Chapter III: Part 3

Nor have minerals failed to affect the international relations of peoples and States. It was chiefly for the precious metals that the Spaniards explored the American Continent and conquered Mexico and Peru. It was for the sake of capturing the ships bringing those metals back to Europe that the English sea-rovers made their way to the American coasts and involved England in wars with Spain. It was the discovery in 1885 of extensive auriferous strata unexampled in the certainty of their yield that drew a swarm of foreign immigrants into the Transvaal, whence arose those difficulties between them and the Dutch inhabitants previously established there which, coupled with the action of the wealthy owners of the mines, led at last to the war of 1899 between Britain and the two South African Republics.

[Sidenote: Man’s Fight with Nature]

The productive capacity of a country is, however, in one respect very different from those great physical features--such as temperature, rainfall, coast configuration, surface character, geological structure, and river system--which have been previously noted. Those features are permanent qualities which man can affect only to a limited extent, as when he reduces the rainfall a little by cutting down forests, or increases it by planting them, or as when he unites an isle, like that of Cadiz, to the mainland, cuts through an isthmus, like that of Corinth, or clears away the bar at a river mouth, as that of the Mississippi has been cleared.

[Sidenote: Exhausting the Mineral Wealth]

But the natural products of a country may be exhausted and even the productive capacity of its soil diminished. Constant tillage, especially if the same crop be raised and no manure added, will wear out the richest soils. This has already happened in parts of Western America. Still the earth is there; and with rest and artificial help it will recover its strength. But timber destroyed cannot always be induced to grow again, or at least not so as to equal the vigour of primeval forests. Wild animals, once extirpated, are gone for ever. The buffalo and beaver of North America, the beautiful lynxes of South Africa and some of its large ruminants, are irrecoverably lost for the purposes of human use, just as much as the dinornis, though a few individuals may be kept alive as specimens. So, too, the mineral resources of a country are not only consumable, but obviously irreplaceable. Already some of the smaller coalfields of Europe have been worked out, while in others it has become necessary to sink much deeper shafts, at an increasing cost. There is not much tin left in Cornwall, not much gold in the gravel deposits of Northern California. The richest known goldfield of the world, that of the Transvaal Witwatersrand, can hardly last more than thirty or forty years. Thus in a few centuries the productive capacity of many regions may have become quite different from what it is now, with grave consequences to their inhabitants.

These are some of the ways in which Nature affects those economic, social, and political conditions of the life of man the changes in which make up history. As we have seen, that which Nature gives to man is always the same, in so far as Nature herself is always the same--an expression which is more popular than accurate, for Nature herself--that is to say, not the laws of Nature, but the physical environment of man on this planet--is in reality always changing. It is true that this environment changes so slowly that a thousand years may be too short a period in which man can note and record some forms of change--such, for instance, as that by which the temperature of Europe became colder during the approach of the glacial period and warmer during its recession--while ten thousand years may be too short to note any diminution in the heat which the sun pours upon the earth, or in the store of oxygen which the earth’s atmosphere holds.

[Sidenote: Progress of Modern Invention]

[Sidenote: Man Cannot Disregard Nature]

But as we have also seen, the relation to man of Nature’s gifts differs from age to age as man himself becomes different, and as his power of using these gifts increases, or his need of them becomes either less or greater. Every invention alters those relations. Water power became less relatively valuable when steam was applied to the generation of motive force. It has become more valuable with the new applications of electricity. With the discovery of mineral dyes, indigo and cochineal are now less wanted than they were. With the invention of the pneumatic tyre for bicycles and carriages, caoutchouc is more wanted. Mountains have become, since the making of railways, less of an obstacle to trade than they were, and they have also become more available as health resorts. Political circumstances may interfere with the ordinary and normal action of natural phenomena. A race may be attracted to or driven into a region for which it is not physically suited, as Europeans have gone to the West Indies, and negroes were once carried into New York and Pennsylvania. The course of trade which Nature prescribes between different countries may be hampered or stopped by protective tariffs; but in these cases Nature usually takes her eventual revenges. They are instances which show, not that man can disregard her, but that when he does so, he does so to his own loss.

It would be easy to add further illustrations, but those already given are sufficient to indicate how multiform and pervading is the action upon man of the physical environment, or in other words, how in all countries, and at all times, geography is the necessary foundation of history, so that neither the course of a nation’s growth, nor its relations with other nations, can be grasped by one who has not come to understand the climate, surface, and products of the country wherein that nation dwells.

[Sidenote: There is no Unmixed Race left]

This conception of the relation of geography to history is, as has been said, the leading idea of the present work, and has furnished the main lines which it follows. It deals with history in the light of physical environment. Its ground plan, so to speak, is primarily geographical, and secondarily chronological. But there is one difficulty in the way of such a scheme, and of the use of such a ground plan, which cannot be passed over. That difficulty is suggested by the fact already noted--that hardly any considerable race, and possibly no great nation, now inhabits the particular part of the earth’s surface on which it was dwelling when a history begins. Nearly every people has either migrated bodily from one region to another, or has received such large infusions of immigrants from other regions as to have become practically a new people. Hence it is rare to find any nation now living under the physical conditions which originally moulded its character, or the character of some at least of its component elements. And hence it follows that when we study the qualities, aptitudes, and institutions of a nation in connection with the land it inhabits, we must always have regard not merely to the features of that land, but also to those of the land which was its earlier dwelling-place. Obviously, this brings a disturbing element into the study of the relations between land and people, and makes the whole problem a far more complicated one than it appeared at first sight.

