Signs of the Times
It is not a very good sign, in either nations or individuals, when they spend much time predicting the future. Happy people are absorbed in the present because its gifts are enough for them, and wise people because its duties occupy them. Our great task is surely not to see what lies dimly in the distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
> Do you know Yesterday, its aim and reason? > Do you work well Today, for worthy things? > Then calmly wait for Tomorrow’s hidden season, > And do not fear whatever it may bring!
But humanity’s “large discourse of reason” will look “before and after” and, impatient with “the ignorant present time,” indulge in anticipation far more than is useful. The unhappy can seldom be persuaded that each day has enough evil of its own. The ambitious are not content with present splendor, but paint still more glorious triumphs on the cloud-curtain of the future.
The case is still worse with nations. Here the prophets are many, and each excites and confirms the others. The prophetic fury spreads wider and wider until even a Saul must join it. There is still real magic in the action and reaction of minds upon one another. The chance delirium of a few becomes, through this mysterious reverberation, the frenzy of many. People lose the use not only of their understanding but of their bodily senses, while the most stubborn, unbelieving hearts melt with the rest in the furnace into which all are cast, both as victims and as fuel.
It is painful to think that this noble, omnipotent power of sympathy has so rarely been the Aaron’s rod of Truth and Virtue, and so often the enchanter’s rod of Wickedness and Folly. No solitary criminal, and scarcely any solitary madman, would venture upon actions and fantasies that large communities of sane people have, under such circumstances, accepted as sound wisdom. Witness the long scenes of the French Revolution: a whole people drunk first with blood and arrogance, then with terror and cruelty, and then with desperation and blood again. Neither frivolity nor the utmost earnestness of character protects against such visitations. The New England Puritan burns witches, wrestles for months with the horrors of Satan’s invisible world and with ghastly phantoms seen daily and hourly as forerunners of the Last Day. Then he suddenly realizes that he has been frantic, weeps bitterly, prays contritely, and leaves the history of that gloomy season behind him like a frightful dream.
Old England has also had its share of such frenzies and panics, though fortunately, like other old diseases, they have lately grown milder. Since the days of Titus Oates they have generally passed without loss of life, or indeed without much loss beyond the temporary loss of reason among those afflicted. In this milder form, however, the disorder recurs rather regularly and may be expected at intervals like other natural visitations. Reasonable people deal with it as Londoners deal with their fogs: they venture cautiously into the groping crowd and patiently carry lanterns at noon, sustained by a well-grounded faith that the sun still exists and will one day reappear.
How often during the last fifty years have we heard that the country was wrecked and rapidly sinking, though up to this date it remains whole and afloat? We have witnessed the “State in Danger” a hundred times. As for the church, it has seldom been out of “danger” for as long as we can remember.
Everyone knows that the present is a crisis of this kind, and knows why it has become one. The repeal of the Test Acts, followed by the removal of Catholic disabilities, has struck many admirers of those restrictions with indescribable astonishment. These things had seemed fixed and immovable, as deep as the foundations of the world. Then, in a moment, they vanished, and their place knew them no more.
Our worthy friends mistook the sleeping Leviathan for an island, although they had often been assured that Intolerance was, and could be, nothing but a monster. Mooring in its shelter, they anchored comfortably in its scaly hide and enjoyed themselves there for a time. But now their Leviathan has suddenly dived, and they can no longer remain fastened in the stream of time. They must drift forward with it like the rest of the world. That would not be a very alarming fate, we think, if only they could understand it, though for a while they will not.
Their little island is gone, sunk deep among confused eddies, and what can remain in the universe worth caring about? What does it matter to them that the great continents of the earth still stand, or that the pole star and all our guiding stars still shine eternally in the heavens? Their cherished little harbor is gone, and they refuse to be comforted. Day after day, therefore, periodical and perennial publications send out the gloomiest predictions. The king has virtually abdicated. The church is a widow without financial provision. Public principle has vanished, private honesty is disappearing, society is rapidly falling to pieces, and an age of unmixed evil has come upon us.
