Transcriber's Note

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in this text. For a complete list, please see [the bottom of this document].

PROGRESS AND
HISTORY

ESSAYS ARRANGED AND EDITED

BY

F. S. MARVIN

late senior scholar of st. john's college, oxford
author of 'the living past'
editor of 'the unity of western civilization'

'Tanta patet rerum series et omne futurum
Nititur in lucem.'
Lucan.

THIRD IMPRESSION

HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK
TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY

1919

PRINTED IN ENGLAND
AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

PREFACE

This volume is a sequel to The Unity of Western Civilization published last year and arose in the same way, from a course of lectures given at the Woodbrooke Settlement, Birmingham.

The former book attempted to describe some of the permanent unifying factors which hold our Western civilization together in spite of such catastrophic divisions as the present war. This book attempts to show these forces in growth. The former aimed rather at a statical, the present at a dynamical view of the same problem. Both are historical in spirit.

It is hoped that these courses may serve as an introduction to a series of cognate studies, of which clearly both the supply and the scope are infinite, for under the general conception of 'Progress in Unity' all great human topics might be embraced. One subject has been suggested for early treatment which would have especial interest at the present time, viz. 'Recent Progress in European Thought'. We are by the war brought more closely than before into contact with other nations of Europe who are pursuing with inevitable differences the same main lines of evolution. To indicate these in general, with stress on the factor of betterment, is the aim of the present volume.

F.S.M.

CONTENTS

I

THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

F. S. Marvin

The editor of these essays was busy in the autumn of last year collating the opinions attached by different people to the word 'progress'. One Sunday afternoon he happened to be walking with two friends in Oxford, one a professor of philosophy, the other a lady. The professor of philosophy declared that to him human progress must always mean primarily the increase of knowledge; the editor urged the increase of power as its most characteristic feature, but the lady added at once that to her progress had always meant, and could only mean, increase in our appreciation of the humanity of others.

The first two thoughts, harmonized and directed by the third, may be taken to cover the whole field, and this volume to be merely a commentary upon them. What we have to consider is, when and how this idea of progress, as a general thing affecting mankind as a whole, first appeared in the world, how far it has been realized in history, and how far it gives us any guidance and hope for the future. In the midst of a catastrophe which appears at first sight to be a deadly blow to the ideal, such an inquiry has a special interest and may have some permanent value.

Words are the thought of ages crystallized, or rather embodied with a constantly growing soul. The word 'Progress', like the word 'Humanity', is one of the most significant. It is a Latin word, not used in its current abstract sense until after the Roman incorporation of the Mediterranean world. It contains Greek thought summed up and applied by Roman minds. Many of the earlier Greek thinkers, Xenophanes and Empedocles as well as Plato and Aristotle, had thought and spoken of a steady process in things, including man himself, from lower to higher forms; but the first writer who expounds the notion with sufficient breadth of view and sufficiently accurate and concrete observation to provide a preliminary sketch, was the great Roman poet who attributed all the best that was in him to the Greeks and yet has given us a highly original picture of the upward tendency of the world and of human society upon it. He, too, so far as one can discover, was the first to use the word 'progress' in the sense of our inquiry. The passage in Lucretius at the end of his fifth book on the Nature of Things is so true and brilliant and anticipates so many points in later thought that it is worth quoting at some length, and the poet's close relation with Cicero, the typical Greco-Roman thinker, gives his ideas the more weight as an historical document.

He begins by describing a struggle for existence in which the less well-adapted creatures died off, those who wanted either the power to protect themselves or the means of adapting themselves to the purposes of man. In this stage, however, man was a hardier creature than he afterwards became. He lived like the beasts of the field and was ignorant of tillage or fire or clothes or houses. He had no laws or government or marriage, and though he did not fear the dark, he feared the real danger of fiercer beasts. Men often died a miserable death, but not in multitudes on a single day as they do now by battle or shipwreck.

The next stage sees huts and skins and fire which softened their bodies, and marriage and the ties of family which softened their tempers. And tribes began to make treaties of alliance with other tribes.

Speech arose from the need which all creatures feel to exercise their natural powers, just as the calf will butt before his horns protrude. Men began to apply different sounds to denote different things, just as brute beasts will do to express different passions, as any one must have noticed in the cases of dogs and horses and birds. No one man set out to invent speech.

Fire was first learnt from lightning and the friction of trees, and cooking from the softening and ripening of things by the sun.

Then men of genius invented improved methods of life, the building of cities and private property in lands and cattle. But gold gave power to the wealthy and destroyed the sense of contentment in simple happiness. It must always be so whenever men allow themselves to become the slaves of things which should be their dependants and instruments.

They began to believe in and worship gods, because they saw in dreams shapes of preterhuman strength and beauty and deemed them immortal; and as they noted the changes of the seasons and all the wonders of the heavens, they placed their gods there and feared them when they spoke in the thunder.

Metals were discovered through the burning of the woods, which caused the ores to run. Copper and brass came first and were rated above gold and silver. And then the metals took the place of hands, nails, teeth, and clubs, which had been men's earliest arms and tools. Weaving followed the discovery of the use of iron.

Sowing, planting, and grafting were learnt from nature herself, and gradually the cultivation of the soil was carried farther and farther up the hills.

Men learnt to sing from the birds, and to blow on pipes from the whistling of the zephyr through the reeds: and those simple tunes gave as much rustic jollity as our more elaborate tunes do now.

Then, in a summary passage at the end, Lucretius enumerates all the chief discoveries which men have made in the age-long process—ships, agriculture, walled cities, laws, roads, clothes, songs, pictures, statues, and all the pleasures of life—and adds, 'these things practice and the experience of the unresting mind have taught mankind gradually as they have progressed from point to point'.[1]

It is the first definition and use of the word in literature. If we accept it as a typical presentation of the Greco-Roman view, seen by a man of exceptional genius and insight at the climax of the period, there are two or three points which must arrest our attention. Lucretius is thinking mainly of progress in the arts, and especially of the arts as they affect man's happiness. There is no mention of increase in knowledge or in love. As in the famous parallel passage in Sophocles' Antigone, it is man's strength and skill which most impressed the poet, and his skill especially as exhibited in the arts. Compared with what we shall see as typical utterances of later times, it is an external view of the subject. The absence of love as an element of progress carries with it the absence of the idea of humanity. There is no conception here, nor anywhere in classical thought before the Stoics, of a world-wide Being which has contributed to the advance and should share fully in its fruits. Still less do we find any hint of the possibilities of an infinite progress. The moral, on the contrary, is that we should limit our desires, banish disturbing thoughts, and settle down to a quiet and sensible enjoyment of the good things that advancing skill has provided for us. It is, of course, true that thoughts can be found in individual writers, especially in Plato and Aristotle, which would largely modify this view. Yet it can hardly be questioned that Lucretius here represents the prevalent tone of thoughtful men of his day. They had begun to realize the fact of human progress, but envisaged it, as was natural in a first view, mainly on the external side, and, above all, had no conception of its infinite possibilities.

When we turn to typical utterances of the next great age in history the contrast is striking. Catholic doctrine had absorbed much that was congenial to it from the Stoics, from Plato and Aristotle, but it added a thing that was new in the world, a passionate love and an overpowering desire for personal moral improvement. This is so clear in the greatest figures of the Middle Ages, men such as St. Bernard and St. Francis, and it is so unlike anything that we know in the world before, that we are justified in treating it as characteristic of the age. To some of us, indeed, it will appear as the most important element in the general notion of progress which we are tracing. It so appeared to Comte.[2] Of numberless passages that might be quoted from fathers and doctors of the Church, a few words from Nicholas of Cusa must suffice. He was a divine of the early fifteenth century, true to the faith, but anxious to improve the discipline of the Church. To him progress took an entirely spiritual form. 'To be able to understand more and more without end is the type of eternal wisdom.... Let a man desire to understand better what he does understand and to love more what he does love and the whole world will not satisfy him.'

Here is a point of view so different from the last that we find some difficulty in fitting it into the same scheme of things. Yet both are essential elements in Western civilization; both have been developed by the operations of similar forces in the world civilized and incorporated by Greece and Rome.

The Catholic divine looks entirely inward for his idea of progress, and his conception contains elements of real and permanent validity, of which our present notions are full. His eyes are turned towards the future and there is no limit to his vision. And though the progress contemplated is within the soul of the individual believer, it rests on the two fundamental principles of knowledge and love which are both essentially social. The believer may isolate himself from the world to develop his higher nature, but the knowledge and the love which he carries with him into his solitude are themselves fruits of that intercourse with his fellows from which an exclusive religious ideal temporarily cuts him off.

Nor must we forget that Catholic doctrine and discipline, though aiming at this perfection of the individual rather than of the race, was embodied in an organization which carried farther than the Roman Empire the idea of a united civilization and furnished to many thinkers, Bossuet as well as Dante, a first sketch of the progress of mankind.

But it is clear that this construction was provisional only, either on the side of personal belief and practice, or of ecclesiastical organization; provisional, that is, if we are looking for real unity in the mind of mankind. For we need a doctrine, a scheme of knowledge, into which all that we discover about the world and our own nature may find its place; we need principles of action which will guide us in attaining a state of society more congruent with our knowledge of the possibilities of the world and human nature, more thoroughly inspired by human love, love of man for man as a being living his span of life here and now, under conditions which call for a concentration of skill and effort to realize the best. The breaking of the old Catholic synthesis, narrow but admirable within its limits, took place at what we call the Renascence and Reformation; the linking up of a new one is the task of our own and many later generations. Let it not be thought that such a change involves the destruction of any vital element in the idea of progress already achieved; if true and vital, every element must survive. But it does involve an acceptance of the fact that progress, or humanity, or the evolution of the divine within us—however we prefer to phrase it—is a larger thing than any one organization or any one set of carefully harmonized doctrines. The truth, and the organ in which we enshrine it, must grow with the human minds who are collectively producing it. The new unity is itself progress.

It must give us confidence in facing such a prospect to observe that at each remove from the first appearance of the idea of progress in the world man's use of the word has carried more meaning and, though sometimes quieter in tone, as in recent times, is better grounded in the facts of life and history. Such an advance in our conceptions took place after the Renascence. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the art and science of the ancient world had been recovered, the word and the idea of progress started on a fresh course of unexampled vigour. The lines were closer to those of the pre-Christian than of the Catholic world, but it would be by no means true to call them pagan. When Bacon and Descartes begin to sound the modern note of progress, they think primarily of an advance in the arts and sciences, but there is a spiritual and human side to their ideal which could not be really paralleled in classical thought. The Spirit of Man is now invoked, and this, not in the sense of an élite, the builders of the Greek State or the rulers of the Roman Empire, but of mankind as a whole. This is Christian, or perhaps we should say, Stoical-Christian. Thus Descartes tells us that he looks to science to furnish us ultimately with an art which will make us 'masters and possessors of nature ... and this not solely for the pleasure of enjoying with ease the good things of the world, but principally for the preservation and improvement of human health which is both the foundation of all other goods and the means of strengthening the spirit itself' ('Discours de la Méthode'). It is significant that the two words Progress and Humanity come into use in their modern sense side by side. The latter is the basis and the ideal of the former.

But the new thing which had come into the world at this point, and gives a fresh impulse and content to the idea of progress, is the development of science. The Greeks had founded it and, as we shall see in a later chapter, it was the recovery of the Greek thread which gave the moderns their clue. But no one before the sixteenth century, before the marvels revealed by Galileo's telescope and knit up by Newton's synthetic genius, could have conceived the visions of human regeneration by science which light up the pioneers of the seventeenth century and are the gospel of the eighteenth.

We turn to the eighteenth century, and primarily to the school of thinkers called 'philosophes' in France, for the fullest and most enthusiastic statement of progress as a gospel. It is, of course, European, as all the greatest advances of thought have been; and German thinkers, as well as English, stand with the French in the vanguard. Kant and Herder, from different points of view, thought it out perhaps more thoroughly than any one else at that time; but the French believed in it as a nation and were willing to stake their lives and souls on the belief. Thus Turgot, before the Revolution, declared that 'the total mass of the human race marches continually though sometimes slowly towards an ever-increasing perfection'. And Condorcet, in the midst of the Revolution, while himself under its ban, painted a picture 'of the human race, freed from its chains, and marching with a firm tread on the road of truth and virtue and happiness'.

Here is the gospel in its purest and simplest form, and when we are inclined to think that the crimes and the partial failure of the Revolution discredit its principles, it is well to remember that the man who believed in them most systematically, expounded his belief with perfect calmness and confidence as he lay under sentence of death from a revolutionary tribunal.

If this enthusiasm is madness, we might all well wish to be possessed. The true line of criticism is different. At the Revolution, as before at the Renascence, the leaders of the new movement could not see all their debt to the past. Like the Renascence, they idealized certain features in classical antiquity, but they had not yet gained the notion of historical continuity; above all, they did not realize the value of the religious development of the Middle Ages. It was left for the nineteenth century and for us, its successors, to attempt the supreme task of seeing things steadily and seeing them whole.

For in spite of the capital contributions of the Renascence to progress and the idea of progress, especially by its scientific constructions, it is undeniable that a bias was then given to the course of Western civilization from which it has suffered ever since, and which it is now our urgent duty to correct. Two aspects of this may be specified. The old international unity which Rome had achieved, at least superficially, in the Mediterranean world, and which the Catholic Church had extended and deepened, was broken up in favour of a system of sovereign and independent states controlling religion and influencing education on lines calculated to strengthen the national forces and the national forces alone. They even believed that, at any rate in trade and commerce, the interests of these independent states were rather rival than co-operative. The Revolution struck the note of human association clearly enough, but we have not yet learnt to set all our other tunes in accord with it. Another, and perhaps even more fundamental, weakness of the Renascence tradition was the stress it laid on the material, mechanical, external side of progress. On the one hand, the spiritual side of life tended to be identified with that system of thought and discipline which had been so rudely disrupted. On the other hand, the new advance in science brought quickly after it a corresponding growth of wealth and mechanical inventions and material comforts. The spirit of man was for the time impeded and half suffocated by its own productions.

The present war seems to many of us the supreme struggle of our better nature to gain the mastery over these obstructions, and freedom for its proper growth.

Now if this analysis be anywhere near the truth, it is clear that our task for the future is one of synthesis on the lines of social progress. Knowledge, power, wealth, increase of skill, increase of health, we have them all in growing measure, and Mr. Clutton Brock will tell us in his chapter in this volume that we may be able by an exercise of will to achieve even a new renascence in art. But we certainly do not yet possess these things fairly distributed or in harmony of mind.

The connexion therefore between progress as we now envisage it, and unity, both in ourselves and in society at large, becomes apparent. At each of the previous great moments in the history of the West development has been secured by emphasis on one side of our nature at the expense of the rest. Visions of mankind in common progress have flashed on individual thinkers, a Roman Emperor, a Catholic Schoolman, a Revolutionary prophet. But the thing achieved has been one-sided, and the needed correction has been given by another movement more one-sided still. The greatest hope of the present day lies in the fact that in all branches of life, in government as well as in philosophy, in science as in social reform, in religion and in international politics, men are now striving with determination to bind the threads together.

There is no necessary opposition between the rival forces which have so often led to conflict. In all our controversies harmony can be reached and has often been reached by the application of patience, knowledge, and goodwill. And goodwill implies here the readiness to submit the particular issue to the arbitration of the general good. The international question has been so fully canvassed in these days that it would be superfluous to discuss it here. The moral is obvious, and abundant cases throughout the world illustrate the truth that well-organized nationalities contain in themselves nothing contrary to the ideal of international peace.[3] Nor is the still more persistent and universal opposition of capital and labour really less amenable to reconciliation, because in this case also the two factors in the problem are equally necessary to social progress, and we shall not enter on the various practical solutions—co-operation, co-partnership, partial state-socialism, &c.—which have been proposed for a problem which no one believes to be insoluble. The conflict in our own souls between the things of matter and sense and the life of the spirit, is more closely germane to the present argument, because ultimately this has to be resolved, if not in every mind yet in the dominant mind of Europe, before the more practical questions can be generally settled. Harmony here is at the root of a sound idea of progress.