[Sidenote: Nature’s Race Factory]

Where a people has migrated from a country whose physical conditions were similar to those under which its later life is spent, or where it had reached only a comparatively low stage of economic and political development before the migration, the difficulties arising from this source are not serious. The fact that the English came into Britain from the lands round the mouth of the Elbe is not very material to an inquiry into their relations to their new home, because climate and soil were similar, and the emigrants were a rude, warlike race. But when we come to the second migration of the English, from Britain to North America, the case is altogether different. Groups of men from a people which had already become highly civilised, had formed a well-marked national character, and had created a body of peculiar institutions, planted themselves in a country whose climate and physical features are widely diverse from those of Britain.

If, for the sake of argument, we assume the Algonquin aborigines of Atlantic North America as they were in A.D. 1600 to have been the legitimate product of their physical environment--I say “for the sake of argument,” because it may be alleged that other forces than those of physical environment contributed to form them--what greater contrast can be imagined than the contrast between the inhabitants of New England in this present year and the inhabitants of the same district three centuries earlier, as Nature, and Nature alone, had turned them out of her factory? Plainly, therefore, the history of the United States cannot, so far as Nature and geography are concerned, be written with regard solely, or even chiefly, to the conditions of North American nature. The physical environment in which the English immigrants found themselves on that continent has no doubt affected their material progress and the course of their politics during the three centuries that have elapsed since settlements were founded in Virginia and on Massachusetts Bay.

[Sidenote: Beginnings of Race History]

But it is not to that environment, but to earlier days, and especially to the twelve centuries during which their ancestors lived in England, that their character and institutions are to be traced. Thus the history of the American people begins in the forests of Germany, where the foundations of their polity were laid, and is continued in England, where they set up kingdoms, embraced Christianity, became one nation, received an influx of Celtic, Danish, and Norman-French blood, formed for themselves that body of customs, laws, and institutions which they transplanted to the new soil of America, and most of which, though changed and always changing, they still retain. The same thing is true of the Spaniards (as also of the Portuguese) in Central and South America. The difference between the development of the Hispano-Americans and that of their English neighbours to the north is not wholly, or even mainly, due to the different physical conditions under which the two sets of colonists have lived.

It is due to the different antecedent history of the two races. So a history of America must be a history not only of America, but of the Spaniards, Portuguese, French, and English--one ought in strictness to add of the negroes also--before they crossed the Atlantic. The only true Americans, the only Americans for whom American nature can be deemed answerable, are the aboriginal red men whom we, perpetuating the mistake of Columbus, still call Indians.

[Sidenote: Geography as a Basis of History]

This objection to the geographical scheme of history writing is no doubt serious when a historical treatise is confined to one particular country or continent, as in the instance I have taken of the Continent of North America. It is, however, less formidable in a universal history, such as the present work, because, by referring to another volume of the series, the reader will find what he needs to know regarding the history of the Spaniards, English, and French in those respective European homes where they have grown to be that which they were when, with religion, slaughter, and slavery in their train, they descended upon the shores of America.

Accordingly the difficulty I have pointed out does not disparage the idea and plan of writing universal history on a geographical basis. It merely indicates a caution needed in applying that plan, and a condition indispensable to its utility--viz., the regard that must be had to the stage of progress at which a people has arrived when it is subjected to an environment different from that which had in the first instance helped to form its type.

THE GROWTH OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

We have now considered some of the ways in which a universal history, written with special reference to the physical phenomena of the earth as geographical science presents them, may bring into strong relief one large and permanent set of influences which determine the progress or retrogression of each several branch of mankind. Upon the other principles which preside over and direct the composition of such a work, not much need be said. They are, of course, in the main, those which all competent historians will follow in writing the history of any particular people.

But a universal history which endeavours to present in a short compass a record of the course of events in all regions and among all peoples, since none can safely be omitted, is specially exposed to two dangers. One is that of becoming sketchy and viewy. When a large object has to be dealt with on a small scale, it is natural to sum up in a few broad generalisations masses of facts which cannot be described or examined in detail. Broad generalisations are valuable when they proceed from a thoroughly trained mind--valuable, even if not completely verifiable, because they excite reflection. But it is seldom possible to make them exact. They necessarily omit most of the exceptions, and thus suggest a greater uniformity than exists.

