdotium_, but they govern
the same society. The one society of mankind an ecclesiastical scheme
uniting a great variety of personal groupings.

IV. The influence of law on the development of the kingdom into the
state--a process begun early in England and France, but only generally
achieved about 1500. The new conditions--geographical, economic,
linguistic--which prepare the way for the new world of the sixteenth
century. The gulf between that world and the old mediaeval world. The
hope of unity to-day.


CHAPTER V. UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LAW

The Problem in the Ancient World. Law universal and supreme over mankind
(Sophocles, Antigone). Law arbitrary and varying from place to place
(Herodotus). Nature and convention. The 'rightlessness' of the stranger
in antiquity. The law was a 'law of citizens'. Admission of the
foreigner to legal protection. Rome develops a law of the men of all
nations (_ius gentium_), which reacts upon the law of citizens (_ius
civile_), and ultimately coalesces with it. The law of nature.

The break-up of the Ancient World; the Middle Ages. The invaders bring
their own law with them. In the kingdoms which they founded each man had
his 'personal law'. Local Law. Feudal Law. The beginnings of National
Law: England, France, Germany. Roman Law in the Middle Ages. The Canon
Law.

The Modern World. The reception of Roman Law. State Sovereignty. The
Modern Codes. Unity and diversity of law within the political unit. The
world divided into territories of the English Common Law and lands where
Roman Law conceptions prevail. Forces making for unity: the notion of a
'law of nature'; the pursuit of common ends. International law, private
and public.


CHAPTER VI. THE COMMON ELEMENTS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ART

The question of the place of nationality in art and literature. It has
little or no place in the Middle Ages. The mediaeval epic; its
character. The mediaeval romance. Modern European art and literature
transcends national conditions. The characteristics of the new European
literature of the fourteenth century: Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer. The
drama of England and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Painting and sculpture from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.
The classical mind, and the principle of good taste and common sense.
The realism of Defoe and Hogarth, and the Spanish Picaresque novel.
Sentimentalism in the eighteenth century. The poetry and painting of
nature. The great revolution and the romantic movement. Great literature
and art are not national but human.


CHAPTER VII. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

Western civilization possesses a certain unity (1) in the sense of unity
of character, (2) in the fact that it has a common origin, ultimately in
the Greco-Roman civilization but more immediately in mediaeval
Christendom, and (3) in the sense that its parts have maintained a
constant intercommunication of ideas. (4) The different qualities of
German, French, and English thinkers have in large measure complemented
one another, (5) and the history of science and of speculative
philosophy is largely a history of the interaction of distinct national
schools. (6) The same thing is true of political thought. (7) Thus the
world of thought forms a commonwealth which is superior to all national
differences and, in spite of the war, remains a foundation of a very
genuine unity.


CHAPTER VIII. UNITY IN EDUCATION

Distinction between Unity and Uniformity. Historical Unity; the origin
of the School and the University. Both instruments of the mediaeval
Church for maintaining a common system throughout Western Christendom.
Importance of Latin as the universal language of education. Suppression
of the vernacular and of national movements. The Reformation; a common
European movement. Erasmus. The new teaching based on classical
literature. Tendency to disunion; the influence of the Reformation and
the national Churches. Growth of national literature. Political
influences, the French Revolution, and the National State. The essential
Unity still preserved, not merely in the study of the natural sciences,
but in the historical unity given by Christianity and the spirit of
Greece.


CHAPTER IX. COMMERCE AND FINANCE

Commerce and finance practical expressions of the instinct of
self-preservation which is common not only to all men, but to all living
creatures. Early appearance of trading habit in boys. Early examples of
trade. Abraham's purchase of a burying-ground from Ephron the Hittite.
Solomon's trade with Hiram of Tyre. Herodotus, the first historian,
opens his history with an allusion to trade. Trade is based on
specialization, and is at once a cause of unity and of disunion. Its
extension from individuals to communities. Foreign trade stimulated by
variations of value in different communities. Specialization increases
efficiency, but makes the worker a machine, and a speculator on the
chance that others will want what he makes. International trade also
promotes both unity and friction. On the whole, commerce a great
promoter of unity. Likewise finance, or money-dealing. Its origin and
development. London's catholic taste in foreign securities: sometimes
prefers them to the home-made article. Effect of foreign investment on
home production and consumption. Foreign finance and productive
specialization.


CHAPTER X. INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION

Interdependence true of countries as of classes. A fact brought home to
us by the European War. Importance of international action in relation
to the raising of social and industrial standards. This truth perceived
by Robert Owen a century ago. Work of Owen and his successors in the
direction of an international minimum of labour conditions. Action of
the Swiss Federal Council. The German Emperor calls the first Conference
on workmen's protection 1890. Formal failure and substantial achievement
of this Conference. Founding of International Association for Labour
Legislation and International Labour Office. Constitution and work of
these bodies. Biennial conferences of the association: subjects and
methods. International Conventions of 1906, their scope and value.
Subsequent labours of the Association. Its present position and future
hopes.


CHAPTER XI. COMMON IDEALS OF SOCIAL REFORM

Ideals arise from perceived social evils. They have caused in recent
years (_a_) Common action by European Governments and (_b_) action by
separate Governments influenced by foreign experience. There has also
been a growth of sentiment, not yet embodied in law or institutions,
with regard to (i) the position of women and children, (ii) social
caste, and (iii) the increase of common action for reform by civilized
states.


CHAPTER XII. THE POLITICAL BASES OF A WORLD-STATE

The nineteenth century has made three great contributions towards the
possibility of International Government, the political realization of
nationality, the growth in substance and method of international law,
and the progress of federalism. In other fields outside politics,
especially in commerce and finance, a network of international
co-operation has grown up. Closer political union is needed for three
purposes: first, the consolidation, extension, and improved sanctions of
existing international law; secondly, the settlement of differences
between nations; thirdly, positive co-operation for the common good.
This progress involves some further diminution of 'sovereignty' and
'independence'. But these concepts have no absolute validity. In the
Hague Conventions and other intergovernmental instruments the rudiments
of international government already exist. In order to establish
effective security for peace, what is needed is a general treaty
providing that all disputes be submitted to arbitration or conciliation,
with such guarantees for acceptance of the award as will establish
confidence. The test of confidence is the voluntary reduction of
armaments. Internationalists differ as to the nature and rigour of the
sanctions. Some rely entirely on a 'moratorium' and the pressure of
public opinion: others would compel the submission of all issues, but
not the acceptance of awards: others, again, would apply force,
diplomatic, economic, or military, to both processes.

Internationalism, to be effective, would require a machinery for dealing
with new issues before they ripened into disputes. How far will the
state of mind following this war assist this progress of
internationalism? Is a spiritual conversion, corresponding to the
process of biological mutatism, possible or probable?


CHAPTER XIII. RELIGION

The history of Europe suggests that, though the Church exerted a
considerable influence on the growth of a common type of civilization in
the West, in modern times religion has proved a divisive rather than a
unifying factor. During the last generation or two, however, there has
been a decline of the dogmatic and sectarian tempers. This change is
largely due to the growth of the scientific spirit, and, as in other
realms of inquiry so in the study of religion, international
co-operation has steadily developed. Both literary criticism and
psychological analysis have contributed to the widening of sympathy. The
better understanding of certain elements in the Christian ideal and the
Christian hope must also be taken into consideration as a factor making
for a new catholicism which finds expression in movements like the Adult
School Movement and the Student Christian Movement, and in the
ever-growing demand for closer co-operation in missionary work.

Beyond this, partly through the comparative study of religions, we are
conscious that religious thought in the West possesses some common
characteristics, notably, faith in the solidarity of mankind and in the
reality of progress. Of themselves, these two convictions do not
constitute any very close bond of union, and both beliefs need to be
defined and enforced by the sense of sin and the consciousness of God
which the West has learned from Jesus.


CHAPTER XIV. THE GROWTH OF HUMANITY

The need of a basis of right sentiments even greater than that of
improved political machinery to secure international union. We must
start from patriotism and enlighten and enlarge it. Of the three Western
nations which lead in the arts and sciences, France and England through
the war become closely allied in defence of a policy of the union of
free and pacific people throughout the world. The position of Italy,
Russia, and the United States. The increase of arbitral methods and the
formation of leagues of peace or even of a world-state are matters
calling for earnest thought; but the spread of the notion of humanity,
the co-operation of all mankind in a common work is more fundamental and
may be begun by any one at home. This idea, starting with the Stoics, is
fully developed with the advent of modern science. It shows itself in
many forms and the spread of exact science is its most powerful aid.
This is entirely independent of nationality and will be increasingly
concerned with the alleviation of human suffering and the improvement of
life.

The final test of a high international aim is the joint effort of the
stronger peoples to protect and assist the weaker and less advanced. The
case of Africa and the Brussels Conference of 1889. Analogy with the
treatment of the young at home.




I

THE GROUNDS OF UNITY


In face of the greatest tragedy in history, it is to history that we
make appeal. What does it teach us to expect as the issue of the
conflict? How far and in what form may we anticipate that the unity of
mankind, centring as it must round Europe, will emerge from the trial?

Only two occasions occur to the mind on which, since the break up of the
Roman Empire, a schism so serious as the present has threatened the
unity of the Western world. The first was the Reformation and the war
which it entailed down to the Peace of Westphalia. The second was the
struggle against Napoleon, terminated a hundred years ago. The latter
was in many respects a closer parallel. It was a struggle of the
independent nations of Europe against the overweening ambition and
aggression of one Power. It united them in an alliance which achieved
its purpose and survived the successful issue of the war for some years.
Some such course, with a comity of nations far wider and more enduring
than the Holy Alliance as its sequel, we hope and predict for the
present war.

The struggle at the Reformation was less like the present, either in its
causes or its course, but it has some features which make it a useful
point for a survey of the permanent unifying elements which hold and
will hold the West together in spite of occasional cataclysms and the
clash of rival interests and passion. A man like Erasmus, trembling
before the catastrophe, willing to make immense sacrifices to avoid an
open breach, uncertain of any final readjustment which might restore the
harmony of the world, was not unlike some among us who hoped against
hope that the enemy might be appeased, who thought that almost any peace
was better than any war, who still fear that the breach in unity is
vital or irreparable for generations.

And the issue three hundred years ago may also inspire us with a
cautious optimism, a strong though not unmeasured trust. The right cause
triumphed, fully in the end. Freedom was secured, both for churches and
for individuals, throughout the world. The evil features in the papal
system, against which the attack was really levelled, quietly but
completely disappeared, and the institution survived, itself reformed.
Before a hundred years were out the world had moved on to the conquest
of new vantage points and the establishment of a wider unity on a firmer
base.

Both previous occasions are therefore full of hope. The European system
is, as we shall see throughout these essays, the necessary nucleus of
any civilized order embracing the whole world; and the great convulsions
which have hitherto continued to occur in it from time to time are
moments of especial value for the study of the conditions under which it
exists. They are the pathological experiences which reveal the strength
and the weaknesses of the normal functions. We strive and hope for a
more lasting state of general health, and do not despair of the patient
even in this grave attack. He has survived even more serious illness.
For though the present war is the most gigantic that the world has ever
seen, its very greatness is the result of some of those modern
developments--scientific skill, improved communications, national
cohesion--on which ultimately the better organization of the whole
commonwealth of nations will be built. _Passi graviora_; we have
weathered the storms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when
the old Roman order and its sequel in the Catholic Church were at their
weakest and the recuperative power of science and social reform and
nationalism had hardly begun its work. We shall not fail with our
greater forces of the present to regain and create a Europe freer,
stronger, and more united than that which now seems to be shaken to the
depths.

The process of gaining a greater unity among the leading nations of the
world, like all the aspects of human evolution, must be regarded from
two points of view, distinct in theory, inextricable in life. What does
the nature of man itself demand? How has this nature expressed itself,
and been affected in history by the external conditions, the geography,
climate, conflict and commingling of races, which the theatre of its
appearance has imposed?

Looked at in itself, so far as we can isolate it from its surroundings,
man's nature is distinguished from that of lower animals by two
features, both of them essentially social and tending to unity. He is
more deeply and permanently attached to members of his own species, by
affection, sympathy, veneration, tradition, than any other creature. And
he is a reasoning being, reason itself requiring the contact and
agreement of various minds. The incomparably greater force which he has
acquired in the world, over all other species and over nature itself, is
due to the working of these two factors. At starting he was physically
less strong than many other creatures, and if he fought with others of
his own kind, other animal species did the same. He was ahead of them by
his reason, and reason acted, and must act, through the concert of
thinking beings. This concert is not merely, or even mainly, an
attachment among those living at the same time to co-operate for some
common end; it is with man a conscious sequence of one generation on
another. Sometimes the movement of adaptation is slower, sometimes
quicker, but in every case the living are carrying on the work of the
dead, and their co-operation in time as well as space is due to the
working of the same qualities of attachment and reason, the social
factors, by which at any moment a community of men is bound together.

Still looking at the matter _a priori_, it is clear that the vast
community of mankind, though it has come more closely in contact in
recent years over all the planet, yet acts, and must act, habitually and
momentarily, through many smaller aggregates. Of these the leading types
are the family and the country or nation. The former is not directly
relevant to our inquiry, the latter plays a leading part in it. The
former is less dependent on external conditions of land-formation and
the like, and is in consequence more universal, more purely human. The
latter has been shaped by geographical conditions, by racial qualities,
by the apparent accidents of history. Its relation to the larger units
of human society raises the most difficult, fundamental and unavoidable
questions. To curb aggressive nationalism is the root-problem of the
present war. To reconcile permanently nationalism with humanity would be
to establish the everlasting peace.

Western society, indeed the whole community of mankind, is built up of
these smaller units, the family and the nation, with their various
intermediate groupings, but the historical process has by no means
conformed at all exactly to this logical order. Society has not been
made in orderly fashion by forming families and then combining families
to make hundreds, and hundreds to make counties, and counties nations,
and so on to the whole. A German god might have done this, but the way
of nature and history was less perfect. The minor forms of human
association have been taking shape, being altered and on the whole
improved, throughout the process. At one point, of high importance for
our argument, a larger form of association was achieved before the
necessary constituent elements were articulated. This was the
Greco-Roman world encircling the Mediterranean and completed in the
Roman Empire of the second century A.D. It was the nucleus from which
the Western world of modern civilization has been developed; yet it was
there, settled in its main outlines, before the national units which it
required for internal harmony and cohesion had taken any definite shape.
It is to the difficulties of their growth and mutual adjustment that we
owe most of the conflicts of modern history.

We shall in this book go back first to a still earlier stage, a stage of
pre-history, to a time when no one, not gifted with superhuman insight
and prescience, could have foreseen the course which human civilization
would pursue. All over the world, for tens of thousands of years, a
culture persisted, associated with stone implements, and marked by a
similarity which is often extremely striking, in races and tribes widely
severed by distance and climatic conditions. The raw material of the
human product in science, art, and invention was alike in texture
although often exuberant in detail and imagination. But it had not yet
the unity of an organic whole, knit by a common purpose and conscious of
itself.

To gain the cohesion of large numbers of men by whom wealth could be
created and sufficient leisure and independence secured for an
intellectual life, not dictated by the necessities of existence, a
special concurrence of favourable physical conditions was required. The
rich and secluded river-basins of many parts of the world provided this,
and in consequence we find similar large communities arising at the end
of the Stone Age in such places as China, Peru, Mexico, and above all in
Mesopotamia and Egypt. The last named derived their special importance
for the sequel from their proximity to the Mediterranean, which was to
act as the great meeting-place and training-school for adventurous
spirits and inquiring minds. From the busy intercourse of these
land-locked waters arose the civilization called Minoan, or Aegean,
centring in Crete, itself to be surpassed by the trading activity of the
Phoenicians and the art and science of the Greeks.

It is with the advent of the Greek that the seal is placed upon the
claim of the Mediterranean to be the birthplace of the highest type of
human civilization, the centre from which a unity of the spirit was to
spread, until, by material force as well as by the conquering mind, the
European or Western man was recognized as in the forefront of the race.
The supremacy of the Greek lay in his achievement in three directions,
as a thinker, as an artist, and as the builder of the city-state. For
our present purpose the first and the last are the most important and
the first the most important of all.

The city-state was important as the first example of a free,
self-governing community in which the individual realized his powers by
living--and dying--with and for his fellows. This new type of human
community was of the highest moment in the sequel. In many points it was
a model to the Romans, and thus became a fulcrum for the upward movement
of the Western world. In the works, too, of the Greek philosophers,
especially of Plato and Aristotle, it inspired the earliest and some of
the deepest reflections on the nature of social life and government. But
it never acquired the permanence of the political units needed to build
up the European Commonwealth. For this nations were required, and the
Greeks were a race and not a nation. The [Greek: polis] lacked the
size, the variety of elements, and the territorial basis on which a
modern nation rests.

It is rather in their achievements as thinkers and as artists, above all
in their science and philosophy, that we find the most fundamental and
lasting contribution of the Greeks to the unity and progress of mankind.
When these became allied to the tenacity, the organizing and legal
genius of the Romans, a firm centre of civilized life was established,
which has survived the shocks of two thousand years of growth and
conflict and will survive the upheaval of the present. The Greek
unification was in the world of thought and art; the Roman attempted a
corresponding work of organization in the human world which lay nearest
to him in the countries round the Mediterranean Sea. Both efforts were
of priceless value and continuing effect, but both were, from the
conditions of the problem, imperfect solutions, the brilliant but
precocious sketches of adolescent genius. The Greek, working at first on
the material accumulated by generations of Chaldean and Egyptian
priests, discovered from their crude, unorganized, and inexact
observations of geometry and astronomy the elements of unity in
diversity which constitute science. Inquiring for causes, comparing and
correcting individual facts, he arrived at the first equations in
mathematics, the first laws of nature. His work in this sphere and in
that of medicine went on continuously until after the Roman occupation
of the Mediterranean world was complete. It died out gradually in the
theological atmosphere of Alexandria, and on the purely human side ended
in Stoicism with an amalgam of universal philosophy and Roman law. The
Stoic Empire of the second century A.D. was the high-water mark of the
joint efforts of Greeks and Romans to attain unity and humanism in
thought and practice. Its brilliance while it lasted the nobility of
its leading men, the persistence of the main lines of its structure, are
the measure of our debt to the builders of the Greco-Roman world.