When the concluding chapters of this volume are reached it will be seen how fully the recent developments both in science and philosophy corroborate the line which is here suggested for the reconciliation of conflicts and the establishment of a stronger and more coherent notion of what we may rightly pursue as progress. For both in science and still more in philosophy attention is being more and more closely concentrated on the meaning of life itself, which science approaches by way of its physical concomitants, and philosophy from the point of view of consciousness. And while science has been analysing the characteristics of a living organism, philosophy finds in our consciousness just that element of community with others which an organic conception of progress demands. The only progress of which we can be certain, the philosopher tells us, is progress in our own consciousness, which becomes constantly fuller, more knowing, and more social, as time unfolds. This, he tells us, must endure, though the storms of passion and nature may fall upon us.

On such a firm basis we would all gladly build our faith. No unity can be perfect except that which we achieve in our own souls, and no progress can be relied on except that which we can know within, and can develop from, our own consciousness and our own powers. But we cannot rest in this. We are bound to look outside our own consciousness for some objective correspondence to that progress which our own nature craves; and history supplies this evidence. It is from history that we derive the first idea and the accumulating proofs of the reality of progress. Lucretius's first sketch is really his summary of social history up to that point. The Catholic thinker had a wider scope. He was able to see that the whole course of Greco-Roman civilization was, from his point of view, a preparation for the Church which had the care of the spiritual life of man while on earth. And in the next stage, that in which we now live, we see all the interests of life taken back again into the completeness of human progress, and can trace that complete being, labouring slowly but unmistakably to a higher state, outside us in the world, as well as within our own consciousness, which is ready to expand if we will give it range.

On such lines we may sketch the historical aspect of progress on which the personal is based; and it is of the utmost importance to keep the two aspects before us concurrently, because reliance on the growing fullness of the individual life to the neglect of the social evolution is likely to empty that life itself of its true content, to leave the self-centred visionary absorbed in the contemplation of some ideal perfection within himself, while the world outside him from which he ultimately derives his notions, is toiling and suffering from the want of those very elements which he is best able to supply.

The succeeding chapters of this book will, it is hoped, supply some evidence of the concrete reality of progress, as well as of the tendency to greater coherence and purity in the ideal itself. It would have been easy to accumulate evidence; some sides of life are hardly touched on at all. The collective and the intellectual sides are fully dealt with both in this and in the volume on The Unity of Western Civilization. But if we make our survey over a sufficient space, coming down especially to our own days, our conclusion as to the advance made in the physical and moral well-being of mankind, will be hardly less emphatic. Our average lives are longer and continue to lengthen, and they are unquestionably spent with far less physical suffering than was generally the case at any previous period. We are bound to give full weight to this, however much we rightly deplore the deadening effect of monotonous and mechanical toil on so large a part of the population. And even for these the opportunities for a free and improving life are amazingly enlarged. We groan and chafe at what remains to be done because of the unexampled size of the modern industrial populations with which we have to deal. But we know in some points very definitely what we want, and we are now all persuaded with John Stuart Mill that the remedy is in our own hands, 'that all the great sources of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them entirely, conquerable by human care and effort.' This conviction is perhaps the greatest step of all that we have gained. In morality some pertinent and necessary questions are raised in Chap. VI, but the general progress would be doubted by very few who have had the opportunity of comparing the evidence as to any previous state of morals, say in the Middle Ages or in the Elizabethan age—the crown of the Renascence in England—with that of the present day. The capital advance in morality, which by itself would be sufficient to justify our thesis, is the increase in the consciousness and the obligation of the 'common weal', that conception of which Government, increasingly better organized, is the most striking practical realization. It has its drawback in the spread of what we feel as a debasing 'vulgarity', but the general balance is overwhelmingly on the side of good. And in all such discussions we are apt to allow far too little weight to the change which the New World, and especially the United States, has brought about. In matters of personal prosperity and a high general standard of intellectual and moral competence, what has been achieved there would outweigh a good deal of our Old World defects when we come to drawing up a world's balance-sheet.

It will be seen therefore that we dismiss altogether any doctrine of an 'illusion of progress' as a necessary decoy to progressive action. Progress is a fact as well as an ideal, and the ideal, though it springs from an objective reality, will always be in advance of it. So it is with all man's activities when he comes to man's estate. In science he has always an ideal of a more perfect knowledge before him though he becomes scientific by experience. In art he is always striving to idealize fresh things, though he first becomes an artist from the pure spontaneous pleasure of expressing what is in him. The deliberate projection of the ideal into the future, seeing how far it will take us and whether we are journeying in the right direction, is a late stage. As to progress, the largest general ideal which can affect man's action, it is only recently that mankind as a whole has been brought to grips with the conception, also enlarged to the full. He was standing, somewhat bewildered, somewhat dazzled, before it, when the war, like an eclipse of the sun, came suddenly and darkened the view. But an eclipse has been found an invaluable time for studying some of the problems of the sun's nature and of light itself.

One of the most acute critics of the mid-Victorian prophets of progress, Dr. John Grote, did very well in disentangling the ideal element which is inherent in every sound doctrine of progress as a guide to conduct. He took the theory of a continuous inevitable progress in human affairs, and showed how this by itself might lead to a weakening of the will, on which alone in his view progress in the proper sense depends. He took the mechanical theory of utilitarianism and subjected it to a similar analysis. We cannot evaluate progress as an increase in a sum-total of happiness. This is incapable of calculation, and if we aim directly at it, we are likely to lose the higher things on which it depends, and which are capable of being made the objects of that direct striving which is essential to progress. Dr. Grote's analysis has long since passed into current philosophical teaching, but he will always be well worth reading for his fresh and vigorous reasoning and for the way in which he builds up his own position without denying the solid contributions of those whom he criticizes. Complete truth in the matter seems to us to involve a larger share for the historical element than Dr. Grote explicitly allows. We grant fully the paramount necessity for an ideal of progress and for constantly revising, purifying, and strengthening it. But in its formation we should trace more than he does to the collective forces of mankind as expressed in history. These have given us the ideal and will carry us on towards it by a force which is greater than, and in one sense independent of, any individual will. This is the cardinal truth of sociology, and is obvious if we consider how in matters of everyday experience we are all compelled by some social force not ourselves, as for instance in actions tending to maintain the family or in a national crisis such, as the war. This general will is not, of course, independent of all the wills concerned, but it acts more or less as an outside compelling force in the case of every one. Moreover our selves are composite as well as wholes, and parts of us are active in forming the general will, parts acquiesce and parts are overborne. Thus it is clear that a general tendency to progress in the human race may be well established—as we hold it to be—and yet go on in ways capable of infinite variation and at very various speed. We are all, let us suppose, being carried onward by one mighty and irresistible stream. We may combine our strength and skill and make the best use of the surrounding forces. This is working and steering to the chosen goal. Or we may rest on our oars and let the stream take us where it will. This is drifting, and we shall certainly be carried on somewhere; but we may be badly bruised or even shipwrecked in the process, and in any case we shall have contributed nothing to the advance. Some few may even waste their strength in trying to work backwards against the stream. We seem to have reached the point in history when for the first time we are really conscious of our position, and the problem is now a possible and an urgent one to mark the goal clearly and unitedly and bend our common efforts to attaining it.

If this be so, the work of synthesis may be thought to have a higher practical value for the moment than the analysis which has prevailed in European thought for the last forty or fifty years. In the earlier part of the nineteenth century the great formative ideas which had been gathering volume and enthusiasm during the revolutionary period, took shape in complete systems of religious and philosophic truth—Kant, Hegel, Spencer, Comte. They have been followed by a period of criticism which has left none of them whole, but on the other hand has produced a mass of contradictions and specialisms highly confusing and even hopeless to the public mind and veiling the more important and profound agreements which have been growing all the time beneath. There are now abundant signs of a reaction towards unity and construction of a broad and solid kind. In no respect is such a knitting up more desirable than in this idea of progress itself. Are we to say that there is no such thing as all-round continuous progress, but only progress in definite branches of thought and activity, progress in science or in particular arts, social progress, physical progress, progress in popular education and the like, but that any two or more branches only coincide occasionally and by accident, and that when working at one we can and should have no thought of working at them all? This is no doubt a prevalent view and we may hope that some things said in this book may modify it. Another school of critical thinkers, approaching the question from the point of view of the ultimate object of action, asks what is the one thing for which all others are to be pursued as means? Is increase of knowledge the absolute good or increase of happiness? Or if it is increase of love, is it quite indifferent what we love? A few words on this may fitly conclude this chapter.

The task of mankind, and of every one of us so far as he is able to enter into it, is to bring together these various aspects of human excellence, to see them as parts of one ideal and labour to approach it. This approach is progress, and if you say 'progress of what, and to what end', the answer can only be, the progress of humanity, and the end further progress. Some of the writers in this book will indicate the point at which in their view this progress is in contact with the infinite, with something not given in history; but, whatever our view of the transcendental problem may be, it is of the utmost importance for all of us to realize that we have given to us in the actual process of time, in concrete history, a development of humanity, a growth from a lower to a higher state of being, which may be most perfectly realized in the individual consciousness, fully awake and fully socialized, but is also clearly traceable in the doings of the human race as a whole. Such is in fact the uniting thread of these essays, and when we proceed to the converse of this truth and apply this ideal which we have shown to be the course of realization, as a governing motive in our lives, it is even more imperative to strive constantly to keep the whole together, and not to regard either knowledge or power or beauty or even love as an ultimate and supreme thing to which all other ends are merely means. The end is a more perfect man, developed by the perfecting of all mankind.

Such a conception embraces all the separate aspects of our nature each in its place, and each from its own angle supreme. Love and knowledge inseparable and fundamental, freedom and happiness essential conditions of healthy growth, personality developed with the development of the greater personality in which we all live and grow. This greater personality is at its highest immeasurably above us, and has no assignable limits in time or in capacity to know, to love, or to enjoy. We cannot fix its origin at any known point in the birth of planets, nor does the cooling of our sun nor of all the suns seem to put any limit in our imagination to the continuous unfolding of life like our own. While thus practically infinite, the ideal of human nature is revealed to us concretely in countless types of goodness and truth and beauty which we may know and love and imitate. To all it is open to study the lineaments of this ideal in the records and figures of the past; to most it is revealed in some fellow beings known in life. From these, the human spirits which embody the strivings, the hopes, the conquered failings of the past, we may form our better selves and build the humanity of the future.

There is a famous and magnificent passage in Dante's Purgatorio which Catholic commentators interpret in sacramental terms but we may well apply in a wider sense to the progress of the human spirit towards the ideal. It occurs at that crucial point where the ascending poet leaves the circles of sad repentance to reach the higher regions of growing light.

'And when we came there, to the first step, it was of white marble, so polished that I could see myself just as I am.

'And the second was coloured dark, a rugged stone, cracked lengthwise and across. And the third piled above it was flaming porphyry, red like the blood from a vein.

'Above this one was the angel of God, sitting on the threshold, bright as a diamond.

'Up the three steps my master led me with goodwill and then he said, "Beg humbly that he unlock the door."'[4]

Like this, the path man has to tread is not an easy progress. But he is rising all the time and he rises on steps of his own past. He sees reflected in them the image of himself, and he sees too the deep faults in his nature, and the rough surface of his path through time. The last step, tinged by his own blood, gives access to a higher dwelling, firm and bright and leading higher still. But it is open only after a long ascent, and to the human spirit that has worked faithfully, with love for his comrades and leaders, and reverence for the laws which bind both the world and him.

Books for Reference

John Grote, Examination of Utilitarian Philosophy.

Kant, Principles of Politics (translated by Hastie and published by Clark) contains his smaller works on Universal History, Perpetual Peace, and the Principle of Progress. See also the Essay on Herder.

Comte's Positive Polity, vols. i. and ii, passim.

FOOTNOTES:

[1]

'usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis
paulatim docuit pedetemtim progredientes.'

[2] Comte, Positive Polity, ii 116.

[3] See Delisle Burns, Morality of Nations, and The Unity of Western Civilization, passim.

[4] Purgatorio, ix. 94-108.

II

PROGRESS IN PREHISTORIC TIMES

R. R. Marett

If I am unable to deliver this lecture in person, it will be because I have to attend in Jersey to the excavation of a cave once occupied by men of the Glacial Epoch. Now these men knew how to keep a good fire burning within their primitive shelter; their skill in the chase provided them with a well-assorted larder; their fine strong teeth were such as to make short work of their meals; lastly, they were clever artisans and one may even say artists in flint and greenstone, not only having the intelligence to make an economic use of the material at their disposal, but likewise having enough sense of form to endow their implements with more than a touch of symmetry and beauty. All this we know from what they have left behind them; and the rest is silence.

And now let us imagine ourselves possessed of one of those time-machines of which Mr. H. G. Wells is the inventor. Transported by such means to the Europe of that distant past, could we undertake to beat the record of those cave-men?

Clearly, all will depend on how many of us, and how much of the apparatus of civilization, our time-machine is able to accommodate. If it were simply to drop a pair of us, naked and presumably ashamed, into the midst of the rigours of the great Ice Age, the chances surely are that the unfortunate immigrants must perish within a week. Adam could hardly manage to kindle a fire without the help of matches. Eve would be no less sorely troubled to make clothes without the help of a needle. On the other hand, if the time-machine were as capacious as Noah's Ark, the venture would undoubtedly succeed, presenting no greater difficulty than, let us say, the planting of a settlement in Labrador or on the Yukon. Given numbers, specialized labour, tools, weapons, books, domesticated animals and plants, and so forth, the civilized community would do more than hold its own with the prehistoric cave-man, devoid of all such aids to life. Indeed, it is tolerably certain that, willingly or unwillingly, our colonists would soon drive the ancient type of man clean out of existence.

On the face of it, then, it would seem that we, as compared with men of Glacial times, have decidedly 'progressed'. But it is not so easy to say off-hand in what precisely such progress consists.

Are we happier? As well ask whether the wild wolf or the tame dog is the happier animal. The truth would seem to be that wolf and dog alike can be thoroughly happy each in its own way; whereas each would be as thoroughly miserable, if forced to live the life of the other. In one of his most brilliant passages Andrew Lang, after contrasting the mental condition of one of our most distant ancestors with yours or mine, by no means to our disadvantage, concludes with these words: 'And after all he was probably as happy as we are; it is not saying much.'[5]

But, if not happier, are we nobler? If I may venture to speak as a philosopher, I should reply, confidently, 'Yes.' It comes to this, that we have and enjoy more soul. On the intellectual side, we see farther afield. On the moral side, our sympathies are correspondingly wider. Imaginatively, and even to no small extent practically, we are in touch with myriads of men, present and past. We participate in a world-soul; and by so doing are advanced in the scale of spiritual worth and dignity as members of the human race. Yet this common soul of mankind we know largely and even chiefly as something divided against itself. Not only do human ideals contradict each other; but the ideal in any and all of its forms is contradicted by the actual. So it is the discontent of the human world-soul that is mainly borne in upon him who shares in it most fully. A possibility of completed good may glimmer at the far end of the quest; but the quest itself is experienced as a bitter striving. Bitter though it may be, however, it is likewise ennobling. Here, then, I find the philosophic, that is, the ultimate and truest, touchstone of human progress, namely, in the capacity for that ennobling form of experience whereby we become conscious co-workers and co-helpers in an age-long, world-wide striving after the good.