At such a time, one would expect the passion for prophecy to be more than usually excited. Accordingly, the Millenarians have appeared on the right and the Millites on the left. The Fifth Monarchy men prophesy from the Bible and the Utilitarians from Bentham. One group announces positively that the last seal will be opened in 1860; the other assures us that “the greatest happiness principle” will turn earth into heaven even sooner. We know these symptoms too well to think interference either necessary or safe. Time and the hours will bring relief to every party. The great encourager of Delphic and other noises is the echo. Left alone, they will soon disperse and die away in space.
Meanwhile, we too admit that the present is an important time, as all present time necessarily is. The poorest day that passes over us is the meeting place of two Eternities. It is made of currents flowing from the remotest Past and onward into the remotest Future. We would be wise indeed if we could read the signs of our own time correctly and, through knowledge of its needs and advantages, adjust our own position in it wisely.
Instead of staring idly into the obscure distance, then, let us look calmly for a while at the perplexing scene around us. Perhaps a more serious inspection will remove some of its confusion and reveal more clearly some of its distinctive features and deeper tendencies. Our own relation to the age, and our true aims and efforts within it, may then also become clearer.
If we had to characterize our age with a single term, we might call it not a Heroic, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but above all others the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery in every outward and inward sense: an age that devotes its entire strength to advancing, teaching, and practicing the great art of adapting means to ends.
Nothing is now done directly or by hand. Everything proceeds by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some aid, accessory, or ingenious labor-saving process stands ready. Our old ways of working are discredited and cast aside. Everywhere the living artisan is driven from the workshop to make room for a faster, lifeless one. The shuttle drops from the weaver’s fingers and passes into iron fingers that drive it faster. The sailor furls his sail, lays down his oar, and commands a strong, tireless servant on vaporous wings to carry him over the waters.
People have crossed oceans by steam. Birmingham’s Fire-King has visited the fabulous East, and the spirit of the Cape, if there were now a Camões to sing of it, has again been alarmed by thunders far stranger than Gama’s. There is no end to machinery. Even the horse is stripped of its harness and replaced by a swift fire-horse. We even have an inventor who hatches chickens by steam. The brood hen herself is to be superseded.
For every earthly purpose, and for some unearthly ones, we have machines and mechanical aids: machines for mincing our cabbages and for casting us into magnetic sleep. We remove mountains and turn seas into smooth highways. Nothing can resist us. We wage war against rough Nature and, with our irresistible engines, always emerge victorious and loaded with spoils.
It is gratifying, and obvious to everyone, how wonderfully these devices have increased and continue to increase humanity’s physical power. With a given amount of labor, people now are, or might be, much better fed, clothed, housed, and accommodated in every outward respect. This new power is also changing the social system. Wealth has increased more and more while gathering itself into ever larger masses, strangely altering old relationships and widening the distance between rich and poor. That question must be left to political economists, and it is far more complex and important than any they have yet addressed.
For now, however, let us observe how the mechanical genius of our time has spread into entirely different provinces. Machinery manages not only the external and physical, but the internal and spiritual as well. Here too nothing follows its spontaneous course, and nothing is left to old, natural methods. Everything has its cleverly designed tools and prearranged apparatus. It is done not by hand, but by machinery.
Thus we have machines for education: Lancastrian machines, Hamiltonian machines, monitors, maps, and emblems. Instruction, that mysterious communion of Wisdom with Ignorance, is no longer treated as an indefinable experimental process requiring study of individual abilities and continual variation of means and methods to reach the same end. It has become a safe, universal, straightforward business, conducted in bulk by the proper mechanism, with whatever intellect happens to be available.
Then we have religious machines of every imaginable variety. Even the Bible Society, which professes to have a far higher, heavenly structure, proves on examination to be an altogether earthly contrivance, supported by fundraising, the stirring up of vanities, promotional hype, intrigue, and trickery. Yet in practice it is a very excellent machine for converting the heathen.
