A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904)
A DYNAMIC theory, like most theories, begins by begging the
question: it defines Progress as the development and economy of Forces.
Further, it defines force as anything that does, or helps to do work.
Man is a force; so is the sun; so is a mathematical point, though
without dimensions or known existence.
Man commonly begs the question again taking for granted that he
captures the forces. A dynamic theory, assigning attractive force to
opposing bodies in proportion to the law of mass, takes for granted
that the forces of nature capture man. The sum of force attracts; the
feeble atom or molecule called man is attracted; he suffers education
or growth; he is the sum of the forces that attract him; his body and
his thought are alike their product; the movement of the forces
controls the progress of his mind, since he can know nothing but the
motions which impinge on his senses, whose sum makes education.
For convenience as an image, the theory may liken man to a
spider in its web, watching for chance prey. Forces of nature dance
like flies before the net, and the spider pounces on them when it can;
but it makes many fatal mistakes, though its theory of force is sound.
The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular
skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in
different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no
power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even
of the honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire
taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running water
probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons of
mechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into
his hands merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens
or supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of
study. With little or no effort on his part, all these forces formed
his thought, induced his action, and even shaped his figure.
Long before history began, his education was complete, for the
record could not have been started until he had been taught to record.
The universe that had formed him took shape in his mind as a reflection
of his own unity, containing all forces except himself. Either
separately, or in groups, or as a whole, these forces never ceased to
act on him, enlarging his mind as they enlarged the surface foliage of
a vegetable, and the mind needed only to respond, as the forests did,
to these attractions. Susceptibility to the highest forces is the
highest genius; selection between them is the highest science; their
mass is the highest educator. Man always made, and still makes,
grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random
from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the
whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day,
his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer
give to force a name.
Man's function as a force of nature was to assimilate other
forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power. He felt
his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a bow or a
sling, to widen his range of power, as he sought fetish or a planet in
the world beyond. He cared little to know its immediate use, but he
could afford to throw nothing away which he could conceive to have
possible value in this or any other existence. He waited for the object
to teach him its use, or want of use, and the process was slow. He may
have gone on for hundreds of thousands of years, waiting for Nature to
tell him her secrets; and, to his rivals among the monkeys, Nature has
taught no more than at their start; but certain lines of force were
capable of acting on individual apes, and mechanically selecting types
of race or sources of variation. The individual that responded or
reacted to lines of new force then was possibly the same individual
that reacts on it now, and his conception of the unity seems never to
have changed in spite of the increasing diversity of forces; but the
theory of variation is an affair of other science than history, and
matters nothing to dynamics. The individual or the race would be
educated on the same lines of illusion, which, according to Arthur
Balfour, had not essentially varied down to the year 1900.
To the highest attractive energy, man gave the name of divine,
and for its control he invented the science called Religion, a word
which meant, and still means, cultivation of occult force whether in
detail or mass. Unable to define Force as a unity, man symbolized it
and pursued it, both in himself, and in the infinite, as philosophy and
theology; the mind is itself the subtlest of all known forces, and its
self-introspection necessarily created a science which had the singular
value of lifting his education, at the start, to the finest, subtlest,
and broadest training both in analysis and synthesis, so that, if
language is a test, he must have reached his highest powers early in
his history; while the mere motive remained as simple an appetite for
power as the tribal greed which led him to trap an elephant. Hunger,
whether for food or for the infinite, sets in motion multiplicity and
infinity of thought, and the sure hope of gaining a share of infinite
power in eternal life would lift most minds to effort.