The Roman contribution to the result which in the end so perfectly
combined both movements was, in its origin and nature, singularly unlike
the Greek. The Roman did not analyse his conceptions. He accepted what
came to him, either from his ancestors or from other peoples, without
scrutiny, except so far as to see that new matter could be worked into
old forms without a dislocation in practice. He was the pragmatist, the
Greek the idealist. This instinct of adaptation and sequence made the
Roman the pioneer in law as the Greek was the pioneer in science. It
rendered possible the holding together in one political system of the
multifarious territories and peoples from the Tigris to the Solway Firth
for long enough to enable the greater part of that area to be
permanently civilized on Roman lines. But, like the artist's sketch of
his picture, the whole was outlined before the parts were worked out in
their final form; and the sketch itself was seriously imperfect in more
than one point. The set-back which Augustus received on the eastern side
of the Rhine was never made good, and the Germanic tribes therefore
remained un-Romanized until the Church in the seventh and eighth
centuries resumed the work on other lines. This defeat of Varus and the
legend of Hermann became to the German a symbol of national greatness in
a sense which none of the other national conflicts with Rome ever
assumed. To us Boadicea is a barbarian, and we trace with gratitude and
pleasure the signs of civilization left by the Roman occupation. To us
the Roman was for centuries a defence against barbarism, and we regret
that we had to do over again many of the things which he had once taught
us. But the Roman Empire, when the German accepted it, was no longer the
Empire which had founded the unity of Europe. It was a German Empire,
and though the ancient world fired his imagination, he always saw it
through German eyes.

The next stage in unity was the mediaeval Church, which inherited the
framework of the Roman Empire and extended the area of moral and
civilized life which Rome had initiated.

In this Germany was included, and she played a distinguished part. Roman
missionaries, some by way of England and Ireland, went further than the
Roman legions had attempted, and the sword of Charlemagne did the rest.
Germany in the later Middle Ages was perhaps the most valued of all the
Pope's domains, and her prince-bishops his greatest lieutenants. The
moral and religious effect of the Catholic discipline, appealing to
sides of human nature which Greece and Rome had left untouched, was
nowhere more deeply felt than by the Germans. Spiritually they were thus
lifted at least to the level of the rest of Western Europe, but
politically they remained unincorporated, the most feudal and military
nation of the West.

The growth of nations was, on the political side, the main achievement
of the Middle Ages. Rome had given the framework of a great system, and
into this had poured barbarians from North and East, Goths, Franks,
Huns, Moors, Lombards, tribes at the level of the Homeric Greeks when
they swept down to the Aegean. They came as migrant hordes, and in the
area civilized by Rome and the Catholic Church they settled down as
nations, mingling with the earlier population and divided up by the
geographical configurations of the Continent. Among them France and
England had the advantage. They gained their unity as nations earlier
than any other countries of the West--England in a form which has lasted
substantially unaltered for six hundred years. Spain, which had been
torn asunder by the Moors, was not consolidated fully till the end of
the fifteenth century, in time to send the last of the crusaders under
Columbus in quest of fresh worlds to conquer across the Atlantic. But
Italy and Germany--and especially the latter--remained disintegrated
until our own time. Both gained their union about the same time, fifty
years ago, but by different methods and in a different spirit. Italy,
naturally a compact geographical unit, was welded by a democratic
enthusiasm, of which Cavour and Mazzini were the soul and Garibaldi the
right arm. Germany, vast in power and numbers, lay strongly entrenched
in the central area of the Continent, but failed to kindle into national
life at the same democratic moment. She was fashioned into political
existence by a Thor's hammer, which, as it rose and fell, dealt
shattering blows on friends as well as foes, in Austria as well as
France, on Danes and Poles, on Liberals and Socialists, on little kings
and great ecclesiastics. And now this Frankenstein creation among states
offers the most serious problem in adjusting national claims with
European unity. We have to check and to assimilate--if the world is to
live as one--the one Power which has hitherto developed most
persistently and successfully its own resources, but least in
subordination to the interests of the whole.

There are those who would regard all national barriers and organization
as somewhat of an obstruction, who would prefer a simple
internationalism to the world as we know it, with its pent-up passions
and attachments, its constant liability to explosion, its slow progress
by tortuous channels towards the larger view and the surer hold. Many
reformers, from Plato downwards, have taken up a similar attitude in
regard to the smaller institution, the family, which is often found to
be an obstruction in the way of short cuts to social utopias at home.
Kant's ideal of a cosmopolitan constitution as the goal of all human
effort rather leans to this side of the balance. But a due balance must
be kept and the full value both of family and nation maintained against
theories or tendencies which would roll us all out into cosmopolitan
items. A glance at other elements which go to make up the unity of
European society will tend to correct the perspective.

The unity of the Roman Empire was mainly political and military. It
lasted for between four and five hundred years. The unity which
supervened in the Catholic Church was religious and moral and endured
for a thousand. Less binding on one side, it was more searching and
pervasive on others, and though now broken, it still remains in full
force over many millions of minds, while the Roman political and legal
structure has to be sought for in formal institutions which have
absorbed its spirit and transformed its letter. But beyond the actual
fabric of the Church itself we have the multitude of cognate and
derivative institutions which have served the cause of unity in the
moral and intellectual sphere. We shall speak later of the more perfect
and lasting unity of science. The universities in the Middle Ages and
the Renascence tended to the same end, using a material in philosophy
and theology which was bound to wear out with the spread of knowledge
and the flux of time. But in their prime they succeeded in producing a
more complete community of scholars than has perhaps been ever witnessed
in Europe before or since. Then as always the realm of the genuine love
of truth, or even of honest disputation, was independent of differences
of race or political boundaries, and the scholar went from Oxford to
Paris, or from Rotterdam to Bologna, solely to widen his mind or to sit
at the feet of some world-famous teacher.

And the wandering scholar was by no means the only social link. Many of
the trade-routes surprise us by the length and adventurousness of their
course. Amber from the Baltic found its way to the south of Italy and
Spain, while small boats from Ireland were brought into the mouths of
the Loire and the Garonne when the coasts of the Channel were impassable
through barbarians from the North.

Mediaeval Europe was, in fact, much more of a unity than the modern
traveller would expect, and this was mainly due to the influence of the
Church. The spiritual unity went deep on one side of man's nature, and
when a man like Erasmus surveyed the prospect at the beginning of the
sixteenth century we can well understand his horror, and his determined
abstention from any step which would precipitate the break-up of the one
organized body which represents the old united culture of Christendom
and might check the new forces which were threatening selfishness and
disorder in ever-widening circles on the globe. For it must be noted
that new forces of expansion were making themselves felt, as the unity
of the Church was being threatened from within. Explorers were
extending, East and West, the sphere in which the European was to impose
his influence for good and evil on other peoples, and the sixteenth
century thus becomes one, perhaps the most critical, of all the
turning-points in the history of the West. Danger was mixed with hope,
disorder with new knowledge and fresh power, and the crisis has not yet
been surmounted. But we have gained by now some insight into the nature
of the new forces and see that they should, and one day will, work more
fully in the direction of unity in the civilized world, of healthy
independence in the parts and a growing harmony in the whole. Little of
this could have been seen by the observer at the outbreak of the
Reformation.

Nationalism, democracy, colonial expansion, religious change, the
growth of knowledge and its application to industry and social reform,
these are the salient features which distinguish our modern from the
mediaeval world, and we have to consider how far they make for the unity
of mankind.

The sixteenth century saw both the strengthening of national governments
and the beginning of European colonization. England, France, Spain,
Portugal, Holland, all settled down under a central government stronger
and more independent than they had previously enjoyed, and pegged out
estates for themselves beyond the seas. In each case wars have been
entailed in the process, and, as we know, the backwardness of Germany at
this period has been visited upon the rest of Europe tenfold in recent
times. National expansion thus appears to be an eminent provocation of
international strife. It is with no intention either of ignoring facts
or minimizing dangers that one turns here to the other side of the
account. Where was the spark actually fired which led to the present
conflagration? In that part of Europe where the national units were
least stable and developed, where the conditions of government and
social order are most remote from our own. Who can doubt that if in the
Balkans the Turks had been able to establish even the sort of government
we maintain in India, or if, still better, the Balkan States, apart from
the Turks, had gained their own independence in a federation like the
Swiss, the aggression of the Central Powers would have been checked? The
compact, well-established national unit is not in itself a danger, but
there is a danger in weak, oppressed, or disjointed nationalities, who
have not found safety and offer a bait to their expansive neighbours.

Thus strong and independent nations, as Kant postulates in his
_Perpetual Peace_, are guarantees of peace, stones in the Temple of
Humanity. Another consideration not generally recognized, strengthens
this conclusion. In recent years all leading and progressive nations
have been devoting their first thought to social reform. This has been
conspicuously the case with ourselves, with the French, with the United
States, with the smaller, more advanced countries in Europe. Germany,
too, though her first energies have been given to organizing war, has
had in this matter two distinct souls. Her social democrats and part of
her governing class have been consistent and successful in working for
the amelioration of the condition of the people, and have often
anticipated other nations in her process. It is self-evident, first,
that a strong national government is needed to carry out wide social
reform, second, that in proportion as governments devote themselves
whole-heartedly to this, their energies are less likely to be devoted to
molesting their neighbours. Germany, unfortunately for herself and the
world, had no government which could speak for the whole people and be
responsible to it. A truly national government in Germany, or anywhere
else, would not have willed this war.

The colonial expansion which was connected with the outburst of national
sentiment in the sixteenth century, and has led to frequent conflicts
between European nations ever since, also appears in a different light
if we study it in view of facts not dreamt of in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The Americas, which appeared to the early
navigators as rich estates to be cultivated for the benefit of
proprietors at home, have developed into powerful and independent
countries, eminently pacific (except for internal brawls), looking
forward to producing new types of life and government, hoping perhaps to
hold the balance in a long-drawn contest of the Old World Powers. The
circle, therefore, of the Mediterranean world which was enlarged by the
discoveries of the sixteenth century, finds its completion to-day in
new states across the Atlantic, which are on the whole enormously
preponderant on the side of peace, and wish to hold their own in Western
civilization by force of wealth and industry, and not by arms. To us,
too, it is clear, and will be one day to the Germanic Powers, that the
British Empire, the largest political aggregate on the globe, is
essentially a league of free peoples, under no compulsion from the
centre, but responsive to attack upon their power or liberty by any
third party, strong from their general contentment with the conditions
and institutions of their life, and not through any systematic
regulations imposed from above. Even India and other protected states
and dominions, though not yet self-governing, are moving steadily in the
direction of responsibility and of willing association with the British
Empire or Commonwealth as a whole.

Such is the much vaster community of nations which has succeeded to the
Western Europe of the sixteenth century; and no mention has been made of
the place of Russia or the countries still further east. The picture
does not suggest a welter of conflicting passions and ambition
throughout the world. On the whole a mass of men and women labouring
with fair contentment at their daily task, not concerned that their
state or nation should extend its boundaries, least of all that it
should provoke attack; little conscious of the historic debt of nations
to one another, but wishing well to others except when they cross the
path of a personal desire; gaining rapidly more sense of actual
community among living men, but hardly realizing yet how man's power has
been built up in the past and how infinitely it might be advanced and
the world improved by harmony and steadily directed efforts in the
future. That the sense of brotherhood has gained ground in the world,
especially since the middle of the eighteenth century, is certain.
Voices of protest reach us even from Germany through the storm of
hatred. But the vague sympathy, the desire for peace and shrinking from
the horrors of war need to be enlightened, to have a reasoned basis in
the belief that all nations, and especially those of the vanguard, are
partners in a common work and essential one to another, above all,
perhaps, to have institutions which tend to co-operation and make a
sudden and disastrous breach as difficult as possible. Many of these
instruments of peace were being forged when the war broke out. Many of
the most profound ties between nations are not understood or are kept in
the background by nationalist teachers or a nationalist press.

Of all the modern steps towards international unity, the most
indisputable, the most firmly based and furthest-reaching, is science,
and the various applications of science, both in promoting intercourse
between different parts of the world and in alleviating suffering and
strengthening and illuminating human life. The more prominence,
therefore, that we can secure for the growth of science in the teaching
of history, the larger place humanity, or the united mind of mankind,
will take in the moving picture which every one of us has, more or less
full and distinct, of the progress of the world. For some hundreds of
years, culminating in the three or four centuries A.D., the dominant
feature in the picture was of a triumphant city-state, Rome, gradually
subduing and embracing the world. Then for some thousand years the
picture was of a religious organization leading the civilized world, and
nationalities were only emerging as somewhat dim and ill-defined
figures. Then, with the rupture in the Church and the upspringing of
other religious bodies and forms of thought, national figures become
predominant in the scene, and attract nearly all the attention, which is
given, except by a few curious persons, to the study of history.
Nationalism, once in defect in Western Europe, has been for some time
in excess. The remedy is not directly to attack it, except in the case
in which it gave us no choice, but to supply the limiting and
controlling ideas. Of all these, science fits the case most exactly,
because, as science, it can know no distinction between French or
German, English or Russian. There is no French physics or German
chemistry, and if we are told that the Prussians have their own theory
of anthropology, based on the predominance of a particular type of skull
which other anthropologists dispute, we are quite sure that in that case
science has not yet said her last word.

We put physical science first because it contains the largest number of
certain and accepted laws. The further we get from mathematical
exactness the more liable we are to differences of opinion, which may,
as in the case of anthropology, cluster round some question of national
pique. But it would be easy to trace through all the sciences, and into
philosophy and religion, a growing unity of method and result before
which national differences often resolve themselves into a difference of
style. The style is the nation's, but the truth is mankind's.

We could not, indeed, be sure that if every one in Western Europe were a
trained scientist, wars would cease from the earth: certain professors
have taught us too well for that. But in so far as men come to recognize
that the great body of organized knowledge is a common possession, due
to the united efforts of different nations, and that it can only be
increased by joint action and may be increased to such a point that the
whole of life is a happier and nobler thing, so far they will be averse
to war. And in its various applications, to increasing production and
quickening communication, to lengthening life and healing sickness, to
protecting workers and cheapening food, men see the natural fruits of an
activity whose basis is common thought and its ultimate purpose the
common good.

It has been said with truth that it is easier to trace the growth of
science as a joint product of co-operating minds, than to find a growth
of common sentiments among the men and the nations who have created it.
True among individuals, it must be at least as true among groups and
nations. We may work successfully with some one at a problem or learn
from a teacher or a companion when we dislike him personally and do not
seek his society apart from the needs of our common work. It has often
happened, and will happen again in private and public. But though
particular antipathies may increase, the tendency to dislike others is a
diminishing quality among civilized men. In the long run common sense
and necessity will prevail. We are born to live a while before we die;
and we must live on the same planet, sometimes next door to those who
have sworn a never-dying hate.




II

UNITY IN PREHISTORIC TIMES[1]


The new perspective, with all its shift of values, which is forced on us
by the war, touches the past no less than the present and the future.
However objectively we try to present to ourselves the data of history,
we cannot emancipate ourselves from the need to present them from a
point of view which must in the last resort be our own. We may bring
ourselves by training and criticism nearer to the centre of things, more
intimate with essential factors and remote from the trivial periphery;
but it is a matter of degree, and historical study an affair after all
of mental triangulation. Like a surveyor in the field, we are safest in
our determination of any third position if we have already knowledge of
two, and of how the third looks from both of them. And even if we were
indeed at the centre of things, I suppose we might take our round of
angles quite uselessly, unless we had also some divine gift of judging
distances.

So the historian accepts his limitations as the rules of the game,
and sets out to see unity askance. It is his rare chance, if events
shift _him_, and set him gazing at a world in which, as now, half
his own career is inside the picture; not perhaps very easy to
find in a moment--as one might fail to recognize oneself in a
group-photograph--but none the less there, and intelligible only in
relation to its actual surroundings.

Looking back, indeed, over the course of anthropology and prehistoric
archaeology, much of which lies in the years since 1870, and nearly all
of it since 1815, the first thing which strikes us now is the frequency
and delicacy of its response to contemporary thoughts and aspirations. A
few of the greatest men have recognized this at the time. I quote from
Karl Ernst von Baer, the founder of comparative embryology, and in great
matters the master of men as different as Huxley, Spencer, and Francis
Balfour. He died in 1876, when political anthropology was still young;
but in his great book on Man he 'appeals to the experience of all
countries and ages, that if a people has power, and attempts wrongdoing
against another, it also does not omit to conceive the other as very
worthless and incompetent, and to repeat this conviction often and
emphatically' (_Der Mensch_, ii. 235). It is easy for us to dot the _i_
and cross the _t_ here; less easy perhaps to realize that what troubled
von Baer was the persistence of British and American ethnologists in the
polygenist heresy, which he traced (and rightly) to their reluctance to
treat their 'black brother' as if he were their relative at all.
Judgement in that ethnological controversy went by default, with the
victory of the North in the American Civil War; and in 1871 the lion lay
down with the lamb, even in London; inveterate foes in the Ethnological
Society and the Anthropological merging their fate in one
Anthropological Institute. In 1915 the reluctance of the 'tall fair
people who come from the north'--I borrow a phrase from Professor
Ridgeway--to fraternize with mere brunettes, beyond Rhine and Danube,
comes in its turn before the same tribunal as polygenism in 1862.

Our subject, 'Unity in Prehistoric Times', embraces three main topics:
(1) the unity of human effort and reason everywhere in Man's struggle
with Nature and with his Fellow-man; (2) the special conditions which
favoured or hindered unity of prehistoric culture in what has been
called elsewhere the 'north-west quadrant' of the Old-World land-mass
west of Ararat and the Median hills and north of Sahara, the cradle and
nursery of the modern 'western world'; and (3) the convergent lines of
advancement within that region, which can be traced through the
centuries before Roman policy let Greek culture penetrate almost as deep
into peninsular Europe as Alexander's conquests had opened to it the
inlands of the Near East.

When we speak of unity in human affairs, and particularly just now, when
the supreme unity seems to some to be nationalism, and to others the
negation, or rather the supersession of nationalism, we mean the rather
complex outcome of several distinct things. This complexity was
confessed, unwittingly perhaps, in the first humanist creed: 'I believe
in one Blood, one Speech, one Cult, one congruous Way of Living.'[2]
Modern ethnology, indeed, tends to subsume cult under way-of-living, as
a peculiarly delicate test of conformity--and to regard language,
alongside of both cult and way-of-living, as another manifestation of
the same human reason; distinguishing therefore two kinds of unity--one
physical or morphological, as of one animal species in an animal
kingdom, the other cultural or psychological, as of the sole incarnate
occupant of a realm of mind; and classifying the 'Science of Man'
accordingly. But, in essentials, that Athenian creed will serve: our
latest ethnologists, and statesmen too, are faced with the same league
of problems.


