CHAPTER I
DECLINE AND FALL OF ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS DUE TO FEMINISM
"This is the function of our and every age, to grasp the knowledge already existing, to make it our own, and in so doing to develop it further and raise it to a higher level. In thus taking it to ourselves we make it different from what it was."—Hegel.
I
Ancient history is depressing study.
It shows us peoples rising slowly and laboriously out of states of barbarism to high degrees of culture and enlightenment, and then, more or less suddenly, falling upon decline; lapsing to total extinction, even. One after another, we may watch them climb the Evolutionary Hill, then slacken pace and struggle on spasmodically. Till presently we find them steadily losing ground; slowly at first, but, gathering momentum, regressing more and more rapidly, until finally they are seen racing headlong to destruction.
Of some among the proudest and the greatest Civilisations, so absolute has been their ultimate extinction that nothing more than ruined temples and some statuary remain to mark their quondam glory.
Biologists tell us this is natural. Races, they say—like individuals—have only a certain life-tenure. They are born, develop, attain maturity, lapse to old age and then die; just as men do.
The analogy is not sound, however. Because although individual men die, the stock they leave behind, if duly preserved and replenished by fresh blood, may live indefinitely. Moreover, such records as remain show that these past civilisations died, obviously, not of natural old age—but of disease. Natural old age is sane and wise, and self-controlled; healthful in mind and in body. Whereas the main features characterising the decline of these great powers, were viciousness and licentiousness; physical, mental and moral corruption. Theirs was no passing in gradual waning of strength and quiet dissolution; not even in senility. They may be described, on the contrary, as having rushed helter-skelter upon death in full vigour of their prime. We see in them, indeed, all the vehemence and self-destructive forces of "sthenic" disease—disease as it occurs in strong men struck down in full health. They died in riot, venality, and lust, and every other form of vice and evil. Clearly, they died unnaturally—of disease, not naturally of old age.
How and why then did this happen? How and why should disease thus have stricken these in mid-career? Since history shows the political institutions, the laws and the administration of many of such mighty decadents to have reached high levels of excellence, in respect of justice and intelligence, while Culture, Art and Industry were likewise notable among them, the causes of their downfall must be looked for elsewhere than in their sociology.