He had reached this completeness five thousand years ago, and
added nothing to his stock of known forces for a very long time. The
mass of nature exercised on him so feeble an attraction that one can
scarcely account for his apparent motion. Only a historian of very
exceptional knowledge would venture to say at what date between 3000
B.C. and 1000 A.D., the momentum of Europe was greatest; but such
progress as the world made consisted in economies of energy rather than
in its development; it was proved in mathematics, measured by names
like Archimedes, Aristarchus, Ptolemy, and Euclid; or in Civil Law,
measured by a number of names which Adams had begun life by failing to
learn; or in coinage, which was most beautiful near its beginning, and
most barbarous at its close; or it was shown in roads, or the size of
ships, or harbors; or by the use of metals, instruments, and writing;
all of them economies of force, sometimes more forceful than the forces
they helped; but the roads were still travelled by the horse, the ass,
the camel, or the slave; the ships were still propelled by sails or
oars; the lever, the spring, and the screw bounded the region of
applied mechanics. Even the metals were old.
Much the same thing could be said of religious or supernatural
forces. Down to the year 300 of the Christian era they were little
changed, and in spite of Plato and the sceptics were more apparently
chaotic than ever. The experience of three thousand years had educated
society to feel the vastness of Nature, and the infinity of her
resources of power, but even this increase of attraction had not yet
caused economies in its methods of pursuit.
There the Western world stood till the year A.D. 305, when the
Emperor Diocletian abdicated; and there it was that Adams broke down on
the steps of Ara Coeli, his path blocked by the scandalous failure of
civilization at the moment it had achieved complete success. In the
year 305 the empire had solved the problems of Europe more completely
than they have ever been solved since. The Pax Romana, the Civil Law,
and Free Trade should, in four hundred years, have put Europe far in
advance of the point reached by modern society in the four hundred
years since 1500, when conditions were less simple.
The efforts to explain, or explain away, this scandal had been
incessant, but none suited Adams unless it were the economic theory of
adverse exchanges and exhaustion of minerals; but nations are not
ruined beyond a certain point by adverse exchanges, and Rome had by no
means exhausted her resources. On the contrary, the empire developed
resources and energies quite astounding. No other four hundred years of
history before A.D. 1800 knew anything like it; and although some of
these developments, like the Civil Law, the roads, aqueducts, and
harbors, were rather economies than force, yet in northwestern Europe
alone the empire had developed three energies--France, England, and
Germany--competent to master the world. The trouble seemed rather to be
that the empire developed too much energy, and too fast.
A dynamic law requires that two masses--nature and man--must go on,
reacting upon each other, without stop, as the sun and a comet react on
each other, and that any appearance of stoppage is illusive. The theory
seems to exact excess, rather than deficiency, of action and reaction
to account for the dissolution of the Roman Empire, which should, as a
problem of mechanics, have been torn to pieces by acceleration. If the
student means to try the experiment of framing a dynamic law, he must
assign values to the forces of attraction that caused the trouble; and
in this case he has them in plain evidence. With the relentless logic
that stamped Roman thought, the empire, which had established unity on
earth, could not help establishing unity in heaven. It was induced by
its dynamic necessities to economize the gods.
The Church has never ceased to protest against the charge that
Christianity ruined the empire, and, with its usual force, has pointed
out that its reforms alone saved the State. Any dynamic theory gladly
admits it. All it asks is to find and follow the force that attracts.
The Church points out this force in the Cross, and history needs only
to follow it. The empire loudly asserted its motive. Good taste forbids
saying that Constantine the Great speculated as audaciously as a modern
stock-broker on values of which he knew at the utmost only the volume;
or that he merged all uncertain forces into a single trust, which he
enormously overcapitalized, and forced on the market; but this is the
substance of what Constantine himself said in his Edict of Milan in the
year 313, which admitted Christianity into the Trust of State
Religions. Regarded as an Act of Congress, it runs: "We have resolved
to grant to Christians as well as all others the liberty to practice
the religion they prefer, in order that whatever exists of divinity or
celestial power may help and favor us and all who are under our
government." The empire pursued power--not merely spiritual but
physical--in the sense in which Constantine issued his army order the
year before, at the battle of the Milvian Bridge: In hoc signo vinces!
using the Cross as a train of artillery, which, to his mind, it was.
