[264-6] There is a peculiar charm, very productive in itself, attaching to the cultivation of a field which has been but little cultivated, and which, therefore, has the advantage of promising something new. On the other hand, the decline of almost all literatures begins with this, that writers and readers no longer think out completely the forms of speech, modes of expression, etc. to which they have become used, as their original creators did; a great temptation to have recourse to a more and more spicy literary style. J. S. Mill considers the stationary state (Principles, IV, ch. 6) a very pleasant one to contemplate, but he overlooks the very important fact, that as men are constituted it uniformly introduces national decline.
[264-7] Great rulers, of whom it is said that they conquered the world by following out their own ideas to their ultimate consequences, would most certainly have lost the world by reason of the same logic if they had continued it only fifty years longer. What would have become of Alexander the Great and Charlemagne if they had lived one generation more?
CONCLUSION.
All the separate nations which have lived side by side, or followed one another, are embraced under the general name, humanity. Who would deny the existence of a point, viewed from which humanity might be seen to constitute one great whole; all the variations and differences in its life only one great plan, one wonderful sovereign decree of the divine will, grandly and wonderfully executed by God? Or who is so bold as to say that he stands on this point himself? Theologians should be the last to do it, since even the apostle Paul calls God's ways inscrutable. So long as we do not even know whether we live in one of the first or one of the last decades of humanity, every system of universal history in which each nation and period is made to take its place in due subordination to its superiors, can be only a castle in the air; and it is a matter of indifference whether the basis of the system is philosophical, socialistic, or natural-philosophical.[265-1]
The usual error into which the builders of such history fall, is that they consider the peculiarities of certain stages of civilization, which may be shown to exist among all nations in the corresponding period of their history as the national peculiarity of the single people with whose history they are, for the time being, concerned. They deduce wonderful consequences, from the premises they laid down, but which our increasing acquaintance with other nations immediately shows to be unfounded.
There is, however, a number of facts really peculiar to a people which make up the national character, and which may give to an observer endowed with an imaginative mind, an inkling to the special vocation in the economy of providence of a particular people. That a positive system can be constructed from the material of such facts, I do not, indeed, think. But they are at least a safeguard against false systems, against the improper application of analogies, against the idle, fatalistic exaggeration of the maxim: "nothing new under the sun!" It had almost become the fashion to compare our present with the period of decline of the Greek and Roman republics. Frightful parallel, in which the greatest and most undoubted differences were frequently overlooked for smaller and certainly questionable similarities. Is not the abolition of slavery, which has been accomplished among all the most important nations of the present, something new and of great import from a moral and economic point of view?[265-2] Can the national wealth, which depends on labor and frugality, be in any way compared with that which was based on plunder? And so, no one can calculate the benefits which may be reaped by posterity from the mere continuation of the scientific and especially natural-philosophical results obtained by former generations. The discovery of the whole earth soon to be completed, and its probable consequence, the civilization of all nations of any importance, must remove the danger to which all the civilized nations of antiquity eventually succumbed, namely, destruction by entirely barbarous hordes. Nor should the significance of the state-system of Europe, which might be extended soon enough into a state-system embracing the world, be under-estimated. Macedonia would not so readily have subjugated the Hellenes and the Persians if the great powers of the west, Rome and Carthage, had intervened at the right time. And there, too, is Christianity, whose means of grace are at hand for every one at all times, for his complete moral regeneration.
In one word, the usual argument with which the "man of experience" meets the man of inventive genius, that there never was anything of the like seen before, may suffice in thousands and thousands of cases; but it affords no strict proof. It is the province of genius to compel rules to extend their limits. But science should never forget that self-denial is necessary to the discovery of truth.[265-3]
[265-1] I mean here, especially, the attempt so frequently made (by Herder, for instance) to draw a parallel between the periods of universal history and the age at different times of the individual, or with the seasons. If there were a great many humanities between which we might institute a comparison, we might accomplish something with the analogy, but——!
[265-2] However, even such a man as Minister Stein, thinks that a laboriously acquired wealth may affect a people's morality injuriously. "The striving after wealth is the striving for the possession of the means of satisfying chiefly sensuous wants. This striving may suppress all nobler feelings, whether it find expression in violence or industry." Contrariwise, it is possible that some of the noblest of human qualities may be found side by side with the forcible acquisition of wealth, viz.: courage, patriotism. (Pertz, Leben Steins, II, 466.)