Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Cincinnatus" to "Cleruchy" / Volume 6, Slice 4

by Various

Thus for six or seven thousand years after man achieved civilization there was rhythmic progress in many lines, but there came no great epochal invention to usher in a new ethnic period. Then, towards the close of what Great inventions of the middle ages. historians of to-day are accustomed to call the middle ages, there appeared in rapid sequence three or four inventions and a great scientific discovery that, taken together, were destined to change the entire aspect of European civilization. The inventions were gunpowder, the mariner’s compass, paper and the printing-press, three of which appear to have been brought into Europe by the Moors, whether or not they originated in the remote East. The scientific discovery which must be coupled with these inventions was the Copernican demonstration that the sun and not the earth is the centre of our planetary system. The generations of men that found themselves (1) confronted with the revolutionary conception of the universe given by the Copernican theory; (2) supplied with the new means of warfare provided by gunpowder; (3) equipped with an undreamed-of guide across the waters of the earth; and (4) enabled to promulgate knowledge with unexampled speed and cheapness through the aid of paper and printing-press—such generations of men might well be said to have entered upon a new ethnic period. The transition in their mode of thought and in their methods of practical life was as great as can be supposed to have resulted, in an early generation, from the introduction of iron, or in a yet earlier from the invention of the bow and arrow. So the Europeans of about the 15th century of the Christian era may be said to have entered upon the Second or Middle Status of civilization.

The new period was destined to be a brief one. It had compassed only about four hundred years when, towards the close of the 18th century, James Watt gave to the world the perfected steam-engine. Almost contemporaneously Steam machinery. Arkwright and Hargreaves developed revolutionary processes of spinning and weaving by machinery. Meantime James Hutton and William Smith and their successors on the one hand, and Erasmus Darwin, François Lamarck, and (a half-century later) Charles Darwin on the other, turned men’s ideas topsy-turvy by demonstrating that the world as the abiding-place of animals and man is enormously old, and that man himself instead of deteriorating from a single perfect pair six thousand years removed, has ascended from bestiality through a slow process of evolution extending over hundreds of centuries. The revolution in practical life and in the mental life of our race that followed these inventions and this new presentation of truth probably exceeded in suddenness and in its far-reaching effects the metamorphosis effected at any previous transition from one ethnic period to another. The men of the 19th century, living now in the period that may be termed the Upper Status of civilization, saw such changes effected in the practical affairs of their everyday lives as had not been wrought before during the entire historical period. Their fathers had travelled in vehicles drawn by horses, quite as their remoter ancestors had done since the time of higher barbarism. It may be doubted whether there existed in the world in the year 1800 a postal service that could compare in speed and efficiency with the express service of the Romans of the time of Caesar; far less was there a telegraph service that could compare with that of the ancient Persians. Nor was there a ship sailing the seas that a Phoenician trireme might not have overhauled. But now within the lifetime of a single man the world was covered with a network of steel rails on which locomotives drew gigantic vehicles, laden with passengers at an hourly speed almost equalling Caesar’s best journey of a day; over the land and under the seas were stretched wires along which messages coursed from continent to continent literally with the speed of lightning; and the waters of the earth were made to teem with gigantic craft propelled without sail or oar at a speed which the Phoenician captain of three thousand years ago and the English captain of the 18th century would alike have held incredible.

There is no need to give further details here of the industrial revolutions that have been achieved in this newest period of civilization, since in their broader outlines at least they are familiar to every one. Nor need we dwell Social and political organization. upon the revolution in thought whereby man has for the first time been given a clear inkling as to his origin and destiny. It suffices to point out that such periods of fermentation of ideas as this suggests have probably always been concomitant with those outbursts of creative genius that gave the world the practical inventions upon which human progress has been conditioned. The same attitude of receptivity to new ideas is pre-requisite to one form of discovery as to the other. Nor, it may be added, can either form of idea become effective for the progress of civilization except in proportion as a large body of any given generation are prepared to receive it. Doubtless here and there a dreamer played with fire, in a literal sense, for generations before the utility of fire as a practical aid to human progress came to be recognized in practice. And—to seek an illustration at the other end of the scale—we know that the advanced thinkers of Greece and Rome believed in the antiquity of the earth and in the evolution of man two thousand years before the coming of Darwin. We have but partly solved the mysteries of the progress of civilization, then, when we have pointed out that each tangible stage of progress owed its initiative to a new invention or discovery of science. To go to the root of the matter we must needs explain how it came about that a given generation of men was in mental mood to receive the new invention or discovery.