Society accepted it in the same character. Eighty years afterwards,
Theodosius marched against his rival Eugene with the Cross for physical
champion; and Eugene raised the image of Hercules to fight for the
pagans; while society on both sides looked on, as though it were a
boxing-match, to decide a final test of force between the divine
powers. The Church was powerless to raise the ideal. What is now known
as religion affected the mind of old society but little. The laity, the
people, the million, almost to a man, bet on the gods as they bet on a
horse.
No doubt the Church did all it could to purify the process, but
society was almost wholly pagan in its point of view, and was drawn to
the Cross because, in its system of physics, the Cross had absorbed all
the old occult or fetish-power. The symbol represented the sum of
nature--the Energy of modern science--and society believed it to be as
real as X-rays; perhaps it was! The emperors used it like gunpowder in
politics; the physicians used it like rays in medicine; the dying clung
to it as the quintessence of force, to protect them from the forces of
evil on their road to the next life.
Throughout these four centuries the empire knew that religion
disturbed economy, for even the cost of heathen incense affected the
exchanges; but no one could afford to buy or construct a costly and
complicated machine when he could hire an occult force at trifling
expense. Fetish-power was cheap and satisfactory, down to a certain
point. Turgot and Auguste Comte long ago fixed this stage of economy as
a necessary phase of social education, and historians seem now to
accept it as the only gain yet made towards scientific history. Great
numbers of educated people--perhaps a majority--cling to the method
still, and practice it more or less strictly; but, until quite
recently, no other was known. The only occult power at man's disposal
was fetish. Against it, no mechanical force could compete except within
narrow limits.
Outside of occult or fetish-power, the Roman world was
incredibly poor. It knew but one productive energy resembling a modern
machine--the slave. No artificial force of serious value was applied to
production or transportation, and when society developed itself so
rapidly in political and social lines, it had no other means of keeping
its economy on the same level than to extend its slave-system and its
fetish-system to the utmost.
The result might have been stated in a mathematical formula as early as
the time of Archimedes, six hundred years before Rome fell. The
economic needs of a violently centralizing society forced the empire to
enlarge its slave-system until the slave-system consumed itself and the
empire too, leaving society no resource but further enlargement of its
religious system in order to compensate for the losses and horrors of
the failure. For a vicious circle, its mathematical completeness
approached perfection. The dynamic law of attraction and reaction
needed only a Newton to fix it in algebraic form.
At last, in 410, Alaric sacked Rome, and the slave-ridden,
agricultural, uncommercial Western Empire--the poorer and less
Christianized half--went to pieces. Society, though terribly shocked by
the horrors of Alaric's storm, felt still more deeply the
disappointment in its new power, the Cross, which had failed to protect
its Church. The outcry against the Cross became so loud among
Christians that its literary champion, Bishop Augustine of Hippo--a
town between Algiers and Tunis--was led to write a famous treatise in
defence of the Cross, familiar still to every scholar, in which he
defended feebly the mechanical value of the symbol--arguing only that
pagan symbols equally failed--but insisted on its spiritual value in
the Civitas Dei which had taken the place of the Civitas Romae in human
interest. "Granted that we have lost all we had! Have we lost faith?
Have we lost piety? Have we lost the wealth of the inner man who is
rich before God? These are the wealth of Christians!" The Civitas Dei,
in its turn, became the sum of attraction for the Western world, though
it also showed the same weakness in mechanics that had wrecked the
Civitas Romae. St. Augustine and his people perished at Hippo towards
430, leaving society in appearance dull to new attraction.
Yet the attraction remained constant. The delight of
experimenting on occult force of every kind is such as to absorb all
the free thought of the human race. The gods did their work; history
has no quarrel with them; they led, educated, enlarged the mind; taught
knowledge; betrayed ignorance; stimulated effort. So little is known
about the mind--whether social, racial, sexual or heritable; whether
material or spiritual; whether animal, vegetable or mineral--that
history is inclined to avoid it altogether; but nothing forbids one to
admit, for convenience, that it may assimilate food like the body,
storing new force and growing, like a forest, with the storage. The
brain has not yet revealed its mysterious mechanism of gray matter.