But to-day I come before you, not primarily as a philosopher, but rather as an anthropologist, a student of prehistoric man. I must therefore define progress, not in the philosophic or ultimate way, but simply as may serve the strictly limited aims of my special science. As an anthropologist, I want a workable definition—one that will set me working and keep me working on promising lines. I do not ask ultimate truth of my anthropological definition. For my science deals with but a single aspect of reality; and the other aspects of the real must likewise be considered on their merits before a final account can be rendered of it.

Now anthropology is just the scientific history of man; and I suppose that there could be a history of man that did without the idea of human progress altogether. Progress means, in some sense, change for the better. But, strictly, history as such deals with fact; and is not concerned with questions of better or worse—in a word, with value. Hence, it must always be somewhat arbitrary on the part of an historian to identify change in a given direction with a gain or increase in value. Nevertheless, the anthropologist may do so, if he be prepared to take the risk. He sees that human life has on the whole grown more complex. He cannot be sure that it will continue to grow more complex. Much less has he a right to lay it down for certain that it ought to grow more complex. But so long as he realizes that he is thereby committing himself by implication to a prophetic and purposive interpretation of the facts, he need not hesitate to style this growth of complexity progress so far as man is concerned. For if he is an anthropologist, he is also a man, and cannot afford to take a wholly external and impartial view of the process whereby the very growth of his science is itself explained. Anthropologists though we be, we run with the other runners in the race of life, and cannot be indifferent to the prize to be won.

Progress, then, according to the anthropologist, is defined as increase in complexity, with the tacit assumption that this somehow implies betterment, though it is left with the philosopher to justify such an assumption finally and fully. Whereas in most cases man would seem to have succeeded in the struggle for existence by growing more complex, though in some cases survival has been secured by way of simplification, anthropology concentrates its attention on the former set of cases as the more interesting and instructive even from a theoretical point of view. Let biology by all means dispense with the notion of progress, and consider man along with the other forms of life as subject to mere process. But anthropology, though in a way it is a branch of biology, has a right to a special point of view. For it employs special methods involving the use of a self-knowledge that in respect to the other forms of life is inevitably wanting. Anthropology, in short, like charity, begins at home. Because we know in ourselves the will to progress, we go on to seek for evidences of progress in the history of mankind. Nor need we cease to think of progress as something to be willed, something that concerns the inner man, even though for scientific purposes we undertake to recognize it by some external sign, as, for instance, by the sign of an increasing complexity, that is, such differentiation as likewise involves greater cohesion. All history, and more especially the history of early man, must deal primarily with externals. Thence it infers the inner life; and thereby it controls the tendency known as 'the psychologist's fallacy', namely, that of reading one's own mind into that of another man without making due allowance for differences of innate capacity and of acquired outlook. In what follows, then, let us, as anthropologists, be content to judge human progress in prehistoric times primarily by its external and objective manifestations; yet let us at no point in our inquiries forget that these ancient men, some of whom are our actual ancestors, were not only flesh of our flesh, but likewise spirit of our spirit.

A rapid sketch such as this must take for granted on the part of the audience some general acquaintance with that succession of prehistoric epochs which modern research has definitely established. Pre-history, as distinguished from proto-history, may, in reference to Europe as a whole, be made coextensive with the Stone Age. This divides into the Old Stone Age and the New. The Old Stone Age, or Palaeolithic Period, yields three well-marked subdivisions, termed Early, Middle, and Late. The New Stone Age, or Neolithic Period, includes two sub-periods, the Earlier or Transitional, and the Later or Typical. Thus our historical survey will fall naturally into five chapters.

There are reasons, however, why it will be more convenient to move over the whole ground twice. The material on which our judgements must be founded is not all of one kind. Anthropology is the joint work of two departments, which are known as Physical Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology respectively. The former, we may say, deals with man as an organism, the latter with him as an organizer. Here, then, are very different standpoints. For, in a broad way of speaking, nature controls man through his physical organization, whereas through his cultural organization man controls nature. From each of these standpoints in turn, then, let us inquire how far prehistoric man can be shown to have progressed. First, did the breed improve during the long course of the Stone Age in Europe? Secondly, did the arts of life advance, so that by their aid man might establish himself more firmly in his kingdom?

Did the breed improve during prehistoric times? I have said that, broadly speaking, nature controls man as regards his physical endowment. Now in theory one must admit that it might be otherwise. If Eugenics were to mature on its purely scientific side, there is no reason why the legislator of the future should not try to make a practical application of its principles; and the chances are that, of many experiments, some would prove successful. But that conscious breeding was practised in prehistoric times is out of the question. The men of those days were one and all what we are ourselves—nature's mongrels, now broken up into varieties by casual isolation, and now by no less casual intermixture recompounded in a host of relatively unstable forms. Whatever progress, therefore, may have occurred in this respect has been unconscious. Man cannot take the credit for it, except in so far as it is indirectly due to that increase and spread of the race which have been promoted by his achievements in the way of culture.

The barest outline of the facts must suffice. For the Early Pleistocene, apart from the Java fossil, Pithecanthropus erectus, a veritable 'missing link', whom we may here disregard as falling altogether outside our world of Europe, there are only two individuals that can with certainty be referred to this distant period. These are the Piltdown and the Heidelberg specimens. The former consists of a fragmentary brain-case, thick-boned and narrow-fronted, but typically human in its general characters, and of the greater part of a lower jaw, which, as regards both its own elongated and curiously flanged structure, and that of the teeth it contained, including an enormous pointed canine, is conversely more appropriate to an ape-like being than to a man. The latter consists only of a lower jaw, of which the teeth, even the canines, are altogether human, whereas the jaw itself is hardly less simian than that of the Sussex skull. If we add the Java example to the list of very primitive forms, it is remarkable to note how, though differing widely from each other, all alike converge on the ape. Nevertheless, even in Pithecanthropus, the brute is passing into the man. We note the erect attitude, to be inferred from his thigh-bone, and the considerably enlarged, though even so hardly human, brain. The Piltdown individual, on the other hand, has crossed the Rubicon. He has a brain-capacity entitling him to rank as a man and an Englishman. Such a brain, too, implies a cunning hand, which doubtless helped him greatly to procure his food, even if his massive jaw enabled him to dispose of the food in question without recourse to the adventitious aids of knife and fork. For the matter of that, if our knowledge made it possible to correlate these rare finds of bones more exactly with the innumerable flint implements ascribable to this period (and, indeed, not without analogies among the spoil from the Piltdown gravels), it might turn out that even the equivalent of knife and fork was not wanting to the Early Pleistocene supper-party, or, at any rate, that the human hand was already advanced from the status of labourer to the more dignified position of superintendent of the tool.

The Middle Pleistocene Epoch belongs to the men of the Neanderthal type. Some thirty specimens, a few of them more or less complete, have come down to us, and we can form a pretty clear notion of the physical appearance of the race. Speaking generally, we may say that it marks a stage of progress as compared with the Piltdown type; though, if the jaw, heavy and relatively chinless as it is, has become less simian, the protruding brow-ridge lends a monstrous look to the face, while the forehead is markedly receding—a feature which turns out, however, to be not incompatible with a weight of brain closely approaching our own average. Whether this type has disappeared altogether from the earth, or survives in certain much modified descendants, is an open question. The fact remains that during the last throes of the Glacial Epoch this rough-hewn kind of man apparently had Northern Europe as his exclusive province; and it is by no means evident what Homo Sapiens, the supposed highly superior counterpart and rival of Homo Neanderthalensis, was doing with himself in the meantime. Moreover, not only in respect of space does the population of that frozen world show remarkable homogeneity; but also in respect of time must we allow it an undisputed sway extending over thousands of years, during which the race bred true. The rate of progress, whether reckoned in physical terms or otherwise, is so slow as to be almost imperceptible. A type suffices for an age. Whereas in the life-history of an individual there is rapid development during youth, and after maturity a steadying down, it is the other way about in the life-history of the race. Man, so to speak, was born old and accommodated to a jog-trot. We moderns are the juveniles, and it is left for us to go the pace.

Yet Late Pleistocene Period introduces us to more diversity in the way of human types. Only one race, however, that named after the rock-shelter of Crô-Magnon in the Dordogne, is represented by a fair number of specimens, namely, about a dozen. At this point we come suddenly and without previous warning on as pretty a kind of man as ever walked this earth. In his leading characters he is remarkably uniform. Six feet high and long-legged, he likewise possessed a head well stocked with brains and a face that, if rather broad and short, was furnished by way of compensation with a long and narrow nose. If the present world can show nothing quite like him, it at least cannot produce anything more shapely in the way of the 'human form divine'. Apart from the Crô-Magnons, the remains of an old woman and a youth found at the lowest level of the Grotte des Enfants at Mentone are usually held to belong to a distinct stock known as the Grimaldi. The physical characters of the pair are regarded as negroid, verging on the Pygmy; but if we could study an adult male of the same stock, it might possibly turn out not to be so very divergent from the Crô-Magnon. Again, a single specimen does duty for the so-called Chancelade race. The skeleton is of comparatively low stature, and is deemed to show close affinities to the type of the modern Eskimo. Without being unduly sceptical, one may once more wonder if the Crô-Magnon stock may not have produced this somewhat aberrant form. Even on such a theory, however—and it is hardly orthodox—diversity of physical structure would seem to be on the increase. On the other hand, there are reasons of considerable cogency for referring to the end of this period skeletons of what Huxley termed the 'River-bed type', the peculiarity of which consists in the fact that they are more or less indistinguishable from the later Neolithic men and indeed from any of those slight-built, shortish, long-headed folk who form the majority in the crowded cities of to-day. Some authorities would ascribe a far greater antiquity to this type, but, I venture to think, on the strength of doubtful evidence. The notorious Galley Hill skeleton, for instance, found more or less intact in an Early Pleistocene bed in which the truly contemporary animals are represented by the merest battered remnants, to my mind reeks of modernity. Be these things as they may, however, when we come to Neolithic times a race of similar physical characters has Europe to itself, though it would seem to display minor variations in a way that suggests that the reign of the mongrel has at length begun. And here we may close our enumeration of the earliest known branches of our family tree, since the coming of the broad-heads pertains to the history of the Bronze Age, and hence falls outside the scope of the present survey.

Now what is the bearing of these somewhat scanty data on the question of progress? It is not easy to extract from them more than the general impression that, as time went on, the breed made persistent headway as regards both the complexity of its organization and the profusion of its forms. After all, we must not expect too much from this department of the subject. For one thing, beyond the limits of North-western Europe the record is almost blank; and yet we can scarcely hope to discover the central breeding-place of man in what is, geographically, little more than a blind alley. In the next place, Physical Anthropology, not only in respect to human palaeontology, but in general, is as barren of explanations as it is fertile in detailed observations. The systematic study of heredity as it bears on the history of the human organism has hardly begun. Hence, it would not befit one who is no expert in relation to such matters to anticipate the verdict of a science that needs only public encouragement in order to come into its own. Suffice it to suggest here that nature as she presides over organic evolution, that is, the unfolding of the germinal powers, may be conceived as a kindly but slow-going and cautious liberator. One by one new powers, hitherto latent, are set free as an appropriate field of exercise is afforded them by the environment. At first divergency is rarely tolerated. A given type is extremely uniform. On the other hand, when divergency is permitted, it counts for a great deal. The wider variations occur nearest the beginning, each for a long time breeding true to itself. Later on, such uncompromising plurality gives way to a more diffused multiplicity begotten of intermixture. Mongrelization has set in. Not but what there may spring up many true-breeding varieties among the mongrels; and these, given suitable conditions, will be allowed to constitute lesser types possessed of fairly uniform characters. Such at least is in barest outline the picture presented by the known facts concerning the physical evolution of man, if one observe it from outside without attempting to explore the hidden causes of the process. Some day, when these causes are better understood, man may take a hand in the game, and become, in regard to the infinite possibilities still sleeping in the transmitted germ, a self-liberator. Nature is but a figurative expression for the chances of life, and the wise man faces no more chances than he needs must. Scientific breeding is no mere application of the multiplication table to a system of items. We must make resolutely for the types that seem healthy and capable, suppressing the defectives in a no less thorough, if decidedly more considerate, way than nature has been left to do in the past. Here, then, along physical lines is one possible path of human progress, none the less real because hitherto pursued, not by the aid of eyes that can look and choose, but merely in response to painful proddings at the tail-end.

Our remaining task is to take stock of that improvement in the arts of life whereby man has come gradually to master an environment that formerly mastered him. For the Early Palaeolithic Period our evidence in respect of its variety, if not of its gross quantity, is wofully disappointing. Not to speak of man's first and rudest experiments in the utilization of stone, which are doubtless scattered about the world in goodly numbers if only we could recognize them clearly for what they are, the Chellean industry by its wide distribution leads one to suppose that mankind in those far-off days was only capable of one idea at a time—a time, too, that lasted a whole age. Yet the succeeding Acheulean style of workmanship in flint testifies to the occurrence of progress in one of its typical forms, namely, in the form of what may be termed 'intensive' progress. The other typical form I might call 'intrusive' progress, as happens when a stimulating influence is introduced from without. Now it may be that the Acheulean culture came into being as a result of contact between an immigrant stock and a previous population practising the Chellean method of stone-work. We are at present far too ill-informed to rule out such a guess. But, on the face of it, the greater refinement of the Acheulean handiwork looks as if it had been literally hammered out by steadfastly following up the Chellean pattern into its further possibilities. Explain it as we will, this evolution of the so-called coup-de-poing affords almost the sole proof that the human world of that remote epoch was moving at all. If we could see their work in wood, we might discern a more diversified skill or we might not. As it is, we can but conclude in the light of our very imperfect knowledge that in mind no less than in body mankind of Early Palaeolithic times displayed a fixity of type almost amounting to that of one of the other animal species.

During Middle Palaeolithic times the Mousterian culture rules without a rival. The cave-period has begun; and, thanks to the preservation of sundry dwelling-places together with a goodly assortment of their less perishable contents, we can frame a fairly adequate notion of the home-life of Neanderthal man. I have already alluded to my excavations in Jersey, and need not enter into fuller details here. But I should like to put on record the opinion borne in upon me by such first-hand experience as I have had that cultural advance in Mousterian days was almost as portentously slow as ever it had been before. The human deposits in the Jersey cave are in some places about ten feet thick, and the fact that they fall into two strata separated by a sterile layer that appears to consist of the dust of centuries points to a very long process of accumulation. Yet though there is one kind of elephant occurring amid the bone refuse at the bottom of the bed, and another and, it would seem, later kind at the top, one and the same type of flint instrument is found at every level alike; and the only development one can detect is a certain gain in elegance as regards the Mousterian 'point', the reigning substitute for the former coup-de-poing. Once more there is intensive progress only, so far at least as most of the Jersey evidence goes. One coup-de-poing, however, and that hardly Acheulean in conception but exactly what a hand accustomed to the fashioning of the Mousterian 'point' would be likely to make by way of an imitation of the once fashionable pattern, lay at lowest floor-level; as if to remind one that during periods of transition the old is likely to survive by the side of the new, and may even survive in it as a modifying element. As a matter of fact, the coup-de-poing is frequent in the earliest Mousterian sites; so that we cannot but ask ourselves how it came to be in the end superseded. Whether the Mousterians were of a different race from the Acheuleans is not known. Certain it is, on the other hand, that the industry that makes its first appearance in their train represents a labour-saving device. The Mousterian had learned how to break up his flint-nodule into flakes, which simply needed to be trimmed on one face to yield a cutting edge. The Acheulean had been content to attain this result more laboriously by pecking a pebble on both faces until what remained was sharp enough for his purpose. Here, then, we are confronted with that supreme condition of progress, the inventor's happy thought. One of those big-brained Neanderthal men, we may suppose, had genius; nature, the liberator, having released some latent power in the racial constitution. Given such a culture-hero, the common herd was capable of carrying on more or less mechanically for an aeon or so. And so it must ever be. The world had better make the most of its geniuses; for they amount to no more than perhaps a single one in a million. Anyway, Neanderthal man never produced a second genius, so far as we can tell; and that is why, perhaps, his peculiar type of brow-ridge no longer adorns the children of men.