Neurdein

THE STONE AGE: HUNTERS RETURNING FROM THE CHASE

From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon
]

[Sidenote: Need of Care in History]

The other danger is that of sacrificing brightness and charm of presentation. When an effort is made to avoid generalisations, and to squeeze into the narrative as many facts as the space will admit, the narrative is apt to become dry, because compression involves the curtailment of the personal and dramatic element. These are the rocks between which every historian has to steer. If he has ample space, he does well to prefer the course of giving all the salient facts and leaving the reader to generalise for himself. If, however, his space is limited, as must needs be the lot of those who write a universal history, the impossibility of going into minute detail makes generalisations inevitable, for it is through them that the result and significance of a multitude of minor facts must be conveyed in a condensed form.

[Sidenote: New Minds and New Facts]

All the greater, therefore, becomes the need for care and sobriety in the forming and setting forth every summarising statement and general conclusion or judgment. Probably the soundest guiding principle and best safeguard against error is to be found in shunning all preconceived hypotheses which seek to explain history by one set of causes, or to read it in the light of one idea. The habit of magnifying a single factor, such as the social factor, or the economic, or the religious, has been a fertile source of weakness in historical writing, because it has made the presentation of events one-sided, destroying that balance and proportion which it is the highest merit of any historian to have attained. Theory and generalisation are the life-blood of history. They make it intelligible. They give it unity. They convey to us the instruction which it always contains, together with so much of practical guidance in the management of communities as history is capable of rendering. But they need to be applied with reserve, and not only with an impartial mind, but after a painstaking examination of all the facts--whether or no they seem to make for the particular theory stated--and of all the theories which any competent predecessor has propounded.

For the historian, though he must keep himself from falling under the dominion of any one doctrine by which it is sought to connect and explain phenomena, must welcome all the light which any such doctrine can throw upon facts. Even if such a doctrine be imperfect, even if it be tainted by error, it may serve to indicate relations between facts, or to indicate the true importance of facts, which previous writers had failed to observe, or had passed too lightly over. It is thus that history always needs to be re-written. History is a progressive science, not merely because new facts are constantly being discovered, not merely because the changes in the world give to old facts a new significance, but also because every truly penetrating and original mind sees in the old facts something which had not been seen before.

A universal history is fitted to correct such defects as may be incident to that extreme specialism in historical writing which is now in fashion. The broad and concise treatment which a history of all times and peoples must adopt naturally leads to efforts to characterise the dominant features and tendency of an epoch or a movement, whether social, economic, or political.

[Sidenote: The Side Streams of History]

Yet even here there is a danger to be guarded against. No epoch, no movement, is so simple as it looks at first sight, or as one would gather from even the most honest contemporary writer. There is always an eddy at the side of the stream; and the stream itself is the resultant of a number of rivulets with different sources, whose waters, if the metaphor may be extended, are of different tints. Let any man study minutely a given epoch, such as that of the Reformation in Germany, or that of the Revolutionary War in America, and he will be surprised to find how much more complex were the forces at work than he had at first supposed, and on how much smaller a number of persons than he had fancied the principal forces did in fact directly operate. Or let any one--for this is perhaps the best, if the most difficult, method of getting at the roots of this complexity--study thoroughly and dispassionately the phenomena of his own time. Let him observe how many movements go on simultaneously, sometimes accelerating, sometimes retarding, one another, and mark how, the more fully he understands this complex interlacing, so much the less confident do his predictions of the future become. He will then realise how hard it is to find simple explanations and to deliver exact statements regarding critical epochs in the past.

Mercier

THE FIRST INDUSTRIES: POTTERY

From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon
]

Mercier

THE FIRST INDUSTRIES: THE FORGE

From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon
]

[Sidenote: The Main Stream of History]

Nevertheless, the task of summarising and explaining is one to which the writer of a History of the World must address himself. If he has the disadvantage of limited space, he has the advantage of being able to assume the reader’s knowledge of what has gone before, and to invite the reader’s attention to what will come after. Thus he stands in a better position than does the writer who deals with one country or one epoch only for making each part of history illustrate other parts, for showing how similar social tendencies, similar proclivities of human nature, work similarly under varying conditions and are followed by similar, though never identical, results. He is able to bring out the essential unity of history, expunging from the reader’s mind the conventional and often misleading distinctions that are commonly drawn between the ancient, the mediæval, and the modern time. He can bring the contemporaneous course of events in different countries into a fruitful relation. And in the case of the present work, which dwells more especially on the geographical side of history, he can illustrate from each country in succession the influence of physical environment on the formation of races and the progress of nations, the principles which determine the action of such environment being everywhere similar, though the forms which that action takes are infinitely various.

Is there, it may be asked, any central thread in following which the unity of history most plainly appears? Is there any process in tracing which we can feel that we are floating down the main stream of the world’s onward movement? If there be such a process, its study ought to help us to realise the unity of history by connecting the development of the numerous branches of the human family.

One such process has already been adverted to and illustrated. It is the gradual and constant increase in man’s power over Nature, whereby he is emancipated more and more from the conditions she imposes on his life, yet is brought into an always closer touch with her by the discovery of new methods of using her gifts. Two other such processes may be briefly examined. One goes on in the sphere of time, and consists in the accumulation from age to age of the strength, the knowledge, and the culture of mankind as a whole. The other goes on in space as well as in time, and may be described as the contraction of the world, relatively to man.

