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.
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration]
THE ARTISTIC GENIUS OF TWO CITIES
A COMPARISON OF THE NATIVE POETS & ARTISTS OF FLORENCE & LONDON
“The quantity of production,” says Mr. Bryce, “bears no relation
to the quality. 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.”
THE GENIUS OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF FLORENCE, 1250 TO 1500, FAR EXCEEDED
THAT OF LONDON FROM 1250 TO THE PRESENT DAY
Poets and Artists Born in Florence from 1250-1500
Alberti, Leon Battista, 1404-1472, architect, painter
Albertinelli, Mariotto, 1474-1515, painter
Andrea del Sarto, 1487-1531, painter
Angelico da Fiesole, Fra Giovanni, 1387-1455, painter
Botticelli, Alessandro, 1447-1510, painter
Cavalcanti, Guido, 1255-1300, poet, philosopher
Cimabue, Giovanni, 1240-1302, painter
Credi, Lorenzo di, 1459-1537, painter
Dante, Alighieri, 1265-1321, poet
Donatello, 1386-1466, sculptor and painter
Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 1378-1455, sculptor
Ghirlandajo, Domenico, 1449-1494, painter
Gozzoli, Benozzo, 1420-1498, painter
Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519, painter, sculptor
Lippi, Fra Filippo, 1412-1469, painter
Lippi, Filippino, 1459-1504, painter
Lorenzo, Don, 1370-1425, painter
Medici, Lorenzo de, 1448-1492, poet
Orcagnia, Andrea di Cione, 1329-1368? sculptor, painter
Perugino, Vannucci Pietro, 1446-1524, painter
Pesellino, Francesco di, 1422-1457, painter
Pesello, Giuliano, 1367-1446, painter, sculptor
Pollajuolo, Antonio, 1429-1498, sculptor, painter
Pollajuolo, Piero, 1443-1496, sculptor, painter
Robbia, Andrea della, 1437-1528, sculptor
Robbia, Luca della, 1399-1482, sculptor
Rossi, Giovanni Battista de, 1494-1541, sculptor, painter
Ruccellai, Giovanni, 1475-1525, poet
Spinello, Aretino, 1334-1410, painter
Ucello, Paolo, 1397-1475, painter
Verocchio, Andrea, 1435-1488, sculptor, painter
THE LAST FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF FLORENTINE CULTURE HAVE BEEN LESS
PRODUCTIVE THAN THE PRECEDING TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES
Poets and Artists Born in Florence since 1500
Allori, Christofano, 1577-1621, painter
Bronzino, Angelo, 1502-1572, painter
Cellini, Benvenuto, 1500-1571, sculptor
Cigoli, Luigi Cardi da, 1559-1613, painter
Cortona, Pietro da, 1596-1669, architect, painter
Dolci, Carlo, 1616-1686, painter
Doni, Antonio Francesco, 1513-1574, author
Furini, Francesco, 1604-1646, painter
Ligozzi, Jacobino, 1543-1627, painter
Poccetti, Bernardino, 1542-1612, painter
Salviati, Francesco, 1510-1563, painter
San Giovanni, Giovanni da, 1599-1636, painter
Santi di Tito, 1538-1603, painter
Tacco, Pietro, 1580-1640, sculptor
Venusti, Marcello, 1515-1579, painter
The Only Great Poet Born in London from 1250-1500
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1328-1400
Poets and Artists Born in London since 1500
Blake, William, 1757-1827, poet and painter
Browning, Robert, 1812-1889, poet
Byron, Geo. Gordon Noel, Lord, 1788-1824, poet
Defoe, Daniel, 1659-1731, author
Ford, Edward Onslow, 1852-1901, sculptor
Gilbert, Alfred, R.A., 1854- --, sculptor
Gray, Thomas, 1716-1771, poet
Hogarth, William, 1697-1764, painter
Hood, Thomas, 1799-1845, poet
Hunt, William Holman, 1827-1910, painter
Jonson, Ben, 1573-1637, poet and dramatist
Keats, John, 1795-1821, poet
Lamb, Charles, 1775-1834, essayist
Linnell, John, 1792-1882, painter
Lucas, John Seymour, 1849- --, painter
Milton, John, 1608-1674, poet
Morland, George, 1763-1804, painter
Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744, poet
Richmond, Sir William Blake, 1843- --, painter
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828-1882, poet, painter
Ruskin, John, 1819-1900, author and art critic
Spenser, Edmund, 1552-1599, poet
Stothard, Thomas, 1755-1834, painter, illustrator
Swinburne, Algernon, 1837-1909, poet
Walker, Frederick, 1840-1875, painter
Watts, George F., 1817-1904, painter, sculptor
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Small World of the Ancients]
The most ancient records we possess from Assyria, Egypt, Palestine,
and from the Homeric poems, show how very limited was the range of
geographical knowledge possessed by that small civilised world from
which our own civilisation has descended. Speaking roughly, that
knowledge seems in the tenth century B.C. to have extended about one
thousand miles in each direction from the Isthmus of Suez. However,
the best point of departure for the peoples of antiquity is the era
of Herodotus, who travelled and wrote B.C. 460-440. The limits of
the world as he knew it were Cadiz and the Straits of Gibraltar on
the west, the Danube and the Caspian on the north, the deserts of
Eastern Persia on the east, and the Sahara on the south, with vague
tales regarding peoples who lived beyond, such as Indians far beyond
Persia, and pygmies beyond the Sahara. He reports, however, not without
hesitation, a circumnavigation of Africa by Phœnicians in the service
of Pharaoh Necho.
[Illustration: THE FIRST KNOWN MAP OF THE WORLD
This Babylonian map is probably of the eighth century B.C. The
two circles are supposed to represent the ocean, while the River
Euphrates and Babylon are shown inside them. The upper part of the
tablet is a cuneiform inscription.
]
Discovery advanced very slowly for many centuries, though the march
of Alexander opened up part of the East, while the Roman conquests
brought the Far North-West, including Britain, within the range of
civilisation; and occasional voyages, such as that of Hanno along the
coast of West Africa, that of Nearchus through the Arabian Sea, and
that of Pythias to the Baltic, added something to knowledge. Procopius
in A.D. 540 can tell us little more regarding the regions beyond Roman
influence than Strabo does five and a half centuries earlier. The
journeys of Marco Polo and Rubruquis throw only a passing light on
the Far East. It is with the Spanish occupation of the Canary Isles,
beginning in 1602, and with the Portuguese voyages of the fifteenth
century, that the era of modern discovery opens. The re-discovery of
America in 1492, for it had been already visited by the Northmen of
Greenland and Iceland in the eleventh century, and the opening of the
Cape route to India in 1497-1498, were hardly equal to the exploit
of Magellan, whose circumnavigation of the globe in 1519-1520 marks
the close of this striking period. Thereafter discovery proceeds
more slowly. Some of the isles of the central and southern Pacific
were not visited till the middle of the eighteenth century, and the
north-west coast of America as well as the north-east Coast of Asia,
remained little known till an even later date. Those explorations
of the interior of North America, of the interior of Africa, of the
interior of Australia, and of East Central Asia, which have completed
our knowledge of the earth, belong to the nineteenth century. The first
crossing of the North American Continent north of latitude 40° was not
effected till A.D. 1806.
[Sidenote: The Thirst for New Territories]