| CHAPTER XXXIII
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| A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904)
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| A DYNAMIC theory, like most theories, begins by begging the
question: it defines Progress as the development and economy of
Forces. Further, it defines force as anything that does, or helps
to do work. Man is a force; so is the sun; so is a mathematical
point, though without dimensions or known existence.
| 1 | |
| Man commonly begs the question again taking for granted that he
captures the forces. A dynamic theory, assigning attractive force
to opposing bodies in proportion to the law of mass, takes for
granted that the forces of nature capture man. The sum of force
attracts; the feeble atom or molecule called man is attracted; he
suffers education or growth; he is the sum of the forces that
attract him; his body and his thought are alike their product;
the movement of the forces controls the progress of his mind,
since he can know nothing but the motions which impinge on his
senses, whose sum makes education.
| 2 | |
| For convenience as an image, the theory may liken man to a
spider in its web, watching for chance prey. Forces of nature
dance like flies before the net, and the spider pounces on them
when it can; but it makes many fatal mistakes, though its theory
of force is sound. The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory,
and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking
apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of
its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or
synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the
honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire
taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running
water probably taught him even more, especially in his first
lessons of mechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting
themselves into his hands merely for the sake of their food, and
carrying his burdens or supplying his clothing; the grasses and
grains were academies of study. With little or no effort on his
part, all these forces formed his thought, induced his action,
and even shaped his figure.
| 3 | |
| Long before history began, his education was complete, for the
record could not have been started until he had been taught to
record. The universe that had formed him took shape in his mind
as a reflection of his own unity, containing all forces except
himself. Either separately, or in groups, or as a whole, these
forces never ceased to act on him, enlarging his mind as they
enlarged the surface foliage of a vegetable, and the mind needed
only to respond, as the forests did, to these attractions.
Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius;
selection between them is the highest science; their mass is the
highest educator. Man always made, and still makes, grotesque
blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from
the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the
whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To
this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though
science can no longer give to force a name.
| 4 | |
| Man's function as a force of nature was to assimilate other
forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power. He
felt his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a
bow or a sling, to widen his range of power, as he sough fetish
or a planet in the world beyond. He cared little to know its
immediate use, but he could afford to throw nothing away which he
could conceive to have possible value in this or any other
existence. He waited for the object to teach him its use, or want
of use, and the process was slow. He may have gone on for
hundreds of thousands of years, waiting for Nature to tell him
her secrets; and, to his rivals among the monkeys, Nature has
taught no more than at their start; but certain lines of force
were capable of acting on individual apes, and mechanically
selecting types of race or sources of variation. The individual
that responded or reacted to lines of new force then was possibly
the same individual that reacts on it now, and his conception of
the unity seems never to have changed in spite of the increasing
diversity of forces; but the theory of variation is an affair of
other science than history, and matters nothing to dynamics. The
individual or the race would be educated on the same lines of
illusion, which, according to Arthur Balfour, had not essentially
varied down to the year 1900.
| 5 | |
| To the highest attractive energy, man gave the name of divine,
and for its control he invented the science called Religion, a
word which meant, and still means, cultivation of occult force
whether in detail or mass. Unable to define Force as a unity, man
symbolized it and pursued it, both in himself, and in the
infinite, as philosophy and theology; the mind is itself the
subtlest of all known forces, and its self-introspection
necessarily created a science which had the singular value of
lifting his education, at the start, to the finest, subtlest, and
broadest training both in analysis and synthesis, so that, if
language is a test, he must have reached his highest powers early
in his history; while the mere motive remained as simple an
appetite for power as the tribal greed which led him to trap an
elephant. Hunger, whether for food or for the infinite, sets in
motion multiplicity and infinity of thought, and the sure hope of
gaining a share of infinite power in eternal life would lift most
minds to effort.
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| He had reached this completeness five thousand years ago, and
added nothing to his stock of known forces for a very long time.