Before we leave the Mousterians, another side of their culture deserves brief mention. Not only did they provide their dead with rude graves, but they likewise furnished them with implements and food for use in a future life. Herein surely we may perceive the dawn of what I do not hesitate to term religion. A distinguished scholar and poet did indeed once ask me whether the Mousterians, when they performed these rites, did not merely show themselves unable to grasp the fact that the dead are dead. But I presume that my friend was jesting. A sympathy stronger than death, overriding its grisly terror, and converting it into the vehicle of a larger hope—that is the work of soul; and to develop soul is progress. A religious animal is no brute, but a real man with the seed of genuine progress in him. If Neanderthal man belonged to another species, as the experts mostly declare and I very humbly beg leave to doubt, we must even so allow that God made him also after his own image, brow-ridges and all.

The presence of soul in man is even more manifest when we pass on to the Late Palaeolithic peoples. They are cave-dwellers; they live by the chase; in a word, they are savages still. But they exhibit a taste and a talent for the fine arts of drawing and carving that, as it were, enlarge human existence by a new dimension. Again a fresh power has been released, and one in which many would seem to have participated; for good artists are as plentiful during this epoch as ever they were in ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. They must have married-in somewhat closely, one would think, for this special aptitude to have blossomed forth so luxuriantly. I cannot here dwell at length on the triumphs of Aurignacian and Magdalenian artistry. Indeed, what I have seen with my own eyes on the walls of certain French caves is almost too wonderful to be described. The simplicity of the style does not in the least detract from the fullness of the charm. On the contrary, one is tempted to doubt whether the criterion of complexity applies here—whether, in fact, progress has any meaning in relation to fine art—since, whether attained by simple or by complex means, beauty is always beauty, and cannot further be perfected. Shall we say, then, with Plato that beauty was revealed to man from the first in its absolute nature, so that the human soul might be encouraged to seek for the real in its complementary forms of truth and goodness, such as are less immediately manifest? For the rest, the soul of these transcendently endowed savages was in other respects more imperfectly illuminated; as may be gathered from the fact that they carved and drew partly from the love of their art, but partly also, and, perhaps, even primarily, for luck. It seems that these delineations of the animals on which they lived were intended to help them towards good hunting. Such is certainly the object of a like custom on the part of the Australian aborigines; there being this difference, however, that the art of the latter considered as art is wholly inferior. Now we know enough about the soul of the Australian native, thanks largely to the penetrating interpretations of Sir Baldwin Spencer, to greet and honour in him the potential lord of the universe, the harbinger of the scientific control of nature. It is more than half the battle to have willed the victory; and the picture-charm as a piece of moral apparatus is therefore worthy of our deepest respect. The chariot of progress, of which the will of man is the driver, is drawn by two steeds, namely, Imagination and Reason harnessed together. Of the pair, Reason is the more sluggish, though serviceable enough for the heavy work. Imagination, full of fire as it is, must always set the pace. So the soul of the Late Palaeolithic hunter, having already in imagination controlled the useful portion of the animal world, was more than half-way on the road to its domestication. But in so far as he mistook the will for the accomplished deed, he was not getting the value out of his second horse; or, to drop metaphor, the scientific reason as yet lay dormant in his soul. But his dream was to come true presently.

The Neolithic Period marks the first appearance of the 'cibi-cultural' peoples. The food-seekers have become food-raisers. But the change did not come all at once. The earlier Neolithic culture is at best transitional. There may even have been one of those set-backs in culture which we are apt to ignore when we are narrating the proud tale of human advance. Europe had now finally escaped from the last ravages of an Arctic climate; but there was cruel demolition to make good, and in the meantime there would seem, as regards man, to have been little doing. Life among the kitchen-middens of Denmark was sordid; and the Azilians who pushed up from Spain as far as Scotland did not exactly step into a paradise ready-made. Somewhere, however, in the far south-east a higher culture was brewing. By steps that have not yet been accurately traced legions of herdsmen and farmer-folk overspread our world, either absorbing or driving before them the roving hunters of the older dispensation. We term this, the earliest of true civilizations, 'neolithic', as if it mattered in the least whether your stone implement be chipped or polished to an edge. The real source of increased power and prosperity lay in the domestication of food-animals and food-plants. The man certainly had genius and pluck into the bargain who first trusted himself to the back of an unbroken horse. It needed hardly less genius to discover that it is no use singing charms over the seed-bearing grass in order to make it grow, unless some of the seed is saved to be sowed in due season. Society possibly brained the inventor—such is the way of the crowd; but, as it duly pocketed the invention, we have perhaps no special cause to complain.

By way of appreciating the conditions prevailing in the Later Neolithic Age, let us consider in turn the Lake-dwellers of Switzerland and the Dolmen-builders of our Western coast-lands. I was privileged to assist, on the shore of the Lake of Neuchâtel, in the excavation of a site where one Neolithic village of pile-dwellings had evidently been destroyed by fire, and at some later date, just falling within the Stone Age, had been replaced by another. Here we had lighted on a crucial instance of the march of cultural progress. The very piles testified to it, those of the older settlement being ill-assorted and slight, whereas the later structure was regularly built and heavily timbered. It was clear, too, that the first set of inhabitants had lived narrow lives. All their worldly goods were derived from strictly local sources. On the other hand, their successors wore shells from the Mediterranean and amber beads from the Baltic among their numerous decorations; while for their flint they actually went as far afield as Grand Pressigny in West-Central France, the mines of which provided the butter-like nodules that represented the ne plus ultra of Neolithic luxury. Commerce must have been decidedly flourishing in those days. No longer was it a case of the so-called 'silent trade', which the furtive savage prosecutes with fear and trembling, placing, let us say, a lump of venison on a rock in the stream dividing his haunts from those of his dangerous neighbours, and stealing back later on to see if the red ochre for which he pines has been deposited in return on the primitive counter. The Neolithic trader, on the other side, must have pushed the science of barter to the uttermost limits short of the invention of a circulating medium, if indeed some crude form of currency was not already in vogue.

When we turn to the Dolmen-builders, and contemplate their hoary sanctuaries, we are back among the problems raised by the philosophic conception of progress as an advance in soul-power. Is any religion better than none? Does it make for soul-power to be preoccupied with the cult of the dead? Does the imagination, which in alliance with the scientific reason achieves such conquests over nature, give way at times to morbid aberration, causing the chill and foggy loom of an after-life to obscure the honest face of the day? I can only say for myself that the deepening of the human consciousnesses due to the effort to close with the mystery of evil and death, and to extort therefrom a message of hope and comfort, seems to me to have been worth the achievement at almost any cost of crimes and follies perpetrated by the way. I do not think that progress in religion is progress towards its ultimate abolition. Rather, religion, if regarded in the light of its earlier history, must be treated as the parent source of all the more spiritual activities of man; and on these his material activities must depend. Else the machine will surely grind the man to death; and his body will finally stop the wheels that his soul originally set in motion.

The panorama is over. It has not been easy, at the rate of about a millennium to a minute, to present a coherent account of the prehistoric record, which at best is like a jig-saw puzzle that has lost most of the pieces needed to reconstitute the design. But, even on this hasty showing, it looks as if the progressive nature of man were beyond question. There is manifest gain in complexity of organization, both physical and cultural; and only less manifest, in the sense that the inwardness of the process cannot make appeal to the eye, is the corresponding gain in realized power of soul. In short, the men of the Stone Age assuredly bore their full share in the work of race-improvement; and the only point on which there may seem to be doubt is whether we of the age of metal are as ready and able to bear our share. But let us be optimistic about ourselves. As long as we do not allow our material achievements to blind us to the need of an education that keeps the spiritual well to the fore, then progress is assured so far as it depends on culture.

Yet if we could likewise breed for spirituality, humanity's chances, I believe, would be bettered by as much again or more. But how is this to be done? Science must somehow find out. To leave it to nature is treason to the mind. Man may be an ass on the whole, but nature is even more of an ass, especially when it stands for human nature minus its saving grace of imaginative, will-directed intelligence. So let us hope that one day people will marry intelligently, and that the best marriages will be the richest in offspring. I believe that the spiritual is not born of the sickly; and at any rate should be prepared to make trial of such a working principle in my New Republic.

So much for the practical corollaries suggested by our flying visit to Prehistoric Europe. But, even if any detailed lessons to be drawn from such fragmentary facts have to be received with caution, you need not hesitate to pursue this branch of study for its own sake as part of the general training of the mind. Accustom yourselves to a long perspective. Cultivate the eagle's faculty of spacious vision. It is only thus that one can get the values right—see right and wrong, truth and error, beauty and ugliness in their broad and cumulative effects. Analytic studies, as they are termed, involving the exploration of the meaning of received ideas, must come first in any scheme of genuine education. We must learn to affirm before we can go on to learn how to criticize. But historical studies are a necessary sequel. Other people's received ideas turn out in the light of history to have sometimes worked well, and sometimes not so well; and we are thereupon led to revise our own opinions accordingly. Now the history of man has hitherto stood almost exclusively for the history of European civilization. Being so limited, it loses most of its value as an instrument of criticism. For how can a single phase of culture criticize itself? How can it step out of the scales and assess its own weight? Anthropology, however, will never acquiesce in this parochial view of the province of history. History worthy of the name must deal with man universal. So I would have you all become anthropologists. Let your survey of human progress be age-long and world-wide. You come of a large family and an ancient one. Learn to be proud of it, and then you will seek likewise to be worthy of it.

Books for Reference

W. J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives, 2nd edition, 1915.

E. A. Parkyn, Introduction to the study of Prehistoric Art.

R. R. Marett, Anthropology (Home University Library).

J. L. Myres, Dawn of History (Home University).

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Presidential Address to the International Folk-Lore Congress, 1891, p. 9.

III

PROGRESS AND HELLENISM

F. Melian Stawell

To speak the truth about national characteristics it is often necessary to speak in paradoxes, for of all unities on earth nothing contains so many contradictions as a nation. So it is here: it may be said quite truly that the Greeks had at once the most profound conceptions about Progress and no faith in it: that they were at once the most hopeful and the most despairing of peoples. Let me try to explain. When we speak of a faith in Progress, whatever else we mean, we must mean, I take it, that there is a real advance in human welfare throughout time from the Past to the Future, that 'the best is yet to be', and that the good wine is kept to the last. But if we are to have a philosophy underlying that faith we must be able to say something more. What, in the first place, do we mean by 'a real advance'? Or by 'human welfare'? Progress, yes, but progress towards what? What is the standard? And if we cannot indicate a standard, what right have we to say that one life is any better than another? The life of the scientific man any better than the life of the South Sea Islander—content if only he has enough bananas to eat? Or than the life of a triumphant conqueror, a Zenghis Khan or a Tamberlaine—exultant if he has enough human heads before him? Or, indeed, any of these rather than the blank of Nirvana or the life of a vegetable?

Our first need, then, is the need of a standard for good over and above the conflicting opinions of men, and some idea as to what that standard implies.

And the next question is, why we should hold that any of this good is going to be realized in human life at all? If it is, there must be some connexion of cause and effect between goodness and human existence. What is the nature of that connexion? Finally, why should we hope that this goodness is realized more and more fully as time goes on?

The Greeks faced these questions, as they faced so many, with extraordinary daring and penetration and with an intimate mixture of sadness and hope.

They themselves, of all nations known to us in history, had made the greatest progress in the shortest space of time. A long course of preparation, it is true, underlay that marvellous growth. The classical Greeks,—and when I speak of Hellenism I mean the flower of classical Greek culture,—the classical Greeks entered into the labours of the island peoples, who, whether kindred to them or not, had built up from neolithic times a great civilization, the major part of which they could, and did, assimilate. They found the soil already worked. None the less it is to their own original genius that we owe those great discoveries of the spirit which, to quote a recent writer, 'created a new world of science and art, established an ideal of the sane mind in the sane body and the perfect man in the perfect society, cut out a new line of progress between anarchy and despotism, and made moral ends supreme over national in the State.'[6]

But these practical achievements of theirs have been already summed up by Professor J. A. Smith in his lecture[7] at this school last year, and it is to that lecture that I would refer you. I will take it as a basis and proceed for my own purposes to discuss the Greek conceptions about progress. Those conceptions were complex, and, speaking roughly, we may say this: if belief in real progress implies belief in three things, namely, (1) an absolute standard apprehended, however dimly, by man, (2) a causal connexion between existence and perfection, and (3) a persistent advance through time, then the Greeks held to the first two and doubted, or even denied, the third. Their two great thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, worked out systems based on the conviction that there really was an absolute standard of perfection, that man could really apprehend something of this perfection, and that the effort towards it was essential to the very existence of the world, part of the stuff, as it were, that made the universe. These systems have had an effect not to be exaggerated on the whole movement of thought since their day. Moreover, many of their fundamental conceptions are being revived in modern science and metaphysics. And the convictions that underlie them are calculated, one would say, to lead at once to a buoyant faith in progress. But with Plato, and Aristotle, and the Greeks generally, they did not so lead. The Greeks could not feel sure that this effort towards perfection, though it is part of existence, is strong enough to deliver man in this world from the web of evil in which also he is involved, nor even that he makes any approach on the whole towards the loosening of the toils. The spectre of world-destruction, as Whitman says of Carlyle, was always before them. And I wish to ask later on if we may not surmise definite reasons in their own history for this recurring note of discouragement. But let us first look at the positive side, and first in Plato. Plato came to his system by several lines of thought, and to understand it we ought to take account of all.

1. In the first place no thinker, I suppose, ever felt more keenly than he felt the desire for an absolute standard of truth, especially in matters of right and wrong, if only to decide between the disputes of men. And, in Greece men disputed so boldly and so incessantly that there was no possibility of forgetting the clash of opinion in any 'dogmatic slumber'. Thus Plato is always asking, like Robert Browning in 'Rabbi Ben Ezra',—

Now, who shall arbitrate?
Ten men love what I hate,
Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;
Ten who in ears and eyes
Match me: we all surmise,
They this thing, and I that; whom shall my soul believe?

In one of his very earliest dialogues, the 'Euthyphro', Plato puts the question almost in so many words. What is it, he asks (7 a-e), that men quarrel over most passionately when they dispute? Is it not over the great questions of justice and injustice, of beauty, goodness, and the like? They do not quarrel thus over a question of physical size, simply because they can settle such a dispute by reference to an unquestioned standard, a standard measure, let us say.

If there is no corresponding standard for right and wrong, if each man is really the judge and the measure for himself, then there is no sense, Plato feels, in claiming that one man is wiser than another in conduct, or indeed any man wiser than a dog-faced baboon (Theaet. 161 c-e).

2. Again, Plato feels most poignantly the inadequacy of all the goodness and beauty we have ever actually seen in this world of space and time, compared with the ideal we have of them in their perfection. How can we have this sense of deficiency, he asks, unless somehow we apprehend something supreme, over and above all the approaches to it that have as yet appeared? (Phaedo, 74 e).

This vision of an absolute perfection, as yet unrealized on earth, so dominates all his thinking, and has such peculiar features of its own, that even familiar quotations must be quoted here. You will find an exquisite translation of a typical passage in our Poet Laureate's Anthology, The Spirit of Man (No. 37). Specially to be noted here is the stress on the unchanging character of this eternal perfection and the suggestion that it cannot be fully realized in the world. At the same time, Plato is equally sure that it is only through the study of this world that our apprehension of that perfection is awakened at all:—

'He who has thus been instructed in the science of Love, and has been led to see beautiful things in their due order and rank, when he comes toward the end of his discipline, will suddenly catch sight of a wondrous thing, beautiful with the absolute Beauty ... he will see a Beauty eternal, not growing or decaying, not waxing or waning, nor will it be fair here and foul there ... as if fair to some and foul to others ... but Beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting; which lending of its virtue to all beautiful things that we see born to decay, itself suffers neither increase nor diminution, nor any other change' (Symp. 211).

