The Unity of Civilization

. Yet reflection on this doctrine will show that it is not only consistent with a serious and steady interest in what is called Antiquity (and indeed in the past in general), bu

he race or in that of individual, the Ariadne-clue which we here call 'the unity of History' it vanishes somewhere beyond our vision into the dark backward and abysm of time. True, of late Archaeology and Anthropology have cast their search-lights into the darkness, piercing a little deeper than of old into the mists that surround the origins of our civilization; but before that dimly illuminated region of pre-history there still lies, and will always l

st or the future that we live, that we act and are acted upon, determine or have determined for us what we do or are to do, what we suffer or are to suffer. The present alone is real, and of the real alone is genuine knowledge possible. But if this is so, it is also so that of this alone does it import us to ascertain the true nature. What we have to discover (or perish in our blindness) is what we now are and where we now sta

formative in our inward selves or our outward environment-in a word what is contemporary, contemporary with our present doings and sufferings. To such a present it is idle to attempt to fix limits of date before or behind. A new conception of the unity of History rises before us as we realize that th

ue their dateless activities, so our spirits, our minds, our very selves are the forms in which other spirits now forgotten or dimly remembered still live and move and have their being, fulfilling the work which, while still their names were named, they initiated or advanced. Not in pious gratitude only must we labour to rescue their memory from fast-coming oblivion, but because only so can we reach that knowledge of ourselves and our world which is to us as living men all and alone important. Nor will such study deny to us the reward we seek. So approaching the labours of the historian, we shall not be jealous because he comes before us with a tale, or as we call it, with a 'story'-

hen were the foundations of both laid, not merely in the sense that we are heirs to the labours of our ancestors. We are the Greeks and the Romans, made what we now are by their deeds and thoughts and experiences, our world their world, at a later stage of an evolution never interrupted but always one and single. Our births and

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ve been makes

Antiquity-not merely in that of gratitude and reverence, not certainly in that of idle and futile c

the true beginning of the modern mind and its world-our mind and our world-lies later and elsewhere than in Classical Antiquity. The birthday and birthplace of that mind and its world have been variously fixed. We have been bidden to find the one, say, as late as the sixteenth century and the other-not from the same point of view-in the plains and woods of Northern Europe or in the deserts of Arabia or in some still more vaguely indicated region of the East. But I must avow my conviction that our civilization-and I specially remember that we are Englishmen-is not only in origin but in essence, Greco-Roman, modified no doubt by influences unknown to that in its earlier stages, but still Greco-Roman grown to a larger stature and a clearer self-consciousness, self-shaped to its present form, the

ved, what we believed, what we, in our later maturity, designed and in part executed. If we turn inward we cannot read them there, for the characters are small and faded; but as we hear their history recounted as it is by professional historians, we recogniz

and institutions, are rooted and from which we draw no small part of our spiritual sustenance. Hence it is highly pertinent here and now to examine them, for in this identity of foundation is to be found the primary unity of the now diffused life of Europe which has parted into so many and so widely divergent currents of national life. We all come spiritually from the same ancient home, and it

the latter and attempting, not without success, to establish it in actual reality. No doubt before them men had felt the pressure of barbarism within and without, and had framed dreams of something better, but it was the Greeks who first defined and conceived the ideal and so made it possible to realize it. Their distinctive peculiarity lay in their setting themselves not merely to imagine but to think out an ideal of civilized life, and narrowly and abstractly as to the end they conceived this ideal, they discerned the main essential lines of its structure, the permanent laws of its development and well-being. In doing this they discovered the need and effica

eedom rendered one another possible. We may amend our formula and re-state their contribution as the idea and fact of civilization regarded as a process in and to Freedom under the control of Knowledge or Reason, each inspiring, guiding, and fertilizing the other. Theory and practice thus co-operate and help one another forward; each in its advance liberates the other for a further effort. The several faculties of

f these groups within itself (for each, we might almost say normally, was torn by intestine faction). It is a commonplace also that Greek civilization rested upon slavery, so that barbarism was not expelled but remained as a domestic and ever-present evil. Freedom and enlightenment was not in thought or practice designed for all men, but only for Greeks, and among them only in reality for a privileged minority. The notion of a civilized world or even a civilized Greece was, if present at all, present only in feeling or imagination, not in clear vision or distinct thought, still less as an ideal of practical politics. On the other hand the ideal so narrowl

mory what the spirit which now lives and moves in us not only once accomplished but still in each new generation accomplishes, accomplishing ever the better if it repeats its former achievements with increased consciousness and more deliberate care. We too here and now have to define what we mean by civilization, by knowledge, by freedom. Otherwise our future will be determined for us, and not by us. 'What is to come out of this struggle? Just anything that may come out of it, or something we mean shall come out of it?' Assuredly, if we are not to stand bankrupt before our present problem, w

ld of dignified and beautiful humanity. 'No thorn or threat stains its beauty bright.' On the whole the gods which are its denizens are humanized and humane, the friends and allies of men, who therefore feel themselves not abased or helpless in their relations with them. 'Of one kind are gods and men,' and their common world is one in which men feel themselves at home. Dark shadows there are, but they hide no mysteries to appal and unman. The imagination is free to foll

