There is one truth, however, the knowledge of which fills us with hope for the future: it is the fact that the results of development and civilisation are often transfused from one people to another, so that a given development need not start again from the very beginning. This is owing to the capacity which races have for absorbing or borrowing civilisations. Absorption of culture is by no means universal; it does not prevent the occasional disappearance of civilisation, for every civilisation has before it at least the possibility of death. Nevertheless the transmission and assimilation of culture is constantly taking place. There are various ways in which it may be brought about. A conquering nation may bring its own civilisation with it to the conquered; culture is often forced upon the latter by coercive measures. The conquerors may acquire culture from the vanquished; or assimilation of culture may come about without the subjection of a people, through the unconscious adoption of external customs and internal modes of thought. Finally, culture may be borrowed consciously from one nation by another, the one state becoming convinced of the outward advantages and inner significance of the foreign civilisation.
In this way the problem of development becomes very complicated; many institutions of vanished races thus continue to live on. Certainly the race that acquires a foreign civilisation must, among other things, be so constituted in its motives and aspirations as to lose the very nerves of its being, its very stability, in order that, intoxicated with the joy of a new life, all traces of its past existence may be allowed to break up and disappear. On the other hand, many a promising germ of culture possessed by a vigorous people may come to grief, owing to the influence of acquisitions from without. But, in return, a race that knows how to assimilate foreign culture may obtain a civilisation of such efficiency as it would never before have been capable of attaining, by reason of the fact that its power is established on a recently acquired basis, and because it has been spared a multitude of faltering experiments.
Progress Goes on For Ever
Civilisation may be mutually obtained from reciprocal action, nations both giving and taking. Such a relation naturally arises when states enter into intercourse with one another, when they have become acquainted with one another’s various institutions and are able to recognise the great merits of foreign organisations and the defects of their own. Especially the world’s commerce, in which every nation wishes to remain a competitor, compels towards mutual acceptance of custom and law; no nation desires to be left behind; and each discovers that it will fall to the rear unless it borrow certain things from the others. Such reciprocal action will be the more effective the more like nations are to one another, the better they understand each other, and the more often they succeed not only in adopting the outward forms, but in absorbing the principles of foreign institutions into their own beings.
Thus we may hope that even if the nations of to-day decay and disappear, the labour of the world’s progress will not be lost; it will constantly reappear in new communities which may rejoice in that for which we have striven, and which we have acquired by the exertion of our own powers.
JOSEPH KOHLER
THE SEVEN WONDERS OF ANCIENT CIVILISATION
From the French of Victor Hugo