The same is true in every other field. If a person, or a society of people, has a truth to speak or a piece of spiritual work to perform, they cannot proceed at once with their natural faculties. They must first call a public meeting, appoint committees, issue prospectuses, and eat a public dinner. In short, they must construct or borrow machinery with which to speak the truth and do the work. Without machinery they would be hopeless and helpless, like a colony of Hindu weavers squatting in the heart of Lancashire.
Every machine must then find its driving power in one of society’s great currents. Every little sect among us, whether Unitarians, Utilitarians, Anabaptists, or Phrenologists, must have its periodical, its monthly or quarterly magazine, extending like a windmill into the popular breeze to grind meal for the society.
Natural strength is equally ineffective in individuals. No one now expects to carry out even the smallest undertaking alone and without mechanical aid. He must win the support of an existing organization and plow his field with its oxen. In these days, more emphatically than ever, “to live, signifies to unite with a party, or to make one.” Philosophy, Science, Art, and Literature all depend upon machinery.
No Newton now discovers the system of the world through silent meditation upon a falling apple. Instead, someone quite unlike Newton stands in his museum or scientific institution, behind whole batteries of retorts, digesters, and galvanic piles, imperiously “interrogates Nature,” and finds that she is in no hurry to answer.
For lack of Raphaels, Michelangelos, and Mozarts, we have Royal Academies of Painting, Sculpture, and Music, through which the failing spirit of Art may be strengthened by the more generous diet of a public kitchen. Literature likewise has its Paternoster Row publishing machinery, trade dinners, editorial conclaves, and enormous subterranean puffing bellows. Books are not merely printed by machinery, but to a great extent written and sold by it.
National culture and spiritual benefit of every kind receive the same management. No Queen Christina today needs to send for her Descartes, and no King Frederick for his Voltaire, then painfully sustain him with pensions and flattery. Any cultured sovereign who wants to enlighten the people has only to impose a new tax and use the proceeds to establish Philosophical Institutes. Hence the Royal and Imperial Societies, the libraries, sculpture galleries, and technical collections that confront us in every capital like so many well-finished beehives. The stray powers of Wisdom are expected to swarm into them of their own accord, settle there, and make honey.
In the same way, when we decide among ourselves that religion is declining, we need only vote half a million’s worth of bricks and mortar and build new churches. In Ireland, it seems, they have gone still farther and actually established a “Penny-a-week Purgatory Society!” Thus the Genius of Mechanism stands ready to help us through every difficulty and emergency, bearing all our burdens on his iron back.
We state these things lightly enough, yet they carry deep significance and indicate a mighty change in our whole manner of existence. The same habit governs not only our ways of acting, but our ways of thinking and feeling. People have become mechanical in head and heart as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual effort and in natural force of every kind. They no longer hope and struggle for inward perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions and constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or another. Their efforts, loyalties, and opinions all turn upon mechanism and take a mechanical form.
We can trace this tendency distinctly in all the great expressions of our time: in its intellectual character, in the studies it favors and the manner in which it conducts them; in its practical character, its politics, arts, religion, and morals; and throughout the sources and currents of its spiritual as well as its material activity.
Consider, for example, the general state of Science in Europe today. Everyone admits that the Metaphysical and Moral Sciences are declining, while the Physical Sciences receive more respect and attention every day. In most European nations, there is now no such thing as a Science of Mind. There is only greater or lesser progress in the general science, or the specialized sciences, of matter.
The French were the first to desert the school of Metaphysics. Though they have lately pretended to revive it, it still shows no sign of life. The land of Malebranche, Pascal, Descartes, and Fénelon now has only its Cousins and Villemains, while in Physics it can count names of a very different order.
Among ourselves, the Philosophy of Mind passed through a sickly infancy that never reached the strength of adulthood, then suddenly declined, languished, and finally died out with its last amiable cultivator, Professor Stewart. In no country except Germany has any decisive effort been made in psychological science, to say nothing of a decisive result.