All beautiful things remind man, Plato tells us in his mythological fashion, of this perfect Beauty, because we had seen it once before in another life, before our souls were born into this world, 'that blissful sight and spectacle' (Phaedrus, 250 b) when we followed Zeus in his winged car and all the company of the gods, and went out into the realm beyond the sky, a realm 'of which no mortal poet has ever sung or ever will sing worthily'.

3. But, beside this passion for the ideal, Plato was intensely interested in our knowledge of the actual world of appearances around us. And one of the prime questions with which he was then concerned was the question, what we mean when we talk about the nature or character of the things we see, a plant, say, or an animal, or a man. We must mean something definite, otherwise we could not recognize, for example, that a plant is a plant through all its varieties and all the different stages of its growth. Plato's answer was, that in all natural things there is a definite principle that copies, as it were, a definite Type or Form, and this Type he calls an Idea. Thus in some sense it is this Type, this Idea, this Form, that brings the particular thing into being.

4. But it was not enough for Plato to say that every natural thing had in some sense a certain type for its basis, unless he could believe that this type was good, and that all the types were harmonious with each other. He could only be satisfied with the world, in short, if he could feel that it came about through a movement towards perfection. He makes his Socrates say that in asking about 'the causes of things, what it is that makes each thing come into being', it was not enough for him if he could only see that the thing was there because something had put it there: he also wanted to see that it was good for it to be there. Socrates tells us that what he needed he thought he had found in a book by Anaxagoras, which announced 'that Mind was the disposer and cause of all' because, 'I said to myself, If this be so—if Mind is the orderer, it will have all in order, and put every single thing in the place that is best for it'.[8]

It is the same feeling as that which underlies the words of Genesis about the Creation, 'And God saw that it was good'. And there is no doubt that such a view of the world would be supremely satisfying if we could count it true. There may be considerable intellectual satisfaction, no doubt, in merely solving a puzzle as to how things come about, but it is as nothing compared to the joy there would be in contemplating their goodness.

5. But is it true? Can we possibly say so in view of the hideous imperfection round us? The writers of Genesis spoke of a Fall. Plato, in his own way, speaks of a Fall himself. He never gives up the belief in an Absolute Perfection, a system of Perfect Types somehow—he does not say exactly how—influencing the structure of things in this world. But he holds that on earth this perfection is always thwarted by a medium which prevents its full manifestation. This medium is the medium of Space and Time, and therefore the medium of history—and therefore history is always and inevitably a record of failure. 'While we are in the body,' Plato writes, 'and while the soul is contaminated with its evils, our desire will never be thoroughly satisfied.'[9] 'The body is a tomb,' he writes elsewhere, quoting a current phrase.

This is sad enough: yet if we put against it Plato's vision of what Man might be, we get as inspiring words as ever were written:

'We have spoken of Man', he says at the end of the Republic, 'as he appears to us now, but now he looks as Glaucus looked after he had been cast into the sea, and his original nature was scarcely to be discerned, for his limbs were broken and crushed and defaced by the waters, and strange things had grown round him, shells and seaweed and stones, so that he was more like a beast than a man. That is how the soul looks to us now encompassed by all her evils. It is elsewhere, my friend, that we ought to look.' Where? asks Plato's friend, and Plato answers, 'We should look to her love of wisdom and realize what she clings to, what company she desires, for she is akin to the Divine and Immortal and Eternal, and we should understand what she would become if she followed after it, with all her strength, and were lifted by that effort out of the sea where she now lies.... Then we should understand her real nature.' (Republic, 611.)

Somewhere, Plato believes, this true nature of man may be realized. The Principle of Good is something active, not a dead helpless thing, with no effect on the rest of the universe (Sophist, 248, 249); it is a living power, which desires that everything everywhere should be as glorious as possible (Tim. 29 d). There is no envy, Plato says, in the Divine, that grudging spirit has no part in the heavenly company. Only it is not on earth that the glory can be realized. It is towards the life after death that Plato's real hopes are directed.

None the less, and this is important, this world does not cease to be significant for him. He does not turn aside,—as some souls, intoxicated with the Divine, have done,—from this world altogether.

Because he holds that man can only advance by struggling to make this world better. Man's ordinary life may be like the life in a cave, as he says in his famous myth, but the true philosopher who has once risen out of the cave must go back into it again and teach the prisoners there what the universe really is (Republic, Book vi, fin.; vii, init.). The very passage that I quoted about man's real nature comes at the end of the Republic. Now the Republic is a Utopia, and no one writes a Utopia unless he believes that the effort to reach it is of prime importance to man and helps him to advance.

Only, for Plato, the advance is not marked in the successive stages of history, as the modern faith in progress asserts. The life on earth, for Plato, is like a school through which men pass and in which they may learn and grow, but the school itself does not go on growing. It is not that he does not envisage change in history, but what he seems to hope for at the best is nothing more hopeful than recurring cycles of better and worse. He tells a fable, in his dialogue 'The Statesman', of how at one time the world is set spinning in the right direction by God and then all goes well, and again how God ceases to control it, and then it gradually forgets the divine teaching and slips from good to bad and from bad to worse, until at last God takes pity on it once more to save it from utter destruction (Polit. 269 ff.). No doubt in this idea of cycles Plato is influenced by the popular thought of his time: this feeling that there had been a lost Golden Age in the past was deeply rooted in Greek mythology. We get it long before Plato, in Hesiod, and there are similar touches in Homer, and once men believe that they have sunk from glory, there is always the dread that if ever they recover it they will lose it again. And with Plato this dread is reinforced by his sense of something incurable in the world, the thwarting influence of spatial and temporal matter (Theaet. 176 a).

It is strange that, though he is always thinking of the individual soul as learning through experience in its passage from one life to another, Plato does not seem to have the idea of mankind learning by the lessons of history, of knowledge being handed down from one age to another, and growing in the process. That is one of the most inspiring ideas in modern thought: a German writer has spoken of history as the long Odyssey of the human spirit, the common mind of Man coming at last through its wanderings to find out what it really wants, and where its true home lies.

And here, significantly enough, we find we are brought back in our modern way to something very like Plato's own conception of an eternal unchanging Reality. There are endless problems in the whole conception of the Eternal that I am quite unable even to attempt; but this much at least seems clear to me, that the whole idea of mankind learning by the experience of History, implies something of permanent value running through that experience. The very thought of continued progress implies that man can look back at the successive stages of the Past and say of each: In that lay values which I, to-day and always, can recognize as good, although I believe we have more good now. Seeley speaks in a noble passage of how religion might conceive a progressive revelation which was, in a sense, the same through all its stages, and yet was a growing thing:—'each new revelation asserts its own superiority to those which went before,' but the superiority is 'not of one thing to another thing—but of the developed thing to the undeveloped'. 'It is thus', he writes, 'that the ages should behave to one another.' This is the true 'understanding and concert with time'.[10] And though Plato does not live in the thought of historic progress, yet such a conception of progress which recognizes at different stages different expressions, more or less adequate, of one eternal value, such a way of thinking is entirely Platonic. When we look back at history in this mood we think not only of grasping the right principles for the Future, but of rejoicing in the definite achievements of the Past, and we feel this most poignantly, I think, of the achievements won by the spirit of Beauty. Great works of Art we are accustomed actually to call immortal, and we mean by this not merely that we think they will always be famous, but that there is something in them that makes it impossible for them ever to be superseded. In themselves they are inexhaustible: if they cease to interest us, it is our fault and not theirs. We may want more, we do want more, where they came from, but we never want to lose them, any more than we could bear to lose our old friends, though we may desire to make new ones. Of all the divine Ideas, said Plato, Beauty is the one that shows itself most plainly in the world of sense and speaks to us most plainly of the eternal realities.

This, however, is perhaps trenching on the subject of Progress in Art, and I should like to return to the general Greek conception of the tendency in all nature towards the Good, the perfect realization of perfect types.

Plato does not expressly insist that this tendency is of the nature of effort, though I think that is involved in his view. But Aristotle does. Following Plato in essentials, he makes bold to say outright that every natural thing in its own way longs for the divine and desires to share in the divine life, so far as it can.[11] Every such thing in this world of space and time has to cope with difficulties and is imperfect, but everything struggles towards the good. That good is in the life of God, a thinking life, an activity of thought, existing in some sense beyond this imperfect world; and this life is so supremely desirable that it makes everything else struggle to reach it. It moves the whole world, Aristotle says, in a famous passage, because it is loved. It is the world's desire.[12]

Now this idea of effort—or of something analogous to effort—constituting the inner nature of every natural thing reappears, with pregnant consequences, in modern thought, though seldom with these vast theological consequences. The idea of an upward effort through nature lies at the base of our most hopeful theories of evolution, and forms the true support of our modern faith in progress. Broadly speaking, our evolutionists are now divided into two schools: the adherents of the one believe that variations are purely accidental, and may occur in any direction whatsoever, the useful ones being preserved only because they happen to be useful for the life of the species, while the adherents of the other—the school that I would call the school of hope—believe that accident, even with natural selection to aid it, is utterly inadequate to account for the ordered beauty and harmony that we do see in natural things. They admit, as Plato and Aristotle admit, imperfection and difficulty in the world, but they insist on a movement towards value: in short, they conceive an order emerging that is brought about, to quote a modern writer, both in nature and in society, by 'a principle of movement and progress conflicting with a principle of inertia.'[13]

Aristotle, in words that are strikingly modern, raises the very question at issue here.[14] He asks whether we can suppose that nature does not aim at the good at all, but that variations arise by chance and are preserved just because they are useful, and he scouts the idea that chance could do more, as Zeller says, than 'bring about isolated and abnormal results'. He chooses instead the conception of purpose and effort, and this in spite of the difficulties in conceiving a purpose and an effort that are not definitely conscious. The sort of thing that is in Aristotle's mind when he speaks of nature aiming at the good, comes out in a passage by Edward Carpenter in his little book The Art of Creation. Carpenter plunges boldly and compares the principle that makes a tree grow and propagate its kind with the impulse that makes a man express himself. Man, he says,

has a Will and Purpose, a Character, which, do what you will, tends to push outwards towards expression. You put George Fox in prison, you flog and persecute him, but the moment he has a chance he goes and preaches just the same as before.... But take a Tree and you notice exactly the same thing. A dominant Idea informs the life of the Tree; persisting, it forms the tree. You may snip the leaves as much as you like to a certain pattern, but they will only grow in their own shape. Finally, you may cut the tree down root and branch and burn it, but, if there is left a single seed, within that seed ... lurks the formative ideal, which under proper conditions will again spring into life and expression.[15]

Aristotle would have endorsed almost every word of this. In his pithy way, speaking of the distinction between natural and artificial objects, he says himself that if you planted a wooden bed and the wood could still grow, it would grow up, not a bed, but a tree.[16]

He would not have gone so far as to talk about the Will of a tree, but he would have admitted that what made the tree grow was the same sort of thing as Will. And in one respect he goes farther than Edward Carpenter does. For he considers that not only growth but even the movement of natural things through space is somehow an expression of a tendency towards the good and the divine, a tendency which, when consciousness supervenes, we can call effort, an activity, even though, at its best, only an imperfect activity. He looks up at the splendour of the circling stars and asks if it is possible that so glorious an order can be anything but a manifestation of something akin to the divine. Here indeed he is speaking of movements made by existences he reckoned among the highest in the world, for he thought the stars were living beings higher than man. But he recognized a rudimentary form of such activity even in what we now call inanimate matter. Here we come to a leading conception of Aristotle's, and one most important for our purpose: the conception of a hierarchy of natural existences, all of them with some value, less or more. When Aristotle is truest to himself, he will tell us not to be afraid of studying the meanest forms of natural existence, because in everything there is something marvellous and divine. He quotes with much satisfaction the story of Heracleitus, who welcomed his friends into the bakehouse with the saying that 'there were gods in the bakehouse too'.[17]

Thus, at the lowest end of the scale, we have what we call inanimate matter, which Aristotle thinks of much as we do, namely, as something occupying space, the different parts of it being endowed with different powers of movement, and with different properties, such as warmth or coldness, wetness or dryness. A natural thing, he says, is a thing that has a principle of activity in itself, something that makes it act in a definite way, whenever it is not interfered with by anything else.[18] Aristotle speaks, for example, of fire having a natural tendency to mount up, much as we might speak of solids having a natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. Go back as far as we like, and, Aristotle thinks, we still find certain primitive differences which constitute what we call the primitive elements. This, I imagine, is much the point of view of modern science.

And these primitive elements in Aristotle's view influence each other, unite with each other, or change into each other. As a rule, however, they exhibit no new powers. But given a happy concurrence of qualities, say a certain union of heat and cold, and a new power does become manifest: the power of life. Thus, in a sense, Aristotle does envisage the spontaneous generation of life; and he knows, roughly, what he means by life. The living thing can go through far more changes than the non-living, while yet remaining recognizably the same thing. For example, it shows in itself a greater advance to richness and also a decline, it uses other things to foster this advance, and it sends out fresh things, like itself, but independent of itself: in short, it grows, decays, feeds itself, and propagates its kind.[19]

As I understand Aristotle, for him there is not an entire and absolute difference between ordinary matter and living things, and yet there is a real difference, and one not to be explained away, for there is a new manifestation of active energy. And if we consider life of more value than mere motion, then we are right in saying there is a higher energy. The quality of growth is a quality which could not be deduced from the quality of warmth or from the quality of mere movement in space, and yet all three qualities are alike in this, that they are all manifestations of an energy which is somehow inherent in things, and not merely imposed on them from without. The manifestations of life are started, in a sense, by the different movements, 'mechanical', if you like to call them so, in the rudimentary forms of matter, the elements meeting each other in space. The process of life could not have begun without such movements. But neither could it have begun if the elements, just as they appear, had been all there was. There had to be latent, that is, the possibility of a different and higher mode of action. This higher mode of action Aristotle calls a higher Form, a higher Idea. And I think it is true to him to say that he believes the lower Forms, the lower Ideas, do their most perfect work when they bring about the conditions under which the higher ones can operate. For when he speaks of that concurrence of elements that conditions life he speaks of the 'warmth and cold' as 'having mastered the matter'.[20]

In any case he conceives a whole series of higher and lower Forms, the higher coming nearer and nearer to that full and glorious activity which he conceives to be the life of God. Above the power of the thing to grow as a plant grows appears the power of sensation as it is present in animals, and above that again the power, first seen in man, of living the life of thought, perceiving what is beautiful and true in the 'forms', the characters, of all the things around him, and with this that further power of setting consciously before himself what he really wants to be and to do, the power of moral action strictly so-called.

Throughout this series, in every higher stage the lower is present as a kind of basis. In the man who thinks there is active not only the power of thought, but also the power of sensation, the faculty of growth, and the physical properties of the body. It would seem that Aristotle has only to take one step, and he would be a thoroughgoing evolutionist. He has only to say that the different stages are successive in time, the lower regularly preceding the higher. But this step he hesitates to take.

He often comes very near it. He speaks of nature passing gradually from inanimate things through living things to living animals. He speaks of what is first in itself, first inherently, 'prior' in the logical sense because it is the goal and the completion of the thing, as appearing later in time. For instance, he believes that man can only find his real happiness and develop his real nature in the State, but the State appears later in time than the primitive associations of the household and the family.[21] What came earlier in history were barbarous communities such as those of the Cyclopes, where 'each man laid down the law for his wife and children and obeyed no other law'.