THE UNITY OF MANKIND AS AN ANIMAL SPECIES

Whatever Greek statesmen thought about the gulf between Greek and
Persian, or Greek and Barbarian generally, Greek ethnologists raised no
fundamental barrier between the different sorts of Man. Good naturalists
as they were, and experienced breeders of farm-stock, they accepted
white, brown, and black men; and were prepared to accept any other breed
that Nearchus or Pytheas might confront them with, as members of one
brotherhood, just as they accepted white, brown, or black sheep, with
horns of Ammon or with none. Eratosthenes, most philosophical, and
therewith most _political_ of them all, was bred in Cyrene, where some
Greeks seem to have been black; and he worked in Alexandria, where the
University was a human Zoo like that of London or Berlin. Their simple
farmer's theory of natural selection attributed 'scorched-faced'
Aethiopians to sunburn, and other racial types to large factors of
region and régime. The classical treatise is that of Hippocrates 'On
Air, Water, and Places'.[3]

In the modern world, too, no serious doubt was cast on the specific
unity of mankind, handed down from antiquity, until Linnaeus and Buffon
had refined upon the biological notions of genus and species (for both
of which there is only one word in Greek), and had defined species by
the criterion of fertility. Now not only the great explorers, but every
ship's captain, knew by this time that white men, at all events, would
form fertile unions with all known kinds of humanity. But in the
eighteenth century it became known also, and in the same empirical way,
that the fertility of unions between white men and black was imperfect;
and as this was the only human cross for which there was any large
quantity of evidence, the impression grew that the zoological distance
between these races was greater than had been supposed. On the other
hand, eighteenth-century formulators of the 'Rights of Man' challenged
reconsideration of the current practice of negro slavery; and the upshot
was a controversy. Abolitionists contended that the 'black brother' was
indeed a blood brother, and entitled to the 'Rights of Man'; their
opponents replied that the negro, being (as they held) of another
species, might justly be treated in all respects as one of white man's
domestic animals, and be his property as well as his drudge. At the turn
of the century, the adherence of Cuvier gave prestige to Polygenesis on
its scientific side: and it took all the reasonableness of Prichard in
the next generation to turn the tide even in England. But the issue of
the American Civil War, to which reference has already been made,
coincided so closely in time with the work of Darwin and Lyell on the
real meaning of species and on the antiquity of man, that the
controversy was closed without bitterness. The new phase of Polygenism
which seems now to be opening, with successive discoveries of the
quaternary stratification of races, and Keith's analysis of the family
tree of the _Hominidae_, starts from wholly different data,
unembarrassed by fears or hopes of a 'Neanderthal' origin for the Negro,
or for any living or recent _Homo_.

The 'human family' then seems re-established as something more than a
platform phrase; and separatists (who are always with us) have had to
fall back upon another criterion of disunity.


THE UNITY OF MANKIND AS A RATIONAL ANIMAL

Omitting language for a moment (which since first telling of the 'Tower
of Babel' story has somewhat fallen from grace as a symptom of unity
among mankind), or rather, subsuming it as one of the most essential
exhibitions of rationality, and indeed its chief instrument, we come to
Man's unity as a creature possessed of reason, and expressing this
reasoning habit in specific modes of living, under whatever external
surroundings. These being almost infinitely various, it is not always
easy to compare examples of Man's reaction to them. For proof of the
uniformity of human reasoning, indeed, we have to begin almost from an
animal plane. 'Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food,
subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and
cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Christian is?' And not only
is men's hunger, and their sensitiveness to 'the same summer and winter'
similar: their ways of satisfying hunger, their conduct of the
food-quest, their elementary organizations 'for the sake of maintaining
life', as Aristotle expressed it, exhibit one mental type throughout. In
the domestication of nature's gifts it is the same: in the fashioning of
implements and weapons, the improvisation of clothing and shelter, the
almost instinctive impulse to 'play with fire' which repels other
animals. Style and finish may vary, and do vary widely from one province
of culture to another; but in their last mechanical analysis, a spade is
a spade all the world over, and a celt a celt.

It was the service of the late General Pitt-Rivers in this country, and
of Klemm more laboriously abroad, to establish this aspect of the
'Evolution of Culture' beyond controversy: as it was the work of Boucher
de Perthes, and of Sir John Evans and Sir John Lubbock to proceed in the
reverse direction, from a criterion of utility to a hypothesis of
design, and the conclusion that certain stones, of reputedly prehuman
antiquity, must be the work of human hands, geared to human brains like
ours. Tylor's wider range of observation, conspicuously supplemented by
other work of Lubbock, embraced all human activities in one formula of
comparison, which is indeed as old as Thucydides.[4] We can infer, that
is, something about early stages of an advanced culture from the
present-day practices of savagery.

Yet, across this 'primitive culture', to use a phrase which has become
classical, so reasonable, and therewith so full of uniformities, in its
intimate interplay of hand and tongue with brain, patches of shadow
fall; a chaos of such incredible absurdities and (in the widest sense)
of 'barbarities', that the charitable hypothesis that here and there man
has lost his way and just _stopped thinking_ hardly seems adequate to
account for things, and writers like Lévy-Bruhl are provoked to the
pessimist guess that there can be a savage logic which is different from
ours and yet is 'logical' in some coherent sense; which _stets verneint_
the conclusions, and even the axioms, which are clear as day to us; and
is a 'knowledge of evil' side by side with the knowledge of good.

But examples of this 'primitive thought', when we come to analyse them,
all seem to resolve themselves into one or other of the ordinary sorts
of fallacy, as our own logic-books expound them. If the study of them
proves anything at all, it is the familiar aphorism that, while there is
only one right way of doing and thinking, there are countless ways of
going wrong. Among the most reasonable people (at their highest) that
the world has yet seen, there were some of the worst miscarriages of
reason and of morals; and throughout their great centuries there was no
word either for the devil or for sin in their language. For the Greek
all human wrongdoing came under the one simple category of [Greek:
hamartia], 'making a mistake', or better 'making a miss'. It is the
slang of target-practice, for the correlative [Greek: otochazein], used
of all happy guesses at truth, is likewise only the word for '_aiming_
straight'.

But why make mistakes? Why these failures of co-ordination between
design and execution, between nature's truth and man's theory and
practice? Why this declining from the best into sloppy or antiquated
work, to name only two main sorts of technological fallacy? Again the
answer comes down, past Lucretius, from the Ionian physicist. It is only
in superficial appearance that 'though reason is common to all, most men
live as if they had a way of thinking of their own',[5] Heraclitus'
momentary despair anticipating Lévy-Bruhl almost verbally. Once
penetrate, with Heraclitus himself, below the surface, and 'all men have
it in them to understand themselves and to think straight'.[6] It is
failure to think, not some distinct and illogical sort of thinking, that
is the cause of the trouble: the lapse of that 'organized common sense'
which is the content of all 'science'.

Such disorganization of common sense, 'idiotic' thinking, in the
Heraclitan sense of an [Greek: idia phronêsis], can be as cumulative,
fallacy on fallacy, and as elaborately wrong, as the fabric of knowledge
is cumulatively and elaborately right. 'Hath this man sinned, or his
parents, that he was born blind?' That is the tragedy of primitive
culture: for the brains are there and the eyes; only they have never
seen anything straight, because in the world they were bred up in there
was nothing left straight to be seen.

Lucretius hit upon half the trouble when he referred the organized
absurdities of his contemporaries to hereditary fear: which in the last
analysis is a derangement of the higher activities extending to
abdication. Its onset is an ataxy; and its culmination a paralysis. In
its mental aspect it is failure of the Will-to-know; acceptance of an
inferiority to which ignorance consigns us.

The other half of the trouble, less clearly diagnosed by Lucretius, but
detected, as we have seen, by Heraclitus, is hereditary pride, based on
ignorance no less than is Lucretian fear. It is the 'lie-in-the-soul',
the conviction, assailed by Socrates and before his time as well as
after, that we know how things stand, when in fact we do not. Like fear,
in its mental aspect, it is a failure of the Will-to-know; once again,
an acceptance of the inferior status of the ignorant.

Organized fears, then, lead to _tabu_, the systematic inhibition of
experiment which might conflict with hypothesis; and organized pride, to
_magic_, with its systematic disregard of the results of each experiment
that is made, when it does so conflict with hypothesis. And it is these
two superstructures of ignorance, inhibiting and insisting by turns,
which add the glamour of irrationality to so much of the behaviour of
mankind, and disguise its native rationalism and its morality too. Beset
by fear and pride, craftsman and cultivator and explorer and reformer
alike are in the same predicament. 'I could do this or that and do it
thus, but may I?' and if such opinion as counts says 'Thou shalt not',
the fallacious substitution of 'shalt not' for 'mayst' cannot fail to
endanger advancement. It may be over the chipping of a flint axe, or a
trade-union rule about a high-speed lathe; but if the craftsman conforms
to opinion as such, and not through positive concurrence of his own
judgement with it, he has accepted the fallacious conclusion as his own,
and lets his work fall to second-hand and to second-best.

Wide uniformities of conduct and of material culture may therefore
result from ignorance, no less than from knowledge, and unless we have
very full acquaintance with the region and external conditions, it is
not easy to decide whether any one of these uniformities is wisely
uniform or not. The record of the dealings of quite well-meaning
conquerors with the institutions and arts of their subjects is full of
tragedies of this kind. I call to mind an example in Paraguay, where
abstention from infanticide, after conversion to Christianity, nearly
wrought the extinction of a native tribe, for the population at once
began to exceed the means of subsistence; and it was only when the
committee in London was induced (just in time) to apply mission funds to
the purchase of seeds and implements of agriculture that the danger was
averted. It is not my purpose here to commend infanticide; only to
indicate that while man cannot live by bread alone, he cannot go on
living, even a good life, if he really falls short of bread. So with
devotion to an ideal unity of culture, we are to combine toleration of
wide diversity, seeing how diverse are the surroundings which make up
the Home of Man. Were Nature uniform, in a geographical sense, from pole
to pole, civilization might be practically as well as ideally one,
though it may fairly be doubted whether in such a world civilization,
such as we know, would arise; but with the present distribution of land
and water, temperature and rainfall, and the complex of plants and
animals which results from their interaction, unity among the phenomena
of culture ceases to be practicable, and it has become hard for some (as
we have seen) even to keep their faith in the unity of human reason.

It was not, in fact, till a rather later stage in the growth of science,
either in the old world, or in our own, that anyone troubled himself
about the existence of such unity at all. That men of alien blood should
behave in alien and incomprehensible ways seemed to the Greek and to the
navigators of the Renaissance equally natural. And Herodotus and Bodin,
to name only pioneers and masters, are agreed as to the cause. Variety
in Man's behaviour is no impish trick of original sin: it is the
response of his single reason to variety in Nature. Only when experience
added intimacy with alien individuals to observations of their habits of
life, did a common humanity in their behaviour begin to be so frequent
and obvious as to cause surprise. Acquiescence in the discovery is
implicit in Thucydides and Hobbes, and confessed in Aristotle and Locke.
Had Europe broken into the Great East in Locke's day, as the Greeks
broke into Persia in Aristotle's, we might have had completer analogy
between the ethnology of Montesquieu and that of Eratosthenes than we
can actually trace. The defect in the writer of the _Lettres Persanes_
is in his knowledge of Persia, not of Paris and London: Eratosthenes, as
we remember, was born in Cyrene and worked in Alexandria.


MAN IN CONFLICT WITH NATURE IN THE NORTH-WEST QUADRANT OF THE OLD WORLD

We come now, from this rather general survey of human faculty, to the
more pertinent question, what sort of unity do we find in human
achievement within that region, or rather within those regions, of the
Old World where the stream-heads of our modern culture seem to take
their rise? The qualification which has slipped from my pen is half the
answer already, for we are to deal not with one homogeneous region but
with a cluster of regions in all climates from Arctic tundra to Sahara
and the Nile, and in all altitudes from alpine to maritime. Unity of
prehistoric culture, in such conditions, can at best be but a question
of degree.

Modern ethnology, emancipated from a belief in an immediate
consanguinity of mankind, by the spread of less infantile views about
Noah's Ark, goes on to question the sufficiency of language as a bond
of union, and forthwith stumbles over the Tower of Babel.

Two contemporary lines of discovery have tended to determine the result.
Geology gives us a very long margin of time since the north-west
quadrant began to be reinhabited by human beings after the Ice Age, and
assumed approximately its present distribution of land and water.
Archaeology, which in this aspect is the special stratigraphy of man,
sanctions an extension of time, since not merely human beings but
organized societies of men made their appearance in Europe, which far
exceeds the period required, or commonly assumed, for the spread of any
known Indo-European language, from any possible 'home' to any region
where it was spoken at the beginning of historic time. And not only does
archaeological evidence enable us to detect such societies sedentary for
a while on this or that site over the face of Europe and its
neighbourhood; it traces not merely one 'prehistoric culture', but a
number of distinct types of such culture, each with its own geographical
distribution, and with distributions which expand and contract at
different times, superseding one type of culture here, and another
there, and in turn superseded by others.

It is not easy to bring home the extent of this diversity to those who
are not familiar with the physical condition of a Europe which was as
yet largely in the 'backwood' stage of exploitation. But it will give
some idea of the range of contrast, if we revert to the method of
Thucydides,[7] and compare the unexploited Europe of the days before
agriculture, with unexploited America at the time of its discovery by
Europeans. Here, within the same geographical limits of the north
temperate zone, and with the far simpler scheme of surface relief which
characterizes the New World, we have civilizations as different as those
of the Eskimo, the Algonkin peoples of the coniferous forests, the Huron
and Iroquois of the deciduous hardwoods, horticultural Muscogeans in the
south-east, buffalo-hunting Sioux on the prairie, predatory Apaches and
Blackfeet in the foothills, and littoral and riparian fisher-folk on the
Pacific slope: just as recognizable now, in their distributions and
overlaps, by the fashions of their pipe-bowls and other débris, as are
the representatives of the 'row-grave' culture or the makers of
'band-keramik' in Central Europe.

Keeping in mind this analogy of prehistoric Europe with pre-Columbian
North America, let us classify the problems of subsistence which these
Old World regions offered to prehistoric man; and consider, granting him
all the reason in the world, and uniform physique (if you please) as
well, how he is to formulate solutions which shall show any trace of
uniformity, and yet be solutions for him of the one Protean problem, how
to sustain life here and now?

Along the Arctic seaboard, homogeneous from Behring Strait nearly to the
North Cape, we have the frozen tundra region, with a characteristic
tundra culture; pushed now far north since Europe mellowed into a
habitable world, but formerly widespread about the skirts of the
shrinking ice-sheet. Here we hunt large animals and sea-shore beasts,
and trap small-deer very ingeniously; we fish in the large
northward-flowing rivers; and eventually (heaven knows after how long,
or how far back from now) we borrowed a notion, probably from pastorals
imprudently straying too far along those northward river-lanes through
the forests, and domesticated our best of beasts, the reindeer; stealing
a march here on our Alaskan cousins, who call them caribou and treat
them so: _they_ had no pastorals on the prairie southward to teach them
otherwise, and when the Russians came and brought reindeer over from
Asia, the silly fellows turned them loose and hunted them till they had
eaten them all.

South of the tundra, the Great Northern Woodland encircles the planet,
interrupted only by the treeless sea. Here too we hunt, and trap, and
eat berries of the undergrowth, like Algonkins or Tacitean Germans, many
of whom had no more skill in cattle than Algonkins. But we have not the
place to ourselves, like the tundra folk and the Algonkins. Our forest
world is in ever-present danger of disintegration, and our wood-craft
with it. Fond folk with tame animals (poor sport, both of them, for
sportsmen like us) come blundering in off the parkland away south, up
the grassy glades, trampling undergrowth and scaring the game. People
are saved from all that 'over there', because no one can tame the
prairie buffalo and drive _him_ over the hunting grounds; some sport,
too, the prairie buffalo! And worse still, there are the people who come
hacking and burning our great trees, and tearing up the turf and
underwood, and all to plant their fancy grasses with the fat seeds, that
the deer like to browse over; and that is the only thing to make those
people show fight, if we or the deer go among their fat-grass plots.
Those people come up, too, from the south and the south-east, and have
to go back thither for seed if their sowings fail. Of course they like
their animals tame, like the other fellows; but the grasses are their
first string, as we bow-men say.

Southward, enveloping the Alpine ridges, except where the snow peaks
perforate its carpet covering, the Woodland changes its character,
rather than gives place to anything fresh along the shores of the Lake
Region of the Old World. Here and there, in detached plateaux enfolded
among the ranges (like the Salt Lake basin and the Shoshonean plateaux
in America), there are isolated grassy plains, repeating on a smaller
scale the great grassland which skirts the Black Sea and the Caspian.
Examples are the heart of Spain and of Asia Minor, and the miniature
grasslands of the Balkan Peninsula, such as Thessaly and Eastern Thrace.

It is in the southern third, or thereabouts, of the continuous Woodland,
where the deciduous forest trees begin to give place to evergreens, as
they themselves replaced the conifers further north, that the minutely
subdivided horticulture and arboriculture begins, which characterize the
Mediterranean region. To call it agriculture would be to exaggerate its
scale. It is more like a northerly extension of tropical _Hackbau_, as
the Germans call those forms of plant-raising which dispense with plough
and spade, and employ only mattocks or hoes, which are little more than
earth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in which
the Greek peasant and what Homer called his 'foot-trailing' oxen work
their Virgilian plough through the recesses of a field no bigger than a
cabbage-patch, and well stocked with olive-trees besides, to realize how
truly in this kind of farming the ox is in place of a house-slave to a
poor man. For the house-slave could handle a _zappa_, the spadelike
Levantine hoe, where an ox would fail to turn round, yet where
food-plants could be coaxed to grow, and an olive-tree would luxuriate.

This kind of garden-cultivation indeed repeats very closely the
foodquest of the Muskogean cultivators in the South-eastern States, who
make up the so-called 'civilized tribes' and, almost alone among the
Redskins, 'are all self-supporting and prosperous'.[8] In the Old World,
as in the New, its distribution is closely defined by certain limits of
rainfall and temperature, and most of all by the extent to which the
rainfall is concentrated into a few winter months, so that a dry warm
summer is assured, which Man can mitigate and even exploit if he has
access to perennial water. It extended, therefore, in quite early times,
and still predominates, all round the mountainous shores of the
Mediterranean, from Syria by Southern Europe to Algeria and Tunis, and
penetrates inland and upland into the forests till summer clouds and
rainfall check it. In this region of its distribution Greek and Roman
legends betray the belief that grain-cultivation came late, and
superseded a staple diet of tree produce, chestnut, walnut, filbert, and
acorn.[9] And when the 'nobler grasses' came, it was barley and red
wheat that predominated, as indeed they predominate still.

