To turn to a more recent example, consider the splendid efflorescence of genius in Russia during the central years of the last century, still a vivifying influence on the literature and music of the world; yet the population of Russia had only just been delivered, nominally at least, from serfdom, and still remained at the intellectual and economic level of serfs. To-day, education has become diffused in the Western world. Yet no one would dream of asserting that genius is more prevalent. Consider the United States, for instance, during the past half-century. It would surely be hard to find any country, except Germany, where education is more highly esteemed or better understood, and where instruction is more widely diffused. Yet, so far as the production of high original genius is concerned, an old Italian city, like Florence, with a few thousand inhabitants, had far more to show than all the United States put together. So that we are at a loss how to apply the intellectual test to the measurement of civilisation. It would almost seem that the two essential elements of this test are mutually incompatible.
Let us fall back on the simple solid fundamental test furnished by the material aspect of civilisation. Here we are among elementary facts and the first that began to be measured. Yet our difficulties, instead of diminishing, rather increase. It is here, too, that we chiefly meet with what Niceforo has called “the paradoxical symptoms of superiority in progress,” though I should prefer to call them ambivalent; that is to say, that, while from one point of view they indicate superiority, from another, even though some may call it a lower point of view, they appear to indicate inferiority. This is well illustrated by the test of growth of population, or the height of the birth-rate, better by the birth-rate considered in relation to the death-rate, for they cannot be intelligibly considered apart. The law of Nature is reproduction, and if an intellectual rabbit were able to study human civilisation he would undoubtedly regard rapidity of multiplication, in which he has himself attained so high a degree of proficiency, as evidence of progress in civilisation. In fact, as we know, there are even human beings who take the same view, whence we have what has been termed “Rabbitism” in men. Yet, if anything is clear in this obscure field, it is that the whole tendency of evolution is towards a diminishing birth-rate.[[118]] The most civilised countries everywhere, and the most civilised people in them, are those with the lowest birth-rate. Therefore, we have here to measure the height of civilisation by a test which, if carried to an extreme, would mean the disappearance of civilisation. Another such ambivalent test is the consumption of luxuries of which alcohol and tobacco are the types. There is held to be no surer test of civilisation than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognisably poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilisation altogether. Again, take the prevalence of suicide. That, without doubt, is a test of height in civilisation; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps. We should be justified in regarding as very questionable a high civilisation which failed to show a high suicide-rate. Yet suicide is the sign of failure, misery, and despair. How can we regard the prevalence of failure, misery, and despair as the mark of high civilisation?
Thus, whichever of the three groups of facts we attempt to measure, it appears on examination almost hopelessly complex. We have to try to make our methods correspondingly complex. Niceforo had invoked co-variation, or simultaneous and sympathetic changes in various factors of civilisation; he explains the index number, and he appeals to mathematics for aid out of the difficulties. He also attempts to combine, with the help of diagrams, a single picture out of these awkward and contradictory tests. The example he gives is that of France during the fifty years preceding the war. It is an interesting example because there is reason to consider France as, in some respects, the most highly civilised of countries. What are the chief significant measurable marks of this superiority? Niceforo selects about a dozen, and, avoiding the difficult attempt to compare France with other countries, he confines himself to the more easily practicable task of ascertaining whether, or in what respects, the general art of civilisation in France, the movement of the collective life, has been upward or downward. When the different categories are translated, according to recognised methods, into index numbers, taking the original figures from the official “Résumé” of French statistics, it is found that each line of movement follows throughout the same direction, though often in zigzag fashion, and never turns back on itself. In this way it appears that the consumption of coal has been more than doubled, the consumption of luxuries (sugar, coffee, alcohol) nearly doubled, the consumption of food per head (as tested by cheese and potatoes) also increasing. Suicide has increased fifty per cent; wealth has increased slightly and irregularly; the upward movement of population has been extremely slight and partly due to immigration; the death-rate has fallen, though not so much as the birth-rate; the number of persons convicted of offence by the courts has fallen; the proportion of illiterate persons has diminished; divorces have greatly increased, and also the number of syndicalist workers, but these two movements are of comparative recent growth.
This example well shows what it is possible to do by the most easily available and generally accepted tests by which to measure the progress of a community in the art of civilisation. Every one of the tests applied to France reveals an upward tendency of civilisation, though some of them, such as the fall in the death-rate, are not strongly pronounced and much smaller than may be found in many other countries. Yet, at the same time, while we have to admit that each of these lines of movement indicates an upward tendency of civilisation, it by no means follows that we can view them all with complete satisfaction. It may even be said that some of them have only to be carried further in order to indicate dissolution and decay. The consumption of luxuries, for instance, as already noted, is the consumption of poisons. The increase of wealth means little unless we take into account its distribution. The increase of syndicalism, while it is a sign of increased independence, intelligence, and social aspiration among the workers, is also a sign that the social system is becoming regarded as unsound. So that, while all these tests may be said to indicate a rising civilisation, they yet do not invalidate the wise conclusion of Niceforo that a civilisation is never an exclusive mass of benefits, but a mass of values, positive and negative, and it may even be said that most often the conquest of a benefit in one domain of a civilisation brings into another domain of that civilisation inevitable evils. Long ago, Montesquieu had spoken of the evils of civilisation and left the question of the value of civilisation open, while Rousseau, more passionately, had decided against civilisation.