But Aristotle does not go on from this belief to the belief in a universal upward process throughout all history. The developed State, it is true, may always have been preceded by a lower form, but that lower form may itself have been preceded by a higher.

Aristotle, in short, is haunted, like Plato, by the idea of cycles, alternations, decline and progress, progress and decline. He feels this both in the life of States and in the whole life of the world. He speaks of the same discoveries being made over and over again, an infinite number of times, in the history of civilization. And his words recall the sad passage in Plato's Laws (676) referring to the numberless nations and states, ten thousand times ten thousand, that had risen and fallen all over the world, passing from worse to better and from better to worse. Similarly Aristotle will speak of degraded animal forms, and sometimes write as though the animal world could sink back into the vegetable altogether.

Admitting, however, something like progress within the different cycles, we must ask a little more about the kind of progress which Aristotle would have desired. (I take Aristotle again as a typical Greek.) Man at his best, he clearly holds, in trying to realize his true nature should aim at a happiness which involves a harmony of all his faculties, a harmony inspired and led by the highest faculty of all, the Reason which rejoices in the contemplation of what is at once true and good and beautiful.

Now in this aim, we must ask, does a man need other men and other creatures, and in what sense does he need them? Here, I think, we come on two inconsistent tendencies in Aristotle's thought, connected with two different ways of regarding the hierarchy of existences. We say that one existence is higher than another. Does this mean that what we call the lower are only so many blundering attempts to reach the higher? That every creature, for example, which is not a thinking man is, on the whole, a mistake? Aristotle often does speak like that. Woman, he says in one passage, is only a mutilated male.[22] The principle which ought to develop into the active power of thought could not, he explains, in women master the recalcitrant element which is always thwarting perfection, and thus woman is man manqué. On these lines of thought it is easy to slip into looking on all other forms of existence as merely valuable in so far as they serve the direct purposes of men, and indeed only of a few men, those namely who are able to think as philosophers. This is the kind of view according to which, as the satirist suggests, cork-trees only grow in order to make corks for champagne-bottles, and the inferior races of mankind only exist to furnish slaves for the higher. And Aristotle does, on occasion, lend himself to such a view: he justifies a slavery in which, as he says, some men are to be treated merely as living tools. And yet on his own principles every man ought to aim at realizing his own end, and not merely the ends of others.

But there is a widely different view, also present in Aristotle, and truer to the essence of his thought. It is a view instinct with that reverence for all existence of which I spoke at first, and it holds that all the different natural types, high or low, could all be united in one harmony, like an ordered army, as Aristotle himself would say, in which the divine spirit was present even as the spirit of a general is present in his men. The greatest thing in man, Aristotle thinks, is the godlike power of apprehending the different characters of all the things around him, and this of itself suggests the belief that all these characters have a value of their own, unique and indispensable, each aiming at a distinct aspect of the Divine, each, if it fulfilled its inner nature, finding, as Plato might have said, the place where it was best for it to be. Again, it is clear from Aristotle's whole treatment of the State, that when he wrote his famous phrase, 'Man is by nature a political animal', he meant that man, as we should say, is essentially social. It is part of man's goal to live with others; it is not merely a means to the goal. His highest happiness lies in the contemplation of the good, and the good, Aristotle says, can be contemplated far better in others than in ourselves. This is a profound saying, and from this thought springs the deep significance of friendship in Aristotle's system. The crown of the civic life he takes to be the community of friends who recognize the good in each other, and enjoy each other through this. The wider this community, then, we must surely say, the better.

For Aristotle then, man's perfection ought to mean the perfection of every individual, and progress, so far as he conceives it, involve progress towards this end. This should lead on to belief in the supreme importance of the individual soul, and to Kant's great principle that we should always treat each man as an end in himself.

Thus, if we concentrate on the hopeful elements in Plato and Aristotle, we may fairly say, I think, that we can see outlined in their philosophies something like the following belief: every natural thing in this world, and every natural creature, so far as it is good,—and all are more or less good,—tends to express some distinct aspect of a perfect harmony: we human beings are the first on earth to be definitely conscious of such a tendency, the first to be able definitely to direct it to its true goal, and our business in life is therefore threefold: to make actual our own function in this harmony, to help other creatures to actualize theirs, and to contemplate every such manifestation, in men or in things, with reverence and rejoicing.

The harmony, if complete, would be a manifestation of a divine reality, and thus the love of God, the love of our neighbour, the love of nature, self-development, political life, scientific study, poetic contemplation, and philosophic speculation, would all unite in one comprehensive and glorious task.

This, surely, is hopeful enough. But the Greek hope faltered and sank. Could this harmony ever be realized? Would not the thwarting element in the world always drag it down again and again, and drag some men down always, so that after all progress was impossible, and for some men should not even be attempted? As a matter of fact, Plato and Aristotle do limit their exhortations to a narrow circle of cultured Greeks, and even with them they doubt of success.

Now this despondency came partly, I think, through the very sensitiveness of the Hellenic nature. The spectacle of the ever-baffled struggle in Nature and Man they felt at times almost intolerable. Aristotle saw that this perpetual failure in the heart of glorious good made the very essence of tragedy. The tragic hero is the man of innate nobleness who yet has some one defect that lays him open to ruin. Man is set in a world full of difficulties, a world much of which is dark and strange to him: his action and those of others have results which he did not, and in his ignorance could not, foresee; he is not strong enough for his great task.

All the Greek poets have this deep sadness. Homer has it, in and through his intense feeling for the beauty and energy of life. There has never been such war-poetry as Homer's, and yet there has never been any which felt more poignantly the senselessness in war. 'And I must come here', Achilles says to his noble enemy at the close, 'to torture you and your children.'

In the next place, the sadness of the world could not be lightened for the Greeks by the vision that the modern theory of evolution has opened up to us of the long advance in the history of life on the planet. Even their knowledge of history in the strict sense was scanty, and it is only a long view of history that is likely to be comforting. What history they did know could bring them little comfort. In the first place it showed them a series of great civilizations, rising and falling, and those that had fallen seemed at least as good as those that followed them. A Greek like Plato knew of the Homeric civilization, simpler indeed, but fresher and purer than his own. And he believed, what we now know to be the fact, that even before the Homeric there had been a wonderful island-culture, what we call the Minoan, flourishing before the Homeric. 'There had been kings before Agamemnon.'

And behind Minos and Agamemnon lay the great, and by that time the ossifying, kingdom of Egypt, compared to which the Greeks were, and felt themselves to be, but children. Plato had seen, finally, the degeneration of the Persian Empire—once so magnificent and mighty.

This fact of recurrent decay is one of the heaviest that the human spirit can shoulder. Any theory of progress must come to terms with it, for Progress through history is certainly not an uninterrupted ascent; a spiral is the better image. And the weight must lie most heavily on a generation which feels its own self to be in peril of decay. Now Plato and Aristotle lived at such a period. Greece had gone through the bitter experiences of the Peloponnesian War, and the shadow of it lay on them, as on its historian Thucydides. In that fratricidal conflict Greece tore herself to pieces. It was a struggle between the two leaders of the then civilized world, and it has a terrible likeness to the struggle that is going on now. From its devastating influence Greece never recovered. Historians still dispute, and always will, as to the exact proportion of praise and blame between the two. But Thucydides himself, a true-hearted Athenian, brings out the tyrannical side in the Athenian temper. Not indeed towards her own people, but towards all who were not of her own immediate stock. Because Athens thought herself the fairest city in the world, as indeed she was, because she thought herself menaced by Sparta, and menaced she was, she allowed herself to tyrannize and lightly took up the burden of war between brethren. There are few passages in history more stately than the Funeral Oration of Pericles in which he calls Athens the School of Hellas, but even in it there is a certain deadly coldness of heart. And few things are more terrible than the coarsening of temper which Thucydides depicts as the war goes on and Pericles is succeeded by his caricature Cleon, the man who means to prosecute the war vigorously, and by vigour means ruthlessness. Nor was there ever a sterner indictment of aggression than that given in the dialogue between the spokesmen of Melos, the little island that desired to stand out of the conflict, and the Athenian representatives who were determined to force her into their policy. And after that dialogue comes, in Thucydides' great drama, the fall of Athens.

The city recovered in some measure from her fall, but only to face another disaster. If she sinned in the Peloponnesian War through the spirit of aggression, she sinned in the struggle with Macedon through slackness and cowardice. In the one struggle she lost comradeship; in the other she lost liberty. And with the loss of the two she lost buoyancy. In a deeper sense than Pericles used the phrase, 'the springtime went out of her year'. Ultimately, perhaps, we cannot explain why this should be so. Other nations have had as disheartening experiences and yet risen above them. Some of the most inspired prophecies in the Hebrew writings came after the tiny state of Judaea had been torn in pieces by the insensate conflict between North and South, and after the whole people had been swept into captivity. But whatever the ultimate reason, Athens did not recover. We must not end, however, on a note of despair. Far from it. The work of Aristotle and Plato and of the Greeks generally, was cramped for lack of sympathy and lack of hope, and, strangely enough, it was after they had passed and their glory with them that sympathy grew in the world, and after sympathy grew, hope returned.

For it is exactly in those failing years, when the Hellenic gave way to the Hellenistic, that men first grasped, and grasped so firmly that it could hardly be lost again, one of the fundamental principles on which the whole fabric of our later civilization has rested, or ought to rest, the great principle of personal equality, the claim of every individual to transcendent value, irrespective of race and creed and endowment. The conquering rule of Alexander, whatever else it did, broke down the barriers of the little city-states and made men of different races feel themselves members of mankind. There rose among the Stoics the conviction that all men do belong together and are all made for each other. And with the advent of Christianity came the belief that every man, however mean and unworthy, can receive a power that will make him all he ought to be. The highest is within his reach. There is no reason now why the glorious life that Hellenism conceived for a few should not lie open to all men.

Finally, we might say, and truly, that the vast political organization built up by Rome gave us Europeans, once and for all, the vision of a united Europe.

That dream has never left it. Even to-day, here and now, in spite of our disasters, our blunders, and our crimes, let us not forget it, that dream which is 'not all a dream', the dream of once again constructing a system in which we might, all of us, all nations and all men and women, make progress together in the common task.

Books for Reference

G. L. Dickinson, The Greek View of Life.

Zeller, Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics.

Edited by Evelyn Abbott, Hellenica.

Bury, History of Greece.

Davies and Vaughan, Plato's Republic.

Welldon, Aristotle's Politics.

Peters, Aristotle's Ethics.

Bridges, The Spirit of Man.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] G. H. Perris, History of War and Peace, p. 54.

[7] 'The Unity of Western Civilization,' c. iii.

[8] The Spirit of Man, 40; Phaedo, 96.

[9] The Spirit of Man, 16; Phaedo, 66.

[10] Natural Religion, part ii, c. 5.

[11] De An. ii. 4, 415, p. 35.

[12] The Spirit of Man, 39; Aristotle, Met. 10.

[13] T. W. Rolleston, Parallel Paths.

[14] Phys. ii. 8, 198 16-34.

[15] Pp. 28-9.

[16] Phys. ii, c. i.

[17] De Part. An., Bk. i, c. 5.

[18] Phys. ii. i, init.

[19] De Anima, init.

[20] Meteor, iv. 1. 378. See Zeller's Aristotle, vol. i, fin.

[21] Polit. 1253 a; Eth. 1162 a.

[22] Gen. An. ii. 3. 737.

IV

PROGRESS IN THE MIDDLE AGES

A. J. Carlyle

There still survives, not indeed among students of history, but among some literary persons, the notion that the civilization of the Middle Ages was fixed and unprogressive; that the conditions of these centuries were wholly different from those of the ancient world and of modern time; that there was little continuity with the ancient world, and little connexion with the characteristic aspects of progress in the modern world.

The truth is very different. It may be doubted whether at any other time, except perhaps in those two marvellous centuries of the flower of Greek civilization, there has been a more rapid development of the most important elements of civilization than in the period from the end of the tenth to the end of the thirteenth centuries. While it is true that much was lost in the ruin of the ancient world, much also survived, and there was a real continuity of civilization; indeed some of the greatest conceptions of the later centuries of the ancient world are exactly those upon which mediaeval civilization was built. And again, it was in the Middle Ages that the foundations were laid upon which the most characteristic institutions of the modern world have grown.

Indeed this notion that the civilization of the Middle Ages was fixed and unprogressive is a mere literary superstition, and its origin is to be found in the ignorance and perversity of the men of the Renaissance; and hardly less, it must be added, in the foolishness of many of the conceptions of the Romantic revival.

There are, indeed, excuses for these mistakes and confusions. The Renaissance represents, among other things, a great and necessary movement of revolt against a religious and intellectual civilization which had once been living and moving, but had tended from the latter years of the thirteenth century to grow stiff and rigid. It was probably a real misfortune that the great thinkers and scholars of the thirteenth century, like Alexander of Hales and Thomas Aquinas, had embarked upon what was a premature attempt at the systematization of all knowledge; they made the same mistake as the Encyclopaedists of the eighteenth century or Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth, but with more disastrous results. For this work unhappily encouraged the mediaeval Church in its most fatal mistake, its tendency to suspect and oppose the apprehensions of new aspects of truth.

The men of the Renaissance had to break the forms under which the schoolmen had thought to express all truth, they had to carry forward the great enterprise and adventure of the discovery of truth, and they had to do this in the teeth of a violent resistance on the part of those who thought themselves the representatives of the mediaeval civilization. There are, therefore, excuses for them in their contempt for the intellectual life of the past; but there is no real excuse for them in their contempt for mediaeval art and literature. When they turned their back upon the immediate past, and endeavoured pedantically to reproduce the ancient world, they were guilty of an outrageous ignorance and stupidity, a stupidity which is expressed in that unhappy phrase of Pope, the 'Gothic night'. Happily neither the great artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries nor the great poets of England and Spain were much affected by the classical pedantry of which unhappily Petrarch was the begetter.

It is this foolishness of the Renaissance which is the best excuse for the foolishness of the Romantic revival; the new classical movement had in such a degree interrupted the continuity of European art that it was very difficult for men in the eighteenth century to recover the past, and we must make allowance for the often ludicrous terms and forms of the new mediaevalism. Indeed it is a strange and often absurd art—the half-serious, half-parodying imitations of Thomson and Walpole and Wieland, this ludicrous caricature Gothic of Strawberry Hill and All Souls, the notion of Gothic architecture as a mass of crockets, battlements, crypts, and dungeons—and all in ruins. Indeed, the Romantic conception of the Middle Ages was often as absurd as that of the Renaissance, and if we are to get at the truth, if we are to make any serious attempt to understand the Middle Ages, we must clear our minds of two superstitions; the one, which we derive from the Renaissance, that mediaeval civilization was sterile, ignorant, and content to be ignorant; the other, which survives from the Romantic movement, that it was essentially religious, chivalrous and adventurous, that men spent their time in saying their prayers, making reverent love to their ladies, or carving the heads of the infidel.