But this is only one part of the distribution of the garden-culture. Far
north along the Atlantic seaboard, and as far inland as the mild
Atlantic climate is perceptible, the same type prevails. Its ancient
limit is traced meteorologically in Tacitus' complaints (for example) of
the austerity of the lands beyond the Rhine. In this northern region
grain crops pass from red to white wheat, from barley to oats, and from
both to rye. The ease with which the Muskogean potato and tomato have
been acclimatized, and their respective prevalence now in the Atlantic
and Mediterranean sections, illustrate exactly the place which primitive
hoe-culture held in the economy of the Old-World region. Early monuments
of this culture, in which hoe and ox-plough are equally conspicuous, are
the 'meraviglie' rock-carvings above Ventimiglia.[10] The fine flower of
it is the Minoan civilization of the Crete and the South Aegean.
Egyptian agriculture is also in great part hoe-work.

South-eastward, outside the Carpathians, and within them also, in the
great plain of Hungary, we meet a totally different régime; vast
featureless and treeless grasslands, extending past the Black Sea and
Caspian to the foot of the mountains of North Persia and the spurs of
the Central Asian highlands. Here, if Man is to maintain himself at all,
he must be master of tame animals which can eat the grass, and in turn
sustain him. South of the eastward continuation of the woodland Mountain
Zone, through Asia Minor into Persia, and also south of the
Mediterranean lake-region and the ridges of Syria and the 'Africa Minor'
of Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco, which partly enclose it, lies another
group of grasslands, Arabia and Sahara, desert-hearted, but capable of
sustaining a considerable population of nomad pastoral folk round their
margins and in oases, and of emitting them in volcanic emigrations now
and then.

From the human point of view, the profound difference between the
northern and the southern group of these grasslands, which collectively
lie athwart the great east-and-west mountain zone of the Old World, is
this. The southern grassland sustains sheep and goats almost
exclusively; it acquired its domesticated horses recently (at earliest
about 2000 B.C.) and from the north-east; and it relies, for transport,
on camels and asses, not on wheeled vehicles. The northern, on the other
hand, has sufficient perennial pasture to permit of oxen; it uses horses
habitually; and it has utilized the timber of its parkland margin, where
it passes over into the northern forest, to construct wheeled carts and
ox-ploughs. Equipped with these fundamental implements of civilization,
wheel-borne nomads have penetrated the Mountain Zone from the north
again and again, introducing the cart into Egypt rather late, and
perhaps even into Babylonia; though with these exceptions no secondary
centre of cart-folk was ever established in the south. Obvious reasons
for this failure lie in the scarcity of parkland and of perennial
pasture for large cattle. At best, Assyria and Syria adopted the horsed
chariot for war; but these regions, like the Hittite chariot-users of
Asia Minor, the Achaean conquerors of the Greek peninsula, and the Gauls
in West-Central Europe, are rather within the parkland fringes of the
Mountain Zone, and among those intermont plateaux which we have noted
already, than borderers of the Grassland itself. In particular, they are
all sedentary, and stand in this respect contrasted with the migratory
Scythian cart-folk in the northern Grassland. The only nomad cart-folk
within the Mountain Zone are the Gipsies,[11] and they seem mainly to
have formed their habit of life in the largest intermont plateau of all,
the vast table-land of Persia.

The plough is less easy to trace. All that can be safely said at present
is that it is a device for applying the strength of large cattle to
break up the soil for a grain crop, deeply and uniformly, and above all
more rapidly than a man can dig it with a hoe. By his own effort a man
can barely break up enough ground to supply his home with grain, except
in irrigated land. With the simplest of ploughs he can do this and more,
and yet have leisure for other pursuits within the ploughing season. But
it is not yet clear in what region ploughing first began. Probably it
was in the comparatively well-watered and well-wooded margin of one of
the large grasslands; but whether north or south of the Mountain Zone,
or round the discontinuous plateaux within it, is not clear. The
presumption of large cattle favours the north, yet Babylonia, and even
Egypt, had large cattle from very early times. North Syria seems to
dispute with Babylonia priority in the production of wheat. Somewhere
in this region we may provisionally place the cradle of what I may
perhaps describe as the Bread-and-Cheese culture, in which the staple
foods are provided by grain-plants and cattle, the latter being valued
for their strength and their milk products, but not primarily for their
flesh.

Disseminated westward, the Bread-and-Cheese culture is found to suffer
regional modification. Southward, among the Mediterranean evergreen
flora and old hoe-cultivation, the dearth of summer grass makes the
large cattle useless for milking, as well as for beef; they are bred
exclusively for draught, as their gait and structure show, and while
cheese is supplied by the sheep and goats, butter and animal-fats are
replaced by the vegetable oils, of which the olive is the chief, a
characteristic Mediterranean product, evergreen, deep-rooted against
summer drought, and fleshy-fruited. A Bread-and-Olive culture results,
familiar to all visitors to Mediterranean lands. In the deciduous
forests of South-Central Europe there is grass in the clearings, and
milk enough; but goats and sheep are restricted, as the undergrowth
becomes deeper and denser, and the prime giver of fats is the
forest-bred pig: in a land rolling with ham and sausages we reach the
Bread-and-Bacon culture. Further afield still, and later, in proportion
as the forest is opened out by semi-pastoral folk, the moister summer
permits open meadow-land, with perennial grass, and the possibility of
hay. Here too the grain crops may be so large that there is something
over to fatten stock; and to Bread and Cheese the farmer of the
north-western plains adds Beef. When there is coarse grain in plenty, of
course, the large-boned horse of the north gradually replaces the ox at
the plough, and permits him to be bred, as with ourselves, not for
draught at all, but for milking and killing exclusively. It is in this
final phase that the Bread-and-Beef culture passes over eventually into
the New World, and into the South Temperate Zone. It has been rather a
long story to tell, and full of platitudes, but the gist of it is by
this time clear. Whatever be the superstructure of social institutions,
of arts and sciences, of religion and philosophy, that European men have
built upon it, the régime which has made the Western World what it is,
from before the dawn of metallurgy until now, has been generically a
Bread culture; based on that combination of pastoral and agricultural
life in which large cattle co-operate with man in the laborious
preparation of the soil which cereal crops require. But the Bread
culture itself is always supplemented by some form of milk product, of
which cheese is typical. It is almost always supplemented further by
some special provision of fats; in Mediterranean conditions by olives
and oil, involving extensive tree culture; in the forest region by pig's
meat; and on the Atlantic seaboard by butter and beef.

The exhilarants show the same geographic control; with the olive culture
go the wines and brandies of the south; with the forest culture, the
ciders and the cherry brandies of Central Europe; with the copious
cereals and meadow-grass, the beers and whiskies of the North. In
details, of course, the distribution of types is intricately confused;
but the main outline is clear; and we reach a first glimpse of a
coherent European culture, on the almost animal plane of regional
foodquests.


RACE, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE AS FACTORS OF UNITY

Precedence has been given in our inquiry to the mere animal struggle of
man with nature for bare subsistence, for two distinct reasons. The
first is economic, namely, that just because this struggle is without
qualification that of a highly intelligent animal species to maintain
itself under these or those conditions, it is one which befalls equally
every breed or race of that species which is ever exposed to those
conditions; and further, is no more mitigated by considerations of
language than by considerations of race. The second reason is historical
or archaeological. The spread of the Bread culture is dated so far back
in the history of man in this region, as to make it certain that it
preceded not merely the spread of the prevalent Indo-European group of
languages, but even the present distribution of racial types. It
certainly reached Italy, and the Atlantic seaboard as the British Isles,
before the brachycephalic 'Alpine' men arrived there; and still more
before the Boreal invasions of Britain and the opposite coasts. Indeed,
it would be truer to say that in general each breed of man which has
changed its distribution has had to adopt sooner or later the types of
culture appropriate to the regions into which it has penetrated, than to
associate the spread of any element of culture so fundamental as the
food-quest with the migrations of any racial type.

Race, indeed, in Europe, as well as further afield, has been anything
but a factor of unity. When we speak (on platforms) of Europeans as
'white men', we are in danger of forgetting, what every practical man in
our audience knows, that we are dealing with at least three distinct
breeds of mankind, which agree, indeed, rather imperfectly in the
whiteness of their skin, but differ greatly in other points of structure
and physique, including resistance to certain types of climate and
regional diseases, and not least in temperament and the quality of their
response to Nature's challenges of hardship or indulgence. Of these
three breeds of man, only one, the blond Boreal giants (the only 'white
men' in the strict sense of defect of pigment in skin, hair, and eyes)
is exclusively European now, and has his habitat within the area of the
'Boreal' groups of animals and plants. His champions in ethnological
propaganda seem to be of two minds about his earlier distribution;
either his 'home' was round the Baltic, in which case it is difficult to
see why he should be represented as a civilizing agency, in view of the
cultural backwardness of that region; or else it was out on the Eurasian
grassland, in which case he is as much an intruder into peninsular
Europe as his brachycephalic 'Alpine' rival, and his claim to represent
indigenous European man must go. The large part which he has played in
European history seems to result partly from his great physical
strength, surpassed (I believe) only by that of the Negro, partly from
his reluctance, not so much to interbreed with more pigmented strains,
but to admit the crossbred offspring to full partnership with himself.
Even among his like, he has his own criteria by which one 'white man'
knows another, and coheres with him politically.

Most strongly contrasted externally with the 'Boreal' type is the
slight-built Mediterranean brunet. That his home is in the south, that
he is closely related with the men of the African and Arabian
grasslands, and that he was among the first post-glacial explorers of
the Atlantic seaboard, is admitted. More doubt arises as to the extent
to which he penetrated from these southern and western bases into the
heart of peninsular Europe. Certainly as we trace him to the south-east
he seems more and more restricted to the Mediterranean coastline, and at
last has no early monopoly even of the islands. The contrast between
Crete and Cyprus is instructive as to this. The 'Mediterranean' type, in
fact, reaffirms to the anthropologist the close zoological affinity
between South-west Europe and North-west Africa.

But if Europe 'ends at the Pyrenees', it ends also anthropologically at
the Balkans, or even at the Carpathians; for the whole Balkan Peninsula,
and most of the highland core of peninsular Europe, is essentially
continuous with Asia Minor and the next eastward sections of the
Mountain Zone, so far as its human population is concerned, no less than
in its animals and plants. Biological continuity is as complete at the
Bosphorus as it is at Gibraltar. Here, what remains in dispute is not so
much whether 'Alpine' types are ultimately of Anatolian origin, as
whether their spread in Europe has been early or late, and whether their
predecessors here were predominantly 'Boreal' or 'Mediterranean'. It is
difficult, and perhaps needless, to decide whether lack of evidence or
political enthusiasm is more to blame for this; for the Roundheads of
prehistoric and of modern Europe are as contentious matter as their
English namesakes in the seventeenth century.

To this broadly threefold analysis of European man, add only this, that
ever since the old 'Sarmatian' sea shrank to its present dimensions and
left the grasslands open between Tienshan and the Carpathians, there has
been a steady westward movement of Mongoloid folk until a strong enough
Muscovy was interposed; and that along the Northern Woodland also there
has been westward movement, slower but no less persistent; and it will
be clear that it is not to race that we have to look for any uniform
basis of our European culture.

Nor is such a basis to be found in Language. People often speak of
Indo-European speech as though they really confused linguistic affinity
with mutual intelligibility. But if you want to test the unifying
influence of kindred languages, get a Welshman, a German, a Russian, and
a Greek into a room together, and see what the 'concert of Europe'
amounts to. The odds are that if they confer at all, they will do so in
French, which is in the strict sense of the word a 'modern' language;
while if you allowed them to write and gave them time, there is just a
chance that the Greek would impose his language on the other three.

There is no need to labour this point further than to recall the
fateful bisection of the culture of the European peninsula which
resulted from the linguistic alienation of Constantinople from Rome; of
the Mediterranean base which understood Latin, from that which thought
in Greek. In this tragic respect, which the Turkish conquest, with its
linguistic and religious sequel, has done little more than aggravate,
Europe ends still at the Save; whereas Rome's greatest daughters have
reconquered more than all that Carthage ever held in Africa. And the
re-incorporation of Britain, too, into the comity of nations is
concurrent with the Latinization of its speech, on which the seal was
set in 1611. Late as it was, then, in any case, in the prehistory of the
region, the spread of a single type of linguistic structure over Europe
has brought not peace, but a sword.

What then of Religion? How far were the older ethnologists on the right
lines, when (in spite of language, rather than aided by it) they
co-ordinated their own Olympus with the confederate polytheisms of the
North? Here, too, we have to keep the dates in mind, and clear ourselves
of enthusiasms. It is not from Tacitus or Caesar, nor even so near to
the Olympians' dwelling-place as the Thrace of Herodotus' time, that we
get our modern impression of the nearness of Olympus to Asgard. If
northern genealogies are any guide,--and they are not likely to have
reduced the real interval wittingly--Rome's empire reached its full
extent while Asgard was in building, or before. And Olympus was in
building, by Greek accounts, not many generations before the Trojan War.
In both cases we are dealing with political and almost historical
transactions; it was not in finished societies like these that Great
Gods (or their votaries either) set out from 'home' over the face of
Europe to unite it.

And when we pass behind Olympian structures, and look into the cults
which they served to federate, such uniformities as they present prove
far too much. The open-air gods of Tacitus (_Germania_, chap. 9) are
common to Semitic folk, and to many peoples further afield, who are
either not sedentary or are themselves not easily 'confined within
walls', but haunt 'forests and groves'.

Leaving, then, these high works of the mind, Language and Religion,
which have proved but blind guides, and 'of a short stay' in this
labyrinth, let us turn to the material evidence of industrial and
aesthetic activity. Here we begin at least to get something like
first-hand evidence, for we have the manufactured object itself, not
Caesar's impression of a Celtic god, or Herodotus' transcript of a
Scythian word. We can judge for ourselves of fabrics and styles, and
though, of course, we have only objects of the least perishable sorts,
stone, metal, pottery, we have, at all events, in the pottery the most
imitative of arts, and therefore the widest basis for conclusions as to
the principles of a style. Moreover, outside the sea-borne culture of
the Mediterranean, pottery does not travel far: its uses are domestic,
not commercial. John Gilpin's fate is typical of those who would carry
things on horseback in bottles. Like words, however, potsherds enlighten
us more about frontiers and contrasts than about uniformities. They are
terribly provincial and tell their tale with a twang. We can trace our
_Bandkeramik_ and _Schnurkeramik_ and _Urfirnissmalerei_ and all that
sort of technological idiom, across the map, as we can trace the
_centum_ and _satem_ languages. But even if we could collate the
'Bandkeramiker' with the 'Satemvölker' as recent enthusiasts propose, we
should be no nearer to a common technology for Europe than we were to a
common language.

Metal, and even stone, implements do not help us much further, though
they were traded more widely than pottery, and form larger provinces. In
modern Europe, in the same way, pocket-knives are rather more uniform
than milk-jugs; and where they differ, are referable to fewer types. But
there is no unity, nor for the present any prospect of it. For anything
more, we are reduced to the great crises of material culture, such as
the introduction of bronze, of iron, of glass and glazed earthenware;
and these we perceive increasingly not as turning points of the whole,
but as processes within it, affecting now one region, now another, in a
sequence which is clearly geographical and at very variable speed.
Bronze, for example, took some thousands of years to permeate the
continent of Europe; iron perhaps as many hundreds; platinum a little
more than fifty years; and radium less than five.

What we do get from this material evidence, however, is a quite
indisputable sequence of styles in time in each locality where we can
hit upon stratified remains. Dead men, they say, tell no tales;
potsherds are as truthful and eloquent as they are, for the very reason
that, once broken, they are dead and done with, and are allowed to lie
quiet in their rubbish heaps. Intervals indeed we cannot so easily
measure; but of sequences we can be sure, and by comparing the sequences
on different sites we can go far towards tracing the spread and
supersession of a style, sometimes over wide areas, and occasionally,
with the help of the geography, we can be pretty sure of the routes by
which innovations travelled. We can infer nothing, however, from this as
to the movements of people: the vogue of the willow-pattern plate is no
measure of our 'yellow-peril'. But where works of art can travel, ideas
can travel too; and can travel right across the frontiers of race and
language and even of religion; meaning at all events by these, the
customary observance of each region, and of its endemic population. A
few merchants, or craftsmen, or philosophers, work transformations in
culture and bring about uniformities, of which language, or
cult-edifices give us no indication at all, or at best an aftermath of
decadence.

It is not a merely ephemeral interest which draws attention at this
point to the significance of engines of war, among this class of
transferable inventions. Little has been done in a systematic way on
this topic, but the rapidity with which a really important change in
equipment and organization passes from camp to camp, and revolutionizes
not only armies but states, when it is a question of survival or defeat,
has its illustration in many phases of warfare, and ranks among the
great levellers of national or regional pride.

The recorded movements of peoples in historic times, and the previous
movements inferred from language, and other symptoms, indicate a
long-established distribution of what might be described in
meteorological phrase as _man-pressure_; certain regions being
characterized either always or repeatedly by high man-pressure, and an
outward flow of men into the cyclonic areas or vortexes of low
man-pressure in the human covering (or biosphere) of the planet. Typical
high-pressure regions are the Arabian peninsula with its repeated crises
of Semitic eruption, and the great Eurasian grasslands. Typical regions
of low man-pressure, and repeated irruption, are the South European
peninsulas. Occasionally a region plays both parts, alternately
accepting inhabitants, and unloading them on to other lands; examples
are the Hungarian plain, Scandinavia, and Britain. Others again can
hardly be said to have a population of their own at all, but are simple
avenues of transmission, like Western Switzerland and the Hellespont
Region. I am speaking now, of course, about ancient times. The causes of
these recurrent movements are not clearly made out; but the movements
themselves, and the fact that they are of regional recurrence, are
matters of history.

Conspicuous among such movements are the westward drift from Asia into
peninsular Europe, in its three parallel columns, through tundra,
forest, and steppe; and the southward drifts, subsidiary to this, from
East Central Europe into the Balkan lands and round the head of the
Adriatic. The course of these drifts is laid out in detail, as we have
seen, by the physique of the regions; and therewith is determined the
kind of life which each set of folk must be living if it is to survive
the journey.

