Nevertheless, as a result of the tremendous resources which, in the beginnings of a higher civilization, were possessed by the world empire alone, there was one field in which the period of such empires was directly creative and in which it set an example to future ages. I refer to the technique of mass and to the monumental art connected with it. The streets, viaducts, and magnificent edifices of the period of the Roman emperors have long aroused the wonder and admiration of later generations, as monuments of a power that had unlimited means at its command. The constructions of the Egyptian, Babylonian-Assyrian, and Persian world empires lacked the artistic execution which the influence of Greek art made possible to the constructions of the Romans. We have now come to know, however, that the former were not surpassed by the latter in the immensity which resulted from the consciousness, on the part of the builders, that they had countless human forces at their disposal. The canals and roadways of the Egyptian and Babylonian monarchs, moreover, also give clear evidence that the needs of agriculture and commerce were provided for in a way that would have been impossible, in these early stages of world culture, except through the resources at the command of a world State. The extension of intercourse resulting from world empire is to be regarded as at least a partial factor in the transition to the institution of money. It exercised an influence also toward the development of a system of writing, whose purpose it was to communicate the decrees of government to officials and vassals, and to preserve a record of the deeds of rulers and of the laws enacted by them. In this wise, the material aspects of world culture exerted an influence upon the mental aspects, whose direct expressions are speech and writing.
As regards the relation of speech and writing, the two fundamental elements of all culture, the culture of individuals and world culture show an important difference. In the culture of individuals, of course, speech long precedes writing, verbal expression being crystallized into writing only after a relatively high level of culture has been attained. In world culture, on the other hand, writing paved the way for verbal intercourse. The reason for this difference lies in the fact that speech is a natural product of the direct intercourse of individuals who are sharing a common life. Writing, however, is an invention by which individuals seek to disseminate and to preserve the ideas embodied in speech far beyond the spacial and temporal bounds that limit oral communication. Hence, communication in writing is the first step from folk culture to world culture. The simplicity of the characters which it employs enables it to pass from one people to another and from one generation to the next even more readily than does the speech of commerce. For though the latter is of a more universal character than the many separate mother tongues, it asserts itself only with difficulty in competition with them. The history of cuneiform writing is especially instructive as regards the point under present discussion. The Semitic people, whose migration to Babylonia succeeded that of the Sumerians, lost all knowledge of the Sumerian language, but they preserved the written texts as sacred. In the course of folk migrations, cuneiform writing likewise penetrated to the coast regions of Asia Minor, although in this instance it was continually used to express new idioms not to be found in the land of its origin. Letters have been found representing a correspondence between certain Babylonian kings and Egyptian Pharaohs, and dating from the fifteenth century before Christ. These letters, called Tel-el-Amarna letters after the place of their discovery, are a remarkable testimony to the fact that the demands of commerce gradually cause speech to follow in the wake of writing, even though the means which the Babylonian employs to make his cuneiform writing intelligible indicates that his Egyptian correspondent possessed only a slight acquaintance with the Babylonian language.
It was not until a much later time that any language of intercourse and literature became sufficiently widespread to be called a world language, even in that relative sense which attaches to all universal terms of this sort. This occurred, in the case of the Greek language, under the rule of the Diadochi. In this instance, again, the first advance in the direction of world culture followed, in the main, upon world empire. For, though we must admit that the empire of Alexander was of altogether too brief a duration for such a purpose, it is nevertheless true that it witnessed only the beginnings of a world dominance of Greek language and culture. Taking into account the narrow limits of the cultural world of that period of history, there has been no age since that of the Diadochi concerning which we would be prepared to say that it attained to so widespread a dissemination of a uniform culture. The striving beyond a national to a world culture which took place at that time was, of course, the fruition of far earlier tendencies. The fact that the Greek colonies retained the language and customs of the mother country was itself a preparatory step. Following the train of colonists were individual travellers, whose desire for knowledge led them beyond the regions where the Greek language was known. Even in that early day, Pythagoras and Xenophanes, Herodotus and Xenophon, Democritus and Plato made extensive travels throughout the lands bordering on the Mediterranean. Alexander's expedition to India, a country which had up to that time been regarded as a marvellous fairyland, marked the culmination of the journeys to remote regions which had, at the outset, been undertaken by individuals. Nevertheless, the spread of the impulse to wander remains of primary significance for the Hellenistic period. The warrior, the tradesman, and the physician share this impulse with the scholar and the artist. In the age of tribal organization, it was the tribe or clan that travelled to distant places, its object being to escape the pressure of want and the need threatened by the exhaustion of the hunting-grounds or the soil; in the heroic age, it was the people as a whole who left their homes, either because they were crowded out by enemies or because they were eager to assert their power by establishing cities and States; in the age under present consideration, it is the individual who is seized with the longing for travel, his purpose being to find elsewhere more favourable opportunities for the exercise of his vocation, or, perhaps, to see the world, and thus to enlarge his field of experience and his knowledge. The large and rapidly growing cities that spring up into centres of the new world culture attract the people of all lands, as do also the ancient and far-famed seats of intellectual culture. In Alexandria, Pergamus, Athens, and, finally, in Rome, there mingle representatives of all races—of the Greek, Egyptian, Syrian, Persian, and Italic peoples. Greek is the language of common intercourse. Alexandria, however, gradually displaces Athens as the chief seat of science. The latter comes to be fostered, not by Greeks, but, in large part, by individuals of other nationalities, particularly those of the Orient.
