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

by Various

What is true of England in this regard is of course true in greater or less measure of all other countries. Everywhere, thanks to the new mechanisms that increase industrial efficiency, there has been an increasing tendency to specialization; and since the manufacturer must often find his raw materials in one part of the world and his markets in another, this implies an ever-increasing intercommunication and interdependence between the nations. This spirit is obviously fostered by the new means of transportation by locomotive and steamship, and by the electric communication that enables the Londoner, for example, to transact business in New York or in Tokio with scarcely an hour’s delay; and that puts every one in touch at to-day’s breakfast table with the happenings of the entire world. Thanks to the new mechanisms, national isolation is no longer possible; globe-trotting has become a habit with thousands of individuals of many nations; and Orient and Occident, representing civilizations that for thousands of years were almost absolutely severed and mutually oblivious of each other, have been brought again into close touch for mutual education and betterment. The Western mind has learned with amazement that the aforetime Terra Incognita of the far East has nurtured a gigantic civilization having ideals in many ways far different from our own. The Eastern mind has proved itself capable, in self-defence, of absorbing the essential practicalities of Western civilization within a single generation. Some of the most important problems of world-civilization of the immediate future hinge upon the mutual relations of these two long-severed communities, branched at some early stage of progress to opposite hemispheres of the globe, but now brought by the new mechanisms into daily and even hourly communication.

While the new conditions of the industrial world have thus tended to develop a new national outlook, there has come about, as a result of the scientific discoveries already referred to, a no less significant broadening of the mental and Modern humanism. spiritual horizons. Here also the trend is away from the narrowly egoistic and towards the cosmopolitan view. About the middle of the 19th century Dr Pritchard declared that many people debated whether it might not be permissible for the Australian settlers to shoot the natives as food for their dogs; some of the disputants arguing that savages were without the pale of human brotherhood. To-day the thesis that all mankind are one brotherhood needs no defence. The most primitive of existing aborigines are regarded merely as brethren who, through some defect or neglect of opportunity, have lagged behind in the race. Similarly the defective and criminal classes that make up so significant a part of the population of even our highest present-day civilizations, are no longer regarded with anger or contempt, as beings who are suffering just punishment for wilful transgressions, but are considered as pitiful victims of hereditary and environmental influences that they could neither choose nor control. Insanity is no longer thought of as demoniac possession, but as the most lamentable of diseases.

The changed attitude towards savage races and defective classes affords tangible illustrations of a fundamental transformation of point of view which doubtless represents the most important result of the operation of new scientific knowledge in the course of the 19th century. It is a transformation that is only partially effected as yet, to be sure; but it is rapidly making headway, and when fully achieved it will represent, probably, the most radical metamorphosis of mental view that has taken place in the entire course of the historical period. The essence of the new view is this: to recognize the universality and the invariability of natural law; stated otherwise, to understand that the word “supernatural” involves a contradiction of terms and has in fact no meaning. Whoever has grasped the full import of this truth is privileged to sweep mental horizons wider by far than ever opened to the view of any thinker of an earlier epoch. He is privileged to forecast, as the sure heritage of the future, a civilization freed from the last ghost of superstition—an Age of Reason in which mankind shall at last find refuge from the hosts of occult and invisible powers, the fearsome galaxies of deities and demons, which have haunted him thus far at every stage of his long journey through savagery, barbarism and civilization. Doubtless here and there a thinker, even in the barbaric eras, may have realized that these ghosts that so influenced the everyday lives of his fellows were but children of the imagination. But the certainty that such is the case could not have come with the force of demonstration even to the most clear-sighted thinker until 19th-century science had investigated with penetrating vision the realm of molecule and atom; had revealed the awe-inspiring principle of the conservation of energy; and had offered a comprehensible explanation of the evolution of one form of life from another, from monad to man, that did not presuppose the intervention of powers more “supernatural” than those that operate about us everywhere to-day.

The stupendous import of these new truths could not, of course, make itself evident to the generality of mankind in a single generation, when opposed to superstitions of a thousand generations’ standing. But the new knowledge has made its way more expeditiously than could have been anticipated; and its effects are seen on every side, even where its agency is scarcely recognized. As a single illustration, we may note the familiar observation that the entire complexion of orthodox teaching of religion has been more altered in the past fifty years than in two thousand years before. This of course is not entirely due to the influence of physical and biological science; no effect has a unique cause, in the complex sociological scheme. Archaeology, comparative philology and textual criticism have also contributed their share; and the comparative study of religions has further tended to broaden the outlook and to make for universality, as opposed to insularity, of view. It is coming to be more and more widely recognized that all theologies are but the reflex of the more or less faulty knowledge of the times in which they originate, that the true and abiding purpose of religion should be the practical betterment of humanity—the advancement of civilization in the best sense of the word; and that this end may perhaps be best subserved by different systems of theology, adapted to the varied genius of different times and divers races. Wherefore there is not the same enthusiastic desire to-day that found expression a generation ago, to impose upon the cultured millions of the East a religion that seems to them alien to their manner of thought, unsuited to their needs and less distinctly ethical in teaching than their own religions.