And here we come at once upon a new factor making strongly for a more
general uniformity of culture within peninsular Europe than its physical
character would at all prepare us to expect. For although individual men
often respond very rapidly to fresh surroundings, and can change their
mode of life almost as they change their clothes, societies react far
more slowly; at the pace, in fact, usually of their most obstinate
members. Confronted therefore with the opportunity, or the need, for a
change of habit, in the course of a migration for example, they must
either refuse it, like a shy horse, or (if they accept it) enter on
their new career imperfectly trained, and extemporizing adjustments here
and there in very unworkmanlike fashion. Only rarely does the statesman
or 'lawgiver' appear, just when he is wanted, to bring Israel up out of
Egypt into the desert, and out of the desert into the good land beyond
Jordan, and to canonize a new code of behaviour suited to a new set of
needs. This social inertia, of which political history is the sorry
record, is of course least perceptible, and most effective, when the
region of transition is graduated gently; and we have already seen that
this is conspicuously so around the parkland margin of the northern
grassland, where it faces on peninsular Europe. Let us follow this clue
in detail.

We may safely assume, as we have seen, that for a long while past, every
group of newcomers into peninsular Europe has come equipped with the
particular type of social organization which enabled it to make good,
either on the tundra, or in the northern woodland, or on the steppe, or
(if it came across the Bosphorus) on the enclosed plateaux of Asia Minor
and beyond. The tundra does not greatly concern us, for the White Sea
cuts through it, and deep into the woodland, and bars off the Lapps from
the Samoyeds and their kin. Classical descriptions of the inhabitants of
the North German plain make it clear that its culture, even so late as
the first century B.C., was at its best a broken prolongation of the
pastoral life of the steppe margin, and that less fortunate tribes
either had never had cattle, like the hunting Redskins of the
corresponding forest zone of North America, or had lost them since they
entered the forest, and maintained themselves by hunting and robbery
like the broken pastorals who infest the east edge of the Congo basin;
the Chatti of Tacitus' day enjoying tyrannous hegemony not unlike that
of the Five Nations.

It is probably to this westward drift from more purely pastoral
condition to less, that we must attribute the only really large unity of
European civilization in the later prehistoric ages, namely, its social
organization in patriarchal households linked into clans and tribes. We
may doubt whether this social type is permanently adaptable to a forest
régime, any more than to industrial life. Certainly forest folk outside
peninsular Europe only display it rarely and imperfectly. But it is
characteristic of all pastoral folk; once established, it coheres and
persists under great external stresses; and in early Europe its
liability (strong though its structure is) to break up sooner or later
into a more individualistic order, was counteracted by the recurrent
drift of new grassland peoples westward from one of its principal homes.
Grassland Arabia, let us note in passing, has been performing the same
function, since history began, for its own marginal neighbours from
Babylonia to Palestine and Egypt.

On the other hand, we now see why the feminism which recurs
intermittently in our 'western' world culminates in those phases of its
history when that world has been strong enough to close its avenues of
intrusion for a while; in the far past which has left us the great
goddesses and other matrilineal survivals; in industrial Babylonia; in
the Minoan palaces; in fifth-and fourth-century Greece, as Aristophanes
joins with Euripides to admit, and Euripides with Plato to advocate; in
the _Femmes savantes_ of renascent Europe; in eighteenth-century France,
which seemed to itself so impregnable; and in the _fin-de-siècle_ Europe
of yesterday, pulling down its barns to build greater.

No one would suggest that this patriarchal and tribal structure favoured
political unity or large enterprises of any kind. In fact, throughout
the early history of Europe these coherent kinship groups, with their
inner insulation and their inability to offer anything but passive
resistance to the forces which were to dissolve them, were an
insuperable bar to anything politically larger. 'If only these could
hold together, they would rule the world' is the judgement of Herodotus
on Scythia, of Thucydides on Thrace, of Polybius and Caesar upon Gaul,
of Tacitus on Germany: each with the unspoken afterthought 'but thank
goodness that they cannot!'

But while it hindered larger growths of political structure, so long as
it remained intact, and furnished a strong social skeleton upon which to
frame manners and ideals which are among man's highest achievements,
patriarchal society had its own dangers, and has now so nearly succumbed
to them, that to see its institutions in working order we have to
penetrate into Albania or amongst the least modern backwoods of the
Slav-speaking east. To take only the leading instance, Greek tribal
society dissolved within historic times under the double attack of
individualism, industrial and commercial, at the one end, and of the
federalism of the city state, at the other. For Aristotle the
village-community was the 'colony' ([Greek: apoikia]) or direct
offspring of the patriarchal household, but he nowhere admits the
city-state to be the 'colony' of the village-community. On the contrary,
at the risk of upsetting his own theory of the state as a natural
outgrowth of man's political nature, he lays stress on 'the man who
first introduced them to each other' as the 'author of the greatest
advantages'. And it was precisely this process of 'introducing them to
one another', so that the members of hitherto autonomous clans became
friends instead of enemies, and were thenceforth citizens all, in one
and the same city-state, that terminated that period of migrations and
political chaos which separates the Minoan from the Hellenic Age in
Greek lands. Rome's mission among the tribal societies of Italy is
essentially the same; and it is the lack of any such missionary of
political enlightenment beyond the frontier of the Roman State in its
imperial fullness, that makes early mediaeval problems, which were
essentially the same, so slow to be solved.

We are now hard upon the borderland of history, and we take leave of a
peninsular Europe--for the grassland stands still outside, as a distinct
geographic entity--in which the diverse races, and languages, and
religious schemes, and material cultures, are almost wholly propagated
under the forms of societies of one homogeneous type, autonomous,
indeed, like the states in the loosest of federations, and involved
annually, somewhere or other, in intertribal feuds and war; but
sufficiently acquainted with each other's customs to know that they were
based on the same large needs, not merely of 'living' somehow but of
'living well', and to respect this common heritage of intertribal
customs, so far that in their uttermost dealings with admitted aliens
they were wont to 'make war like gentlemen'. To Homer's audience it was
sure proof that Odysseus was really 'at the back of nowhere', when the
Cyclops was unable to behave when a stranger came to his cave: he was 'a
monster, of knowledge not according to the rules'.[12] It was a
criticism of despair, like that of M. Lévy-Bruhl: for the Cyclops had
the 'will to power'.[13]

Here, then, was a social structure and a political world, an _oikoumené_
where _men_ could _live_, tolerant of fairly wide variations in detail,
within a general uniformity: for tribal society in Middle Italy or even
in Western Greece, as we first catch sight of it, was by no means
homogeneous with tribal society beyond the Alps in the times of Caesar
and Tacitus. But apart from these variations, tribal Europe was a
coherent whole; and it was so because, and as long as, no new problems
of adjustment between Man and Nature arose to upset the balance struck
by that Bread-culture with which we were concerned just now. For the
patriarchal tribal societies, as we watch them still in Albania for
example, are neither more nor less than the political aspect of that
culture, and their varieties and deviations stand in close correlation
with the varieties which we have seen the Bread-culture assume.

In the same way, the break-down of this social structure proceeds, step
by step, in relation with the two great changes to which normal
Bread-culture is exposed. On the one hand, primitive self-sufficiency
(the retrospective ideal of Greek political thought) was infringed
irrevocably as soon as contact was made with a region, like ancient
Scythia, where, as Herodotus puts it, 'there are no earthquakes and they
grow wheat to sell'; for in the Mountain Zone you are never secure
against shocks, and almost never have any surplus of grain. Once in
oversea contact with lands like these, it became more economical to buy
grain thence, and to pay for it by increasing the production of oil and
wine, than to grow everything at home; and a new and 'limitless' source
of wealth emerged in the process of exchange.

On the other hand, oil and wine needing far less labour than grain-crops
and offering longer leisure (which for Greeks meant the chance to start
doing something else), the contemporary revelation of mineral wealth,
and of many forms of craftsmanship, again largely (though not wholly)
introduced from oversea, created another source of wealth, no less
'limitless' and dangerously unmanageable, in a world where wealth of any
kind was literally 'so little good'. And this industrial wealth, like
its commercial counterpart, was personal wealth, owed wholly to skill
and push, and in no way due to your clansmen or your clan. When the poet
cursed the discovery of metals, he put his finger on the 'key-industry'
of the whole industrial development; and when he cursed the invention of
shipping, he struck at the root-trouble of all, which had revealed to
autonomous Bread-cultured tribes in peninsular Europe lands otherwise
constituted and endowed by Nature, the exploitation of which seemed in
the beginning so easy and obvious, but is, in fact, so profound a
revolution for the societies whose members have attempted it. The tree
of the knowledge of good and evil was for him the shipbuilding pine.[14]

But the dissolution of early European society and culture under the
stress of contact with regions outside Europe is no matter of
prehistoric times. The task of this essay is over when it has presented
that society and culture as Man's reasoned attempt to 'live well' in an
exclusively European world.


BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Marett, _Anthropology_. Home University Library.

J.L. Myres, _The Dawn of History_. Home University Library.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This chapter has not had the advantage of Prof. Myres's
revision, in view of the rest of the book which he has not seen. Being
for some time abroad on war-work, it was impossible to communicate with
him; and it is therefore thought best to print his paper just as it was
written some months before the lectures were delivered.]

[Footnote 2: Herodotus, viii. 144. After the battle of Salamis, when the
Athenians are invited by Xerxes' envoy to desert the Greek cause, they
say they cannot betray what 'is of one blood and of one speech, and has
establishments of gods in common, and sacrifices, and habits of life of
similar mode'.]

[Footnote 3: For details see the section on Herodotus in _Anthropology
and the Classics_; and E.E. Sikes, _The Anthropology of the Greeks_.]

[Footnote 4: Thucydides i. 6 (Greek: polla d' an kai alla tis
apodeixeie, to palaion Hellênikon omoiotropa tô nun barbarikô
diaitômenon).]

[Footnote 5: (Greek: tou gar logon eontos xynon, zôousin oi polloi ôs
idian echoutes phronêsin).]

[Footnote 6: (Greek: anthrôpoisi pasi metesti ginôskein eautous kai
sôphroneein).]

[Footnote 7: Thucydides, i. 5. He too, as it happens, is illustrating a
primitive Old World, round the Aegean shores of Greece, by the
contemporary West in the backwoods of Aetolia.]

[Footnote 8: Farrand, _The Basis of American History_, 1904, p. 270.]

[Footnote 9: The [Greek: balanêphagoi andres], 'acorn-eating men', of
Greek traditional ethnology.]

[Footnote 10: Bicknell, _The Prehistoric Rock Engravings in the Italian
Maritime Alps_, Bordighera, 1902; _Further Explorations_, 1903. I begin
to suspect that the stippled and shaded enclosures which accompany the
drawings of oxen, ploughs, and men with hoes may represent the
cultivation plots.]

[Footnote 11: I owe valuable information about the Gipsies to my friend
Dr. John Sampson, of the University of Liverpool; but he is in no way
responsible for this interpretation of it.]

[Footnote 12: _Odyssey_ ix. 428 (Greek: pelôr, athemistia eidôs).]

[Footnote 13: _Odyssey_ ix. 214-15:

    (Greek: andr' epeleusesthai megalên epieimenon alkên,
    agrion, oute dikas en eidota oute themistas.)]

[Footnote 14: Horace, _Epode_ xvi. In his 'better land'--

    Non huc Argoo contendit remige pinus,
      Neque impudica Colchis intulit pedem....
    Iuppiter illa piæ _secrevit_ litora genti,
      Ut inquinavit ære tempus aureum;

    Ære, dehinc ferro duravit sæcula; quorum
      Piis secunda, vate me, datur fuga.]




III

THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME


It might appear the height of paradox to preface a discourse on the
Ancient World by asserting the conviction that the only genuine and
important history is contemporary history. Yet reflection on this
doctrine will show that it is not only consistent with a serious and
steady interest in what is called Antiquity (and indeed in the past in
general), but its only rational basis and justification. Were the past
really past it were dead--dead and done with, and it were wisdom for us
who are alive to let the dead bury their dead. Much of what has been
done and suffered under the sun is indeed gone beyond recall, and is
well buried in forgetfulness. In such forgetfulness lies the fact and
evidence of progress. 'Vex not its ghost'; no necromancy will or should
evoke the departed spirits or avail to make them utter significant
speech to living men. The chain of links which once bound stage to stage
of human history is somewhere for ever broken; and as we retrace, in the
memory of the race or in that of individual, the Ariadne-clue which we
here call 'the unity of History' it vanishes somewhere beyond our vision
into the dark backward and abysm of time. True, of late Archaeology and
Anthropology have cast their search-lights into the darkness, piercing a
little deeper than of old into the mists that surround the origins of
our civilization; but before that dimly illuminated region of
pre-history there still lies, and will always lie, an impenetrable pall.
As again in thought we move forward down the stream of time, the light
available to us for a while increases, increases till we reach the
present where it threatens to blind us with its dazzling excess, and
then suddenly fades and is quenched in the twilight and final darkness
by which the future is hidden from us. Of the whole stream of history
our best or utmost intelligence illuminates but a short reach, and that
imperfectly.

'Our ignorance is infinitely greater than our knowledge,' and the wise
historian is sobered but not discouraged by this reminder of the limits
of his possible understanding. Neither the remote past nor the distant
future can be the objects of knowledge nor, properly speaking, the
subjects of judgement. If our insatiate curiosity has bounds thus
eternally set to its satisfaction, we remember also that it is not
either in the past or the future that we live, that we act and are acted
upon, determine or have determined for us what we do or are to do, what
we suffer or are to suffer. The present alone is real, and of the real
alone is genuine knowledge possible. But if this is so, it is also so
that of this alone does it import us to ascertain the true nature. What
we have to discover (or perish in our blindness) is what we now are and
where we now stand. All other so-called knowledge or understanding, save
as it ministers to the framing of a true judgement concerning our
present selves and our present situation and world, is but vanity or
lumber, at best a rhetorical device for bringing before ourselves or
others what we so judge concerning the one and the other. Genuine
understanding, however it disguise itself as chronicle or prophecy, is
always of the present or nothing.

But this present is not the momentary meeting-place of two eternities or
the brief span of time which psychologists have named 'the specious
present'. Its content is whatsoever is not the dead past or the unborn
future; it is whatever is still or already alive, whatever is yet or
already operative and formative in our inward selves or our outward
environment--in a word what is contemporary, contemporary with our
present doings and sufferings. To such a present it is idle to attempt
to fix limits of date before or behind. A new conception of the unity of
History rises before us as we realize that the Past and the Future are
not _severed_ by the Present, but that these meet and are made one in
its living and concrete actuality. This is the fact, the centre to which
all radii converge and from which they diverge again; and in the Present
the Past and the Future live and are, together and all at once.

Bearing this in mind, we approach the records of history in a new spirit
and with a new hope. We desire to know neither origins nor ends, we
expect no cosmogony and we look for no apocalyptic vision. What we aim
at understanding is what we now are and where we now stand, and we
realize that to understand this we must not restrict our study to what
is merely of recent acquisition or growth. Neither ourselves nor our
environment are bounded by chronological limits; both are contemporary
with the Pyramids just as much as with the Eiffel Tower. We are not
merely the heirs but the epitomes of the ages. As our bodies are but the
present forms on which the secular forces of the earth continue their
dateless activities, so our spirits, our minds, our very selves are the
forms in which other spirits now forgotten or dimly remembered still
live and move and have their being, fulfilling the work which, while
still their names were named, they initiated or advanced. Not in pious
gratitude only must we labour to rescue their memory from fast-coming
oblivion, but because only so can we reach that knowledge of ourselves
and our world which is to us as living men all and alone important. Nor
will such study deny to us the reward we seek. So approaching the
labours of the historian, we shall not be jealous because he comes
before us with a tale, or as we call it, with a 'story'--a narrative of
'old unhappy things and battles long ago'. For though he so puts it,
spacing it out in sections, half-concealing, half-revealing its logical
connexions and ultimate unity, its real meaning, its ultimate--which is
also its present--import is an account of what we now are and the
situation in which we now stand; and unless somehow for each of us its
message comes into such an account, distils and sublimates into such a
quintessential judgement on the present, History remains but 'a tale of
sound and fury, signifying nothing'. It is in the profoundest sense
useless to us unless in the end we can say '_De nobis fabula
narratur_'--it is _our_ history to which we have been listening.

This is especially true of the history of the Ancient World--the world
of classical antiquity. It is not a dead world; its deeds and thoughts
are not past but still live, still 'breathe and burn' in us. They are
largely the stuff of which our present selves and our present world are
made. Not merely, I repeat, in the sense that then were the foundations
of both laid, not merely in the sense that we are heirs to the labours
of our ancestors. We _are_ the Greeks and the Romans, made what we now
are by their deeds and thoughts and experiences, our world their world,
at a later stage of an evolution never interrupted but always one and
single. Our births and deaths are but a sleep and a forgetting in the
unbroken biography of a spirit, not above but in us all, which is the
hero of the history of European civilization, itself a part of the
history of Humanity. Thus the history of Antiquity, and especially of
Classical Antiquity, is the record of the thoughts and deeds of our own
youth.

    Our deeds (and also our thoughts) still travel with us from afar,
    And what we have been makes us what we are.

This is the spirit and the conviction in which I would invite you to
approach the study of Classical Antiquity--not merely in that of
gratitude and reverence, not certainly in that of idle and futile
curiosity, but as seekers for knowledge of yourselves and your world.
For what other knowledge matters?

This quest is but the beginning of a search which is and must be
lifelong. Perhaps I am wrong in calling it the beginning, and there are
others who would and do bid you begin earlier. I can only ask you to
begin where I began or begin myself. At any rate if you begin later or
elsewhere I am confident that you will lose much light on your present
selves and your present world. My own temptation has been rather to stop
too soon and so to overleap the intervening period--the 'Middle
Ages'--between such Antiquity and the Present. Fortunately for you, you
have guides who will point out to you the way of a profitable and
instructive journey across the--to me--unknown or imperfectly explored
land. I must, however, in no controversy with any of my fellow lecturers
here, say a word on the contention that the true beginning of the modern
mind and its world--our mind and our world--lies later and elsewhere
than in Classical Antiquity. The birthday and birthplace of that mind
and its world have been variously fixed. We have been bidden to find the
one, say, as late as the sixteenth century and the other--not from the
same point of view--in the plains and woods of Northern Europe or in the
deserts of Arabia or in some still more vaguely indicated region of the
East. But I must avow my conviction that our civilization--and I
specially remember that we are Englishmen--is not only in origin but in
essence, Greco-Roman, modified no doubt by influences unknown to that in
its earlier stages, but still Greco-Roman grown to a larger stature and
a clearer self-consciousness, self-shaped to its present form, the same
vital and vitalizing force, constantly reinvigorated and re-enlightened
by reflection upon its own past. It is a true instinct that in this
country still bases our system of higher education upon a study of the
languages and literature of Classical Antiquity. We are, as Englishmen,
co-heirs, because co-descendants of Classical Antiquity, with France and
Italy and Greece, yes also with Germany, for European civilization--and
not European civilization only--is, I reiterate, in essence still
Greco-Roman, not Teutonic or Semitic. At least, if this inheritance is
not ours by descent it is ours by adoption, and we are equally
legitimate members of the household. And the bonds of such spiritual
kinship are closer and more durable than those of blood, if indeed those
of blood provably exist at all.