Never has Nature offered it so violent a stimulant as when she opened
to it the possibility of sharing infinite power in eternal life, and it
might well need a thousand years of prolonged and intense experiment to
prove the value of the motive. During these so-called Middle Ages, the
Western mind reacted in many forms, on many sides, expressing its
motives in modes, such as Romanesque and Gothic architecture, glass
windows and mosaic walls, sculpture and poetry, war and love, which
still affect some people as the noblest work of man, so that, even
to-day, great masses of idle and ignorant tourists travel from far
countries to look at Ravenna and San Marco, Palermo and Pisa, Assisi,
Cordova, Chartres, with vague notions about the force that created
them, but with a certain surprise that a social mind of such singular
energy and unity should still lurk in their shadows.
The tourist more rarely visits Constantinople or studies the
architecture of Sancta Sofia, but when he does, he is distinctly
conscious of forces not quite the same. Justinian has not the
simplicity of Charlemagne. The Eastern Empire showed an activity and
variety of forces that classical Europe had never possessed. The navy
of Nicephoras Phocas in the tenth century would have annihilated in
half an hour any navy that Carthage or Athens or Rome ever set afloat.
The dynamic scheme began by asserting rather recklessly that between
the Pyramids (B.C. 3000), and the Cross (A.D. 300), no new force
affected Western progress, and antiquarians may easily dispute the
fact; but in any case the motive influence, old or new, which raised
both Pyramids and Cross was the same attraction of power in a future
life that raised the dome of Sancta Sofia and the Cathedral at Amiens,
however much it was altered, enlarged, or removed to distance in space.
Therefore, no single event has more puzzled historians than the sudden,
unexplained appearance of at least two new natural forces of the
highest educational value in mechanics, for the first time within
record of history. Literally, these two forces seemed to drop from the
sky at the precise moment when the Cross on one side and the Crescent
on the other, proclaimed the complete triumph of the Civitas Dei. Had
the Manichean doctrine of Good and Evil as rival deities been orthodox,
it would alone have accounted for this simultaneous victory of hostile
powers.
Of the compass, as a step towards demonstration of the dynamic
law, one may confidently say that it proved, better than any other
force, the widening scope of the mind, since it widened immensely the
range of contact between nature and thought. The compass educated. This
must prove itself as needing no proof.
Of Greek fire and gunpowder, the same thing cannot certainly be
said, for they have the air of accidents due to the attraction of
religious motives. They belong to the spiritual world; or to the
doubtful ground of Magic which lay between Good and Evil. They were
chemical forces, mostly explosives, which acted and still act as the
most violent educators ever known to man, but they were justly feared
as diabolic, and whatever insolence man may have risked towards the
milder teachers of his infancy, he was an abject pupil towards
explosives. The Sieur de Joinville left a record of the energy with
which the relatively harmless Greek fire educated and enlarged the
French mind in a single night in the year 1249, when the crusaders were
trying to advance on Cairo. The good king St. Louis and all his staff
dropped on their knees at every fiery flame that flew by, praying--"God
have pity on us!" and never had man more reason to call on his gods
than they, for the battle of religion between Christian and Saracen was
trifling compared with that of education between gunpowder and the
Cross.
The fiction that society educated itself, or aimed at a
conscious purpose, was upset by the compass and gunpowder which dragged
and drove Europe at will through frightful bogs of learning. At first,
the apparent lag for want of volume in the new energies lasted one or
two centuries, which closed the great epochs of emotion by the Gothic
cathedrals and scholastic theology. The moment had Greek beauty and
more than Greek unity, but it was brief; and for another century or
two, Western society seemed to float in space without apparent motion.
