and artistic life than can conceivably arise in one great State without great or close rivals, since there one set of ideals or standards is likely to overbear all others, with the result of partly stereotyping taste and opinion.
This point is well put by Hume as to Greece, in his essay Of the Rise of the Arts and Sciences (1752); and after him by Gibbon, ch. 53, Bohn ed. vi, 233; Cp. Heeren, Pol. Hist. of Ancient Greece, Eng. tr. p. 42; Walckenaer, Essai cited, p. 338; Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767, pp. 182, 183; Dunbar, Essays on the History of Mankind, 1780, pp. 257, 271; Goguet, De l'origine des lois, des arts, et des sciences, 1758, iii Epoque, L. ii, ch. 2; Salverte, De la Civilisation, 1813, pp. 83–88; Grote, History of Greece, pt. ii, ch. i, ed. 1888, ii, 156; Cunningham, Western Civilisation, i, 75. Grote brings out very clearly the "mutuality of action and reaction" in the case of the maritime Greeks as compared with the others and with other nations. See also Hegel, Philos. der Geschichte, Th. ii, Absch. i (ed. 1840, p. 275). Hegel, besides noting the abstract element of geographical variety, points to the highly mixed character of the Greek stocks, especially in Attica. So Salverte, as cited. The same principle is rightly put by Guizot (Hist. de la civilisation en France, i, leçon 2), and accepted by J.S. Mill (On Liberty, ch. iii, end), as a main explanation of the intellectual progress of modern Europe. It is therefore worth weighing as regards given peoples, by those who, like Mr. Bryce, see nothing but harm in the subdivision of Germany after the Thirty Years' War (Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed. p. 346). Against the undoubted evils connected with the partition system ought to be set the intellectual gains which latterly arose from it when the intellectual life of Germany had, as it were, recovered breath.
(9) Thus, while an empire with a developed civilisation may communicate it to uncivilised conquered peoples not too far below its own anthropological level, the secondary civilisation thus acquired is in its nature less "viable," less capable of independent evolution, than one set up by the free commerce of trading peoples. The most rapid growths of civilisation appear always to have occurred by way of the multiplying of free contacts among trading communities, and among the free colonies of such.[140] The "money economy" they introduced was a great instrument of social and industrial evolution;[141] and on such city civilisations the ancient empires themselves seem always to have proceeded.[142]
(10) Every phase of civilisation has its special drawbacks, so that great retrogression may follow on great development, especially when adventitious sources of wealth are the foundation of a luxurious culture. In some cases a great development may be dependent on an exhaustible source of wealth, as in the case of Britain's coal supply, the empire of ancient Rome, the primacy of the Pope before the Reformation, or even the Periclean empire of Athens, and the trade monopolies of Venice, the Hansa Towns, and the Dutch Republic.
(11) The expression "decay" as applied to a people, however, has only a relative significance: used absolutely, it stands for a delusion. Economic conditions may worsen, and military power decline; but such processes imply no physiological degeneration. All the "dead" civilisations of the past were overthrown or absorbed by military violence; and there is no known case of a nation physically well placed dying out.
Professor W.D. Whitney, who is usually so well worth listening to, fails to recognise this fact in his interesting essay on "China and the Chinese" (Oriental and Linguistic Studies, 2nd series). He declares that "according to the ordinary march of events in human history, the Chinese empire should have perished from decay, and its culture either have become extinct or have passed into the keeping of another race, more than two thousand years ago. It had already reached the limit to its capacity of development" (p. 88). Similarly Ratzel pronounces (History of Mankind, Eng. tr. 1896, i, 26) that "Voltaire hits the point when he says Nature has given the Chinese the organ for discovering all that is useful to them, but not for going any further." Voltaire never penned such a "bull." He wrote (Essai sur les mœurs, Avant-Propos, ch. i), "Il semble que la Nature ait donné," and "nécessaire," not "useful." Even that has a touch of paralogism; but the great essayist goes on to suggest two causes for Chinese conservatism—their ancestral piety and the nature of their method of writing. The first is a pseudo-explanation; the second is a vera causa, though only one of those involved. The German specialist of to-day is really further from the scientific point of view than the French wit of the middle of the eighteenth century, going on as he does to decide that "defect in their endowments" causes the mediocrity of the Chinese, and "also is the sole cause of the rigidity in their social system."
This is a vain saying; and it is no less vain to go on to ask, as Professor Whitney does, what has become of Egypt, of the Phœnicians and Hebrews, of the Persians, of Greece and Rome, and of Spain. The answer is easy. Egypt was conquered, and the old race still reproduces itself, in vassalage. The "Pelasgic" civilisation of ancient Greece was absorbed by the Greek invaders. The "Mycenæan" and "Minoan" civilisations, as seen in ancient Troy and "Minoan" Crete, were conquered and partly absorbed. The Phœnicians and Hebrews were destroyed or absorbed. The Persians are at present retrograde, but may rise again.[143] Rome and Greece were successively overrun by barbarism. Spain, like Italy, retrograded, but, like Italy, is on the path of regeneration. In all these cases the process of causation is obvious. No nation dies or disappears save by violence; and, given the proper conditions, all races are capable of progress indefinitely. China, though unprogressive in comparison with a European State, has changed in many respects within two thousand years—nay, within twenty.[144] Professor Whitney adopts an empirical convention, and accordingly misses any real elucidation of the problem of Chinese sociology, which he assumes to solve (p. 87) by saying we must look for our explanations "deep in the foundations of the national character itself." That is to say, the national character is determined by the national character.
It is surely time that this palæo-theological fashion of explaining human affairs were superseded by the more fruitful method of positive science, even as regards China, which is perhaps the worst explained of all sociological cases. Like others, it had been intelligently taken up by sociologists of the eighteenth century before the conservative reaction (see the Esprit des Lois, vii, 6; viii, 21; x, 15; xiv, 8; xviii, 6; xix, 13–20; Dunbar's Essays, as cited, pp. 257, 258, 262, 263, 321; and Walckenaer, Essai cited, pp. 175, 176); but that impetus seems to have been thus far almost entirely lost. Voltaire's fallacy is remembered and his truth ignored; and the methods of theology continue to be applied to many questions of moral science after they have been wholly cast out of physics and biology. The old "falsisms" of empirical politics are repeated even by professed biologists when they enter on the field of social science. Thus we have seen them accepted by Dr. Draper, and we find Professor Huxley (Evolution and Ethics, Romanes Lecture for 1893, p. 4) rhetorically putting "that successive rise, apogee, and fall of dynasties and states which is the most prominent topic of civil history," as scientifically analogous to the process of growth and decay and death in the human organism. Any comparative study of history shows the analogy to be spurious. Professor Whitney was doubtless influenced, like Dr. Draper, by the American habit of regarding European and ancient civilisations as necessarily decrepit because "slow" and "old." Cp. Draper as cited, ii, 393–98.
In the cases above dealt with, however, and in many others, there is seen to have been intellectual decay, in the sense of, first, a cessation of forward movement, and, next, a loss of the power to appreciate ideas once current. A common cause of such paralysis of the higher life is the malignant action of dogmatic religious systems, as in the cases of Persia, Jewry, Byzantium, Islam, Spain under Catholicism, and Scotland for two centuries under Protestantism. Such paralysis by religion may arise alike in a highly-organised but isolated State like Byzantium, and in a semi-civilised country like Anglo-Saxon England.[145]