Such are but a few of the illustrations that might be cited from many fields to suggest that the mind of our generation is becoming receptive to a changed point of view that augurs the coming of a new ethnic era. If one may be permitted to enter very tentatively the field of prophecy, it seems not unlikely that the great revolutionary invention which will close the third period of civilization and usher in a new era is already being evolved. It seems not over-hazardous to predict that the air-ship, in one form or another, is destined to be the mechanism that will give the new impetus to human civilization; that the next era will have as one of its practical ideals the conquest of the air; and that this conquest will become a factor in the final emergence of humanity from the insularity of nationalism to the broad view of cosmopolitanism, towards which, as we have seen, the tendencies of the present era are verging. That the gap to be covered is a vastly wide one no one need be reminded who recalls that the civilized nations of Europe, together with America and Japan, are at present accustomed to spend more than three hundred million pounds each year merely that they may keep armaments in readiness to fly at one another’s throats should occasion arise. Formidable as these armaments now seem, however, the developments of the not very distant future will probably make them quite obsolete; and sooner or later, as science develops yet more deadly implements of destruction, the time must come when communal intelligence will rebel at the suicidal folly of the international attitude that characterized, for example, the opening decade of the 20th century. At some time, after the first period of cosmopolitanism shall be ushered in as a tenth ethnic period, it will come to be recognized that there is a word fraught with fuller meanings even than the word patriotism. That word is humanitarianism. The enlightened generation that realizes the full implications of that word will doubtless marvel that their ancestors of the third period of civilization should have risen up as nations and slaughtered one another by thousands to settle a dispute about a geographical boundary. Such a procedure will appear to have been quite as barbarous as the cannibalistic practices of their yet more remote ancestors, and distinctly less rational, since cannibalism might sometimes save its practiser from starvation, whereas warfare of the civilized type was a purely destructive agency.

Equally obvious must it appear to the cosmopolite of some generation of the future that quality rather than mere numbers must determine the efficiency of any given community. Race suicide will then cease to be a bugbear; and it will no longer be considered rational to keep up the census at the cost of propagating low orders of intelligence, to feed the ranks of paupers, defectives and criminals. On the contrary it will be thought fitting that man should become the conscious arbiter of his own racial destiny to the extent of applying whatever laws of heredity he knows or may acquire in the interests of his own species, as he has long applied them in the case of domesticated animals. The survival and procreation of the unfit will then cease to be a menace to the progress of civilization. It does not follow that all men will be brought to a dead level of equality of body and mind, nor that individual competition will cease; but the average physical mental status of the race will be raised immeasurably through the virtual elimination of that vast company of defectives which to-day constitutes so threatening an obstacle to racial progress. There are millions of men in Europe and America to-day whose whole mental equipment—despite the fact that they have been taught to read and write—is far more closely akin to the average of the Upper Period of Barbarism than to the highest standards of their own time; and these undeveloped or atavistic persons have on the average more offspring than are produced by the more highly cultured and intelligent among their contemporaries. “Race suicide” is thereby prevented, but the progress of civilization is no less surely handicapped. We may well believe that the cosmopolite of the future, aided by science, will find rational means to remedy this strange illogicality. In so doing he will exercise a more consciously purposeful function, and perhaps a more directly potent influence, in determining the line of human progress than he has hitherto attempted to assume, notwithstanding the almost infinitely varied character of the experiments through which he has worked his way from savagery to civilization.

All these considerations tend to define yet more clearly the ultimate goal towards which the progressive civilization of past and present appears to be trending. The contemplation of this goal brings into view the outlines of a vastly Ethical evolution. suggestive evolutionary cycle. For it appears that the social condition of cosmopolite man, so far as the present-day view can predict it, will represent a state of things, magnified to world-dimensions, that was curiously adumbrated by the social system of the earliest savage. At the very beginning of the journey through savagery, mankind, we may well believe, consisted of a limited tribe, representing no great range or variety of capacity, and an almost absolute identity of interests. Thanks to this community of interests,—which was fortified by the recognition of blood-relationship among all members of the tribe,—a principle which we now define as “the greatest ultimate good to the greatest number” found practical, even if unwitting, recognition; and therein lay the germs of all the moral development of the future. But obvious identity of interests could be recognized only so long as the tribe remained very small. So soon as its numbers became large, patent diversities of interest, based on individual selfishness, must appear, to obscure the larger harmony. And as savage man migrated hither and thither, occupying new regions and thus developing new tribes and ultimately a diversity of “races,” all idea of community of interests, as between race and race, must have been absolutely banished. It was the obvious and patent fact that each race was more or less at rivalry, in disharmony, with all the others. In the hard struggle for subsistence, the expansion of one race meant the downfall of another. So far as any principle of “greatest good” remained in evidence, it applied solely to the members of one’s own community, or even to one’s particular phratry or gens.