[Sidenote: The Great Increase of Population]

The accumulation of physical strength is most apparent in the increase of the human race. We have no trustworthy data for determining the population, even of any one civilised country, more than a century and a half ago; much less can we conjecture that of any country in primitive or prehistoric times. It is clear, however, that in prehistoric times--say, six or seven thousand years ago, there were very few men on the earth’s surface. The scarcity of food alone would be sufficient to prove that; and, indeed, all our data go to show it. Fifty years ago the world’s population used to be roughly conjectured at from seven to nine hundred millions, two-thirds of them in China and India. It is now estimated at over fifteen hundred millions. That of Europe alone must have tripled within a century, and can hardly be less than four hundred millions. That of North America may have scarcely exceeded four or five millions in the time of Christopher Columbus, or at the date of the first English settlements, though we have only the scantiest data for a guess. It may now be 130,000,000, for there are over a hundred millions in the United States alone, about fifteen in Mexico, and eight in Canada, besides the inhabitants of Central America.

[Sidenote: The Prolific Power of White People]

[Sidenote: Physical & Intellectual Power]

The increase has been most swift in the civilised countries, such as Britain, Germany, Russia, and the United States; but it has gone on in India also since India came under British rule (famines notwithstanding), and in the regions recently colonised by Europeans, such as Australia, Siberia, and Argentina, the disappearance of aborigines being far more than compensated for by the prolific power of the white immigrants. Some regions, such as Asia Minor and parts of North Africa, are more thinly peopled now than they were under the Roman Empire, and both China and Peru may have no larger population than they had five, or ten, or fifteen centuries ago. But taking the world at large, the increase is enormous, and will apparently continue. Even after the vacant cultivable spaces which remain in the two Americas, Northern Asia, and Australasia have been filled, the discovery of new modes of enlarging the annually available stock of food may maintain the increase. It is most conspicuous among the European races, and is, of course, due to the greater production in some regions of food, and in others of commodities wherewith food can be purchased. It means an immense addition to the physical force of mankind in the aggregate, and to the possibilities of intellectual force also--a point to be considered later. And, of course, it also means an immense and growing preponderance of the civilised white nations, which are now probably one half of mankind, and may, in another century, when they have risen from about five hundred to, possibly, one thousand or fifteen hundred millions, be nearly two-thirds.

[Sidenote: Modern Man Stronger than his Ancestors]

As respects the strength of the average individual man, the inquiry is less simple. Palæolithic man and neolithic man were apparently (though here and there may have been exceptions) comparatively feeble creatures, as are the relics of the most backward tribes known to us, such as the Veddas of Ceylon, the Bushmen, the Fuegians. Some savages, as, for instance, the Patagonians, are men of great stature, and some of the North American Indians possess amazing powers of endurance. The Greeks of the fifth century B.C., and the Teutons of the time of Julius Cæsar, had reached a high physical development. Pheidippides is said to have traversed one hundred and fifty miles on foot in forty-eight hours. But if we think of single feats of strength, feats have been performed in our own day--such as Captain Webb’s swimming across the Straits of Dover--equal to anything recorded from ancient or mediæval times. To swim across the much narrower Hellespont was then deemed a surprising exploit. Nor do we know of any race more to be commended for physical power and vigour of constitution than the American backwoodsmen of Kentucky or Oregon to-day. The swords used by the knights of the fifteenth century have usually handles too small for many a modern English or German hand to grasp.

[Sidenote: America’s Mingled Races]

Isolated feats do not prove very much, but there is good reason to believe that the average European is as strong as ever he was, and probably more healthy, at least if longevity is a test of health. One may fairly conclude that with better and more abundant food, the average of stature and strength has improved over the world at large, so that in this respect also the force of mankind as a whole has advanced. Whether this advance will continue is more doubtful. In modern industrial communities the law of the survival of the fittest may turn out to be reversed, for it is the poorer and lower sections of the population that marry at an early age, and have the largest families, while prudential considerations keep down the birth-rate among the upper middle-class. In Transylvania, for instance, the Saxons are dying out, because very few children are born to each pair, while the less educated and cultured Rumans increase fast. In North America, the Old New England stock of comparatively pure British blood has begun to be swamped by the offspring of the recent immigrants, mostly Irish or French Canadians; and although the sons of New England, who have gone West, continue to be prolific, it is probable that the phenomena of New England will recur in the Mississippi Valley, and that the newcomers from Europe who form the less cultivated strata of the population--Irish, Germans, Italians, Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, Rumans--will contribute an increasing proportion of the inhabitants. Some of these, and especially the Irish and the Germans and the Scandinavians, are among the best elements in the American population, and have produced men of the highest distinction. But the average level among them of versatile aptitude and of intellectual culture is slightly below that of the native Americans.