We see the whole question from another point, yet not incongruously, when we turn to Professor William McDougall’s Lowell Lectures, “Is America Safe for Democracy?” since republished under the more general title “National Welfare and National Decay,” for the author recognises that the questions he deals with go to the root of all high civilisation. As he truly observes, civilisation grows constantly more complex and also less subject to the automatically balancing influence of national selection, more dependent for its stability on our constantly regulative and foreseeing control. Yet, while the intellectual task placed upon us is ever growing heavier, our brains are not growing correspondingly heavier to bear it. There is, as Remy de Gourmont often pointed out, no good reason to suppose that we are in any way innately superior to our savage ancestors, who had at least as good physical constitutions and at least as large brains. The result is that the small minority among us which alone can attempt to cope with our complexly developing civilisation comes to the top by means of what Arsène Dumont called social capillarity, and McDougall the social ladder. The small upper stratum is of high quality, the large lower stratum of poor quality, and with a tendency to feeble-mindedness. It is to this large lower stratum that, with our democratic tendencies, we assign the political and other guidance of the community, and it is this lower stratum which has the higher birth-rate, since with all high civilisation the normal birth-rate is low.[[119]] McDougall is not concerned with the precise measurement of civilisation, and may not be familiar with the attempts that have been made in that direction. It is his object to point out the necessity in high civilisation for a deliberate and purposive art of eugenics, if we would prevent the eventual shipwreck of civilisation. But we see how his conclusions emphasise those difficulties in the measurement of civilisation which Niceforo has so clearly set forth.
McDougall is repeating what many, especially among eugenists, have previously said. While not disputing the element of truth in the facts and arguments brought forward from this side, it may be pointed out that they are often overstated. This has been well argued by Carr-Saunders in his valuable and almost monumental work, “The Population Problem,” and his opinion is the more worthy of attention as he is himself a worker in the cause of eugenics. He points out that the social ladder is, after all, hard to climb, and that it only removes a few individuals from the lower social stratum, while among those who thus climb, even though they do not sink back, regression to the mean is ever in operation so that they do not greatly enrich in the end the class they have climbed up to. Moreover, as Carr-Saunders pertinently asks, are we so sure that the qualities that mark successful climbers—self-assertion, acquisition, emulation—are highly desirable? “It may even be,” he adds, “that we might view a diminution in the average strength of some of the qualities which mark the successful at least with equanimity.” Taken altogether, it would seem that the differences between social classes may mainly be explained by environmental influences. There is, however, ground to recognise a slight intellectual superiority in the upper social class, apart from environment, and so great is the significance for civilisation of quality that even when the difference seems slight it must not be regarded as negligible.[[120]]
More than half a century ago, indeed, George Sand pointed out that we must distinguish between the civilisation of quantity and the civilisation of quality. As the great Morgagni had said much earlier, it is not enough to count, we must evaluate; “observations are not to be numbered, they are to be weighed.” It is not the biggest things that are the most civilised things. The largest structures of Hindu or Egyptian art are outweighed by the temples on the Acropolis of Athens, and similarly, as Bryce, who had studied the matter so thoroughly, was wont to insist, it is the smallest democracies which to-day stand highest in the scale. We have seen that there is much in civilisation which we may profitably measure, yet, when we seek to scale the last heights of civilisation, the ladder of our “metrology” comes to grief. “The methods of the mind are too weak,” as Comte said, “and the Universe is too complex.” Life, even the life of the civilised community, is an art, and the too much is as fatal as the too little. We may say of civilisation, as Renan said of truth, that it lies in a nuance. Gumplowicz believed that civilisation is the beginning of disease; Arsène Dumont thought that it inevitably held within itself a toxic principle, a principle by which it is itself in time poisoned. The more rapidly a civilisation progresses, the sooner it dies for another to arise in its place. That may not seem to every one a cheerful prospect. Yet, if our civilisation has failed to enable us to look further than our own egoistic ends, what has our civilisation been worth?
II
The attempt to apply measurement to civilisation is, therefore, a failure. That is, indeed, only another way of saying that civilisation, the whole manifold web of life, is an art. We may dissect out a vast number of separate threads and measure them. It is quite worth while to do so. But the results of such anatomical investigation admit of the most diverse interpretation, and, at the best, can furnish no adequate criterion of the worth of a complex living civilisation.
Yet, although there is no precise measurement of the total value of any large form of life, we can still make an estimate of its value. We can approach it, that is to say, as a work of art. We can even reach a certain approximation to agreement in the formation of such estimates.