In short, the science of the age is physical, chemical, physiological, and mechanical in every form. Our favorite Mathematics, the highly valued interpreter of all these other sciences, has itself become increasingly mechanical. Excellence in what are called its higher departments depends less on natural genius than on acquired skill in operating its machinery.
Without undervaluing the wonderful results that a Lagrange or Laplace produces by means of it, we may observe that the differential and integral calculus is little more than an ingeniously constructed arithmetic mill. Once the factors are put in, they are ground out of sight into the correct product, while our only further labor is to turn the handle steadily. We certainly possess more Mathematics than ever before, but less Mathesis: more calculational technique, but less deep mathematical understanding. Archimedes and Plato could not have read the Méchanique Céleste; yet the entire French Institute would see nothing in the saying “God geometrises!” except sentimental, bombastic boasting.
From Locke’s time onward, our Metaphysics has been wholly physical. It is not a spiritual philosophy, but a material one. The strange esteem in which his Essay was so long held as a scientific work (for the man’s character entitled everything he said to reverence) will one day be considered a curious sign of the spirit of these times.
His entire doctrine is mechanical in its purpose and origin, its method and its results. It is merely a discussion of the origin of our consciousness, ideas, or whatever else they may be called: a developmental history of what we see in the mind. But the great mysteries of Necessity and Free Will, of whether the mind’s dependence on matter is essential to its existence or not, and of our mysterious relations to Time and Space, to God and the universe, are not touched in the faintest degree by these inquiries and seem to have no connection with them.
The last generation of our Scottish Metaphysicians had a dim idea that much of this was wrong, but they did not know how to correct it. Reid’s school had also taken a mechanical path from the beginning because it saw no other. That school came into being through the extraordinary conclusions Hume was reaching from premises its members accepted. They released Instinct like an undiscriminating watchdog to protect themselves from those conclusions. They pulled vigorously against the logical chain with which Hume was so calmly towing them and the world into the bottomless abysses of Atheism and Fatalism. Somehow the chain snapped between them, and the result is that no one now cares about either party, any more than about the contemporary work of Hartley, Darwin, or Priestley in England.
Hartley’s vibrations and miniature vibrations might seem material and mechanical enough, but our continental neighbors have gone still farther. One of their philosophers recently discovered that “as the liver secretes bile, so does the brain secrete thought,” and Dr. Cabanis, even more recently, has developed this astonishing discovery down to its smallest details in his Rapports du Physique et du Morale de l’Homme. The metaphysical philosophy of this latest investigator is certainly neither shadowy nor insubstantial. With dissecting knives and real metal probes, he lays open our moral structure and displays it for human inspection under Leeuwenhoek microscopes and by inflating it with the anatomical blowpipe.
He remains inclined to believe that thought is secreted by the brain. But Poetry and Religion, and this is truly worth knowing, are “a product of the smaller intestines!” We have the greatest admiration for this learned doctor. With what scientific stoicism he walks unwondering through the land of wonders, like a wise man passing through some enormous, gaudy, imposing Vauxhall. The common people may enjoy and believe in its fireworks, cascades, and symphonies, but he finds nothing real there except saltpeter, pasteboard, and catgut.
His book may be regarded as the final result of mechanical metaphysics in our time. It remarkably realizes what was still only an idea in Martinus Scriblerus: “as the jack had a meat-roasting quality, so had the body a thinking quality.” On the strength of that principle, the people of Nuremberg were to build a wooden and leather man “who should reason as well as most country parsons.” Vaucanson did indeed make a wooden duck that seemed to eat and digest, but the bold Nuremberg scheme remained for a more modern experimenter.
This condition of the two great branches of knowledge sufficiently reveals the intellectual bias of our time and its all-pervading tendency toward this kind of inquiry. The outer world is cultivated exclusively on mechanical principles, while the inner world is finally abandoned because, when cultivated on those principles, it yields no result.
