Part 24 (1/2)

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 cah fetish or a planet in the world beyond He cared little to know its i ahich 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 Hefor Nature to tell hi the ht no more than at their start; but certain lines of force were capable of acting on individual apes, andtypes 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 see diversity of forces; but the theory of variation is an affair of other science than history, andto dynamics The individual or the race would be educated on the sa to Arthur Balfour, had not essentially varied down to the year 1900

To the highest attractive energy, ave the name of divine, and for its control he invented the science called Religion, a hich 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 hiy; 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 hest powers early in his history; while the mere motive rereed which led hier, whether for food or for the infinite, sets in ht, and the sure hope of gaining a share of infinite power in eternal life would lift most minds to effort

He had reached this co 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 e would venture to say at what date between 3000 BC and 1000 AD, the ress as the world y rather than in its development; it was proved in mathematics, measured by names like Archimedes, Aristarchus, Ptolemy, and Euclid; or in Civil Law, un life by failing to learn; or in coinage, which was , and most barbarous at its close; or it was shown in roads, or the size of shi+ps, or harbors; or by the use of ; 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 shi+ps were still propelled by sails or oars; the lever, the spring, and the screw bounded the region of appliedcould 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 AD 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 Adaes 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 e No other four hundred years of history before AD 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 eland, and Germany--competent to master the world The trouble seey, and too fast

A dynao on, reacting upon each other, without stop, as the sun and a coe 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 studenta dynan values to the forces of attraction that caused the trouble; and in this case he has theic that staht, the empire, which had established unity on earth, could not help establishi+ng 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 reforladly 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 e that Constantine the Great speculated as audaciously as a modern stock-broker on values of which he knew at the uted 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 adarded 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 overnment” The empire pursued power--not merely spiritual but physical--in the sense in which Constantine issued his are: In hoc signo vinces!

using the Cross as a train of artillery, which, to his mind, it was

Society accepted it in the saainst his rival Eugene with the Cross for physical chaht 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 non 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 alan 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 syy of modern science--and society believed it to be as real as X-rays; perhaps it was! The eunpowder in politics; the physicians used it like rays into 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 eion disturbed econoes; but no one could afford to buy or construct a costly and complicatedexpense Fetish-poas cheap and satisfactory, down to a certain point Turgot and Auguste Coe of economy as a necessary phase of social education, and historians seeain yet made towards scientific history Great nu to the method still, and practice it more or less strictly; but, until quite recently, no other was known The only occult power at ainst 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 rese 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 otherits economy on the same level than to extend its slave-systeht have been stated in a mathematical formula as early as the time of Archimedes, six hundred years before Ro society forced the ee its slave-system until the slave-syste society no resource but further enlargeious 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 Roricultural, 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 neer, the Cross, which had failed to protect its Church The outcry against the Cross beca Christians that its literary chaiers 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 an 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, becah it also showed the same weakness in ustine and his people perished at Hippo towards 430, leaving society in appearance dull to new attraction

Yet the attraction re 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 thee; betrayed ignorance; stimulated effort So little is known about the mind--whether social, racial, sexual or heritable; whether etable or ether; but nothing forbids one to admit, for convenience, that it rowing, like a forest, with the storage The brain has not yet revealed its ray matter

Never has Nature offered it so violent a sti infinite power in eternal life, and it ed and intense experi these so-called Middle Ages, the Westernits motives in lass s and mosaic walls, sculpture and poetry, war and love, which still affect some people as the noblest work of norant tourists travel from far countries to look at Ravenna and San Marco, Palerue notions about the force that created theular 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 sane 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 Roan by asserting rather recklessly that between the Pyramids (BC 3000), and the Cross (AD 300), no new force affected Western progress, and antiquarians may easily dispute the fact; but in any case the motive influence, old or nehich 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 Aed, or rele event has more puzzled historians than the sudden, unexplained appearance of at least t 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 e of contact between nature and thought The co no proof

Of Greek fire and gunpowder, the sa cannot certainly be said, for they have the air of accidents due to the attraction of religiousto 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 hich the relatively hared the French ht 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 fla--”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 counpowder and the Cross

The fiction that society educated itself, or aiunpohich dragged and drove Europe at will through frightful bogs of learning At first, the apparent lag for want of voluies lasted one or two centuries, which closed the great epochs of ey 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 y continued to attract, and education becaan to resist, but the individual showed greater and greater insistence, without realizing what he was doing When the Crescent drove the Cross in igno and Fust were printing their first Bible at Mainz under the i 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 Roland in 1620, they too were looking to found a Civitas Dei in State Street; and when Bunyan e 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 conde to us every day--it condemned anarchists, not atheists None of the astrononifying God through his works; a forion no credit Neither Galileo nor Kepler, neither Spinoza nor Descartes, neither Leibnitz nor Newton, any more than Constantine the Great--if so e of their heresies reached only its personality

This persistence of thought-inertia is the leading idea of modern history Except as reflected in hi unity in the universe, or an ultimate substance, or a priuing the more active--or reactive--ed society to lay aside the idea of evolving the universe froht froister forces--take the unity at all ”Nature, to be coiven 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 shi+ft for itself

The revolution in attitude seemed voluntary, but in fact was asAfter 1500, the speed of progress so rapidly surpassed h 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 er when its reflection lost itself in space The danger was all the greater because er synthesis,” and poets called the undevout astronoidly standing on its head; the unpowder 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 anarchis, 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, sohteenth century are best studied in the wit of Voltaire, but all history and all philosophy frone 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 ht; 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 fens in western Europe Asia refused to be touched by the stream, and America, except for Franklin, stood outside