Now, the poorer sections are in most countries, though of course not always to the same extent, somewhat inferior in physical as well as in mental quality, and more prone to suffer from that greatest hindrance to physical improvement, the abuse of alcoholic drinks.

We come next to another form of the increase of human resources, the accumulation of knowledge, and of what may be called intellectual culture and capacity, for it is convenient to distinguish these two latter from knowledge.

The discovery of precious metals is a great factor in progress.
Seekers after gold are chief among the pioneers who help to carry
civilisation into new lands.
]

[Sidenote: Inventions Mean Progress]

In knowledge there has been an advance, not merely a tolerably steady and constant advance, but one which has gone on with a sort of geometrical progression, moving the faster the nearer we come to our own time. Whatever may have befallen in the prehistoric darkness, history knows of only one notable arrest or setback in the onward march--that which marks the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries of the Christian era. Even this set-back was practically confined to Southern and Western Europe, and affected only certain departments of knowledge. It did not, save, perhaps, as regards a few artistic processes, extinguish that extremely important part of the previously accumulated resources of mankind which consisted in the knowledge of inventions. It is in respect of inventions, especially mechanical and physical or chemical inventions, that the accumulation of knowledge has been most noteworthy and most easy to appreciate.

A history of inventions is a history of the progress of mankind, of a progress to which every race may have contributed in primitive times, though all the later contributions have come from a few of the most civilised. Every great invention marks one onward step, as one may see by enumerating a few, such as the use of fire, cooking, metal working, the domestication of wild animals, the tillage of the ground, the use of plough and mattock and harrow and fan, the discovery of plants or trees useful for food or for medicine, the cart, the wheel, the water-mill (overshot, undershot, and turbine), the windmill, the distaff (followed long, long after by the spinning-wheel), the loom, dyestuffs, the needle, the potter’s wheel, the hydraulic press, the axe-handle, the spear, the bow, the shield, the war-chariot, the sling, the cross-bow, the boat, the paddle, the oar, the helm, the sail, the mariner’s compass, the clock, picture-writing, the alphabet, parchment, paper, printing, photography, the sliding keel, the sounding-lead, the log, the brick, mortar, the column, the arch, the dome, till we come down to explosives, the microscope, the cantilever, and the Röntgen rays.

Many flourishing cities in South Africa, Australia, and America
have grown up around the sites where the first gold-seekers pegged
out their claims in unexploited territories and began digging for
the precious metal.
]

The history of the successive discovery, commixture, and applications of the metals, from copper and bronze down to manganese, platinum, and aluminium, or of the successive discovery and utilisation of sources of power--the natural sources, such as water and wind, the artificially procured, such as steam, gas, and electricity--or of the production and manufacture of materials available for clothing, wool, hair, linen, silk, cotton, would show how every step becomes the basis for another step, and how inventions in one department suggest or facilitate inventions in another. Recent discoveries in surgery and medicine, such as the use of antiseptics, tend to improve health and to prolong life; and in doing so, they increase the chances of further discoveries being made.

[Sidenote: The Prolonging of Life]

Who can tell what the world may have lost by the early death of many a man of genius? One peculiar line of discovery which at first seemed to have nothing to do with practice has proved to be of signal service; the working out of mathematical methods of calculation by means of which the mechanical and physical sciences have in recent times made a progress in their practical application undreamt of by those who laid the foundations of geometry and algebra many centuries ago. It may, indeed, be said that all the sciences need one another, and that none has been without its utilities for practice, since even that which deals with the heavenly bodies has been used for the computation of time, was used by the agriculturist before he had any calendars to guide him, and has been of supreme value to the navigator. It has also been suggested that an observation of sun spots may enable the advent of specially hot seasons, involving droughts, to be predicted.

Another kind of knowledge also grows by the joint efforts of many peoples, that which records the condition of men in the past and the present, including history, economics, statistics, and the other so-called social sciences. This kind also is useful for practice, and has led to improvements by which nearly all nations have profited, such as an undebased currency, banking and insurance, better systems of taxation, corporations, and joint stock companies. With this we may couple the invention of improved political institutions.

The accumulation of knowledge, especially of scientific knowledge applied to the exploitation of the resources of Nature, means the accumulation of wealth--that is to say, of all the things which men need or use. The total wealth of the world must have at least quadrupled or quintupled within the last hundred years. Nearly all of it is in the hands or under the control of the civilised nations of European stock, among whom the United States stands foremost, both in rate of economic growth and in the absolute quantity of values possessed.