This new world culture possesses two distinctive characteristics. The first of these consists in a growing indifference to the State as such. The second, antithetical to the former and yet most closely related to it, is a high appreciation of the individual personality, connected with which is a tendency on the part of the individual to develop his own personality and to assert his rights. That which the public values undergoes a change. The emphasis shifts, on the one hand, from the State to a culture which is universally human, and thus independent of State boundaries; it passes, on the other hand, from political interests, in part, to the individual personality and, in part, to universal spiritual development. Thus, world culture is at once cosmopolitan and individualistic. As respects both these characteristics, however, the interest in humanity finds expression in a transcendence of the limits of a single people. Here, again, preparatory stages will be found far back in Greek culture. As early as the time of the Sophists, individuals, wandering from city to city as travelling teachers, proclaim the spirit of personal freedom and the dependence of all social institutions and ties upon the will of the individual. When we come to the Epicurean and Stoic schools, which reach over into the period of early world culture, the idea of humanity in both its aspects receives its classic expression, though with differing emphases, conditioned by the ethical and religious needs as a whole. Similar conditions prevail in the positive sciences. In natural science, which reached its first classical development in the Alexandrian period, an interest in universal natural laws, as discovered in astronomy and mechanics, occurs side by side with an absorption in descriptive observations of the most detailed sort. History fluctuates between attempts at an abstract schematization of the epochs of political development, after the pattern of the Aristotelian classification of the forms of the State, and biographical accounts of dominating personalities and their deeds. Similarly, philology combines the grammatical disputes of the Peripatetic and Stoic schools—disputes as yet unfruitful in their abstract generalities—with that minute pursuit of literary studies which has since given the period the discreditable name of 'Alexandrianism.' Art also manifests this coincidentia oppositorum. The monumental edifices of this epoch exhibit a tendency toward the colossal, whereas sculpture is characterized by a painstaking and individualizing art of portraiture; the drama portraying the pompous action of ruler and State, appears alongside of the play of civic intrigue and the mime.
As the result both of inner dissolution and of the aggression of new peoples who were just entering upon their political development, Hellenistic world culture underwent disintegration. It first split up into Greek and Roman divisions, in correspondence with the partition of the Roman world empire and that of the Christian Church connected with it. Except the fact of the separation itself, nothing shows more significantly how far both divisions were from possessing a world culture than does the decline of that indispensable means of common culture, language. The West preserved meagre remnants of the Latin civilization, the East, fragments of the Greek civilization. In the course of the centuries, the clergy of the West developed a class of scholars who were out of sympathy with the prevailing tendencies toward national culture. In the East, the barbarian nations, which the Church barely succeeded in holding together, exercised a benumbing influence upon culture; cultural activity, therefore, sank into a dull lethargy. The ancient world empires, whose last brilliant example, the monarchy of Alexander, had formed the transition to the first great world culture, gave place, at this later time, to world religion. As the result of struggles which, though long, were assured of ultimate success, world religion subjected the political powers to its authority. Destined, in the belief of peoples, to be imperishable, this religion outlived the changing forms of the secular State, and was the only remaining vehicle of world culture, fragmentary as this may have been. But the inner dissolution to which the last of the great world empires, that of Rome, succumbed, overpowered also the Church as soon as the latter endeavoured to become a new world State and insisted on the duty of believers to render obedience to it. When this occurred, the world culture fostered by it necessarily proved too weak to assimilate the new tendencies which were beginning to manifest themselves. Conditions were ripe for the striving to achieve a new culture. In contrast with the ideal of the Church, this culture was concerned with the actual world, and therefore felt itself related to the cultural idea of antiquity. Thus arose the culture of the Renaissance. In it, we again have a world culture in the true sense of the word, even though it was shared, at the outset, only by the ambitious and the educated, as had, indeed, also essentially been the case with its prototype.