st took the measure of the Universe in which they lived, asserting the mind of man to be its measure, and it amenable and subject to reason. The world they lived in was not only beautiful to the imagination, it was also reasonable, penetrable, and governable by the intellect. The ways of it and everything in it were regular and orderly, predictable, explicable not eccentric, erratic, baffling and inscrutable. Not only was Nature knowable; it was also through knowledge of it m

holly so successful advances in Physics and Chemistry, in Botany and Zoology, in Anatomy and Physiology. Doubtless, especially in the case of the Sciences where experiments are required and have proved so fertile in the extension of our knowledge, there were grave defects, and too much trust was placed in mere observation and hasty speculation; but what they accomplished in Science is no less but more marvellous

t and not its master-at the same time finally liberating itself from the narrowing and blinding influences of passion and imagination and all the shackles of merely practical needs and disabilities. Here too it fixed the idea or the ideal. 'Life without reflection upon life, without self-examination and self-study and self-knowledge, is a life not worth living by man.' In doing so it revealed a self deeper than the physical being of man and an environment wider and more real-more stable and permanent-tha

als and under exceptionally favourable circumstances. Yet in principle it was open to all, and certainly not confined to those privileged by birth or wealth or social position. It was not the reward of magical favour or ascetic exercises, it was reached by the beaten path of the loyal citizen and the resolute student. There was about it no esoteric mystery or other-

that I have dwelt too much on theory, and have not said enough of the specific contribution of Greece as working out in practice a certain type or types of corporate life such as the City State; but the fact is that in Greek civilization theory continually outran practice and that it endowed mankind much more with ideas or ideals than with practical illustra

l youth of Greece, (the Greeks were 'always children') but they are well aware of how much they learned and had to learn from their predecessors in the task of civilizing the world. So much is this so that in many departments of civilized life they look upon themselves as imitating the Greeks and carrying out their ideas. In this they were less than just to themselves, for even in the world of art they continued to create; and certainly in literature they produced works not unworthy to stand beside their chosen models. Especially they created a prose style, whic

achievements which most deeply moulded the fabric of Europe. The latter is the greater loss, and here we must remember that it is the history of Imperial Rome that is most relevant to our purpose and most informative. Under the Empire Rome worked as a master, no longer as an apprentice or a journeyman. The theatre of her civilizing activities was here little less than the whole world then known, and the boast is not unjustified that she made into a city what had formerly been but a world, as we might say, merely a geographical expression. The record

the necessity of organization was equally grasped, insisted upon, realized. The civilized world was covered with a network of institutions through which the will of the Emperor flowed and circulated throughout the Empire. Peace through system and order-that was the secret of the Roman success. But two other ideas must be added to complete the explanation. The one was the idea or ideal of Justice; no system and no order could work unless it was, and commended itself to its subjects as being, scrupulously and exactly jus

ts phantom survival in the ghostly form of the Holy Roman Empire. But I would point to the way in which it still-in thought-controls us when without essential alteration of the idea we transfer its application to the nation and still look for the secret of its peace and strength in an organization of all its activities under a law proceeding from and enforced by a sovereign will resident somewhere within its structure, a law demanding and receiving obedien

decline and fall, though a few words on them may not be out of place. In the first place it declined and fell because those who administered ignored its economic substructure, paying no attention to the causes which were undermining its very material basis, or the enormous suffering which the neglect and consequent disorganization of that entailed. In the second, and partly because of that neglect, they did not sufficiently strengthen its defences against external attack; I do not so much mean in the way of remissness in military preparation as by a surcease of the former policy of bringing their barbarous or semi-civilized neighbours into the higher system, and so extending the range of civilization. It is perhaps fanciful to suggest that we are now suffering the penalty of

in any real sense seems to me an unsubstantial dream-the administration of a belated nostrum for our disease, not a panacea. Not that way do the lessons of history point. The Roman ideal must be transformed, must be reborn, if it is not to lead our anticipations and our actions wholly astray. No more in the political or secular sphere than in the spiritual or ecclesiastical is 'Romanism' a possible guide to the reconstruc

e ends in the means, securing a peace, a comfort, an ease, a leisure of which they made no particularly valuable use. It has been said that at no time in the world's history were civilized men so happy as under the Roman Empire. It might be said with greater truth that at no time were civilized men so unhappy, for the happiness that was theirs was empty, mere dead-sea fruit, dust and ashes in the mouth; a very Death in

es can only work fugitively, erratically, and so ineffectively, as they did in the Greek world. To the prosaic business of creating or recreating and maintaining in being such a structure a large part of our energies must be devoted, and in all this from the Romans we have still much to learn. If we decline to learn and digest this lesson, turning from such concernment in disgust or disdain, our lives will be lost in vain dreams, in idle longings and empty regrets; and the kingdom of

is ours a thing worth living and dying for; still they hold us together in a unity and concord deeper than ever plummet can sound, obscured but not destroyed by the present noise and confusion of battle. Still at heart we care-and not we only but also our enemies and all neutrals benevolent or malevolent-for the ends for which civilization exists, for the peace and order and justice which are their necessary conditions: we still have minds to devise and wi

forth by Benedetto Croce, of Naples, from whose works several expressions ha

FOR RE

read not as philosophy, but as history guided and enli

iving Past. C

ckwood. (For a brief but pregnant account consult We

the Greek Genius ('What we

the Greek Epic.

Rome. Home Univ

Roman Empir