Yet the attractive mass of nature's energy continued to attract, and
education became more rapid than ever before. Society began to resist,
but the individual showed greater and greater insistence, without
realizing what he was doing. When the Crescent drove the Cross in
ignominy from Constantinople in 1453, Gutenberg and Fust were printing
their first Bible at Mainz under the impression that they were helping
the Cross. When Columbus discovered the West Indies in 1492, the Church
looked on it as a victory of the Cross. When Luther and Calvin upset
Europe half a century later, they were trying, like St. Augustine, to
substitute the Civitas Dei for the Civitas Romae. When the Puritans set
out for New England in 1620, they too were looking to found a Civitas
Dei in State Street; and when Bunyan made his Pilgrimage in 1678, he
repeated St. Jerome. Even when, after centuries of license, the Church
reformed its discipline, and, to prove it, burned Giordano Bruno in
1600, besides condemning Galileo in 1630--as science goes on repeating
to us every day--it condemned anarchists, not atheists. None of the
astronomers were irreligious men; all of them made a point of
magnifying God through his works; a form of science which did their
religion no credit. Neither Galileo nor Kepler, neither Spinoza nor
Descartes, neither Leibnitz nor Newton, any more than Constantine the
Great--if so much--doubted Unity. The utmost range of their heresies
reached only its personality.
This persistence of thought-inertia is the leading idea of
modern history. Except as reflected in himself, man has no reason for
assuming unity in the universe, or an ultimate substance, or a
prime-motor. The a priori insistence on this unity ended by fatiguing
the more active--or reactive--minds; and Lord Bacon tried to stop it.
He urged society to lay aside the idea of evolving the universe from a
thought, and to try evolving thought from the universe. The mind should
observe and register forces--take them apart and put them
together--without assuming unity at all. "Nature, to be commanded, must
be obeyed." "The imagination must be given not wings but weights." As
Galileo reversed the action of earth and sun, Bacon reversed the
relation of thought to force. The mind was thenceforth to follow the
movement of matter, and unity must be left to shift for itself.
The revolution in attitude seemed voluntary, but in fact was as
mechanical as the fall of a feather. Man created nothing. After 1500,
the speed of progress so rapidly surpassed man's gait as to alarm every
one, as though it were the acceleration of a falling body which the
dynamic theory takes it to be. Lord Bacon was as much astonished by it
as the Church was, and with reason. Suddenly society felt itself
dragged into situations altogether new and anarchic--situations which
it could not affect, but which painfully affected it. Instinct taught
it that the universe in its thought must be in danger when its
reflection lost itself in space. The danger was all the greater because
men of science covered it with "larger synthesis," and poets called the
undevout astronomer mad. Society knew better. Yet the telescope held it
rigidly standing on its head; the microscope revealed a universe that
defied the senses; gunpowder killed whole races that lagged behind; the
compass coerced the most imbruted mariner to act on the impossible idea
that the earth was round; the press drenched Europe with anarchism.
Europe saw itself, violently resisting, wrenched into false positions,
drawn along new lines as a fish that is caught on a hook; but unable to
understand by what force it was controlled. The resistance was often
bloody, sometimes humorous, always constant. Its contortions in the
eighteenth century are best studied in the wit of Voltaire, but all
history and all philosophy from Montaigne and Pascal to Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche deal with nothing else; and still, throughout it all, the
Baconian law held good; thought did not evolve nature, but nature
evolved thought. Not one considerable man of science dared face the
stream of thought; and the whole number of those who acted, like
Franklin, as electric conductors of the new forces from nature to man,
down to the year 1800, did not exceed a few score, confined to a few
towns in western Europe. Asia refused to be touched by the stream, and
America, except for Franklin, stood outside.
Very slowly the accretion of these new forces, chemical and
mechanical, grew in volume until they acquired sufficient mass to take
the place of the old religious science, substituting their attraction
for the attractions of the Civitas Dei, but the process remained the
same. Nature, not mind, did the work that the sun does on the planets.
Man depended more and more absolutely on forces other than his own, and
on instruments which superseded his senses. Bacon foretold it: "Neither
the naked hand nor the understanding, left to itself, can effect much.