The works and thoughts of which I am to speak--the dreams, the plans,
the hopes and aspirations--are assuredly ours also, the stuff and
substance of our being, our inner _genius_, our guiding and controlling
selves, what we in our first youth imagined and conceived, what we
believed, what we, in our later maturity, designed and in part executed.
If we turn inward we cannot read them there, for the characters are
small and faded; but as we hear their history recounted as it is by
professional historians, we recognize it as the record of a past which
is our very own, while at the same time it is a past which we share with
other nations who are our co-partners in the work of conserving,
deepening, extending, enriching the present-day civilization of Europe
and the world.

In most of us at all times, and in all of us at most times, these
influences and their operations lie deep below the threshold of
consciousness, some of them deeper than any plummet of self-analysis can
sound. They are also the unseen foundations of the social and political
superstructure in which we live. Or, to use another figure, they form
the fertile soil in which we, with all our activities and institutions,
are rooted and from which we draw no small part of our spiritual
sustenance. Hence it is highly pertinent here and now to examine them,
for in this identity of foundation is to be found the primary unity of
the now diffused life of Europe which has parted into so many and so
widely divergent currents of national life. We all come spiritually from
the same ancient home, and it is well and wise to recall its memories.
So we and others shall be the more disposed to re-knit the old bonds and
to weave new ones which may one day restore on a grander scale, in more
organized fullness and more efficacious potency, the primordial unity
which interests and passions have with rude violence, at least in
appearance, disrupted and dissolved and so for a time arrested or
enfeebled.

I have many predecessors in the task of answering the question, What do
we owe to the Greeks? Any answer which I have to offer, must, in the
compass at my disposal, be imperfect; it must also be abstract; and
lastly it cannot but be in form dogmatic. But I think it is not too much
to say that it is to the Greeks that we owe the very conception of
civilization and through that in large measure its very existence. The
truth of this is more evident if we put the truth in another way, saying
that the Greeks first explicitly recognized the contrast between the
barbarous and the civilized state of mankind, and delivered themselves
and us from the former by defining the latter and attempting, not
without success, to establish it in actual reality. No doubt before them
men had felt the pressure of barbarism within and without, and had
framed dreams of something better, but it was the Greeks who first
defined and conceived the ideal and so made it possible to realize it.
Their distinctive peculiarity lay in their setting themselves not merely
to imagine but to think out an ideal of civilized life, and narrowly
and abstractly as to the end they conceived this ideal, they discerned
the main essential lines of its structure, the permanent laws of its
development and well-being. In doing this they discovered the need and
efficacy of knowledge for the conduct of human life, individual and
collective; and found in knowledge no mere means to living but a new and
heightened form of life itself, lifted above the trammelling conditions,
the disillusionments and disappointments of the merely practical
life. Thus they created Science and Philosophy, bequeathing to
us the ideals and the results of the one and the other. We may
so far define their contribution as consisting in the thought of
Civilization-through-knowledge, a thought which was not a thought only
but a potent and effective instrument of action, not a mere ideal but an
ideal governing, directing, and realized, in action and life.

We have also to recognize another most powerful influence of which they
were the vehicles--closely related to the other. The Greeks first
articulately conceived and deliberately pursued the ideal of Freedom. It
was, I say, closely related to the other, for they meant by it not
merely freedom from physical or political constraint but also inward
freedom from prejudice and passion, and they held that knowledge and
freedom rendered one another possible. We may amend our formula and
re-state their contribution as the idea and fact of civilization
regarded as a process in and to Freedom under the control of Knowledge
or Reason, each inspiring, guiding, and fertilizing the other. Theory
and practice thus co-operate and help one another forward; each in its
advance liberates the other for a further effort. The several faculties
of the human spirit work harmoniously together in mutual respect and
reciprocal alliance. Hence arises another distinctive feature of the
Greek ideal, namely, that of wholeness or all-round completeness; there
is in it no one-sided insistence on this or that element in human
nature, no tendency to ascetic mutilation, no fear or jealousy of what
is merely human, tainted by its animal origin or its secular
associations.

But we must not exaggerate. This ideal was imperfectly defined, still
more imperfectly executed or realized. It would be absurd to suppose
that it was held by all Greeks; it was indeed advocated by and for a
minority only. Those who now find in it the impulse and guide of Greek
history might be hard put to it if they were obliged to produce evidence
of their faith, and they would be forced to confess that there was much
to be said against their interpretation. There is to be acknowledged
first the apparent want of internal unity in the Greek world, split up
as it was into small and mutually hostile civic groups; and secondly,
the loose coherence of each of these groups within itself (for each, we
might almost say normally, was torn by intestine faction). It is a
commonplace also that Greek civilization rested upon slavery, so that
barbarism was not expelled but remained as a domestic and ever-present
evil. Freedom and enlightenment was not in thought or practice designed
for all men, but only for Greeks, and among them only in reality for a
privileged minority. The notion of a civilized world or even a civilized
Greece was, if present at all, present only in feeling or imagination,
not in clear vision or distinct thought, still less as an ideal of
practical politics. On the other hand the ideal so narrowly conceived
was not _in principle_ confined to a 'chosen people', or to one strain
of blood. It supplied a programme extensible to all who could show their
title to be regarded as members of the common race of humanity. As the
special features of Greek civilization faded, the lineaments of this
common humanity emerged more clearly into view, and the Greek, when he
was compelled to give up his parochialism and provincialism, found
himself already in spirit prepared to take his place as a citizen of the
world. He had learned his lesson, and to him the whole world went to
school, first to learn of him what civilization meant and then to better
his instructions.

This the world did, but not once for all; for every time since that
mankind, or at least European mankind, has begun to lose faith in its
dream of civilization or has again to shake itself free from the menace
of outward or inward barbarism, it has always reverted to the thought
and life of Greece and drawn inexhaustibly from it new light and new
fruit, for it is its own thought and its own life, while still there ran
in its veins the freshness and the vigour, the blitheness and
hopefulness of its immortal youth. In meditating upon the unforgotten
debt which we owe to Greece, we revive in memory what the spirit which
now lives and moves in us not only once accomplished but still in each
new generation accomplishes, accomplishing ever the better if it repeats
its former achievements with increased consciousness and more deliberate
care. We too here and now have to define what we mean by civilization,
by knowledge, by freedom. Otherwise our future will be determined for
us, and not by us. 'What is to come out of this struggle? Just anything
that may come out of it, or something we mean _shall_ come out of it?'
Assuredly, if we are not to stand bankrupt before our present problem,
we must go to school with Greece, with Rome, with Classical Antiquity,
and in the end with all History, that is to say, with our own experience
as a whole; or out of the spreading chaos no civilized cosmos will be
re-born. Our civilization has been shaken to its foundations, the task
before us and our descendants is to rebuild once more in Europe a
habitable city for the mind of man; and in designing and reconstructing
it we must take counsel with our predecessors who first found the way of
escape from outward and inward barbarism, doing for and in us what we
would do for and in our successors.

The first and most obvious achievement of the Greek mind was the
deliverance of itself in the sphere of the imagination. Behind the fair
creations of Greek art lies a dark and ugly background, but it does lie
behind them. That was its first conquest. Under the magic spell of Art
the hateful and terrifying shapes of barbarous religion retreated and
the world of imagination was peopled with gracious and attractive
figures. The Greek Pantheon is, for all its defects, a world of
dignified and beautiful humanity. 'No thorn or threat stains its beauty
bright.' On the whole the gods which are its denizens are humanized and
humane, the friends and allies of men, who therefore feel themselves not
abased or helpless in their relations with them. 'Of one kind are gods
and men,' and their common world is one in which men feel themselves at
home. Dark shadows there are, but they hide no mysteries to appal and
unman. The imagination is free to follow its own laws, and so to create
what is lovely and lovable. Language is no longer a tyrant but a willing
and dexterous servant, and the Greek language reflecting, as all
language does, the spirit of its users, is the most perfect instrument
that the human mind has ever devised for the expression of its dreams.
The works which were then created have ever since haunted the mind of
Europe like a passion, and we are right in speaking of them as immortal,
'a joy for ever'.

In such a manner the Greek mind humanized its world, and in doing so
humanized itself, or rather divinized itself, without stretching to the
breaking-point the strands which bound itself to its world. But it did
not stop there, and we do it wrong if we dwell too exclusively on its
triumphant achievements in literature and art. For 'speech created
thought, which is the measure of the universe'. The Greeks were not only
supreme artists but also the pioneers of thought. They first took the
measure of the Universe in which they lived, asserting the mind of man
to be its measure, and it amenable and subject to reason. The world they
lived in was not only beautiful to the imagination, it was also
reasonable, penetrable, and governable by the intellect. The ways of it
and everything in it were regular and orderly, predictable, explicable
not eccentric, erratic, baffling and inscrutable. Not only was Nature
knowable; it was also through knowledge of it manageable, a realm over
which man could extend his sway, making it ever a more and more
habitable home. In it and availing himself of its offered aid he built
his households and his cities, dwelling comfortably in his habitations.
But the thought which enabled him to lay a secure basis, economic and
social or political, for his life had other issues and promised other
fruit. The Greek mind became interested in knowledge for its own sake
and in itself as the knower of its world.

The second and more important creation of the Greek mind was Science or
the Sciences. In no earlier civilization can we trace anything but the
faintest germs of this, while in Greek civilization it comes almost at
once to flower and fruit. First and foremost we have to think of
Mathematics, of Arithmetic and Geometry and Optics and Acoustics and
Astronomy, but we must not forget also their later and perhaps not
wholly so successful advances in Physics and Chemistry, in Botany and
Zoology, in Anatomy and Physiology. Doubtless, especially in the case of
the Sciences where experiments are required and have proved so fertile
in the extension of our knowledge, there were grave defects, and too
much trust was placed in mere observation and hasty speculation; but
what they accomplished in Science is no less but more marvellous than
what they accomplished in Art. The idea of Science was there, disengaged
from the limiting restrictions of practical necessities, the idea of
free and therefore all the more potent Science. The whole physical--and
much more than the physical--environment of human life was proclaimed
permeable to human thought and therefore governable by human will or at
any rate already amicable and amenable to human purposes.

But yet a third advance was made. The Greek mind became conscious of
itself as the knower and therefore the lord and master of its world.
Turning inward upon itself it discovered itself as the centre of its
universe and set itself to explore this new inner realm of being. In the
consciousness of itself it found inexhaustible interest and strength.
Thus it created Philosophy, its last and greatest gift to humanity. In
so doing it freed itself from the trammels even of Science, which thus
became its servant and not its master--at the same time finally
liberating itself from the narrowing and blinding influences of passion
and imagination and all the shackles of merely practical needs and
disabilities. Here too it fixed the idea or the ideal. 'Life without
reflection upon life, without self-examination and self-study and
self-knowledge, is a life not worth living by man.' In doing so it
revealed a self deeper than the physical being of man and an environment
wider and more real--more stable and permanent--than the physical
cosmos, finding in the one and the other something more enduring,
substantial, and precious than shows itself either to Science or the
economic and political prudence, yet which alone gives meaning and worth
to the one and the other. Thus for the first time arose before the mind
of man the conception of a life not sunk in nature and practice, but
superior to them and the end or meaning of their existence--a life of
intense activity, of unfailing interest, of inexhaustible and eternal
value.

This life was throughout the duration of Greek thought too narrowly
conceived. It was frequently thought and spoken of as the life of a
spectator or bystander or onlooker, as a life withdrawn or isolated, cut
off from what we should call ordinary human business and concerns, a
life into which we, or at least a few of us, could escape or be
transported at rare intervals and under exceptionally favourable
circumstances. Yet in principle it was open to all, and certainly not
confined to those privileged by birth or wealth or social position. It
was not the reward of magical favour or ascetic exercises, it was
reached by the beaten path of the loyal citizen and the resolute
student. There was about it no esoteric mystery or other-worldliness.
And if to reach it was a high privilege its attainment brought with it
the imperative duty of a descent into the ordinary world to instruct, to
enlighten, to comfort and help and console, to play a part in the great
business and work of human civilization. In a sense this was, and is,
the most permanent and fruitful gift of Greece to the European world.

These then were the three ideas or ideals which the Greeks wrought into
the very texture and substance of the modern mind, the idea of Art, the
idea of Science, the idea of Philosophy; in all three introducing and
still more deeply implanting the ideas of Freedom as the motive and end
of civilized life and of Knowledge as its guide and ally. It may be
thought that I have dwelt too much on theory, and have not said enough
of the specific contribution of Greece as working out in practice a
certain type or types of corporate life such as the City State; but the
fact is that in Greek civilization theory continually outran practice
and that it endowed mankind much more with ideas or ideals than with
practical illustrations or models for our imitation. Yet again we must
not exaggerate or imagine these ideas as merely Utopian or such stuff as
dreams are made of. The ferment which they set up burst the fabric of
Greek social and political institutions, but it clarified and steadied
down, as the enthusiasms of youth may do, into the sober designs of
grave and energetic manhood.

The spectacle of the dissolution of the Greek civilization is not a
pleasant one. 'The glory that was Greece' fades out of the world and
leaves it grey and dull, and there was worse than this; there was also
decay and degeneracy and corruption. To dwell upon it is as the sin of
Ham. Nevertheless what took place was not a mere relapse towards
barbarism, but on the contrary the supersession of a form of
civilization which had done its work by another form less attractive,
but more sound and solid. The Romans have the airs of grown and grave
men beside the perpetual youth of Greece, (the Greeks were 'always
children') but they are well aware of how much they learned and had to
learn from their predecessors in the task of civilizing the world. So
much is this so that in many departments of civilized life they look
upon themselves as imitating the Greeks and carrying out their ideas. In
this they were less than just to themselves, for even in the world of
art they continued to create; and certainly in literature they produced
works not unworthy to stand beside their chosen models. Especially they
created a prose style, which without ceasing to be artistic served the
sober and serious purposes of political oratory and historic record. But
their peculiar genius showed itself most in the applied arts which
pressed Greek science into the ministry of life in architecture and
engineering. Their roads and bridges and aqueducts still stand to bear
witness of them. It would be a great error to deny to them fertile
advance in the sciences, because their discoveries are so immediately
put to the proof in practice and so little disengage themselves into
express theory from their applications.

But before we proceed to reckon up their contributions to European
civilization it is well to correct a misconception which arises only too
easily from an accident of our education. It is the custom in England to
concentrate attention upon a brief period in the history of Rome,
ignoring on the one hand the early Republican period and on the other
the later Imperial. There is thus lost to our imaginations those figures
and their deeds which seemed for example to Shakespeare most
characteristically Roman and to our more thoughtful consideration those
achievements which most deeply moulded the fabric of Europe. The latter
is the greater loss, and here we must remember that it is the history of
_Imperial_ Rome that is most relevant to our purpose and most
informative. Under the Empire Rome worked as a master, no longer as an
apprentice or a journeyman. The theatre of her civilizing activities was
here little less than the whole world then known, and the boast is not
unjustified that she made into a city what had formerly been but a
world, as we might say, merely a geographical expression. The record of
that progress reads to us too much as a narrative of incessant warfare,
and we are accustomed to think of her empire as a gigantic military
power, but in reality it was in aim and result essentially pacific, and
so appeared to those who lived under her sway. To them the name of her
empire was the 'Roman peace'. It was as such that the memory of it
haunted the minds of men when it too broke down from internal economic
disorders and external pressure, and a distracted and divided Europe
looked back to it as the pattern for a restored civilization.

The aim and result of the Roman Empire was peace, a world-wide peace.
It is true that this end was not very articulately defined by those who
pursued it, but (perhaps just because of that) the means to it were more
practically designed and more effectively executed. The civilized world
was one and to be treated as one; it was still Rome under a single
government and a single head. There arose then the idea of a supreme
sovereignty one and indivisible, that was the absolutely indispensable
condition of a world peace. But the necessity of organization was
equally grasped, insisted upon, realized. The civilized world was
covered with a network of institutions through which the will of the
Emperor flowed and circulated throughout the Empire. Peace through
system and order--that was the secret of the Roman success. But two
other ideas must be added to complete the explanation. The one was the
idea or ideal of Justice; no system and no order could work unless it
was, and commended itself to its subjects as being, scrupulously and
exactly just. The second idea was that in order to be this it must be a
legal system, based upon a known body of legal rights and duties,
determining and controlling the whole conduct of the subjects to the
sovereign and to one another. The notion which the Romans, not so much
by their thought or speech, but by their acts, added to the world's
stock was that of a peace secured and maintained by the just operation
throughout the civilized world of a system of law the same for all,
issuing from and enforced by a single central power.

The notion is at least grandiose, and so stated seems almost too high
and difficult for human nature to realize. Yet for centuries it was
applied, and applied with marvellous success. Nor in spite of its
apparent failure in the end has the idea of it ceased to dominate men's
minds. I do not speak here of the transitory imitation of it by the
Carolingians or of the attempt at the restitution or copy of it in the
spiritual sphere of the Church, or again of its phantom survival in the
ghostly form of the Holy Roman Empire. But I would point to the way in
which it still--in thought--controls us when without essential
alteration of the idea we transfer its application to the nation and
still look for the secret of _its_ peace and strength in an organization
of all its activities under a law proceeding from and enforced by a
sovereign will resident somewhere within its structure, a law demanding
and receiving obedience from all loyal subjects. Nor is the hope extinct
that the way to a wider or world-wide peace lies through the restoration
of a similar system in its application to international relations.
Though I am unable to share this hope (or indeed the desire that its
realization should be endeavoured after), I find it impossible to judge
that it has yet lost its hold on men's minds or is without elements of
importance in view of our present problem and perplexity.