Barbaric man, thanks to his conquest of animal and vegetable nature, was able to extend the size of the unified community, and hence to develop through diverse and intricate channels the application of the principle of “greatest good” out of which the idea of right and wrong was elaborated. But quite as little as the savage did he think of extending the application of the principle beyond the bounds of his own race. The laws with which he gave expression to his ethical conceptions applied, of necessity, to his own people alone. The gods with which his imagination peopled the world were local in habitat, devoted to the interests of his race only, and at enmity with the gods of rival peoples. As between nation and nation, the only principle of ethics that ever occurred to him was that might makes right. Civilized man for a long time advanced but slowly upon this view of international morality. No Egyptian or Babylonian or Hebrew or Greek or Roman ever hesitated to attack a weaker nation on the ground that it would be wrong to do so. And few indeed are the instances in which even a modern nation has judged an international question on any other basis than that of self-interest. It was not till towards the close of the 19th century that an International Peace Conference gave tangible witness that the idea of fellowship of nations was finding recognition; and in the same recent period history has recorded the first instance of a powerful nation vanquishing a weaker one without attempting to exact at least an “indemnifying” tribute.

But the citizen of the future, if the auguries of the present prove true, will be able to apply principles of right and wrong without reference to national boundaries. He will understand that the interests of the entire human family are, in the last analysis, common interests. The census through which he attempts to estimate “the greatest good of the greatest number” must include, not his own nation merely, but the remotest member of the human race. On this universal basis must be founded that absolute standard of ethics which will determine the relations of cosmopolite man with his fellows. When this ideal is attained, mankind will again represent a single family, as it did in the day when our primeval ancestors first entered on the pathway of progress; but it will be a family whose habitat has been extended from the narrow glade of some tropical forest to the utmost habitable confines of the globe. Each member of this family will be permitted to enjoy the greatest amount of liberty consistent with the like liberty of every other member; but the interests of the few will everywhere be recognized as subservient to the interests of the many, and such recognition of mutual interests will establish the practical criterion for the interpretation of international affairs.

But such an extension of the altruistic principle by no means presupposes the elimination of egoistic impulses—of individualism. On the contrary, we must suppose that man at the highest stages of culture will be, even as was the Progress and efficiency. savage, a seeker after the greatest attainable degree of comfort for the least necessary expenditure of energy. The pursuit of this ideal has been from first to last the ultimate impelling force in nature urging man forward. The only change has been a change in the interpretation of the ideal, an altered estimate as to what manner of things are most worth the purchase-price of toil and self-denial. That the things most worth the having cannot, generally speaking, be secured without such toil and self-denial, is a lesson that began to be inculcated while man was a savage, and that has never ceased to be reiterated generation after generation. It is the final test of progressive civilization that a given effort shall produce a larger and larger modicum of average individual comfort. That is why the great inventions that have increased man’s efficiency as a worker have been the necessary prerequisites to racial progress. Stated otherwise, that is why the industrial factor is everywhere the most powerful factor in civilization; and why the economic interpretation is the most searching interpretation of history at its every stage. It is the basal fact that progress implies increased average working efficiency—a growing ratio between average effort and average achievement—that gives sure warrant for such a prognostication as has just been attempted concerning the future industrial unification of our race. The efforts of civilized man provide him, on the average, with a marvellous range of comforts, as contrasted with those that rewarded the most strenuous efforts of savage or barbarian, to whom present-day necessaries would have been undreamed-of luxuries. But the ideal ratio between effort and result has by no means been achieved; nor will it have been until the inventive brain of man has provided a civilization in which a far higher percentage of citizens will find the life-vocations to which they are best adapted by nature, and in which, therefore, the efforts of the average worker may be directed with such vigour, enthusiasm and interest as can alone make for true efficiency; a civilization adjusted to such an economic balance that the average man may live in reasonable comfort without heart-breaking strain, and yet accumulate a sufficient surplus to ensure ease and serenity for his declining days. Such, seemingly, should be the normal goal of progressive civilization. Doubtless mankind in advancing towards that goal will institute many changes that could by no possibility be foretold, but (to summarize the views just presented) it seems a safe augury from present-day conditions and tendencies that the important lines of progress will include (1) the organic betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity; (2) the lessening of international jealousies and the consequent minimizing of the drain upon communal resources that attends a military régime; and (3) an ever-increasing movement towards the industrial and economic unification of the world.