Adventures of Ideas

SECTION II.

The history of ideas is dominated by a dichotomy which is illustrated by this comparison of Steam and Democracy in recent times to Barbarians and Christians in the classical civilization. Steam and Barbarians, each in their age, were the senseless agencies driving their respective civilizations away from inherited modes of order. These senseless agencies are what Greek writers somtimes [e.g. in the Timaus of Plato, and passim throughout general literature] call 'compulsion' [anagkh], and sometimes 'violence' [ bia].

They are apt to speak of 'compulsion' when these appear with a general coordination among themselves and agencres, and of 'violence' when they appear as a welter of sporadic outbursts. It is one task of history to display the types of compulsion and of violence characteristic of each age. On the other hand, Democracy in modern times and Christianity in the Roman Empire, exemplify articulated beliefs issuing from aspirations, and issumg into asprrations. Their force was that of consciously formulated ideals at odds with the ancestral pieties which had preserved and modulated existing social institutions. For example. we find the Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria exhorting his contemporaries to shun custom [ sunhqeia ]. These Christian ideals were among the persuasive agencies re-fashioning their respective ages.

The well-marked transition from one age into another can always be traced to some analogues to Steam and Democracy, or-- if you prefer it-- to some analogues to Barbarians and Christians. Senseless agencies and formulated aspirations cooperate in the work of driving mankind from its old anchorage. Sometimes the period of change is an age of hope, sometimes it is an age of despair. When mankind has slipped its cables. sometimes it is bent on the discovery of a New World, and sometimes it is haunted by the dim sound of the breakers dashing on the rocks ahead. The Fall of the Roman Em-pire occurred in a prolonged age of despair: Steam and Democracy belong to an age of hope. It is easy to exaggerate the contrast between these two kinds of ages of transition. It all depends upon the surviving records. Whose feelings do they express? After all. even during the worst Period of the decline of Rome the barbarians were enjoying themselves. To Attila and his hordes their incursion into Europe was an enjoyable episode diversifying the monotonous round of a pastoral life. But we have preserved for us hymns and ejaculations of sentinels in North Italian towns as they paced the walls amid the gathering gloom of a winter's night: 'From the fury of the Huns, Good Lord deliver us.' In this instance it seems easy to discriminate; barbarism and civiliza-tion were at odds with each other, and we stand for civilization. I waive the point that we now know something about the social state of central Asia at that epoch, and that the imagination of a sentinel on the walls of Padua or Aquileia was not quite adequate in its presentation of the Huns.

In every age of well-marked transition there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing, and there is on-coming of a new complex of habit. Between the two lies a zone of anarchy, either a passing danger or a prolonged welter involving misery of decay and zest of young life. In our estimate of these agencies everything depends upon our standpoint of criticism. In other words, our history of ideas is derivative from our ideas of history, that is to say, upon our own intellectual standpoint. Mankind is not wholly dumb, and in this respect it differs from other races of animals. Yet in the history of the world of animals even among the ancestors of men, there have been transitions of pattems of habit which exemplify a history of forms of behaviour devoid of any contemporary intellectual expression, either in the form of antecedently expressed purpose or in the form of subsequently expressed reflection. For example, at a remote period urged by the growth of forests some mammals ascended trees and became apes; and then later, after the lapse of some vast period, urged by the decay of forests, the same race descended from trees and became men . We have here history on its senseless side, with its transitions pushed forward either by rainfall and trees, or by brute barbarians, or by coal, steam, electricity and oil. Yet even the senseless side of history refuses to accept its own proper category of sheer senselessness. The rainfall and the trees are items in a majestic order of nature: Attila's Huns had their own intellectual pioint of view in some respects surprisingly preferable to that of the degenerate Romans: the age of coal and steam was pierced through and through by the intellectual abilities of particular men who urged forward the transition. But finally, with all this qualification, rainfall and Huns and steam-engines represent brute necessity, as conceived in Greek thought, urging forward mankind apart from any human conception of an end intellectually expressed. Fragmentary intellectual agencies cooperated blindly to turn apes into men, to turn the classic civilization into mediaeval Europe, to overwhelm the Renaissance by the industrial revolution. Men knew not what they did.