The pursuit of this question would carry us farther into the realm of communal and racial psychology—to say nothing of the realm of conjecture—than comports with the purpose of this article. It must suffice to point out that alertness of mind—that all mentality—is, in the last analysis, a reaction to the influences of the environment. It follows that man may subject himself to new influences and thus give his mind a new stimulus by changing his habitat. A fundamental secret of progress is revealed in this fact. Man probably never would have evolved from savagery had he remained in the Tropics where he doubtless originated. But successive scientific inventions enabled him, as has been suggested, to migrate to distant latitudes, and thus more or less involuntarily to become the recipient of new creative and progressive impulses. After migrations in many directions had resulted in the development of divers races, each with certain capacities and acquirements due to its unique environment, there was opportunity for the application of the principle of environmental stimulus in an indirect way, through the mingling and physical intermixture of one race with another. Each of the great localized civilizations of antiquity appears to have owed its prominence in part at least—perhaps very largely—to such intermingling of two or more races. Each of these civilizations began to decay so soon as the nation had remained for a considerable number of generations in its localized environment, and had practically ceased to receive accretions from distant races at approximately the same stage of development. There is a suggestive lesson for present-day civilization in that thought-compelling fact. Further evidence of the application of the principle of environmental stimulus, operating through changed habitat and racial intermixture, is furnished by the virility of the colonial peoples of our own day. The receptiveness to new ideas and the rapidity of material progress of Americans, South Africans and Australians are proverbial. No one doubts, probably, that one or another of these countries will give a new stimulus to the progress of civilization, through the promulgation of some great epochal discovery, in the not distant future. Again, the value of racial intermingling is shown yet nearer home in the long-continued vitality of the British nation, which is explicable, in some measure at least, by the fact that the Celtic element held aloof from the Anglo-Saxon element century after century sufficiently to maintain racial integrity, yet mingled sufficiently to give and receive the fresh stimulus of “new blood.” It is interesting in this connexion to examine the map of Great Britain with reference to the birthplaces of the men named above as being the originators of the inventions and discoveries that made the close of the 18th century memorable as ushering in a new ethnic era. It may be added that these names suggest yet another element in the causation of progress: the fact, namely, that, however necessary racial receptivity may be to the dynamitic upheaval of a new ethnic era, it is after all individual genius that applies its detonating spark.

Without further elaboration of this aspect of the subject it may be useful to recapitulate the analysis of the evolution of civilization above given, prior to characterizing it from another standpoint. It appears that the entire Nine periods of progress. period of human progress up to the present may be divided into nine periods which, if of necessity more or less arbitrary, yet are not without certain warrant of logic. They may be defined as follows: (1) The Lower Period of Savagery, terminating with the discovery and application of the uses of fire. (2) The Middle Period of Savagery, terminating with the invention of the bow and arrow. (3) The Upper Period of Savagery, terminating with the invention of pottery. (4) The Lower Period of Barbarism, terminating with the domestication of animals. (5) The Middle Period of Barbarism, terminating with the discovery of the process of smelting iron ore. (6) The Upper Period of Barbarism, terminating with the development of a system of writing meeting the requirements of literary composition. (7) The First Period of Civilization (proper) terminating with the introduction of gunpowder. (8) The Second Period of Civilization, terminating with the invention of a practical steam-engine. (9) The Upper Period of Civilization, which is still in progress, but which, as will be suggested in a moment, is probably nearing its termination.

It requires but a glance at the characteristics of these successive epochs to show the ever-increasing complexity of the inventions that delimit them and of the conditions of life that they connote. Were we to attempt to characterize in a few phrases the entire story of achievement thus outlined, we might say that during the three stages of Savagery man was attempting to make himself master of the geographical climates. His unconscious ideal was, to gain a foothold and the means of subsistence in every zone. During the three periods of Barbarism the ideal of conquest was extended to the beasts of the field, the vegetable world, and the mineral contents of the earth’s crust. During the three periods of Civilization proper the ideal of conquest has become still more intellectual and subtle, being now extended to such abstractions as an analysis of speech-sounds, and to such intangibles as expanding gases and still more elusive electric currents: in other words, to the forces of nature, no less than to tangible substances. Hand in hand with this growing complexity of man’s relations with the external world has gone a like increase of complexity in the social and political organizations that characterize man’s relations with his fellowmen. In savagery the family expanded into the tribe; in barbarism the tribe developed into the nation. The epoch of civilization proper is aptly named, because it has been a time in which citizenship, in the narrower national significance, has probably been developed to its apogee. Throughout this period, in every land, the highest virtue has been considered to be patriotism,—by which must be understood an instinctive willingness on the part of every individual to defend even with his life the interests of the nation into which he chances to be born, regardless of whether the national cause in which he struggles be in any given case good or bad, right or wrong. The communal judgment of this epoch pronounces any man a traitor who will not uphold his own nation even in a wrong cause—and the word “traitor” marks the utmost brand of ignominy.