[Sidenote: Knowledge Means Wealth]

Two further observations belong to this part of the subject. One is that this stock of useful knowledge, the accumulation of which is the central fact of the material progress as well as of the intellectual history of mankind, now belongs to (practically) all races and states alike. Some, as we shall note presently, are more able to use it than others, but all have access to it. This is a new fact. It is true that most races have contributed something to the common stock; and that even among the civilised peoples, no one or two or three (except possibly the Greeks as respects ancient times) can claim to have contributed much more than the others. But in earlier ages there were peoples or groups of peoples who were for a time the sole possessors of inventions which gave them great advantages, especially for war. Superior weapons as well as superior drill enabled Alexander the Great, and afterward the Romans, to conquer most of the civilised world. Horses and firearms, with courage and discipline, enabled two Spanish adventurers to seize two ancient American empires with very scanty forces, as they enabled a handful of Dutch Boers to overcome the hosts of Mosilikatze and Dingaan. So there were formerly industrial arts known to or practised by a few peoples only. But now all inventions, even those relating to war, are available even to the more backward races, if they can learn how to use them or can hire white men to do so for them. The facilities of communication are so great, the means of publicity so abundant, that everything becomes speedily known everywhere.

[Sidenote: Inventions are now Universal]

The other observation is that there is now no risk that any valuable piece of knowledge will be lost. Every public event that happens, as well as every fact of scientific consequence, is put on record, and that not on a single stone or in a few manuscripts, but in books, of which so many copies exist that even the perishable nature of the material will not involve the loss of the contents, since, if these contents are valuable, they will be transferred to and issued in other books, and so _ad infinitum_. Thus every process of manufacture is known to so many persons that while it continues to be serviceable it is sure to be familiar and transmitted from generation to generation by practice as well as by description. We must imagine a world totally different from the world we know in order to imagine the possibility of any diminution, indeed of any discontinuance of the increase, of this stock of knowledge which the world has been acquiring, and which is not only knowledge but potential wealth.

When one passes from knowledge considered as a body of facts ascertained and available for use to the thing we call intellectual aptitude or culture--namely, the power of turning knowledge to account and of producing results in spheres other than material--and when we inquire whether mankind has made a parallel advance in this direction, it becomes necessary to distinguish three different kinds of intellectual capacity.

The first may be called the power of using scientific methods for investigating phenomena, whether physical or social.

[Sidenote: No Decrease of Knowledge is now Likely]

The second is the power of speculation, applied to matters which have not hitherto been found capable of examination by the methods of science, whether observational, experimental, or mathematical. The third is the power of intellectual creation, whether literary or artistic.

The methods of scientific inquiry may almost be classed with the ascertained facts of science or with inventions, as being parts of the stock of accumulated knowledge built up by the labour of many generations. They are known to everybody who cares to study them, and can be learnt and applied by everybody who will give due diligence. Just as every man can be taught to fire a gun, or steer a ship, or write a letter, though guns, helms, and letters are the result of discoveries made by exceptionally gifted men, so every graduate in science of a university can use the methods of induction, can observe and experiment with a correctness which a few centuries ago even the most vigorous minds could scarcely have reached.

[Sidenote: Original Thinkers are still Rare]

Because the methods have been so fully explained and illustrated as to have grown familiar, a vast host of investigators, very few of whom possess scientific genius, are at work to-day extending our scientific knowledge. So the methods of historical criticism--so the methods of using statistics--are to-day profitably applied by many men with no such original gift as would have made them competent critics or statisticians had not the paths been cut by a few great men and trodden since by hundreds of feet. All that is needed is imitation--intelligent and careful imitation. Nevertheless, there remains this sharp contrast between knowledge of the facts of applied science and knowledge of the methods, that whereas there is no radical difference between the ability of one man and that of another to use a mechanical invention, such as a steam plough or an electric motor-car, there is all the difference in the world between the power of one intellect and another to use a method for the purposes of fresh discovery. Knowledge fossilised in a concrete invention or even in a mathematical formula is a sort of tool ready to every hand. But a method, though serviceable to everybody, becomes eminently fruitful only when wielded by the same kind of original genius as that which made discoveries by the less perfect methods of older days. This is apparent even in inquiries which seem to reside chiefly in collection and computation. Everybody tries nowadays to use statistics. Many people do use them profitably. But the people who by means of statistics can throw really fresh and brilliant light on a problem are as few as ever they were.

[Sidenote: Advantage of Modern over Old Thinkers]

When we turn to the exercise of speculative thought on subjects not amenable to strictly scientific--that is to say, to exact--methods, the gain which has come to mankind by the labour of past ages is of a different order. Metaphysics, ethics, and theology, to take the most obvious examples, are all of them the richer for the thoughts of philosophers in the past. A number of distinctions have been drawn, and a number of classifications made, a number of confusions, often verbal, have been cleared up, a number of fallacies detected, a number of technical terms invented, whereby the modern speculator enjoys a great advantage over his predecessor. His mind has been clarified, and many new aspects of the old problems have been presented, so that he is better able to see all round the old problems.