The mass of nature exercised on him so feeble an attraction that
one can scarcely account for his apparent motion. Only a
historian of very exceptional knowledge would venture to say at
what date between 3000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., the momentum of Europe
was greatest; but such progress as the world made consisted in
economies of energy rather than in its development; it was proved
in mathematics, measured by names like Archimedes, Aristarchus,
Ptolemy, and Euclid; or in Civil Law, measured by a number of
names which Adams had begun life by failing to learn; or in
coinage, which was most beautiful near its beginning, and most
barbarous at its close; or it was shown in roads, or the size of
ships, or harbors; or by the use of metals, instruments, and
writing; all of them economies of force, sometimes more forceful
than the forces they helped; but the roads were still travelled
by the horse, the ass, the camel, or the slave; the ships were
still propelled by sails or oars; the lever, the spring, and the
screw bounded the region of applied mechanics. Even the metals
were old.
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| Much the same thing could be said of religious or supernatural
forces. Down to the year 300 of the Christian era they were
little changed, and in spite of Plato and the sceptics were more
apparently chaotic than ever. The experience of three thousand
years had educated society to feel the vastness of Nature, and
the infinity of her resources of power, but even this increase of
attraction had not yet caused economies in its methods of
pursuit.
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| There the Western world stood till the year A.D. 305, when the
Emperor Diocletian abdicated; and there it was that Adams broke
down on the steps of Ara Coeli, his path blocked by the
scandalous failure of civilization at the moment it had achieved
complete success. In the year 305 the empire had solved the
problems of Europe more completely than they have ever been
solved since. The Pax Romana, the Civil Law, and Free Trade
should, in four hundred years, have put Europe far in advance of
the point reached by modern society in the four hundred years
since 1500, when conditions were less simple.
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| The efforts to explain, or explain away, this scandal had been
incessant, but none suited Adams unless it were the economic
theory of adverse exchanges and exhaustion of minerals; but
nations are not ruined beyond a certain point by adverse
exchanges, and Rome had by no means exhausted her resources. On
the contrary, the empire developed resources and energies quite
astounding. No other four hundred years of history before A.D.
1800 knew anything like it; and although some of these
developments, like the Civil Law, the roads, aqueducts, and
harbors, were rather economies than force, yet in northwestern
Europe alone the empire had developed three energies -- France,
England, and Germany -- competent to master the world. The
trouble seemed rather to be that the empire developed too much
energy, and too fast.
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| A dynamic law requires that two masses -- nature and man --
must go on, reacting upon each other, without stop, as the sun
and a comet react on each other, and that any appearance of
stoppage is illusive. The theory seems to exact excess, rather
than deficiency, of action and reaction to account for the
dissolution of the Roman Empire, which should, as a problem of
mechanics, have been torn to pieces by acceleration. If the
student means to try the experiment of framing a dynamic law, he
must assign values to the forces of attraction that caused the
trouble; and in this case he has them in plain evidence. With the
relentless logic that stamped Roman thought, the empire, which
had established unity on earth, could not help establishing unity
in heaven. It was induced by its dynamic necessities to economize
the gods.
| 11 | |
| The Church has never ceased to protest against the charge that
Christianity ruined the empire, and, with its usual force, has
pointed out that its reforms alone saved the State. Any dynamic
theory gladly admits it. All it asks is to find and follow the
force that attracts. The Church points out this force in the
Cross, and history needs only to follow it. The empire loudly
asserted its motive. Good taste forbids saying that Constantine
the Great speculated as audaciously as a modern stock-broker on
values of which he knew at the utmost only the volume; or that he
merged all uncertain forces into a single trust, which he
enormously overcapitalized, and forced on the market; but this is
the substance of what Constantine himself said in his Edict of
Milan in the year 313, which admitted Christianity into the Trust
of State Religions. Regarded as an Act of Congress, it runs: "We
have resolved to grant to Christians as well as all others the
liberty to practice the religion they prefer, in order that
whatever exists of divinity or celestial power may help and favor
us and all who are under our government." The empire pursued
power -- not merely spiritual but physical -- in the sense in
which Constantine issued his army order the year before, at the
battle of the Milvian Bridge: In hoc signo vinces! using the
Cross as a train of artillery, which, to his mind, it was.
Society accepted it in the same character. Eighty years
afterwards, Theodosius marched against his rival Eugene with the
Cross for physical champion; and Eugene raised the image of
Hercules to fight for the pagans; while society on both sides
looked on, as though it were a boxing-match, to decide a final
test of force between the divine powers. The Church was powerless
to raise the ideal. What is now known as religion affected the
mind of old society but little. The laity, the people, the
million, almost to a man, bet on the gods as they bet on a horse.
| 12 | |
| No doubt the Church did all it could to purify the process, but
society was almost wholly pagan in its point of view, and was
drawn to the Cross because, in its system of physics, the Cross
had absorbed all the old occult or fetish-power. The symbol
represented the sum of nature - the Energy of modern science -
and society believed it to be as real as X-rays; perhaps it was!