But while the idea of nationality has thus been accentuated, there has been a never-ending struggle within the bounds of the nation itself to adjust the relations of one citizen to another. The ideas that might makes right, that the Nationality and cosmopolitanism. strong man must dominate the weak, that leadership in the community properly belongs to the man who is physically most competent to lead—these ideas were a perfectly natural, and indeed an inevitable, outgrowth of the conditions under which man fought his way up through savagery and barbarism. Man in the first period of civilization inherited these ideas, along with the conditions of society that were their concomitants. So throughout the periods when the oriental civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia and Assyria and Persia were dominant, a despotic form of government was accepted as the natural order of things. It does not appear that any other form was even considered as a practicality. A despot might indeed be overthrown, but only to make way for the coronation of another despot. A little later the Greeks and Romans modified the conception of a heaven-sent individual monarch; but they went no further than to substitute a heaven-favoured community, with specially favoured groups (Patricii) within the community. With this, national egoism reached its climax; for each people regarded its own citizens as the only exemplars of civilization, openly branding all the rest of the world as “barbarians,” fit subjects for the exaction of tribute or for the imposition of the bonds of actual slavery. During the middle ages there was a reaction towards individualism as opposed to nationalism: but the entire system of feudalism, with its clearly recognized conditions of over-lordship and of vassaldom, gave expression, no less clearly than oriental despotism and classical “democracy” had done, to the idea of individual inequality; of divergence of moral and legal status based on natural inheritance. Thus this idea, a reminiscence of barbarism, maintained its dominance throughout the first period of civilization.

But gunpowder, marking the transition to the second period of civilization, came as a great levelling influence. With its aid the weakest peasant might prove more than a match for the most powerful knight. Before its assaults the castle of the lord ceased to be an impregnable fortress. And while gunpowder thus levelled down the power of the mighty, the printing-press levelled up the intelligence, and hence the power and influence of the lowly. Meantime the mariner’s compass opened up new territories beyond the seas, and in due course men of lowly origin were seen to attain to wealth and power through commercial pursuits, thus tending to break in upon the established social order. In the colonial territories themselves all men were subjected more or less to the same perils and dependent upon their own efforts. Success and prominence in the community came not as a birthright, but as the result of demonstrated fitness. The great lesson that the interests of all members of a community are, in the last analysis, mutual could be more clearly distinguished in these small colonies than in larger and older bodies politic. Through various channels, therefore, in the successive generations of this middle period of civilization, the idea gained ground that intelligence and moral worth, rather than physical prowess, should be the test of greatness; that it is incumbent on the strong in the interests of the body politic to protect the weak; and that, in the long run, the best interests of the community are conserved if all its members, without exception, are given moral equality before the law. This idea of equal rights and privileges for all members of the community—for each individual “the greatest amount of liberty consistent with a like liberty of every other individual”—first found expression as a philosophical doctrine towards the close of the 18th century; at which time also tentative efforts were made to put it into practice. It may be said therefore to represent the culminating sociological doctrine of the middle period of civilization,—the ideal towards which all the influences of the period had tended to impel the race.

It will be observed, however, that this ideal of individual equality within the body politic in no direct wise influences the status of the body politic itself as the centre of a localized civilization that may be regarded as in a sense antagonistic to all other similarly localized civilizations. If there were any such influence, it would rather operate in the direction of accentuating the patriotism of the member of a democratical community, as against that of the subject of a despot, through the sense of personal responsibility developed in the former. The developments of the middle period of civilization cannot be considered, therefore, to have tended to decrease the spirit of nationality, with its concomitant penalty of what is sometimes called provincialism. The history of this entire period, as commonly presented, is largely made up of the records of international rivalries and jealousies, perennially culminating in bitterly contested wars. It was only towards the close of the epoch that the desirability of free commercial intercourse among nations began to find expression as a philosophical creed through the efforts of Quesnay and his followers; and the doctrine that both parties to an international commercial transaction are gainers thereby found its first clear expression in the year 1776 in the pages of Condillac and of Adam Smith.

But the discoveries that ushered in the third period of civilization were destined to work powerfully from the outset for the breaking down of international barriers, though, of course, their effects would not be at once manifest. Thus the substitution of steam power for water power, besides giving a tremendous impetus to manufacturing in general, mapped out new industrial centres in regions that nature had supplied with coal but not always with other raw materials. To note a single result, England became the manufacturing centre of the world, drawing its raw materials from every corner of the globe; but in so doing it ceased to be self-supporting as regards the production of food-supplies. While growing in national wealth, as a result of the new inventions, England has therefore lost immeasurably in national self-sufficiency and independence; having become in large measure dependent upon other countries both for the raw materials without which her industries must perish and for the foods to maintain the very life of her people.