It is perhaps more profitable to ask what we have to learn from the
history both of its success and its failure. Of its success for a time
and long time in the history of Europe there can be no doubt, and on its
permanent effects rests much of what is most sound and stable in the
civilization of modern Europe. Peace there was because of it, and again
because of it and what it accomplished Europe resisted and survived
internal disorder and barbarian invasion so that, as I said above, what
still exists as a united or allied Europe is the Roman or Romanized
world. Roman ideas and ideals still hold it together, although the Roman
Empire has declined and fallen, and no other Empire has risen or, I
trust, may rise, upon its ruins. It is not my business to analyse the
causes of that decline and fall, though a few words on them may not be
out of place. In the first place it declined and fell because those who
administered ignored its economic substructure, paying no attention to
the causes which were undermining its very material basis, or the
enormous suffering which the neglect and consequent disorganization of
that entailed. In the second, and partly because of that neglect, they
did not sufficiently strengthen its defences against external attack; I
do not so much mean in the way of remissness in military preparation as
by a surcease of the former policy of bringing their barbarous or
semi-civilized neighbours into the higher system, and so extending the
range of civilization. It is perhaps fanciful to suggest that we are now
suffering the penalty of the failure of Rome to Romanize, that is to
say, to civilize their Teutonic neighbours. In the third place, they
erred by not recognizing and taking account of new forces which in the
way of ideas were entering into the conception of civilized life, the
ideas which we mass together under the head of feudalism, the idea of
nationality. Under the influence of the one and the other the ideal of a
single world State, with a uniform or rigid system of laws resting upon
a sovereign will, one and indivisible, dissolved, or at least entered
upon dissolution, approving itself unadapted or unadaptable to the needs
of a novel and immensely more complex situation of the world. No mere
tinkering at it did or could suffice to save it; and the organization of
Europe based upon it collapsed.

The Revolution of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth centuries was in many ways the last attempt to reinstate it,
and failure to do so pronounced its doom. We cannot now look forward to
the reorganization of civilized Europe on the model of the Roman Empire
or of an Empire at all, and the more definitely formulated hope of
salvation by the erection or re-erection of an international system of
law in any real sense seems to me an unsubstantial dream--the
administration of a belated nostrum for our disease, not a panacea. Not
that way do the lessons of history point. The Roman ideal must be
transformed, must be reborn, if it is not to lead our anticipations and
our actions wholly astray. No more in the political or secular sphere
than in the spiritual or ecclesiastical is 'Romanism' a possible guide
to the reconstruction of modern European civilization. For that far too
much water (and blood) has run under the bridge. Yet the spirit which
gave it life and efficacy is immortal, and the study of the secret of
its vitality and power is a necessity for us. In the work of
reconstruction we must learn from the Romans the value of System and
Order, of Justice and Law, as from Greece we have ever afresh to learn
the love of Freedom and Truth.

The Greeks have given us the idea of a life worth living which
civilization renders possible, but does not directly produce. This life
in its essential features they rightly conceived, but its content they
failed to articulate, and whether because of that or not, they failed to
realize its indispensable conditions, material, economic, political, &c.
The Romans did more effectively realize this, but they lost sight of the
ends in the means, securing a peace, a comfort, an ease, a leisure of
which they made no particularly valuable use. It has been said that at
no time in the world's history were civilized men so happy as under the
Roman Empire. It might be said with greater truth that at no time were
civilized men so unhappy, for the happiness that was theirs was empty,
mere dead-sea fruit, dust and ashes in the mouth; a very Death in Life.
Life was without savour, and they turned away from it in weariness and
disgust and despair, seeking and finding in Philosophy--the fruits of
reflection upon life--nothing better than consolation for the wounds and
disillusions of life. Thus those who gave their lives to Rome lost
heart, and retreating into themselves found nothing there but solitude
and emptiness. Civilization was but the husk of a life that had fled.

Nevertheless, as it is necessary for the living body to deposit a bony
skeleton and for the living soul to harden its impulses into habits and
stiffen its aspirations into rules and plans of action, so civilization
as a whole must create within and around it a structure of ordered and
systematic thought and action within which the higher forces now
recognized and disengaged may be all the more free to do their work.
Without such a mechanical or apparently unspiritual basis these forces
can only work fugitively, erratically, and so ineffectively, as they did
in the Greek world. To the prosaic business of creating or recreating
and maintaining in being such a structure a large part of our energies
must be devoted, and in all this from the Romans we have still much to
learn. If we decline to learn and digest this lesson, turning from such
concernment in disgust or disdain, our lives will be lost in vain
dreams, in idle longings and empty regrets; and the kingdom of Freedom
and Truth will be taken from us and given to others who have known how
to grow up and to face like men the hardships and hazards without which
it cannot be won or held. From the inspiring visions of these ideals we
must turn as we did when we and our world were Roman, to the serious and
sober task of creating a political and legal structure on which the
eternal spirit of European civilization can resume its work of
extending, deepening, enriching, the common life of Humanity.

It seems as if we--the heirs of their experience--bound to face a more
appalling problem, are bankrupt, even of hopes, having lost both the
ideal of a life worth living on this earth and that of some large and
complex organization rendering this life possible. But this is not so,
for the forces which in Antiquity created and for long maintained a
civilization at first desirable and then strong, are not spent. Still
they make the Greco-Roman civilization which is ours a thing worth
living and dying for; still they hold us together in a unity and concord
deeper than ever plummet can sound, obscured but not destroyed by the
present noise and confusion of battle. Still at heart we care--and not
we only but also our enemies and all neutrals benevolent or
malevolent--for the ends for which civilization exists, for the peace
and order and justice which are their necessary conditions: we still
have minds to devise and wills to execute whatever is necessary to its
progress. Still we are willing to learn of history and resolved to
better its instruction, to know ourselves and our world and adjust our
ideas and our acts to the situation in which we find ourselves. The
civilized world has not lost heart or hope; and will not, so long as the
dreams of its immortal youth and the plans of its immortal manhood are
not lost to its memory or passed beyond its retrospective reflection.

     _Note_. The doctrine that all History is contemporary History has
     been best set forth by Benedetto Croce, of Naples, from whose
     works several expressions have here been borrowed, with a
     profound acknowledgement of indebtedness to him.


BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Hegel, _Philosophy of History_, Parts II and III (to be read not as
philosophy, but as history guided and enlightened by philosophy).
Translation in Bohn's Library.

Marvin, _The Living Past_. Clarendon Press.

Adamson, _The Development of Greek Philosophy_. W. Blackwood. (For a
brief but pregnant account consult Webb's _History of Philosophy._ Home
University Library.)

Butcher's _Some Aspects of the Greek Genius_ ('What we owe to Greece').
Macmillan.

Murray's _Rise of the Greek Epic_. Clarendon Press.

Warde Fowler's _Rome_. Home University Library.

Bryce's _Holy Roman Empire_. Macmillan.




IV

UNITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES[15]

     Ergo humanum genus bene se habet et optime, quando secundum quod
     potest Deo adsimilatur. Sed genus humanum maxime Deo adsimilatur
     quando maxime est unum; vera enim ratio unius in solo illo est.
     Propter quod scriptum est: 'Audi, Israel, Dominus Deus tuus unus
     est'. DANTE, _De Monarchia_, i. viii.


I

He who shuts his eyes to-day to make a mental picture of the world sees
a globe in which the mass of Asia, the bulk of Africa, and the length of
America vastly outweigh in the balance the straggling and sea-sown
continent of Europe. He sees all manner of races, white and yellow,
brown and black, toiling, like infinitesimal specks, in every manner of
way over many thousands of miles; and he knows that an infinite variety
of creeds and civilizations, of practices and beliefs--some immemorially
old, some crudely new; some starkly savage, and some softly
humane--diversify the hearts of a thousand million living beings. But if
we would enter the Middle Ages, in that height and glory of their
achievement which extended from the middle of the eleventh to the end of
the thirteenth century, we must contract our view abruptly. The known
world of the twelfth century is a very much smaller world than ours, and
it is a world of a vastly greater unity. It is a Mediterranean world;
and 'Rome, the head of the world, rules the reins of the round globe'.
From Rome the view may travel to the Sahara in the south; in the east to
the Euphrates, the Dniester, and the Vistula; in the north to the Sound
and the Cattegat (though some, indeed, may have heard of Iceland), and
in the west to the farther shores of Ireland and of Spain. Outside these
bounds there is something, at any rate to the east, but it is something
shadowy and wavering, full of myth and fable. Inside these bounds there
is the clear light of a Christian Church, and the definite outline of a
single society, of which all are baptized members, and by which all are
knit together in a single fellowship.

Economically the world was as different from our own as it was
geographically. Money, if not unknown, was for the most part unused. It
had drifted eastwards, in the latter days of the Roman Empire, to
purchase silks and spices; and it had never returned. From the days of
Diocletian, society had been thrown back on an economy in kind. Taxes
took the form either of payments of personal service or of quotas of
produce: rents were paid either in labour or in food. The presence of
money means a richly articulated society, infinitely differentiated by
division of labour, and infinitely connected by a consequent nexus of
exchange. The society of the Middle Ages was not richly articulated.
There were merchants and artisans in the towns; but the great bulk of
the population lived in country villages, and gained subsistence
directly from the soil. Each village was practically self-sufficing; at
the most it imported commodities like iron and salt; for the rest, it
drew on itself and its own resources. This produced at once a great
uniformity and a great isolation. There was a great uniformity, because
most men lived the same grey, quiet life of agriculture. The peasantry
of Europe, in these days when most men were peasants, lived in the same
way, under the same custom of the manor, from Berwick to Carcassonne,
and from Carcassonne to Magdeburg. But there was also a great isolation.
Men were tied to their manors; and the men of King's Ripton could even
talk of the 'nation' of their village. If they were not tied by
conditions of status and the legal rights of their lord, they were still
tied, none the less, by the want of any alternative life. There were
towns indeed; but towns were themselves very largely agricultural--the
homes of _summa rusticitas_--and what industry and commerce they
practised was the perquisite and prerogative of local guilds. Custom was
king of all things, and custom had assorted men in compartments in which
they generally stayed. The kaleidoscopic coming and going of a society
based on monetary exchanges--its speedy riches and speedy bankruptcies,
its embarrassment of alternative careers all open to talents--these were
unthought and undreamed of. The same uniformity and the same isolation
marked also, if in a less degree, the knightly class which followed the
profession of arms. A common feudal system, if we can call that a system
which was essentially unsystematic, reigned over the whole of Western
Europe, and, when Western Europe went crusading into Syria, established
itself in Syria. Historians have tried to establish distinctions between
the feudalism of one country and that of another--between the feudalism
of England, for instance, and that of France. It is generally held
nowadays that they have failed to establish the distinction. A fief in
England was uniform with a fief in France, as a manor in one country was
uniform with manors in other countries, and a town in one country with
towns in others. 'One cannot establish a line of demarcation between
German and French towns,' says a famous Belgian historian, 'just as one
cannot distinguish between French and German feudalism.'[16] The
historian of the economic and institutional life of the Middle Ages
will err unless he proceeds on the assumption of its general uniformity.
But the uniformity of the fief, like that of the manor and the town, was
compatible with much isolation. Each fief was a centre of local life and
a home of local custom. The members of the feudal class lived, for the
most part, local and isolated lives. Fighting, indeed, would bring them
together; but when the 'season' was over, and the forty days of service
were done, life ran back to its old ruts in the manor-hall, and if some
of the summer was spent in company, much of the winter was spent in
isolation. On a society of this order--stable, customary, uniform, with
its thousands of isolated centres--the Church descended with a
quickening inspiration and a permeating unity. Most of us find a large
play for our minds to-day in the competition of economics or the
struggles of politics. The life of the mind was opened to the Middle
Ages by the hands of the Church. We may almost say that there was an
exact antithesis between those days and these latter days, if it were
not that exact antitheses never occur outside the world of logic. But it
is as nearly true as are most antitheses that while our modern world is
curiously knit together by the economic bonds of international finance,
and yet sadly divided (and never more sadly than to-day) by the clash of
different national cultures and different creeds, the mediaeval world,
sundered as it was economically into separate manors and separate towns,
each leading a self-sufficing life on its own account, was yet linked
together by unity of culture and unity of faith. It had a single mind,
and many pockets. We have a single pocket, and many minds. That is why
the wits of many nowadays will persist in going wool-gathering into the
Middle Ages, to find a comfort which they cannot draw from the golden
age of international finance.

But retrogression was never yet the way of progress. It is probable,
for instance, that the sanitation of the Middle Ages was very
inadequate, and their meals sadly indigestible; and it would be useless
to provoke a revolt of the nose and the stomach in order to satisfy a
craving of the mind. An uncritical mediaevalism is the child of
ignorance of the Middle Ages. Sick of vaunting national cultures, we may
recur to an age in which they had not yet been born--the age of a single
and international culture; but we must remember, all the same, that the
strength of the Middle Ages was rooted in weakness. They were on a low
stage of economic development; and it was precisely because they were on
a low stage of economic development that they found it so easy to
believe in the unity of civilization. Unity of a sort is easy when there
are few factors to be united; it is more difficult, and it is a higher
thing, when it is a synthesis of many different elements. The Middle
Ages had not attained a national economy: their economy was at the best
municipal, and for the most part only parochial. A national economy has
a higher economic value than a municipal or parochial economy, because
it means the production of a greater number of utilities at a less cost,
and a richer and fuller life of the mind, with more varied activities
and more intricate connexions. A national economy could only develop
along with--perhaps we may say it could only develop through--a national
system of politics; and the national State, which is with us to-day, and
with some of whose works we are discontented, was a necessary condition
of economic progress. With the coming of the national State the facile
internationalism of the Middle Ages had to disappear; and as economics
and politics ran into national channels, the life of the spirit,
hitherto an international life, suffered the same change, and national
religions, if such a thing be not a contradiction in terms, were duly
born. But a national economy, a national State, a national Church were
all things unknown to the Middle Ages. Its economy was a village
economy: its mental culture was an international culture bestowed by a
universal Church (a village culture there could not be, and with a
universal Church the only possible culture was necessarily
international); while, as for its politics, they were something betwixt
and between--sometimes parochial, when a local feudal lord drew to
himself sovereignty; sometimes national, when a strong king arose in
Israel; and sometimes, under a Charlemagne, almost international.

A consideration of the linguistic factor may help to throw light on the
point in question. Here again we may trace the same isolation and the
same uniformity which we have also seen in the world of economics. There
was an infinity of dialects, but a paucity of languages, in the Middle
Ages. One is told that to-day there are dialects in the Bight of
Heligoland and among the Faroes which are peculiar to a single family.
Something of the same sort must have existed in the Middle Ages. Just as
there were local customs of the manor, the town, and the fief, there
must have been local dialects of villages and even of hamlets. But here
again isolation was compatible with uniformity. There were perhaps only
two languages of any general vogue in the central epoch of the Middle
Ages, and they were confined by no national frontiers. First there was
Latin, the language of the Church, and since learning belonged to the
Church, the language of learning. Scholars used the same language in
Oxford and Prague, in Paris and Bologna; and within the confines of
Latin Christianity scholarship was an undivided unity. Besides Latin the
only other language of any general vogue in the middle of the Middle
Ages was vulgar Latin, or Romance. To Dante, writing at the close of
the thirteenth century, Romance was still one _idioma_--even if it were
_trifarium_, according as its 'yes' was _oïl_, or _oc_, or _sì_.[17] Of
the three branches of this _idioma_, that of _oïl_, or Northern France,
was easily predominant. The Norman conquest of England carried it to
London: the Norman conquest of Sicily carried it to Palermo: the
Crusades carried it to Jerusalem. With it you might have travelled most
of the mediaeval world from end to end. It was the language of courts;
it was the language of chansons; it was the language of all lay culture.
It was the language of England, France, and Italy; and St. Francis
himself had delighted in his youth in the literature which it enshrined.

The linguistic basis of mediaeval civilization was thus Latin, either in
its classical or in its vulgar form. There were of course other
languages, and some of these had no small vogue. Just before the period
of which we are treating--the period which extends from 1050 to
1300--Icelandic had a wide scope. It might have been heard not only in
Scandinavia and the Northern Isles, but in a great part of the British
Islands, in Normandy, in Russia--along the river-road that ran to
Constantinople--and in Constantinople itself. But the fact remains that
the linguistic basis of mediaeval thought and literature was a Latin
basis. The Romance University of Paris was the capital of learning: the
Romance tongue of Northern France was the tongue of society. And as the
linguistic basis of mediaeval civilization was Romance, so, too, was
mediaeval civilization itself. The genius of Latin Christianity was the
source of its inspiration: the spirit of the Romance peoples was the
breath of its being. The souvenir of the old Roman Empire provided the
scheme of its political ideas; and the Holy Roman Empire, if a religious
consecration had given it a new sanctity, was Roman still. Yet the
irruption of the Teutons into the Empire had left its mark; and the
emperor of the Middle Ages was always of Teutonic stock. It was perhaps
at this point that the unity of the mediaeval scheme betrayed a fatal
flaw. It would be futile to urge that the dualism which showed itself in
the struggles of papacy and empire had primarily, or even to any
considerable extent, a racial basis. Those struggles are struggles of
principles rather than of races; they are contentions between a secular
and a clerical view of life, rather than between the genius of Rome and
the genius of Germany. Hildebrand stood for a free Church--a Church free
from secular power because it was controlled by the papacy. Henry IV
stood for the right of the secular power to use the clergy for purposes
of secular government, and to control the episcopacy as one of the
organs of secular administration. But the fact remains that a scheme
which rested on a Teutonic emperor and a Roman pontiff was already a
thing internally discordant, before these other and deeper dissensions
appeared to increase the discord.

Such were the bases on which the unity of mediaeval civilization had to
depend. There was a contracted world, which men could regard as a unity,
with a single centre of coherence. There was a low stage of economic
development, which on the one hand meant a general uniformity of life,
in fief and manor and town, and on the other hand meant a local
isolation, that needed, and in the unity of the Church found, some
method of unification. With many varieties of dialect, there was yet a
general identity of language, which made possible the development, and
fostered the dissemination, of a single and identical culture.
Nationalism, whether as an economic development, or as a way of life and
a mode of the human spirit, was as yet practically unknown. Races might
disagree; classes might quarrel; kings might fight; there was hardly
ever a national conflict in the proper sense of the word. The mediaeval
lines of division, it is often said, were horizontal rather than
vertical. There were different estates rather than different states. The
feudal class was homogeneous throughout Western Europe: the clerical
class was a single corporation through all the extent of Latin
Christianity; and the peasantry and the townsfolk of England were very
little different from the peasantry and the townsfolk of France. We have
to think of a general European system of estates rather than of any
balance of rival powers.