The emperors used it like gunpowder in politics; the physicians
used it like rays in medicine; the dying clung to it as the
quintessence of force, to protect them from the forces of evil on
their road to the next life.
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| Throughout these four centuries the empire knew that religion
disturbed economy, for even the cost of heathen incense affected
the exchanges; but no one could afford to buy or construct a
costly and complicated machine when he could hire an occult force
at trifling expense. Fetish-power was cheap and satisfactory,
down to a certain point. Turgot and Auguste Comte long ago fixed
this stage of economy as a necessary phase of social education,
and historians seem now to accept it as the only gain yet made
towards scientific history. Great numbers of educated people --
perhaps a majority -- cling to the method still, and practice it
more or less strictly; but, until quite recently, no other was
known. The only occult power at man's disposal was fetish.
Against it, no mechanical force could compete except within
narrow limits.
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| Outside of occult or fetish-power, the Roman world was
incredibly poor. It knew but one productive energy resembling a
modern machine -- the slave. No artificial force of serious value
was applied to production or transportation, and when society
developed itself so rapidly in political and social lines, it had
no other means of keeping its economy on the same level than to
extend its slave-system and its fetish-system to the utmost.
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| The result might have been stated in a mathematical formula as
early as the time of Archimedes, six hundred years before Rome
fell. The economic needs of a violently centralizing society
forced the empire to enlarge its slave-system until the
slave-system consumed itself and the empire too, leaving society
no resource but further enlargement of its religious system in
order to compensate for the losses and horrors of the failure.
For a vicious circle, its mathematical completeness approached
perfection. The dynamic law of attraction and reaction needed
only a Newton to fix it in algebraic form.
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| At last, in 410, Alaric sacked Rome, and the slave-ridden,
agricultural, uncommercial Western Empire -- the poorer and less
Christianized half -- went to pieces. Society, though terribly
shocked by the horrors of Alaric's storm, felt still more deeply
the disappointment in its new power, the Cross, which had failed
to protect its Church. The outcry against the Cross became so
loud among Christians that its literary champion, Bishop
Augustine of Hippo -- a town between Algiers and Tunis -- was led
to write a famous treatise in defence of the Cross, familiar
still to every scholar, in which he defended feebly the
mechanical value of the symbol -- arguing only that pagan symbols
equally failed -- but insisted on its spiritual value in the
Civitas Dei which had taken the place of the Civitas Romae in
human interest. "Granted that we have lost all we had! Have we
lost faith? Have we lost piety? Have we lost the wealth of the
inner man who is rich before God? These are the wealth of
Christians!" The Civitas Dei, in its turn, became the sum of
attraction for the Western world, though it also showed the same
weakness in mechanics that had wrecked the Civitas Romae. St.
Augustine and his people perished at Hippo towards 430, leaving
society in appearance dull to new attraction.
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| Yet the attraction remained constant. The delight of
experimenting on occult force of every kind is such as to absorb
all the free thought of the human race. The gods did their work;
history has no quarrel with them; they led, educated, enlarged
the mind; taught knowledge; betrayed ignorance; stimulated
effort. So little is known about the mind -- whether social,
racial, sexual or heritable; whether material or spiritual;
whether animal, vegetable or mineral -- that history is inclined
to avoid it altogether; but nothing forbids one to admit, for
convenience, that it may assimilate food like the body, storing
new force and growing, like a forest, with the storage. The brain
has not yet revealed its mysterious mechanism of gray matter.
Never has Nature offered it so violent a stimulant as when she
opened to it the possibility of sharing infinite power in eternal
life, and it might well need a thousand years of prolonged and
intense experiment to prove the value of the motive. During these
so-called Middle Ages, the Western mind reacted in many forms, on
many sides, expressing its motives in modes, such as Romanesque
and Gothic architecture, glass windows and mosaic walls,
sculpture and poetry, war and love, which still affect some
people as the noblest work of man, so that, even to-day, great
masses of idle and ignorant tourists travel from far countries to
look at Ravenna and San Marco, Palermo and Pisa, Assisi, Cordova,
Chartres, with vague notions about the force that created them,
but with a certain surprise that a social mind of such singular
energy and unity should still lurk in their shadows.