Indeed, an inward conviction has long been spreading, and occasionally even speaks aloud, that no true sciences exist except those of external things; that our only conceivable road to the inward world, if there is one, passes through the outward; and, in short, that whatever cannot be investigated and understood mechanically cannot be investigated or understood at all.
We pay particular attention to these intellectual tendencies because they are prominent symptoms of our age. Opinion is always related to Action in two ways, first as a cause and then as an effect. The speculative tendency of any age therefore gives us, on the whole, the best indication of its practical tendency.
Nowhere is our deep and almost exclusive faith in Mechanism more visible than in contemporary Politics. Civil government naturally includes much that is mechanical and must be treated accordingly. In ordinary language we call it the Machine of Society and speak of it as the great working wheel from which all private machines must take their motion, or to which they must adapt it.
As a mere metaphor, this is acceptable enough. But here, as in so many other cases, the “foam hardens itself into a shell,” and the shadow we carelessly summoned stands terribly before us and refuses to leave when commanded. Government also contains much that is not mechanical and cannot be treated mechanically. The political theories and efforts of our time seem to take less and less notice of this latter truth.
At the very outset, indeed, we might regard the enormous interest taken in mere political arrangements as itself a sign of a mechanical age. All Europe’s discontent turns in this direction. The deep, strong cry of every civilized nation, a cry that everyone now sees must and will be answered, is: Give us a reform of Government! A good structure of legislation, a proper check upon the executive, and a wise arrangement of the judiciary are all that human happiness requires.
The Philosopher of this age is not a Socrates, Plato, Hooker, or Taylor, teaching people the necessity and infinite value of moral goodness and the great truth that our happiness depends upon the mind within us, not the circumstances outside us. He is a Smith, De Lolme, or Bentham, chiefly teaching the reverse: that our happiness depends entirely upon external circumstances, and even that the strength and dignity of the mind within us are created by and result from those circumstances. If the laws and government were properly ordered, all would be well, and everything else would take care of itself.
People who dissent from this opinion, whether it is stated openly or merely implied, are now rarely found. Widely and angrily as they differ over its application, they all accept the principle.
The methods both sides propose for achieving or securing this all-sufficient perfection of arrangement are equally mechanical and equally simple. We are no longer concerned with the moral, religious, and spiritual condition of the people, but with their physical, practical, and economic condition as regulated by public laws. Thus the Body Politic is worshiped and tended more than ever, while the Soul Politic is tended less than ever.
Love of country in any high or generous sense, anything beyond an almost animal instinct or mere habit, is given little importance in such reforms or in the opposition to them. People are to be guided only by their self-interest. Good government means a good balance among those interests and requires no virtue anywhere except a sharp eye and appetite for self-interest.
To both parties, government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a “taxing-machine”; to the contented, a “machine for securing property.” Its duties and faults are not those of a father, but of an energetic parish constable.
Our salvation as social beings is therefore to be secured and promoted indefinitely through the condition of the machine alone, either by preserving it untouched or by rebuilding and freshly oiling it. Construct the fabric of law correctly and, without further effort on your part, the divine spirit of freedom that all hearts honor and desire will come of herself to inhabit it. Under her healing wings, every harmful influence will wither and every good and wholesome one will increasingly flourish.
So devoted are we to this principle, and at the same time so curiously mechanical, that a new trade founded specifically upon it has arisen among us under the name of “Codification,” or code-making in the abstract. For a reasonable payment, any people may be supplied with a patent code more easily than a fastidious individual can obtain patent breeches, since the people do not need to be measured first.
Because we live amid all this and continually see everyone’s faith, hope, and practice founded on Mechanism of one kind or another, it tends to seem perfectly natural, as though things could never have been otherwise. Yet if we remember or reflect a little, we will find both that they have been otherwise and that they might become so again.