[Sidenote: The Living Thought of Past Ages]

None of the great thinkers, from Pythagoras down to Hegel, has left metaphysics where he found it. Yet none can be said to have built on the foundations of his predecessors in the same way as the mathematicians and physicists and chemists have added to the edifice they found. What the philosophers have done is to accumulate materials for the study of man’s faculties and modes of thinking, and of his ideas regarding his relations to the universe, while also indicating various methods by which the study may be pursued. Each great product of speculative thought is itself a part of these materials, and for that reason never becomes obsolete, as the treatises of the old physicists and chemists have mostly become. Aristotle, for instance, has left us books on natural history, on metaphysics and ethics, and on politics. Those on natural history are mere curiosities, and no modern biologist or zoologist needs them. Those on metaphysics and ethics still deserve the attention of the student of philosophy, though he may in a certain sense be said to have got beyond them. The treatise on politics still keeps its place beside Montesquieu, Burke, and Tocqueville. Or, to take a thinker who like Aristotle seems very far removed from us, though fifteen hundred years later in date, St. Thomas of Aquinum discusses questions from many of which the modern world has moved away, and discusses them by methods which many do not now use, starting from premises which many do not accept. But he marks a remarkable stage in the history of human thought, and as a part of that history, and as an example of extraordinary dialectical ingenuity and subtlety, he remains an object of interest to those least in agreement with his conclusions.

[Sidenote: Every Great Thinker Affects Others]

Every great thinker affects other thinkers, and propagates the impulse he has received, though perhaps in a quite different direction. The teaching of Socrates was the starting point for nearly all the subsequent schools of Greek philosophy. Hume became the point of departure for Kant, who desired to lay a deeper foundation for philosophy than that which Hume seemed to have overturned. All these great ones have not only enriched us, but are still capable of stimulating us. But they have not improved our capacity for original thinking. The accumulation of scientific knowledge has, as already observed, put all mankind in a better position for solving further physical problems and establishing a more complete dominion over Nature. The accumulation of philosophic thought has had no similar effect. In the former case each man stands, so to speak, on the shoulders of his predecessors. In the latter he stands on his own feet. The value of future contributions to philosophy will depend on the original power of the minds that make them, and only to a small extent (except by way of stimulus) on what such minds may have drawn from those into whose labours they have entered.

[Sidenote: Ebb-Tides of Intellectual Culture]

When we come to the products of literary and artistic capacity, we find an even vaster accumulation of intellectual treasure available for enjoyment, but a still more marked absence of connection between the amount of treasures possessed and the power of adding fresh treasures to them. Since writing came into use, and, indeed, even in the days when memory alone preserved lays and tales, every age and many races have contributed to the stock. There have been ebbs and flows both in quantity and quality. The centuries between A.D. 600 and A.D. 1100 have left us very little of high merit in literature, though something in architecture; and the best of that little in literature did not come from the seats of Roman civilisation in Italy, France, Spain, and the East Roman Empire.

Some periods have seen an eclipse of poetry, others an eclipse of art or a sterility in music. Literature and the arts have not always flourished together, and musical genius in particular seems to have little to do with the contemporaneous development of other forms of intellectual power. The quantity of production bears no relation to the quality, not even an inverse relation; for the pessimistic notion that the larger the output the smaller is the part which possesses brilliant excellence, has not been proved. Still less does the amount of good work produced in any given area depend upon the number of persons living in that area. Florence, between A.D. 1250 and A.D. 1500 gave birth to more men of first-rate poetical and artistic genius than London has produced since 1250; yet Florence had in those two and a half centuries a population of probably only from forty to sixty thousand. And Florence herself has since A.D. 1500 given birth to scarcely any distinguished poets or artists, though her population has been larger than it was in the fifteenth century.

Mansell

THE MIND OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

Aristotle (B.C. 384-322) whose influence is greater in some lines
than that of St. Thomas of Aquinum, who represents mediæval
thought, 1500 years later.
]

The increase in the world’s stock of intellectual wealth is one of the most remarkable facts in history, for it represents a constant increase in the means of enjoyment. Such losses as there have been nearly all occurred during the Dark Ages; but there is now little risk that anything of high literary or musical value will perish, though, of course, works of art, and especially buildings and carvings, suffer or vanish.

The increase does not, however, tend to any strengthening of the creative faculty. There is a greater abundance of models of excellence, models of which form the taste, afford a stimulus to sensitive minds, and establish a sort of technique with well-known rules. The principles of criticism are more fully investigated. The power of analysis grows, and the appreciation both of literature and of art is more widely diffused. Their influence on the whole community becomes greater, but the creative imagination which is needed for the production of original work becomes no more abundant and no more powerful. It may, indeed, be urged, though our data are probably insufficient for a final judgment, that the finer qualities of poetry and of pictorial and plastic art tend rather to decline under the more analytic habit of mind which belongs to the modern world. Simplicity, freshness, spontaneity come less naturally to those who have fallen under the pervasive influence of this habit.

