The Evolution of States. J. M. Robertson
special drawbacks, so that great retrogression may follow on great development, especially when adventitious sources of wealth are the foundation of a luxurious culture. In some cases a great development may be dependent on an exhaustible source of wealth, as in the case of Britain's coal supply, the empire of ancient Rome, the primacy of the Pope before the Reformation, or even the Periclean empire of Athens, and the trade monopolies of Venice, the Hansa Towns, and the Dutch Republic.
(11) The expression "decay" as applied to a people, however, has only a relative significance: used absolutely, it stands for a delusion. Economic conditions may worsen, and military power decline; but such processes imply no physiological degeneration. All the "dead" civilisations of the past were overthrown or absorbed by military violence; and there is no known case of a nation physically well placed dying out.
Professor W.D. Whitney, who is usually so well worth listening to, fails to recognise this fact in his interesting essay on "China and the Chinese" (Oriental and Linguistic Studies, 2nd series). He declares that "according to the ordinary march of events in human history, the Chinese empire should have perished from decay, and its culture either have become extinct or have passed into the keeping of another race, more than two thousand years ago. It had already reached the limit to its capacity of development" (p. 88). Similarly Ratzel pronounces (History of Mankind, Eng. tr. 1896, i, 26) that "Voltaire hits the point when he says Nature has given the Chinese the organ for discovering all that is useful to them, but not for going any further." Voltaire never penned such a "bull." He wrote (Essai sur les mœurs, Avant-Propos, ch. i), "Il semble que la Nature ait donné," and "nécessaire," not "useful." Even that has a touch of paralogism; but the great essayist goes on to suggest two causes for Chinese conservatism—their ancestral piety and the nature of their method of writing. The first is a pseudo-explanation; the second is a vera causa, though only one of those involved. The German specialist of to-day is really further from the scientific point of view than the French wit of the middle of the eighteenth century, going on as he does to decide that "defect in their endowments" causes the mediocrity of the Chinese, and "also is the sole cause of the rigidity in their social system."
This is a vain saying; and it is no less vain to go on to ask, as Professor Whitney does, what has become of Egypt, of the Phœnicians and Hebrews, of the Persians, of Greece and Rome, and of Spain. The answer is easy. Egypt was conquered, and the old race still reproduces itself, in vassalage. The "Pelasgic" civilisation of ancient Greece was absorbed by the Greek invaders. The "Mycenæan" and "Minoan" civilisations, as seen in ancient Troy and "Minoan" Crete, were conquered and partly absorbed. The Phœnicians and Hebrews were destroyed or absorbed. The Persians are at present retrograde, but may rise again.[143] Rome and Greece were successively overrun by barbarism. Spain, like Italy, retrograded, but, like Italy, is on the path of regeneration. In all these cases the process of causation is obvious. No nation dies or disappears save by violence; and, given the proper conditions, all races are capable of progress indefinitely. China, though unprogressive in comparison with a European State, has changed in many respects within two thousand years—nay, within twenty.[144] Professor Whitney adopts an empirical convention, and accordingly misses any real elucidation of the problem of Chinese sociology, which he assumes to solve (p. 87) by saying we must look for our explanations "deep in the foundations of the national character itself." That is to say, the national character is determined by the national character.
It is surely time that this palæo-theological fashion of explaining human affairs were superseded by the more fruitful method of positive science, even as regards China, which is perhaps the worst explained of all sociological cases. Like others, it had been intelligently taken up by sociologists of the eighteenth century before the conservative reaction (see the Esprit des Lois, vii, 6; viii, 21; x, 15; xiv, 8; xviii, 6; xix, 13–20; Dunbar's Essays, as cited, pp. 257, 258, 262, 263, 321; and Walckenaer, Essai cited, pp. 175, 176); but that impetus seems to have been thus far almost entirely lost. Voltaire's fallacy is remembered and his truth ignored; and the methods of theology continue to be applied to many questions of moral science after they have been wholly cast out of physics and biology. The old "falsisms" of empirical politics are repeated even by professed biologists when they enter on the field of social science. Thus we have seen them accepted by Dr. Draper, and we find Professor Huxley (Evolution and Ethics, Romanes Lecture for 1893, p. 4) rhetorically putting "that successive rise, apogee, and fall of dynasties and states which is the most prominent topic of civil history," as scientifically analogous to the process of growth and decay and death in the human organism. Any comparative study of history shows the analogy to be spurious. Professor Whitney was doubtless influenced, like Dr. Draper, by the American habit of regarding European and ancient civilisations as necessarily decrepit because "slow" and "old." Cp. Draper as cited, ii, 393–98.
In the cases above dealt with, however, and in many others, there is seen to have been intellectual decay, in the sense of, first, a cessation of forward movement, and, next, a loss of the power to appreciate ideas once current. A common cause of such paralysis of the higher life is the malignant action of dogmatic religious systems, as in the cases of Persia, Jewry, Byzantium, Islam, Spain under Catholicism, and Scotland for two centuries under Protestantism. Such paralysis by religion may arise alike in a highly-organised but isolated State like Byzantium, and in a semi-civilised country like Anglo-Saxon England.[145] The special malignity of dogma in these cases is itself of course a matter for analysis and explanation. Other cases are partly to be explained by (a) the substitution of systematic militarism, always fatal to progressive culture, for a life of only occasional warfare, favourable to study among the leisured class.[146] But (b) there is reason to surmise a further and profoundly important cause of intellectual retrogression in the usage which develops the culture of a people for the most part in one sex only. The thesis may be ventured that whereas vigorous and creative brains may arise in abundance in a young civilisation, where the sexes are physiologically not far removed from the approximate equality of the semi-barbarous stage, the psychological divergence set up by mentally and physically training the males and not the females is likely to be unfavourable to the breeding of mentally energetic types.
(12) Whether or not the last hypothesis be valid, it is clear that the co-efficient or constituent of intellectual progress in a people, given the necessary conditions of peace and sufficient food, is multiplication of ideas; and this primarily results from international contact, or the contact of wholly or partly independent communities of one people. Multiplication of arts and crafts is of course included under the head of ideas. But unless the stock of ideas is not merely in constant process of being added to among the studious or leisured class, but disseminated among the other classes, stagnation will take place among these, and will inevitably infect the educated class.
De Tocqueville, balancing somewhat inconclusively, because always in vacuo, the forces affecting literature in aristocratic and democratic societies, says decisively enough (Démocratie en Amérique, ed. 1850, ii, 62–63) that "Toute aristocratie qui se met entièrement à part du peuple devient impuissante. Cela est vrai dans les lettres aussi bien qu'en politique." This holds clearly enough of Italian literature in the despotic period. Mr. Godkin's criticism (Problems of Modern Democracy, p. 56) that "M. de Tocqueville and all his followers take it for granted that the great incentive to excellence, in all countries in which excellence is found, is the patronage and encouragement of an aristocracy," is hardly accurate. De Tocqueville puts the case judicially enough, so far as he goes; and Mr. Godkin falls into strange extravagance in his counter statement that there is "hardly a single historical work composed prior to the end of the last [eighteenth] century, except perhaps Gibbon's, which, judged by the standard that the criticism of our day has set up, would not, though written for the 'few,' be pronounced careless, slipshod, or superficial." Tillemont, by the testimony of Professor Bury, was a more thorough worker in his special line than Gibbon. It would be easy to name scores of writers in various branches of history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whom no good critic to-day would call careless