The domain of Mechanism, meaning political, ecclesiastical, and other outward establishments, was once thought to embrace only a limited part of human interests, and by no means the highest part. We are convinced that it can never embrace more.
To speak somewhat pedantically, there is a science of Dynamics in human nature and fortune as well as one of Mechanics. One science deals with and practically addresses humanity’s primary, unmodified forces and energies: the mysterious springs of Love, Fear, Wonder, Enthusiasm, Poetry, and Religion, all of which possess a truly vital and infinite character. The other practically addresses only the finite, modified forms of these energies when they appear as immediate “motives,” such as hope of reward or fear of punishment.
In former times, wise people and enlightened lovers of humanity, who usually appeared as Moralists, Poets, or Priests, dealt chiefly with the Dynamic realm without neglecting the Mechanical one. Their principal work was to regulate, increase, and purify humanity’s inward primary powers, because they believed that this was the main difficulty and the best service they could undertake.
Our age shows a striking difference. Its wise people, appearing as Political Philosophers, deal exclusively with the Mechanical realm. They count and estimate human motives and try, through elaborate systems of checks, balances, and other adjustments of Profit and Loss, to guide people toward their true advantage. Unfortunately, those same “motives” are so numerous and vary so greatly in every individual that their enumeration can never produce a genuinely useful conclusion.
Mechanism, wisely designed, has certainly done much for humanity from a social and moral point of view. Yet we cannot believe that it has ever been the principal source of human worth or happiness. Consider the great elements of human enjoyment, the attainments and possessions that have raised human life to its present height. Ask what portion we owe to institutions and Mechanism of any kind, and what portion to the instinctive, unbounded force that Nature herself originally gave us and still continues to give.
Shall we say, for example, that Science and Art are principally indebted to the founders of schools and universities? Did Science not originate and advance instead in the obscure rooms of the Roger Bacons, Keplers, and Newtons, and in the workshops of the Fausts and the Watts, wherever and in whatever form Nature, from the earliest times onward, sent a gifted spirit to earth?
Again, were Homer and Shakespeare members of some salaried guild, or made Poets by one? Were Painting and Sculpture created by planning and brought into the world by institutions established for that purpose? No. Science and Art have always been Nature’s free gift, unsolicited and unexpected, and often even fatal to the recipient. They sprang up by spontaneous growth in Nature’s free soil and sunshine. They were not planted or grafted, nor even greatly multiplied or improved through the cultivation and manure of institutions. Generally, institutions have given them only partial help and have often enough done them harm. They made their own constitutions. They originated in humanity’s Dynamic nature, not its Mechanical nature.
Or take an infinitely higher example: the Christian Religion. Under every theory of it, whether in a believing or unbelieving mind, Christianity must always be regarded as the crowning glory, or rather the life and soul, of our whole modern culture. How did Christianity arise and spread among humanity? Was it through institutions, establishments, and well-designed systems of mechanism?
It was not. On the contrary, its divine spirit has invariably languished and decayed in all past and present institutions established for those ends. It arose in the mystic depths of the human soul and spread through the “preaching of the word,” through simple, entirely natural and individual efforts. It flew like sacred fire from heart to heart until all were purified and illuminated by it, and its heavenly light shone, as it still shines and as the sun or stars will always shine, through the whole dark destiny of humanity.
Here again there was no Mechanism. Humanity’s highest attainment was accomplished Dynamically, not Mechanically. Indeed, we will venture to say that no high attainment, not even any far-reaching movement among people, has ever been accomplished in any other way.
Strange as it may seem, if we read History with any thoughtfulness, we find that the checks and balances of Profit and Loss have never been humanity’s great motivating forces. People have never been stirred to deep, thorough, all-pervading effort by any calculable prospect of Profit and Loss directed toward a visible and finite object. They have always been stirred by something invisible and infinite.