It is by instruments and helps that the work is done." Once done, the
mind resumed its illusion, and society forgot its impotence; but no one
better than Bacon knew its tricks, and for his true followers science
always meant self-restraint, obedience, sensitiveness to impulse from
without. "Non fingendum aut excogitandum sed inveniendum quid Natura
faciat aut ferat."
The success of this method staggers belief, and even to-day can
be treated by history only as a miracle of growth, like the sports of
nature. Evidently a new variety of mind had appeared. Certain men
merely held out their hands--like Newton, watched an apple; like
Franklin, flew a kite; like Watt, played with a tea-kettle--and great
forces of nature stuck to them as though she were playing ball.
Governments did almost nothing but resist. Even gunpowder and ordnance,
the great weapon of government, showed little development between 1400
and 1800. Society was hostile or indifferent, as Priestley and Jenner,
and even Fulton, with reason complained in the most advanced societies
in the world, while its resistance became acute wherever the Church
held control; until all mankind seemed to draw itself out in a long
series of groups, dragged on by an attractive power in advance, which
even the leaders obeyed without understanding, as the planets obeyed
gravity, or the trees obeyed heat and light.
The influx of new force was nearly spontaneous. The reaction of
mind on the mass of nature seemed not greater than that of a comet on
the sun; and had the spontaneous influx of force stopped in Europe,
society must have stood still, or gone backward, as in Asia or Africa.
Then only economies of process would have counted as new force, and
society would have been better pleased; for the idea that new force
must be in itself a good is only an animal or vegetable instinct. As
Nature developed her hidden energies, they tended to become
destructive. Thought itself became tortured, suffering reluctantly,
impatiently, painfully, the coercion of new method. Easy thought had
always been movement of inertia, and mostly mere sentiment; but even
the processes of mathematics measured feebly the needs of force.
The stupendous acceleration after 1800 ended in 1900 with the
appearance of the new class of supersensual forces, before which the
man of science stood at first as bewildered and helpless as, in the
fourth century, a priest of Isis before the Cross of Christ.
This, then, or something like this, would be a dynamic formula
of history. Any schoolboy knows enough to object at once that it is the
oldest and most universal of all theories. Church and State, theology
and philosophy, have always preached it, differing only in the
allotment of energy between nature and man. Whether the attractive
energy has been called God or Nature, the mechanism has been always the
same, and history is not obliged to decide whether the Ultimate tends
to a purpose or not, or whether ultimate energy is one or many. Every
one admits that the will is a free force, habitually decided by
motives. No one denies that motives exist adequate to decide the will;
even though it may not always be conscious of them. Science has proved
that forces, sensible and occult, physical and metaphysical, simple and
complex, surround, traverse, vibrate, rotate, repel, attract, without
stop; that man's senses are conscious of few, and only in a partial
degree; but that, from the beginning of organic existence, his
consciousness has been induced, expanded, trained in the lines of his
sensitiveness; and that the rise of his faculties from a lower power to
a higher, or from a narrower to a wider field, may be due to the
function of assimilating and storing outside force or forces. There is
nothing unscientific in the idea that, beyond the lines of force felt
by the senses, the universe may be--as it has always been--either a
supersensuous chaos or a divine unity, which irresistibly attracts, and
is either life or death to penetrate. Thus far, religion, philosophy,
and science seem to go hand in hand. The schools begin their vital
battle only there. In the earlier stages of progress, the forces to be
assimilated were simple and easy to absorb, but, as the mind of man
enlarged its range, it enlarged the field of complexity, and must
continue to do so, even into chaos, until the reservoirs of sensuous or
supersensuous energies are exhausted, or cease to affect him, or until
he succumbs to their excess.
For past history, this way of grouping its sequences may answer
for a chart of relations, although any serious student would need to
invent another, to compare or correct its errors; but past history is
only a value of relation to the future, and this value is wholly one of
convenience, which can be tested only by experiment. Any law of
movement must include, to make it a convenience, some mechanical
formula of acceleration.