II

The stage of development of Humanity as a whole must be gauged by the outer edge, so to speak, of progress that is, by the most advanced indications in the most advanced people at the period; it is in them that humanity is for the nonce most fully embodied and realised. They alone give the tone to all the rest. For instance, until about the sixth century the Oriental monarchies represented this “human spirit” (to employ a Germanism), the Aryan races being far behind them. The torch then passed on to South Eastern Europe, which became the head-quarters of advancing human energy. In the Middle Ages the ancestors of the modern races of Western Europe embodied the active principle of human progress, etc. When once the particular stage has been reached and passed by the races in the van of progress – although to attain it they may have required a long and arduous development – it is henceforth achieved for all progressive races. The complete evolution which led up to it having once been passed through in its entirety by the highest group of races at the time being, can be attained by all less advanced races without passing through the same development. Thus the economic condition of Western Europe to-day has implied a development of four hundred years from medieval conditions. Yet this does not mean that backward races, in which the level of production corresponds to that of the Middle Ages with us, will require at this date to wait four hundred years before they reach the present condition of Western Europe. They may easily attain it in ten years. Russia, for instance, affords an illustration of this. Where but yesterday mediaeval methods of individualist production prevailed, to-day we see the great industry in its rankest growth. The same with the intellectual side of things. The most advanced thought of Western Europe subsists there side by aide with the most archaic superstition. Yet with these facts before their eyes, writers, who ought to know better, base arguments respecting the future on the relative backwardness of Russia at the present moment! The most advanced races, those in which the genius humunitatis is embodied at the time, workout a development vicariously, so to say, for the rest, who merely adopt its result. These latter may then easily take the lead in progress (start a new development of their own) while their superiors of yesterday fall into the background. This has been persistently the case throughout history.

Historic evolution, though one movement, is not the movement of one people or society, but a movement which passes through and uses up or exhausts, so to say, whole races one after the other. Indeed, the races touched by the breath of the movement of history, while receiving the seal of everlasting life in one sense, that is, as embodying a moment of historic evolution, receive the seal of death in another, that is, as actually existent races. The African savage untouched by civilisation lives on to-day as he was in Pliny’s time, and as he might be two thousand years hence, so far as internal causes of decay are concerned. But what of the nations of Asia Minor, the Cilicians, the Lydians, the Carians, etc.? What of the Phoenicians, the Assyrians, the Hittites? Or, for that matter, what of the classical nations of Greece and Italy themselves, who can hardly be said to survive in their modern representatives? Each race that is drawn into the evolution of human society brings with it, besides its own grade of development, its own ethnical character, that is, the character it has had impressed upon it by climatic, topographical, and other considerations. This is one of the cardinal difficulties in an appreciation of history. Another difficulty is in the many-sided nature of human development. Although unquestionably the domestic and economical aspects of human affairs are the fundamental aspects – although industrial development is their foundation – yet social development is not purely industrial, but political, imaginative, religious, ethical, in addition. Were, for example, the historical order, the exact counterpart of the logical and were the development, a purely economical one taking place in one continuous society, we should find something like the logical process presented. But in the real process of history a particular aspect may be accelerated, retarded, or hold in solution at any stage. Archaic, domestic, and economic forms are preserved in religious beliefs and observances, etc.