of dogma in these cases is itself of course a matter for analysis and explanation. Other cases are partly to be explained by (a) the substitution of systematic militarism, always fatal to progressive culture, for a life of only occasional warfare, favourable to study among the leisured class.[146] But (b) there is reason to surmise a further and profoundly important cause of intellectual retrogression in the usage which develops the culture of a people for the most part in one sex only. The thesis may be ventured that whereas vigorous and creative brains may arise in abundance in a young civilisation, where the sexes are physiologically not far removed from the approximate equality of the semi-barbarous stage, the psychological divergence set up by mentally and physically training the males and not the females is likely to be unfavourable to the breeding of mentally energetic types.
(12) Whether or not the last hypothesis be valid, it is clear that the co-efficient or constituent of intellectual progress in a people, given the necessary conditions of peace and sufficient food, is multiplication of ideas; and this primarily results from international contact, or the contact of wholly or partly independent communities of one people. Multiplication of arts and crafts is of course included under the head of ideas. But unless the stock of ideas is not merely in constant process of being added to among the studious or leisured class, but disseminated among the other classes, stagnation will take place among these, and will inevitably infect the educated class.
De Tocqueville, balancing somewhat inconclusively, because always in vacuo, the forces affecting literature in aristocratic and democratic societies, says decisively enough (Démocratie en Amérique, ed. 1850, ii, 62–63) that "Toute aristocratie qui se met entièrement à part du peuple devient impuissante. Cela est vrai dans les lettres aussi bien qu'en politique." This holds clearly enough of Italian literature in the despotic period. Mr. Godkin's criticism (Problems of Modern Democracy, p. 56) that "M. de Tocqueville and all his followers take it for granted that the great incentive to excellence, in all countries in which excellence is found, is the patronage and encouragement of an aristocracy," is hardly accurate. De Tocqueville puts the case judicially enough, so far as he goes; and Mr. Godkin falls into strange extravagance in his counter statement that there is "hardly a single historical work composed prior to the end of the last [eighteenth] century, except perhaps Gibbon's, which, judged by the standard that the criticism of our day has set up, would not, though written for the 'few,' be pronounced careless, slipshod, or superficial." Tillemont, by the testimony of Professor Bury, was a more thorough worker in his special line than Gibbon. It would be easy to name scores of writers in various branches of history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whom no good critic to-day would call careless or slipshod; and if Hume and Robertson, Clarendon and Burnet, be termed superficial, the "standard" will involve a similar characterisation of most historical writers of our own day. As regards present-day literary productions, De Tocqueville and Mr. Godkin alike omit the necessary economic analysis.
(13) In the intellectual infectiousness of all class degradation, properly speaking, lies the final sociological (as apart from the primary ethical) condemnation of slavery. The familiar argument that slavery first secured the leisure necessary for culture, even were it wholly instead of being merely partially true, would not rebut the censure that falls to be passed on slavery in later stages of civilisation. All the ancient States, before Greece, stood on slavery: then it was not slavery that yielded her special culture. What she gained from older civilisations was the knowledge and the arts developed by specialisation of pursuits; and such specialisation was not necessarily dependent on slavery, which could abound without it. It was in the special employment, finally, of the exceptionally large free population of Athens that the greatest artistic output was reached.[147] In later periods, the slave population was the great nucleus of superstition and anti-culture.
Inasmuch, then, as education is in only a small degree compatible with toilsome poverty, the betterment of the material conditions of the toiling class is essential to progress in ideas. That is to say, continual progress implies gradual elimination of class inequality, and cannot subsist otherwise. At the same time, a culture-class must be maintained by new machinery when leisured wealth is got rid of.[148]
(14) Again, it follows from the foregoing (4–10) that the highest civilisation will be that in which the greatest number of varying culture-influences meet,[149] in the most happily-crossed stock, under climatic conditions favourable to energy, on a basis of a civilisation sufficiently matured.[150] But in order to the effectual action of such various culture-influences through all classes of the nation in which they meet, there is needed a constant application of social or political regimen. In the lack of that, a great conflux of culture-forces may miss fruition. A mere fortuitous depression of the rich class, and elevation of the poor, will not suffice to place a society on a sound or even on an improved footing. Such a change occurred in ancient Athens after Salamis, when the poorer sort, who had constituted the navy, flourished[151] as against the richer, who had been the land soldiery, and whose lands had been ravaged. But the forces of disintegration played afresh. Yet again, transient financial conditions, such as those of Italy before the Reformation, of Holland until the decline of its fishing and trade, and of Venice until its final commercial decay, may sustain a great artistic life, art having always depended on private or public demand. Thus with a change in the geographical course of trade, a great phase of culture-life may dwindle. So many and so complex are the forces and conditions of progress in civilisation.
§ 2
It will readily be seen that most of the foregoing propositions have direct reference to well-known facts of history. Thus (a) ancient Egypt represents a primary civilisation, marked indeed by some fluctuations connected with dynastic changes which involved mixture of stocks, but on the whole singularly fixed; while ancient Greek civilisation was emphatically a secondary one, the fruit of much race-mixture and many interacting culture-forces, all facilitated by the commercial position and coast-conformation of Hellas.
This view is partly rejected by Grote in two passages (pt. i, chs. xvi, xvii, ed. 1888, i, 326, 413) in which he gives to the "inherent and expansive force" of "the Greek mind" the main credit of Greek civilisation. But his words, to begin with, are confused and contradictory: "The transition of the Greek mind from its poetical to its comparatively positive stage was self-operated, accomplished by its own inherent and expansive force—aided indeed, but by no means either impressed or provoked from without." In the second place, there is no basis for the denial of "impression or provocation" from without. And finally, what is decisive, the historian himself has in other passages acknowledged that the Greeks received from Asia and Egypt just such "provocation" as is seen to take place in varying degrees in the culture-contacts of all nations (chs. xv, xvi, pp. 307, 329). Of the contact with Egypt he expressly says that it "enlarged the range of their thoughts and observations." His whole treatment of the rise of culture, however, is meagre and imperfect relatively to his ample study of the culture itself. Later students grow more and more unanimous as to the composite character of the Greek-speaking stock in the earliest traceable periods of Hellenic life (cp. Bury, History of Greece, ed. 1906, pp. 39–42, and Professor Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete, 1907, p. 144), and the consequent complexity of the entire Hellenic civilisation. The case is suggestively put by Eduard Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 155) in the observation that while the west coast of Greece had as many natural advantages as the eastern, it remained backward in civilisation when the other had progressed far. "Here there lacked the foreign stimulus: the west of Greece is away from the source of culture. Here, accordingly, primitive conditions continued to rule, while in the east a higher culture evolved itself. … Corinth in the older period played no part whatever, whether in story or in remains." The same proposition was put a generation ago by A. Bertrand, who pointed out that the coasts