What I should desire to do is to persuade you that the more you study the Middle Ages the more you will see that these men and women were really very much like ourselves, ignorant, no doubt, of much which is to us really or superficially important, gifted on the other hand with some qualities which for the time we seem to have in a large measure lost, but substantially very like ourselves, neither very much better nor very much worse. Let me illustrate this by considering for a moment the figure which to us is typical of the Middle Ages. What was the mediaeval knight? We think of him as a courteous, chivalrous person of a romantic and adventurous temper, whose business it was to fight for his lady or in the service of religion against the infidel. In reality he was usually a small landowner, who held his land on condition of military service to some lord; the title 'knight' means in its Latin form (miles), simply a soldier, in its Germanic form a servant, and distinguishes him from the older type of landowner who held his land in absolute ownership and free of all service except of a national kind. In virtue of his holding a certain amount of land he had to present himself for military service on those occasions and for those periods for which he could be legally summoned. But even this description implies a wholly wrong emphasis, for he was not primarily a soldier, but a small landowner and cultivator, very much what we should call a squireen. He was normally much more concerned about his crops, his cattle and pigs, than about his lord's affairs and his lord's quarrels. He was ignorant, often rather brutal, and turbulent, very ready for a quarrel with his neighbour, but with no taste for national wars, and the prolonged absence from his home which they might involve, unless indeed there was a reasonable prospect of plunder. Indeed, he was a very matter-of-fact person, with very little sense of romance, and little taste for adventure unless there was something to be got out of it. We must dismiss from our minds the pretty superstitions of romance from Chaucer and Spenser to the time of the Romantic revival, and we must understand that the people of the Middle Ages were very much like ourselves; the times were rougher, more disorderly, there was much less security, but on the whole the character of human life was not very different.

What was it, then, that happened with the end of the ancient world? Well, the civilization of the Roman Empire was overthrown by our barbarous ancestors, the old order, and tranquillity, and comfort disappeared, and the world fell back into discomfort and turbulence, and disorder; the roads fell into disrepair and were not mended, the drains were neglected, and the towns dwindled and shrank. We must remember, however, that this great civilization was dying out, was failing by some internal weakness, and that the barbarians only hastened the process.

Much of the achievement of Greece and Rome was lost, much both material and intellectual, but not all, and the new civilization which began rapidly to grow up on the ruins of the old was in many respects continuous with it. In order, however, that we may understand this we must remember that the form of civilization with which the Middle Ages were continuous was the Graeco-Roman civilization of the later Empire, and not the great Hellenic civilization itself. What the Middle Ages knew was primarily that which the Christian Fathers like St. Augustine and St. Gregory the Great, St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nazianzus learned at their schools and universities. Some of these Fathers were educated at the great universities, like Athens, others at comparatively humble provincial institutions; some of them were men of powerful intellect, while others were more commonplace. What they learned was the general intellectual system of the late Empire, and what they learned they handed on to the Middle Ages; but it was not the great intellectual culture of Greece. We have still too strong an inclination to think of the ancient world as one and homogeneous; we have not yet sufficiently apprehended the great changes both in the form and in the temper of that world. And yet the varieties, the changes, are very diverse, the outlook, the artistic methods of the Homeric poetry are very different from the emotional and intellectual modernity of Euripides. The philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is very different from that of the Stoics and Neoplatonists. In that picturesque but perhaps not very felicitous phrase which Mr. Murray has borrowed from Mr. Cornford, there was a 'failure of nerve' which separates the earlier from the later stages of the moral and intellectual culture of the ancient world. However this may be, and we shall have more to say about this presently, the civilization of the Middle Ages was made up on the one hand of elements drawn from the later Empire, and on the other of characteristics and principles which seem to have belonged to the Barbarian races themselves.

With the end of the sixth century the ancient world had passed away and the mediaeval world had begun, and we have to consider the nature and movement of the new order, or rather we have to consider some of its elements, and their development, especially during the period from the end of the tenth century to the end of the thirteenth, during which it reached its highest level. We have to pass over the great attempt of the ninth century, for we can only deal with a small part of a large subject, and we shall only deal with a few aspects of it, and chiefly with the development of the spiritual conception of life which we call religion, with the reconstruction of the political order of society, with the beginning of a new intellectual life and the pursuit of truth, and with the development under new forms of the passion for beauty.

I have been compelled to warn you against the romantic superstition that the Middle Ages were specifically religious, and yet it is quite true that the first aspect of mediaeval life which compels our attention is exactly the development of the sense of the significance of the spiritual quality of life. This was the first great task of the men of the Middle Ages, and this was in a real sense their achievement; but not as contradicting the characteristic developments of the Hellenic civilization, but rather as completing and fulfilling it. It is indeed a singular superstition that the Hellenic world was lacking in spiritual insight, but I need only refer you to Miss Stawell's lecture, as serving to show you how great and how real this was. It really was not a mistake when an honest but rather stupid man like Justin Martyr, and the more acute and penetrating minds of the Alexandrian Fathers like Clement and Origen, thought that they heard the authentic accents of the 'Word' of God in the great philosophers of Greece, and especially in Plato.

The apprehension of the spiritual element in human experience was not wanting in Hellenic civilization, but it needed a further development and especially in relation to those new apprehensions of personality and individuality, whose appearance we can trace both in the post-Aristotelian philosophy, and in the later Hebrew prophets and poets, which Christianity found in the world, and to which in its conception of the human in the Divine, and the Divine in the human, it gave a new force and breath. It is easy for us to smile at what may well be the over-rhetorical phrases of Seneca when he speaks of the self-sufficingness (αυταρκεια) of the wise man, or when he says that the wise man is, but for his mortality, like God himself; and yet these rhetorical phrases are, after all, the forms of an apprehension which has changed and is changing the world. And, it must be remembered that to understand the full significance of these phrases, we must bear in mind that the men of the Graeco-Roman civilization had put aside once and for all the 'natural' distinction between the 'Greek' and the 'Barbarian', had recognized that men were equal and alike, not different and unequal, that all men were possessed of reason, and all were capable of virtue,[23] or, in the Christian terms, all men are the children of God and capable of communion with Him.

It is this new apprehension of life for which the Middle Ages found a new form in the great organization of the Church, and it is this which justifies our sense of the great and permanent significance of the tremendous conflict of the Papacy and the Empire. It is true that at times some of the representatives of the Church seem to have fallen into the mistake of aiming at a tyranny of the Church over the State, which would have been in the end as disastrous to the Church itself as to the State. But the normal principle of the Church was that which was first fully stated by Pope Gelasius I in the fifth century, that the two great authorities, the spiritual and the temporal, are each divine, each draws its authority ultimately from God himself, each is supreme and independent in its own sphere, while each recognizes the authority of the other within its proper sphere.

It is, indeed, the freedom of the spiritual life which the mediaeval Church was endeavouring to defend; it was the apprehension that there was some ultimate quality in human nature which stands and must stand outside of the direct or coercive control of society, which lies behind all the confused clamour of the conflicts of Church and State.

It is true that in this great and generous effort to secure the freedom of the human soul men in some measure lost their way. They demanded and in a measure they succeeded in asserting the freedom of the religious organization, as against the temporal organization, but in doing this they went perilously near to denying the freedom of the individual spiritual experience. They went perilously near to denying it, but they never wholly forgot it. The Church claimed and exercised an immense authority in religion, so immense an authority that it might easily seem as though there were no place left for the freedom of the individual judgement and conscience. And yet that was not the case. The theory of excommunication that is set out in the canonical literature of the Middle Ages has generally been carelessly studied and imperfectly understood. It was the greatest and most masterful of the Popes, Innocent III, who laid down in memorable phrases which are embodied in the great collection of the Decretals, that if a Christian man or woman is convinced in his own mind and conscience that it would be a mortal sin to do or to leave undone some action, he must follow his own conscience even against the command of the authorities of the Church, and must submit patiently to Church censures and even excommunication; for it may well happen that the Church may condemn him whom God approves, or approve him whom God condemns.[24] This is no isolated or exceptional opinion, but is the doctrine which is constantly laid down in the canonical literature.[25] It is, I think, profoundly true to say that when men at last revolted against what seemed to them the exaggerated claims of the Church, when they slowly fought their way towards toleration and religious freedom, they were only asserting and carrying out its one most vital principle, the principle of the independence or autonomy of the spiritual life; the modern world is only fulfilling the Middle Ages.

I do not continue to develop this aspect of the progress of western civilization, not because it is unimportant, for indeed it is perhaps the greatest and most significant aspect of mediaeval life, but because it is well known to you, and indeed, it has generally been insisted on to such a degree as to obscure the other aspects of progress in the Middle Ages, with which we must deal.

And first I would ask you to observe that it was in these centuries that there were laid over again the foundations of the social and political order of civilization, and that there were devised those forms of the political order upon which the structure of modern society is founded.

We are familiar with the conception of the divine nature of political authority, the normal and fundamental mediaeval view of the State. If we translate this into more general terms we shall find that its meaning is that the State has an ethical or moral purpose or function; the State exists to secure and to maintain justice. You must not, indeed, confuse this great conception with that foolish perversion of it which was suggested, I think, by some characteristically reckless phrases of St. Augustine, stated in set terms by St. Gregory the Great, almost forgotten in the Middle Ages, and unhappily revived by the perversity of some Anglicans and Gallicans in the seventeenth century. This foolish perversion, which we know as the theory of the 'Divine Right of Kings', is indeed the opposite of the great Pauline and mediaeval conception of the divine nature of political authority, for to St. Paul, to the more normal Fathers like St. Ambrose, and to the political theory of the Middle Ages authority is divine just because, and only in so far as, its aim and purpose is the attainment and maintenance of justice. Indeed, it is not only the notion of the 'Divine Right' which was inconsistent with the mediaeval conception of the State, but the notion of an absolute sovereignty inherent in the State, that notion with which some eccentric or ignorant modern political theorists, ignorant of Rousseau as well as of Aristotle, have played, to the great danger of society; we have, indeed, got beyond the theory of the sovereignty of the king, but we are in some danger of being hag-ridden by the imposture of the sovereignty of the majority. Whatever mistakes the people of the Middle Ages may have made, they were, with rare exceptions, clear that there was no legitimate authority which was not just, and which did not make for justice.

It is here that we find the real meaning of the second great political principle of the Middle Ages, that is the supremacy of law; that it is the law which is the supreme authority in the State, the law which is over every person in the State. When John of Salisbury, the secretary of Thomas à Becket, wishes to distinguish between the prince and the tyrant, he insists that the prince is one who rules according to law, while the tyrant is one who ignores and violates the law.[26] And in a memorable phrase, Bracton, the great English jurist of the latter part of the thirteenth century, lays it down dogmatically that the king has two superiors, God and the law.[27] There is an absurd notion still current among more ignorant persons—I have even heard some theologians fall into the mistake—that men in the Middle Ages thought of authority as something arbitrary and unintelligible, while the truth is that such a conception was wholly foreign to the temper of that time. It is quite true that the political life of the Middle Ages seems constantly to oscillate between anarchy and despotism, but this is not because the men of those days did not understand the meaning of law and of freedom, but because they were only slowly working out the organization through which these can be secured. The supreme authority in the mediaeval state was the law, and it was supreme because it was taken by them to be the embodiment of justice.

It is again out of this principle that there arose another great conception which is still often thought to be modern, but which is really mediaeval, the conception that the authority of the ruler rests upon and is conditioned by an agreement or contract between him and the people. For this agreement was not an abstract conception, but was based upon the mutual oaths of the mediaeval coronation ceremony, the oath of the king to maintain the law, and to administer justice, and the oath of the people to serve and obey the king whom they had recognized or elected. The people do, indeed, owe the king honour and loyal service, but only on the condition that he holds inviolable his oath. The ruler who breaks this is a tyrant, and for him there was no place in mediaeval political theory. This conception was expressed in very plain and even crude terms by Manegold in the eleventh century when he said that the king was in the same relation to the community as the man who is hired to keep the pigs to his master. If the swineherd fails to do his work the master turns him off and finds another. And if the king or prince refuses to fulfil the conditions on which he holds his power he must be deposed.[28] John of Salisbury in the twelfth century expressed this in even stronger terms when he said that if the prince became a tyrant and violated the laws, he had no rights, and should be removed, and if there were no other way to do it, it was lawful for any citizen to slay him.[29]

These are, no doubt, extreme forms of the mediaeval conception, but the principle that the authority of the ruler was conditioned by his faithful discharge of his obligations is the normal doctrine of the Middle Ages, is maintained by the compilers of the feudal law-books of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, by the great English jurist Bracton, by St. Thomas Aquinas, and even by some of the most representative of the Roman jurists of Bologna, like Azo.

These were the fundamental principles of the conception of the nature of political authority whose development we can trace in the Middle Ages, and it is out of these conceptions that there grew the system of the control of the common affairs of the community by means of the representation of the community. For it should be more clearly understood than it is, that the representative system was the creation of the mediaeval political genius, it was these men—to whom even yet the more ignorant would deny the true political instinct—it was these men who devised that method upon which the structure of modern civilized government has been built up.

There is, however, yet another aspect of the development of political civilization which deserves our attention if we are to understand the nature of political progress in the Middle Ages. It was in these centuries that there were created the elementary forms of the administrative system of government. And indeed, there is perhaps no clearer distinction between a barbarian and a civilized government than this, that while the barbarian government hangs precariously on the life of the capable king, the civilized government is carried on continuously by an organized civil service. It would be impossible here to discuss the earlier forms of this in the organization of government by Charles the Great, or the very interesting developments of the royal or imperial chapel as the nucleus of a civil service in Germany, it is enough here to remind ourselves that it is the creation of this organized administration by Henry I and Henry II of England which laid the foundations of our national order. Enough has, I think, been said to illustrate the reality and significance of the progressive reconstruction of the political order of Western society in the Middle Ages.

It may, however, be said that this may all be true, but that in all this we have after all only an example of the preoccupation of the Middle Ages with conduct and religion. I must, therefore, ask you to consider the character and development of the intellectual movement of the Middle Ages. And here, fortunately, we can find the best of guidance in Dr. Rashdall's great work on The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, and in Dr. R. L. Poole's Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought. Indeed I could wish that a little more attention was given to the history and character of the intellectual movement which the Universities represent, and perhaps a little less to reading and discussing the great scholastic works of the thirteenth century, which are almost impossible to understand except in relation to the intellectual movements of the twelfth century.

The new intellectual movement came very suddenly in the last years of the eleventh century; why it should have come then is hard to determine, but it seems reasonable to say that it represents the reawakening of the desire for knowledge which had been in abeyance during the stormy centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, when men had little leisure for anything but the constant labour to secure a little decent order and peace. For a few years, indeed, in the ninth century the genius of Charlemagne had almost restored the order of civilization, and even in those few years the human mind reasserted itself, and for a moment the learning and culture which had been preserved mainly by the Irish and their pupils in Britain, and in Central Europe, flowered and bore fruit; but with his death Western Europe plunged again into anarchy and misery, and it was only slowly that the genius of the great German emperors in Central Europe, and of the Norman settlers in France and England, rebuilt the commonwealth of European civilization. By the end of the eleventh century the work was not indeed done, but was being done, and men had again a little leisure, and the desire for knowledge reawakened, but indeed it was no mere gentle desire, but a veritable passion which possessed the men of the twelfth century, and it was this spontaneous passion which produced the universities.

The first thing, indeed, which we must observe about the oldest universities of Europe, especially Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, is just this, that they were not made by any external authority, that they did not derive their being from Church or State, from pope or king, but that they were formed by the enthusiasm and passion which drew men from every quarter of Europe to sit at the feet of some man or another who could give them the knowledge which they desired, and, in their turn, to become teachers. It is quite true that as time went on, and they found that popes and kings were friendly and interested, these groups of students procured for themselves bulls and charters of recognition and protection, but while later universities may trace their foundation to these respectable patrons, the older universities recognize them indeed as benefactors and friends, but not as founders, but rather claim that they grew out of men's desire for knowledge, and that they were recognized by the general consent of the civilized world.