The culture of the Renaissance formulated its ideal by reference both to the past and to the future. It sought to revive the world culture of the Græco-Roman period, but yet to give to the latter a content suited to the spirit of the new age and to the tasks awaiting it. Hence the Renaissance was not merely a rebirth, as its name might suggest, but a new world culture. Though possessing many traits in common with the older culture of Hellenism, it bore, in an even greater measure, its own peculiar stamp. The most noteworthy feature common to the two was their combination of universalism and individualism—a feature that is, perhaps, characteristic of world culture as such. Apparently both universalism and individualism become more prominent with the course of time. During the period of the Renaissance, the cultivation—one might almost say the cult—of the individual personality probably reached the highest point that it had as yet attained. The human monster, who violated without compunction all laws of propriety and custom, and the ascetic zealot, who sacrificed himself for a visionary ideal, could both alike arouse admiration because of the uniqueness of their characters. Along with this emphasis of individual personality, there flourished social ideals of a religious and a political nature. It was under this influence that the reformation of the church began its work and that new political theories and Utopian accounts of a happy future for the human race made their appearance. In still another respect does the age of the Renaissance appear to be a genuine revival, in an enlarged world, of the Hellenistic period. Again the individual is overpowered by the impulse to travel, and, as a consequence, the age of great geographical discoveries is inaugurated. The voyages of the great discoverers—of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Magellan—were the result, for the most part, of personal initiative. And, though other motives may have lurked in the background, the discoverers themselves were chiefly inspired by that desire to wander which, more than a century earlier, had led the Venetian Marco Polo to travel alone in the distant lands of eastern Asia.
But, in certain essential particulars, the later period of world culture possessed a character all its own. The basis of culture was no longer a world State, but a world Church. No longer, moreover, was there an indifference to the State, as had been so generally the case in Hellenistic times. A heightened political interest was everywhere beginning to be manifest. That which long continued to give this period its unique stamp was the struggle between State and Church. The social impulses tended in the direction of a new political order, and to a certain extent, even at this time, toward a social reconstruction. The world culture of this period, moreover, sustained a completely altered relation to language, that universal vehicle both of mental life and of the material culture which grows up out of the intercourse of peoples. It was not a world language, such as results naturally from the authority of a world empire, that constituted the basis of the new cultural unity. On the contrary, the latter was dependent upon a multiplicity of languages, which gave expression to the mental individuality of peoples just as did the national States to the diversity of particular political and social interests. The influence of more extensive educational activities made itself felt. The forms of commerce and of the interchange of the mental products of nations were manifold, yet education rendered the means of material and intellectual intercourse common property so far as this was possible and necessary. Thus, world culture itself acquired a new foundation. A world language must of necessity be an active and a living language, and, in view of the fact that all social institutions are historically conditioned, it can attain its supremacy only through the influence of a world empire. Hence every world culture whose basis is a unity of language, in the sense of a world language, is doomed to be transitory. Fragments of such a culture may survive, but it itself must perish along with the language by which it is sustained and, more remotely, with the political power by which the language is upheld. All this is changed as soon as world culture is established on the basis of a multiplicity of national tongues as well as of national States. Then, for the first time, may world culture become more than merely an occasional epoch of history; thenceforth it may enjoy a permanent development. With this in mind, one may say that the period of the Renaissance laid the foundation for a new form of world culture, whose characteristic feature is that combination of humanistic and national endeavour which is still prevalent throughout the civilized world.