Chapter XX: Against the Materialistic View of History

Before passing, however, from the physical inventions to the new moral ideas and mental contacts, I must interpolate a comment to save myself from misunderstanding. Generally, those who trace to mechanical utilities new epochs in the development of mankind proceed upon the materialistic theory of history. But this theory I have in no wise committed myself to, for I count it to be false. It is true that I have traced all the great steps in human advancement to physical inventions, but I have in no word implied that the inventions themselves were caused by anything material whatsoever. And if they themselves were, as I believe, the result of man's mental and spiritual activities reacting against events, then my tracing of human advancement to them implies no belief in the materialistic theory of history. Every effect of the inventions must be set down ultimately not to them, but to their causes; and their causes were mental. Casually I have said as much, in remarking several times that they took place by a happy chance, or by a stroke of insight on the part of some rare genius, or by the reaction of some mediocre person's intelligent volition against some extraordinary experience which made the idea of the invention so obtrusively evident that even a mind not unusually gifted could scarcely have avoided lighting upon it.

The only phrase I have used by which I cannot absolutely stand is the expression "by a happy chance"; for I believe that the mental productions of each person are due not to uncaused chance, or to accident, but to trends of the social mind that have been set in motion by mental exigencies arising out of current events. As primitive peoples, however, have left no record of their mental sequences, we cannot say with confidence what were the exact experiences that led to the idea of using fire, or to any other device that transformed the relation of human beings to one another or to their material habitat. I only repeat that whatever caused the inventions caused all the remote effects of these, and that if the causes of the inventions were mental and spiritual, then an interpretation of history is not materialistic merely because it traces advancement to mechanical utilities. That I am right in tracing these to mental and spiritual causes is proved at least in the case of recent inventions. For we know that their causes were psychic; we know the mental atmosphere, and how it arose, that brought forth the telephone and aeroplane and submarine. We know that these were not due to physical necessities or to any material causes. They arose from the brooding of creative imaginations disciplined in a method learned by reflection upon former successes in discovery. We also know in what main particulars this modern atmosphere differs from that of former centuries. But such questions are not germane to my central theme, and so I pass them over lightly. Let me then return without further delay from this digression which has been made in the interests, not of my argument, but of my self-respect as a student of social facts.