In the second place it is important, and especially I think in these days, to understand that the men who thus created the universities in their eagerness to learn, were of every class and condition, rich and poor, noble and simple, and they lived as they could, in comfortable quarters if they were wealthy men, or in the garrets and cellars of the citizens if they were poor, and for the most part they were poor; but neither poverty nor riches could destroy their noble thirst for knowledge. The life of the universities was indeed turbulent and disorderly, the students were always at war with the citizens, and, when they were not breaking the heads of the citizens or having their heads broken by them, they were at war with each other, the men of the north with the southerners, the western with the eastern; for the universities were not local or national institutions, but were made up of a cosmopolitan crowd of men of every nation in Europe, intelligible to each other, as unhappily we are not, by the universal knowledge and use of that mediaeval Latin, which might distress the Ciceronian ears of a pedant of the Renaissance, but was a good, useful, and adaptable language. It was a turbulent, disorderly, brutal, profligate, and drunken world, for the students were as hard drinkers as the citizens, but it was animated, it was made alive by a true passion for knowledge, by an unwearied and never satisfied intellectual curiosity.

But it will be asked, what did they learn? Well, the only answer that one can give is that they learned whatever there was to learn. Our literary friends have often still the impression that in the Middle Ages men spent their whole time in learning theology, and were afraid of other forms of knowledge, but this is a singular delusion. As the universities developed a system, their studies were arranged in the main under four heads, the general studies of what came to be called the Faculty of Arts, and the professional studies of the three superior Faculties of Law, Medicine, and Theology, but the student was not normally allowed to study in the three superior Faculties until he had spent some years in the studies of the Faculty of Arts. It is therefore with this latter that we are primarily occupied. The studies in the Faculty of Arts consisted, to use our modern terminology, of literature, philosophy, and science, and the accomplished mediaeval student was expected to know whatever there was to know.

And this means—what is strangely often forgotten—that the studies of the mediaeval universities were primarily based upon the literature which had survived from the ancient world. The Latin poets and orators were their models of literary art, the surviving treatises of the ancients their text-books in medicine, and the Greek philosophers in Latin translations, or in Latin works founded on them, their masters in thought. To understand the extent of the influence and the knowledge of antiquity of a twelfth-century scholar we need only turn again to John of Salisbury, and we shall find him as familiar as any Renaissance scholar with Latin literature, and possessing a very considerable acquaintance with Greek literature so far as it could be obtained through the Latin.[30] Indeed, so much is he possessed by the literature of antiquity that in works like the Policraticus he can hardly write two lines together without a quotation from some classical author. This type of literary scholarship has been too much overlooked, and, as I said before, too exclusive an attention has been given to the thirteenth-century schoolmen, who are neither from a literary nor from a philosophical point of view as representative of mediaeval scholars, and philosophically they are often really unmediaeval, for the general quality of mediaeval thought is its Platonism: the Aristotelian logic was indeed known to the Middle Ages through Bœthius, but the other Aristotelian works were not known till towards the middle of the thirteenth century.

It would be impossible here, even if I were competent, which I am not, to discuss the character of mediaeval thought, but one thing we can observe, one aspect of the intellectual method which may serve to clear away some confusion. The great intellectual master of the Middle Ages was Abelard, and the method which he elaborated in his Sic et Non is the method which imposed itself upon all aspects of mediaeval thought.

It has often been supposed that mediaeval thinkers were in such a sense the creatures of authority that it was impossible for them to exercise any independent judgement; how far this may have been true of the decadent scholasticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries I do not pretend to say, but such a judgement is a ludicrous caricature of the living and active thought of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and a little consideration of the critical method which Abelard developed is sufficient to correct this. This is as follows: first some general principle is enunciated for consideration, then all the authorities which may seem to support it are cited, then all the authorities against, and finally the writer delivers his own judgement, criticizing and explaining the opinions which may seem contrary to it. The method has its defects and its limitations, but its characteristic is rather that of scepticism than of credulity. And it is on this method that the most important systems of knowledge of the Middle Ages are constructed. It was applied by Gratian in his Decretum, the first great reasoned treatise on Church law, and leads there often to somewhat unexpected conclusions, such as that even the legislative authority of the Pope is limited by the consenting custom of the Christian people;[31] and it is this method upon which the great systematic treatises, like the Suma Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, were constructed in the thirteenth century. Whatever its defects may be the method cannot fairly be accused of ignoring difficulties and of a submission to authority which leaves no place for the critical reason.

I have, I hope, said enough to make it clear that there was a real and living intellectual movement in the Middle Ages, and that even in those days men had resumed the great adventure of the pursuit of truth.

We can only for a moment consider the significance and the character of mediaeval civilization as it expresses itself in Art, and we must begin by noticing a distinction between mediaeval art and mediaeval learning, which is of the first importance.

The intellectual movement of the Middle Ages was related to the ancient world, both in virtue of that continuity which was mediated by the Christian Fathers, whose education was that of the later Empire, and also in virtue of the intense and eager care with which mediaeval scholars studied all that they possessed of ancient literature. The relation of the art of the Middle Ages to the ancient world was quite different. There was no continuity between the vernacular poetry of the Middle Ages and that of the ancient world, and while there was a certain continuity in architecture and in mosaic painting, this amounted to little more than that the mediaeval artists took the formal structure or method as the starting-point of their own independent and original work. For the western art of the third and fourth centuries was conventional and decadent, and had apparently lost its power of recovery, while the art of the centuries which followed was at first rude and imperfect, but was full of new life, determined in its reality and dominated by some intimate sense of beauty; it was in no sense imitative of ancient art, but grew and changed under the terms of its own inherent life and power.

Mediaeval art, whatever else is to be said about it, was new and independent, and it had all the variety, the audacious experiments, characteristic of a living art. Nothing is so foolish as to imagine that it was uniform and unchanging. Indeed, from the historical point of view, the interest of the study of it is curiously contrasted with that of the art of the ancient world. There we have only an imperfect and fragmentary knowledge of the earlier and ruder form; its history, as we know it, might almost be said to begin with the perfection of the sixth and fifth centuries, and what we know after that is the history of a long decadence, not indeed without new developments of importance, as for instance in the architectural structure of Roman building, and perhaps in the sculpture of the Early Empire on one side, and in certain aspects of Latin literature on another. The history of mediaeval art is the history of the long development from what are generally rude forms to the highly developed art of the thirteenth century, a development full of incidents and experiments and variety. I have called the early form rude, but the phrase is not very happy, as those who know either the early mosaic or the early epic will understand.

There are still some people, I suppose, who think that mediaeval poetry was all of one kind, cast in one mould, but the truth is that it is of every form and character. It ranges from the bold imaginative realism of the Epic of England, Iceland, Germany, and France, to the exquisite and gracious but somewhat artificial allegory of the Romance of the Rose. It includes the first great emotional poetry of the modern world—the sense of the greatness and tragedy of human passion has perhaps never been expressed in more moving terms than in the Tristan and Iseult of Thomas or Beroul—but it also includes the mordant satire of the Renard poetry and of Jean de Meun, and the gross realistic humour of the Fabliaux. The mediaeval drama, in whose complex development we have to trace many strands, probably represents in its oldest forms the coarse farcical buffoonery which may be related to the last fashions of the ancient world; it received a new impulse from the dramatization of scripture history in the twelfth century; but in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at least in France, it had already become substantially a drama of romantic or contemporary life, as we can see in Jean Bodel's Jeu de St. Nicholas, in Adam de la Halle's Jeu de la Feuillée and Robin et Marion, and in dramas like the Empress of Rome or the Otho. Whatever criticism we might want to make on mediaeval literature, at least we cannot say that it was of one type and of one mood.

It is hardly necessary to point out the movement and changes in the other forms of art in the Middle Ages; it is only necessary to remind ourselves that, while we can see that the artists were often hampered by inadequate technical knowledge, they were not conventional or merely imitative.

It would be impossible here to consider the history of mosaic painting, and its development from the decadent Graeco-Roman work of Santa Pudenziana in Rome, to the magnificent and living decorations of St. Mark's in Venice, or of the cathedral of Monreale. It is enough to remind ourselves of the immense interval which lies between the rude but living sculpture of the ninth century, and the exquisite grace of Chester or Wells, and of that development of architecture which culminates in the majesty of Durham, and in the beauty of Chartres and Westminster Abbey.

It is doubtful if we have yet at all fully or correctly appreciated the nature of mediaeval art; there has been a good deal of foolish talk about 'primitives', which usually goes with a singular ignorance of mediaeval civilization; the one thing which is already clear, and which grows clearer, is that the men of those ages had an instinct and a passion for beauty which expressed itself in almost every thing that they touched; and, whatever we have gained, we have in a large measure lost this.

The mediaeval world was then a living growing world, neither cut off from the past, nor unrelated to the future. It was a rough and turbulent world, our ancestors were dogged, quarrelsome, and self-assertive, and the first task of civilization was to produce some sort of decent order. The world was a long way off from the firm urbanity of the English policeman. And yet the men of the Middle Ages never fell into that delusion which, as it would seem, has ruined other civilizations; the great effort for order was not in their mind to be fulfilled by any mere mechanical discipline, by any system imposed from outside, the only system of order which they were prepared to accept was one which should express the character, the tradition, and finally the will of the whole community. The great phrase of Edward I's summons to Parliament, 'Quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur' (That which concerns all, must be approved by all), was not a mere tag, as some foolish people have thought, but expressed the character and the genius of a living political civilization.

And this rough turbulent world was inspired by a great breath of spiritual and intellectual and artistic life and freedom.

It might well seem as though the Church and religion were merely a new bondage, and in part that is true, but it is not the whole truth. With all its mistakes the religion of the Middle Ages meant the growing apprehension of the reality of that 'love which moves the sun and other stars', it meant the growth of reverence for that which is beyond and above humanity and which is also within it. For it is the last truth of the Christian faith that we know God only under the terms of human life and nature. And with all the cruelty and brutality of the Middle Ages they taught men love as well as obedience.

Again, it was in these ages, as soon as the confusion of the outer world was a little reduced, that the passion for knowledge awoke again in men's hearts. It is true that some were afraid lest the eager inquiry of men's minds should destroy the foundations of that order which men were slowly achieving, but still the passionate pursuit of knowledge has rarely been more determined. And once again the world was rough, but these men had an instinct, a passion for beauty which expressed itself in almost everything which they touched. They had not, indeed, the almost miraculous sense and mastery of the great artists of Greece, that did not come again till the time of the great Italian artists of the fifteenth century. But they were free from pedantry, from formalism, they left the dying art of the ancient world and made their own way. Their sense of colour was almost infallible, as those who have seen the mosaics of the older Roman basilicas and of St. Mark's in Venice will know; but, indeed, we have only to look at the illuminated manuscripts which are to be found in all our libraries. And in that great art in which, above all perhaps, they expressed themselves, in their great architecture, we see the growth of a constructive genius which is only overshadowed by the superb beauty of its form.

A rough, disorderly, turbulent, greedy, cruel world, but it knew the human soul, and it knew the human heart. The ancient world had ended in a great destruction, but the sadness and emptiness of its last days compel us to feel that it was well that it should end. And the new world was a world of life, of crude force and restless energy, and from it we have received the principles and the forms of a great civilization, and the temper which is never satisfied, for there is no end to life.

Books for Reference

H. W. C. Davis, Mediaeval Europe (Home University Library).

Lord Bryce, History of Roman Empire.

Rashdall, Universities of Empire in the Middle Ages.

R. L. Poole, Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought.

Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages.

W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] Cf. Cicero, De Legibus, i. 10-12; and Seneca, De Beneficiis, iii. 18.

[24] Cf. Decretals, v. 39. 44, 28.

[25] Cf. Carlyle, Mediaeval Political Theory, vol. ii. pp. 244-9.

[26] Cf. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, iv. 1.

[27] Cf. Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus, i. 8, 5.

[28] Cf. Manegold, Ad Gebehardum, c. xxx.

[29] Cf. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, iii. 15, viii. 17, 18, 20.

[30] Cf. C. C. J. Webb's edition of John of Salisbury's Policraticus, introduction.

[31] Cf. Gratian, Decretum, D. iv. c. 3.

V

PROGRESS IN RELIGION

Baron Friedrich von Hügel

The difficulties are deep and delicate which confront any man at all well acquainted with the fuller significance of Religion and of Progress, who attempts clearly and shortly to describe or define the ultimate relations between these two sets of fact and conviction. It is plain that Religion is the deeper and richer of the two terms; and that we have here, above all, to attempt to fathom the chief elements and forces of Religion as such, and then to see whether Progress is really traceable in Religion at all. And again it is clear that strongly religious souls will, as such, hold that Religion answers to, and is occasioned by, the action, within our human life and needs, of great, abiding, living non-human Realities; and yet, if such souls are at all experienced and sincere, they will also admit—as possibly the most baffling of facts—that the human individuals, families, races, are relatively rare in whom this sense and need of Religion is strongly, sensitively active. Thus the religion of most men will either all but completely wither or vanish before the invasion of other great facts and interests of human life—Economics or Politics or Ethics, or again, Science, Art, Philosophy; or it will, more frequently, become largely assimilated, in its conception, valuation, and practice, to the quite distinct, and often subtly different, conceptions, valuations, and practices pertaining to such of these other ranges and levels of human life as happen here to be vigorously active. And such assimilations are, of course, effected with a particular Philosophy or Ethic, mostly some passing fashion of the day, which does not reach the deepest laws and standards even of its own domain, and which, if taken as Religion, will gravely numb and mar the power and character of such religious perception as may still remain in this particular soul.

I will, then, first attempt some discriminations in certain fundamental questions concerning the functioning of our minds, feelings, wills. I will next attempt short, vivid descriptions of the chief stages in the Jewish and Christian Religions, with a view to tracing here what may concern their progress; and will very shortly illustrate the main results attained by the corresponding main peculiarities of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism. And I will finally strive to elucidate and to estimate, as clearly as possible, the main facts in past and present Religion which concern the question of religious 'Progressiveness'.

I

I begin with insisting upon some seven discriminations which, even only forty years ago, would have appeared largely preposterous to the then fashionable philosophy.

First, then, our Knowledge is always wider and deeper than is our Science. I know my mother, I know my dog, I know my favourite rose-tree; and this, although I am quite ignorant of the anatomical differences between woman and man; of the psychological limits between dog and human being; or of the natural or artificial botanical order to which my rose-plant belongs. Any kind or degree of consciousness on my part as to these three realities is a knowledge of their content. 'Knowledge is not simply the reduction of phenomena to law and their resolution into abstract elements; since thus the unknowable would be found well within the facts of experience itself, in so far as these possess a concrete character which refuses translation into abstract relations.' So Professor Aliotta urges with unanswerable truth.[32]

And next, this spontaneous awareness of other realities by myself, the reality Man, contains always, from the first, both matter and form, and sense, reason, feeling, volition, all more or less in action. Sir Henry Jones insists finely: 'The difference between the primary and elementary data of thought on the one hand, and the highest forms of systematized knowledge on the other, is no difference in kind, analogous to a mere particular and a mere universal; but it is a difference of articulation.'[33]

Thirdly, direct, unchallengeable Experience is always only experience of a particular moment; only by means of Thought, and trust in Thought, can such Experience be extended, communicated, utilized. The sceptic, to be at all effective, practises this trust as really as does his opponent. Thought, taken apart from Experience, is indeed artificial and arid; but Experience without Thought, is largely an orderless flux. Philosophers as different as the Neo-Positivist Mach and the Intuitionist Bergson, do indeed attempt to construct systems composed solely of direct Experience and pure Intuition; and, at the same time, almost ceaselessly insist upon the sheer novelty, the utter unexpectedness of all direct Experience, and the entire artificiality of the constructions of Thought—constructions which alone adulterate our perceptions of reality with the non-realities repetition, uniformity, foreseeableness. Yet the amazing success of the application of such constructions to actual Nature stares us all in the face. 'It is, indeed, strange,' if that contention be right, 'that facts behave as if they too had a turn for mathematics.' Assuredly 'if thought, with its durable and coherent structure, were not the reflection of some order of stable relations in the nature of things, it would be worthless as an organ of life'.[34]