II

The unity which rested on these bases begins to appear, as a reality and
not only an idea, about the middle of the eleventh century, and lasts
till the end of the thirteenth. That unity, as we have seen, was
essentially ecclesiastical. It was the product of the Church: we may
almost say that it was the Church. Before 1050 the Catholic Church,
however universal in theory, had hardly been universal in fact. The
period of the Frankish, the Saxon, and the early Salian emperors had
been a period of what German writers call the _Landeskirche_. The power
of the Bishop of Rome had not yet been fully established; and the great
churches of Reims and Mainz and Milan were practically independent
centres. Independent of the papacy, they were not independent of the lay
rulers within whose dominions they lay. On the contrary, their members
were deeply engaged in lay activities; they were landlords, feudatories,
and officials in their various countries. In the face of these facts,
the Gregorian movement of the eleventh century pursues two closely
interconnected objects. It aims at asserting the universal primacy of
the papacy; it aims at vindicating the freedom of the clergy from all
secular power. The one aim is a means to the other: the pope cannot be
universal primate, unless the clergy he controls are free from secular
control; and the clergy cannot be free from secular control, unless the
universal primacy of the papacy effects their liberation. Gregorianism
wins a great if not a thorough triumph. It establishes the theory, and
in a very large measure the practice, of ecclesiastical unity. The days
of the _Landeskirche_ are numbered: the days of the Church Universal
under the universal primacy of Rome are begun. But when the universality
of the Church has once been established in point of extension, it begins
to be also asserted in point of intensity. Once ubiquitous, the papacy
seeks to be omnicompetent. Depositary of the truth, and only depositary
of the truth, by divine revelation, the Church, under the guidance of
the papacy, seeks to realize the truth in every reach of life, and to
control, in the light of Christian principle, every play of human
activity. Learning and education, trade and commerce, war and peace, are
all to be drawn into her orbit. By the application of Christian
principle a great synthesis of human life is to be achieved, and the
_lex Christi_ is to be made a _lex animata in terris_.

This was the greatest ambition that has ever been cherished. It meant
nothing less than the establishment of a _civitas Dei_ on earth. And
this kingdom of God was to be very different from that of which St.
Augustine had written. His city of God was neither the actual Church nor
the actual State, nor a fusion of both. It was a spiritual society of
the predestined faithful, and, as such, thoroughly distinct from the
State and secular society. The city of God which the great mediaeval
popes were seeking to establish was a city of this world, if not of this
world only. It was a fusion of the actual Church, reformed by papal
direction and governed by papal control, with actual lay society,
similarly reformed and similarly governed. Logically this meant a
theocracy, and the bull of Boniface VIII, by which he claimed that every
human creature was subject to the Roman pontiff, was its necessary
outcome. But a theocracy was only a means, and a means that was never
greatly emphasized in the best days of the papacy. It was the end that
mattered; and the end was the moulding of human life into conformity
with divine truth. The end may appear fantastic, unless one remembers
the plenitude of means which stood at the command of the mediaeval
Church. The seven sacraments had become the core of her organization.
Central among the seven stood the sacrament of the Mass, in which bread
and wine were transubstantiated into the divine body and blood of our
Lord. By that sacrament men could touch God; and by its mediation the
believer met the supreme object of his belief. Only the priest could
celebrate the great mystery; and only those who were fit could be
admitted by him to participation. The sacrament of penance, which became
the antechamber, as it were, to the Mass, enabled the priest to
determine the terms of admission. Outside the sacraments stood the
Church courts, exercising a large measure of ethical and religious
discipline over all Christians; and in reserve, most terrible of all
weapons, were the powers of excommunication and interdict, which could
shut men and cities from the rites of the Church and the presence of the
Lord. Who shall say, remembering these things, that the aims of the
mediaeval Church were visionary or impracticable?

For a time, and in some measure, they were actually accomplished. Let us
look at each estate in turn, and measure the accomplishment--speaking
first of the knightly world, and the Church's control of war and peace;
then of the world of the commons, and the Church's control of trade and
commerce; and last of the clerical world and the Church's control of
learning and education.

The control of war and peace was a steady aim of the Church from the
beginning of the eleventh century. The evil of feudalism was its
propensity to private war. To cure that evil the Church invented the
Truce of God. The Truce was a diocesan matter. The 'form' of Truce was
enacted in a diocesan assembly, and the people of the diocese formed a
_communitas pacis_ for its enforcement. There was no attempt to put an
absolute stop to private war; the Truce was only directed to a
limitation of the times and seasons in which feuds could be waged, and a
definition of the persons who were to be exempted from their menace. But
from seeking to limit the fighting instinct of a feudal society, the
Church soon rose to the idea of enlisting that instinct under her own
banner and directing it to her own ends. So arose chivalry, which, like
most of the institutions of the Middle Ages, was the invention of the
Church. Chivalry was the consecration of the fighting instinct to the
defence of the widow, the fatherless, and the oppressed; and by the
beginning of the eleventh century liturgies already contain the form of
religious service by which neophytes were initiated into knighthood.
This early and religious form of chivalry (there was a later and lay
form, invented by troubadour and trouvère, which was chiefly concerned
with the rules for the loves of knights and ladies) culminated in the
Crusades. In the Crusades we touch perhaps the most typical expression
of the mediaeval spirit. Here we may see the clergy moulding into
conformity with Christian principle the apparently unpromising and
intractable stuff of feudal pugnacity: here we may see the papacy
asserting its primacy of a united Europe by gathering Christian men
together for the common purpose of carrying the flag of their faith to
the grave of their Redeemer. Here the permeating influence of Christian
revelation may be seen attempting to permeate even foreign policy (for
what are the Crusades but the foreign policy of a Christian commonwealth
controlled and directed by the papacy?); and here again even the
instinct for colonial expansion, so often the root of desperate wars,
was brought into line with the unity of all nations in Christ, and made
to serve the cause of Him 'in whom alone is to be found the true nature
of the One'.

There is another aspect of the clerical control of peace and war in the
interest of Christian unity which must not be forgotten. The papacy
sought to become an international tribunal. The need for such a tribunal
was as much a mediaeval as it is a modern commonplace. Dante, who sought
to vindicate for the emperor, rather than for the pope, the position and
power of an international judge, has started the argument in famous
words. 'Between any two princes, of whom the one is in no way subject to
the other, disputes may arise, either by their own fault, or by that of
their subjects. Judgement must therefore be given between them. And
since neither can have cognizance of the other, because neither is
subject to the other, there must be a third of ampler jurisdiction, to
control both by the ambit of his power.'[18] Such ampler jurisdiction,
which might indeed be claimed for the emperor, but which he had never
the power to exercise, was both claimed and exercised by the papacy. The
papacy, which sought to enforce the Christian canon of conduct in every
reach of life and every sphere of activity, would never admit that
disputes between sovereign princes lay outside the rule of that canon.
Innocent III, in a letter to the French bishops defending his claim to
arbitrate between France and England, stands very far from any such
admission. 'It belongs to our office', he argues, 'to correct all
Christian men for every mortal sin, and if they despise correction, to
coerce them by ecclesiastical censure. And if any shall say, that kings
must be treated in one way, and other men in another, we appeal in
answer to the law of God, wherein it is written, "Ye shall judge the
great as the small, and there shall be no acceptance of persons among
you." But if it is ours to proceed against criminal sin, we are
especially bound so to do when we find a sin against peace.'[19] Here,
in these words of Innocent, the clerical claim to control of peace and
war touches its highest point. In the name of a Christian principle,
permeating all things, and reducing all things to unity, the dread
arbitrament of war is itself to be submitted to a higher and finer
arbitration. The claim was too high to be sustained or translated into
effect. It is not too high to be admired.

Nor was it altogether remote from the actual life of the day. Even to
the laity of the Middle Ages, war was not a mere conflict of powers, in
which the strongest power must necessarily prevail. It was a conflict of
rights before a watching God of battles, in which the greatest right
could be trusted to emerge victorious. War between States was analogous
to the ordeal of battle between individuals: it was a legal way of
testing rights. Now ordeal by battle was a mode of procedure in courts
of law, and a mode of procedure whose conduct and control belonged to
the clergy. If, therefore, war between States is analogous to ordeal, it
follows, first, that it is a legal procedure which needs a high court
for its interpretation (and what court could be more competent than the
papal curia?), and, next, that it is a matter which in its nature
touches the clergy. Such ideas were a natural basis for the Church's
attempt to control the issues of war and peace; and if we remember these
ideas, we shall acquit the Church of any impracticable quixotism.

The attempt to control trade and commerce was no less lofty and no less
arduous. It is perhaps still easier to stop war than to stop
competition; and yet the Church made the attempt. The Christian law of
love was set against the economic law of demand and supply. It was
canonical doctrine that the buyer should take no more, and the seller
offer no less, than the just price of a commodity--a price which would
in practice depend on the cost of production. The rule for prices was
also the rule for wages: the just wage was the natural complement of the
just price. The prohibition of usury and of the taking of interest was
another factor in the same circle of ideas. If prices and wages are both
to be returns for work done, and returns of an exact equivalence, then,
on the assumptions which the canonists made--that the usurer does no
work, and that his loan is unproductive of any new value--it necessarily
follows that no return is due, or can be justly paid, for the use of
borrowed money. Work is the one title of all acquisition, and all
acquisition should be in exact proportion to the amount of work done.
This is the basic principle, and it is the principle of the Divine Law:
_In sudore frontis tuae comedes panem tuum_. Once more, therefore, and
once more in an unpromising and intractable material, we find the Church
seeking to enforce the unity of the Christian principle and to reduce
the Many to the One. In the same way, and from the same motive, that
private war was to be banished from the feudal class in the country,
competition--the private war of commerce--was to be eliminated from the
trading classes in the towns. Nor was the attack on competition, any
more than the attack on war, so much of a forlorn hope as it may seem to
a modern age. Even to-day, custom is still a force which checks the
operation of competition, and custom covered a far greater area in the
Middle Ages than it does to-day. The rent of land, whether paid in
labour or in kind, was a customary rent; and in every mediaeval
community the landed class was the majority. It was an easy transition
from fixed and customary rents to the fixing of just prices for
commodities and services. Lay sentiment supported clerical principle.
Guilds compelled their members to sell commodities at a level price, and
in a spirit of collectivism endeavoured to prevent the making of corners
and the practice of undercutting. Governments refused to recognize the
'laws' of demand and supply, and sought, by Statutes of Labourers, to
force masters to give, and workman to receive, no more and no less than
a 'just' and proper wage.

It was not only by the regulation of trade and commerce that the Church
sought to penetrate the life of the towns. The friars made their homes
in the towns in the thirteenth century; and the activity of the
friars--Franciscan and Dominican, Austin and Carmelite--enabled the
Church to exercise an influence on municipal life no less far-reaching
than that which she sought to exert on the feudal classes. Towns became
trustees of property for the use of the mendicant orders; and the orders
of Tertiaries, which flourished among them, enabled the townsfolk to
attach themselves to religious societies without quitting the pursuits
of lay life. A mediaeval town--with its trade and commerce regulated,
however imperfectly, by Christian principle; with its town council
acting as trustee for religious orders; and with its members attached as
Tertiaries to those orders--might be regarded as something of a type of
Christian society; and St. Thomas, partly under the influence of these
conditions, if partly also under the influence of the Aristotelian
philosophy of the [Greek: polis], is led to find in the life of the town
the closest approach to the ethics of Christianity.

The control of learning and education by the Church is the most peculiar
and essential aspect of her activity. The control of war and peace was a
matter of guiding the estate of the baronage; the control of trade and
commerce was a way of directing the estate of the commons; but the
control of learning and education was nothing more nor less than the
Church's guidance of herself and her direction of her own estate.
_Studium_ may be distinguished from _sacerdotium_ by mediaeval writers;
but the students of a mediaeval university are all 'clergy', and the
curricula of mediaeval universities are essentially clerical. All
knowledge, it is true, falls within their scope; but every branch of
knowledge, from dialectic to astronomy, is studied from the same angle,
and for the same object--_ad maiorem Dei gloriam_. Here, as elsewhere,
the penetrating and assimilative genius of the Church moulded and
informed a matter which was not, in its nature, easily receptive of a
clerical impression. The whole accumulated store of the lay learning of
the ages--geometry, astronomy, and natural science; grammar and
rhetoric; logic and metaphysics--this was the matter to be moulded and
the stuff to be permeated; and on this stuff St. Thomas wrought the
greatest miracle of genuine alchemy which is anywhere to be found in the
annals of learning.

The learning which the Church had to transform was essentially the
learning of the Hellenic world. Created by the centuries of nimble and
inventive thought which lie between the time of Thales and that of
Hipparchus, this learning had been systematized into a _corpus
scientiae_ during that age of Greek scholasticism which generally goes
by the name of Hellenistic. In its systematized Hellenistic form, it had
been received by the Roman world, and had become the culture of the
Roman Empire. By writers ranging from Ptolemy to Boethius the body of
all known knowledge had been arranged in a digest or series of pandects;
and along with the legal codification of Justinian it had been handed to
the Christian Church as the heritage of the ancient world. The attitude
of the Church to that heritage was for long unfixed and uncertain. The
logic, and still more the metaphysics, of Aristotle were not the most
comfortable of neighbours to the new body of Christian revelation
committed to the Church's keeping. In the hand of Berengar of Tours the
methods of Greek logic proved a corrosive to the received doctrine of
the Mass. In the hands of Abelard, in the _Sic et Non_, they served to
suggest the need of criticism of the text of Christian tradition. If
unity was to be preserved, a bridge must be built between the secular
science of the Greeks and the religious faith of the Church. In the
thirteenth century that bridge was built. Aristotle was reconciled with
St. Augustine; the _Organon_, the _Ethics_, and the _Politics_ were
incorporated in the body of Christian culture; and the mediaeval
instinct for unification celebrated its greatest and perhaps its most
arduous triumph.

The thirteenth century thus witnessed a unity of civilization alike as a
structure of life and as a content of the human mind. On the one hand,
there rose a single governing scheme of society, which culminated in the
universal primacy of Rome and the Roman pontiff. On the other hand, set
in this scheme, and contained in this structure, there was a single
stuff of thought, directed to the manifestation of the eternal glory of
God. The framework we may chiefly ascribe to Gregory VII; the content to
St. Thomas Aquinas. But the whole resultant unity is less the product of
great personalities than of a common instinct and a common conviction.
Men saw the world _sub specie unitatis_; and its kaleidoscopic variety
was insensibly focused into a single scheme under the stress of their
vision. The heavens showed forth the glory of God, and the firmament
declared His handiwork. Zoology became, like everything else, a willing
servant of Christianity; and _bestiaria moralizata_ were written to
show how all beasts were made for an ensample, and served for a type,
of the one and only truth. All things, indeed, were types and allegories
to this way of thinking; and just as every text in the Bible was an
allegory to mediaeval interpretation, so all things in the world of
creation, animate and inanimate, the jewel with its 'virtue' as well as
the beast with its 'moral', became allegories and parables of heavenly
meanings. Thus the world of perception became unreal, that it might be
transmuted into the real world of faith; and symbolism like that of Hugh
of St. Victor dominated men's thought, making all things (like the Mass
itself, if in a less degree) into _signa rei sacrae_.

The unity of knowledge was thus purchased at a price. Things must cease
to be studied in themselves, and must be allegorized into types, in
order that they might be reduced to a unity. Perhaps the purchase of
unity on terms such as these is a bad bargain; and it is at any rate
obvious that in such an atmosphere scientific thought will not flourish,
or man learn to adjust himself readily to the laws of his environment.
From the standpoint of natural science we may readily condemn the Middle
Ages and all their works; and we may prefer a single _Opus_ of Roger
Bacon to the whole of the _Summa_ of St. Thomas. But it is necessary to
judge an age which was destitute of natural science by some other
criterion than that of science; nor must we hasten to say that the
Middle Ages found the Universal so easily, because they ignored the
Particular so absolutely. The truth is, that though mediaeval thinkers
knew far more of the writings of Aristotle than they did of those of
Plato, they were none the less far better Platonists than they were
Aristotelians. If they had been better Aristotelians, they would have
been better biologists; but as they were good Platonists, they had a
conception of the purpose and system of human life in society, which
perhaps excuses all, and more than all, the defects of their biology.
Any survey, however brief, of the political theory of the Middle Ages
will show at once its Platonic character and its incessant impulse
towards the achievement of unity.


III

To mediaeval thought, as to Plato, the unity of society is an organic
unity, in the sense that each member of society is an organ of the whole
to which he belongs, and discharges a function at once peculiar to
himself and necessary to the full life of the whole. Monasticism, so
often misrepresented, attains its true meaning in the light of this
conception. The monk is a necessary organ of Christian society,
discharging his function of prayer and devotion for the benefit not of
himself solely, or primarily, but rather of every member of that
society. He prays for the sins of the whole world, and by his prayer he
contributes to the realization of the end of the world, which is the
attainment of salvation. In the same way the conception of a treasury of
merits, afterwards perverted in the system of indulgences, belongs to an
organic theory and practice of society. The merits which Christ and the
saints have accumulated are a fund for the use of the whole of Christian
society, a fund on which any member can draw for his own salvation, just
because each is fitly joined and knit together with all the rest in a
single body for the attainment of a single purpose. But we need not take
isolated instances of the Platonism of mediaeval thought. The whole
basic conception of a system of estates, which recurs everywhere in
mediaeval life, is a Platonic conception. The estates of clergy,
baronage, and commons are the Platonic classes of guardians,
auxiliaries, and farmers. The Platonic creed of [Greek: to auton
prattein] ('Do thine own duty') is the Christian creed of 'doing my
duty in that state of life to which it shall please God to call me'. The
Middle Ages are full of a spontaneous Platonism, and inspired by an
_anima naturaliter Platonica_. The control which the mediaeval clergy
exercised over Christian society in the light of divine revelation
repeats the control which the guardians of Plato were to exercise over
civic society in the light of the Idea of the Good. The communism of the
mediaeval monastery is reminiscent of the communism of the Platonic
barracks. And if there are differences between the society imagined by
Plato and the society envisaged by the mediaeval Church, these
differences only show that the mediaeval Church was trying to raise
Platonism to a higher power, and to do so in the light of conceptions
which were themselves Greek, though they belonged to a Greece posterior
to the days of Plato. These conceptions--which were cherished by Stoic
thinkers; which penetrated int

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