Mansell

THE MIND OF THE MEDIÆVAL WORLD

St. Thomas of Aquinum, 1500 years later than Aristotle, represents
mediæval thought. St. Thomas, however, influences the life and
thought of many thousands to-day.
]

[Sidenote: Effect of Thought on Mankind]

There remains one other way in which the incessant play of thought may be said to have increased or improved the resources of mankind. Certain principles or ideas belonging to the moral and social sphere--to the moral sphere by their origin, to the social sphere by their results--make their way to a more or less general acceptance, and exert a potent influence upon human life and action. They are absent in the earliest communities of which we know, or are present only in germ. They emerge, sometimes in the form of customs gradually built up in one or more peoples, sometimes in the utterances of one gifted mind. Sometimes they spread impalpably; sometimes they become matter for controversy, and are made the battle-cries of parties. Sometimes they end by being universally received, though not necessarily put into practice. Sometimes, on the other hand, they continue to be rejected in one country, or by one set of persons in a country, as vehemently as they are asserted by another. As instances of these principles or ideas or doctrines, whatever one is to call them, the following may be taken: The condemnation of piracy, of slavery, and of treaty-breaking, of outrages on the bodies of dead enemies, of cruelty to the lower animals, of the slaughter of prisoners in cold blood, of polygamy, of torture to witnesses or criminals; the recognition of the duty of citizens to obey the laws, and of the moral responsibility of rulers for the exercise of their power, of the right of each man to hold his own religious opinion and to worship accordingly, of the civil (though not necessarily of the political) equality of all citizens; the disapproval of intoxication, the value set upon female chastity, the acceptance of the social and civil (to which some would add the political) equality of women.

[Sidenote: Men who Contributed to Progress]

[Sidenote: Slavery was Destroyed by Sentiment]

All these dogmas or ideas or opinions--some have become dogmas in all civilised peoples, others are rather to be described as opinions whose truth or worth is denied or only partially admitted--are the slow product of many generations. Most of them are due to what we may call the intelligence and sentiment of mankind at large, rather than to their advocacy by any prominent individual thinkers. The teachings of such thinkers have, of course, done much to advance them. Everybody would name Socrates and Confucius as among the men who have contributed to their progress; some would add such names as those of Mohammed and St. Francis of Assisi. Christianity has, of course, made the largest contributions. How much is due to moral feeling, how much to a sense of common utility, cannot be exactly estimated. Economic reasonings and practical experience would have probably in the long run destroyed slavery, but it was sentiment that did in fact destroy it in the civilised States where it had longest survived.

How much these doctrines, even in the partial and imperfect application which most of them have secured, have done for humanity may be perceived by anyone who will imagine what the world would be if they were unknown. They form one of the most substantial additions made to what may be called the intellectual and moral capital with which man has to work this planet and improve his own life upon it. And the most interesting and significant crises in history are those which have turned upon the recognition or application of principles of this kind. The Reformation of the sixteenth century, the French Revolution, the War of Secession in the United States, are familiar modern examples.

[Sidenote: Intellect Mightier than Population]

Putting all these forms of human achievement together--the extension of the scientific knowledge of Nature with consequent mastery over her, the scientific knowledge of social phenomena in the past and the present, the records of philosophic speculation, the mass of literary and artistic products, the establishment, however partial and imperfect, of regulative moral and political principles--it will be seen that the accumulation of this vast stock of intellectual wealth has been an even more important factor than the increase of population in giving man strength and dignity over against Nature, and in opening up to him an endless variety of modes of enjoying life--that is to say, of making it yield to him the most which its shortness and his own physical infirmities permit. The process by which this accumulation has been carried along is the central thread of history. The main aim of a history of the world must be to show what and how each race or people has contributed to the general stock. To this aim political history, ecclesiastical history, economic history, the history of philosophy, and the history of science, are each of them subordinate, though it is only through them that the process can be explained.

In these last few pages intellectual progress has been considered apart from the area in which it has gone on, and apart from the conditions imposed on it by the natural features of that area. A few words are, however, needed regarding its relation to the surface of the earth. The movement of civilisation must be considered from the side of space as well as from that of time.

[Sidenote: Contraction of the World]

Space is a material element in the inquiry because it has divided the families of mankind from one another. Some families, such as the Chinese and the Peruvians, have developed independently, some, such as the South and West European peoples, in connection with, or perhaps in dependence on, the development of other races or peoples. Hence that which each achieved was in some cases achieved for itself only, in other cases for its neighbours as well. The contributions made by different races have--at any rate during the last four thousand years, and probably in earlier days also--been very unequal; yet none can have failed to contribute something if only by way of influencing the others. Inequality in progress would seem to have become more marked in the later than in the earlier periods. Indeed, some races, such as those of Australia, appear during many centuries, possibly owing to their isolation, to have made no progress at all. They may even have receded.

When we regard the evolution and development of man from the side of his relations to space, three facts stand out--the contraction of the world, the overflow of the more advanced races, and the consequent diffusion all over the world of what is called civilisation.

By the contraction of the world, I mean the greater swiftness, ease, and safety with which men can pass from one part of it to another, or communicate with one another across great intervening spaces. This has the effect of making the world smaller for most practical purposes, while the absolute distance in latitude and longitude remains the same. The progress of discovery is worth tracing, for it shows how much larger the small earth, which was known to the early nations, must have seemed to them than the whole earth, which we know, seems to us.

THE ARTISTIC GENIUS OF TWO CITIES

A COMPARISON OF THE NATIVE POETS & ARTISTS OF FLORENCE & LONDON