The Crusades arose from Religion. Commercially speaking, their visible object was worth nothing. The boundless Invisible world opened in the imaginations of those people, and in its burning light the visible world shrank like a scroll. This vast movement was not mechanical and was not produced by mechanical means. No dinner at Freemasons’ Tavern, with the whole long train of modern machinery, was required. There was no ingenious reconciliation of “vested interests,” only the passionate voice of one man and the enraptured soul looking through one man’s eyes. Rugged, steel-clad Europe trembled beneath his words and followed wherever he chose to lead.
In later ages it was still the same. The Reformation had an invisible, mystical, and ideal aim. Its result was indeed to be embodied in external things, but its spirit and worth were internal, invisible, and infinite. Our English Revolution also originated in Religion. Even in those days, people fought not for the sake of their purses but for the sake of conscience.
Nor is it any different in our own time. The French Revolution itself contained something higher than cheap bread and a Habeas Corpus Act. Here too was an Idea, a Dynamic rather than a Mechanical force. It was a struggle, though a blind and ultimately insane one, for the infinite and divine nature of Right, Freedom, and Country.
Thus, consciously or unconsciously, humanity vindicates its heavenly birthright in every age. Thus Nature continues on her wonderful, unquestionable course, while all our systems and theories are merely foam eddies or sandbanks that she throws up from time to time and then washes away. When we can drain the Ocean into our millponds and bottle the Force of Gravity for retail sale in gas jars, then we may hope to comprehend the infinities of the human soul in formulas of Profit and Loss and govern it like a patent engine with checks, valves, and balances.
Even in Government itself, can anyone need to be reminded that Freedom, without which all spiritual life is impossible, depends upon influences infinitely more complex than either extending or restricting the “democratic interest”? Who, “taking the high priori road,” can identify these influences or explain what deep, subtle, and inextricably entangled forces they have been and may yet be?
Humanity is not the creature and product of Mechanism. In a far truer sense, humanity creates and produces it. A noble people makes a noble Government rather than the reverse. On the whole, Institutions are much, but they are not everything.
The freest and highest spirits in the world have often appeared under strange outward conditions. Saint Paul and his fellow Apostles were political slaves, and Epictetus was personally a slave. Or forget the influences of Chivalry and Religion and ask what countries produced Columbus and Las Casas. Descending from virtue and heroism to mere energy and spiritual talent, what countries produced Cortés, Pizarro, Alba, and Jiménez?
The Spaniards of the sixteenth century were indisputably the noblest nation in Europe, yet they had the Inquisition and Philip II. They have the same government today and are now the lowest nation. The Dutch have likewise retained their old constitution, but there is no longer a Siege of Leiden among them, nor a William the Silent, nor even an Egmont or De Witt.
Among ourselves too, where much has changed, the supposed effect has not followed the cause as it should have. Two centuries ago, the Speaker of the Commons addressed Queen Elizabeth on bent knees, thankful that the fierce woman’s foot did not strike him. Yet the people were then governed not by a Castlereagh but by a Burghley. They had their Shakespeare and Philip Sidney where we have Sheridan Knowles and Beau Brummell.
These and similar facts are so familiar, and the truths they teach are so obvious and were so universally believed and acted upon in every past age, that we would almost be ashamed to repeat them. Yet everywhere their memory seems to have vanished or, at best, faded into a weak tradition with no value as a practical principle.
Judging by the loud clamor of our Constitution-builders, political thinkers, Economists, directors, creators, and reformers of Public Societies, in short, of Mechanists of every kind, from the cart-builder to the Code-maker, and judging also by the almost complete silence of the Preachers and Teachers who should give a voice to Poetry, Religion, and Morality, we might imagine one of two things. Either humanity’s Dynamic nature has become spiritually extinct, or it has been so perfected that the old means can improve it no further, leaving hope only in Mechanical contrivances.
The nature of these two fields of human activity makes it impossible to define the boundaries between them, since they work into and through each other so intricately and inseparably. Their relative importance will vary, even for the wisest mind, from one era to another according to each era’s particular needs and tendencies.