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| The tourist more rarely visits Constantinople or studies the
architecture of Sancta Sofia, but when he does, he is distinctly
conscious of forces not quite the same. Justinian has not the
simplicity of Charlemagne. The Eastern Empire showed an activity
and variety of forces that classical Europe had never possessed.
The navy of Nicephoras Phocas in the tenth century would have
annihilated in half an hour any navy that Carthage or Athens or
Rome ever set afloat. The dynamic scheme began by asserting
rather recklessly that between the Pyramids (B.C. 3000), and the
Cross (A.D. 300), no new force affected Western progress, and
antiquarians may easily dispute the fact; but in any case the
motive influence, old or new, which raised both Pyramids and
Cross was the same attraction of power in a future life that
raised the dome of Sancta Sofia and the Cathedral at Amiens,
however much it was altered, enlarged, or removed to distance in
space. Therefore, no single event has more puzzled historians
than the sudden, unexplained appearance of at least two new
natural forces of the highest educational value in mechanics, for
the first time within record of history. Literally, these two
forces seemed to drop from the sky at the precise moment when the
Cross on one side and the Crescent on the other, proclaimed the
complete triumph of the Civitas Dei. Had the Manichean doctrine
of Good and Evil as rival deities been orthodox, it would alone
have accounted for this simultaneous victory of hostile powers.
| 19 | |
| Of the compass, as a step towards demonstration of the dynamic
law, one may confidently say that it proved, better than any
other force, the widening scope of the mind, since it widened
immensely the range of contact between nature and thought. The
compass educated. This must prove itself as needing no proof.
| 20 | |
| Of Greek fire and gunpowder, the same thing cannot certainly be
said, for they have the air of accidents due to the attraction of
religious motives. They belong to the spiritual world; or to the
doubtful ground of Magic which lay between Good and Evil. They
were chemical forces, mostly explosives, which acted and still
act as the most violent educators ever known to man, but they
were justly feared as diabolic, and whatever insolence man may
have risked towards the milder teachers of his infancy, he was an
abject pupil towards explosives. The Sieur de Joinville left a
record of the energy with which the relatively harmless Greek
fire educated and enlarged the French mind in a single night in
the year 1249, when the crusaders were trying to advance on
Cairo. The good king St. Louis and all his staff dropped on their
knees at every fiery flame that flew by, praying -- "God have
pity on us!" and never had man more reason to call on his gods
than they, for the battle of religion between Christian and
Saracen was trifling compared with that of education between
gunpowder and the Cross.
| 21 | |
| The fiction that society educated itself, or aimed at a
conscious purpose, was upset by the compass and gunpowder which
dragged and drove Europe at will through frightful bogs of
learning. At first, the apparent lag for want of volume in the
new energies lasted one or two centuries, which closed the great
epochs of emotion by the Gothic cathedrals and scholastic
theology. The moment had Greek beauty and more than Greek unity,
but it was brief; and for another century or two, Western society
seemed to float in space without apparent motion. Yet the
attractive mass of nature's energy continued to attract, and
education became more rapid than ever before. Society began to
resist, but the individual showed greater and greater insistence,
without realizing what he was doing. When the Crescent drove the
Cross in ignominy from Constantinople in 1453, Gutenberg and Fust
were printing their first Bible at Mainz under the impression
that they were helping the Cross. When Columbus discovered the
West Indies in 1492, the Church looked on it as a victory of the
Cross. When Luther and Calvin upset Europe half a century later,
they were trying, like St. Augustine, to substitute the Civitas
Dei for the Civitas Romae. When the Puritans set out for New
England in 1620, they too were looking to found a Civitas Dei in
State Street; and when Bunyan made his Pilgrimage in 1678, he
repeated St. Jerome. Even when, after centuries of license, the
Church reformed its discipline, and, to prove it, burned Giordano
Bruno in 1600, besides condemning Galileo in 1630 -- as science
goes on repeating to us every day -- it condemned anarchists, not
atheists. None of the astronomers were irreligious men; all of
them made a point of magnifying God through his works; a form of
science which did their religion no credit. Neither Galileo nor
Kepler, neither Spinoza nor Descartes, neither Leibnitz nor
Newton, any more than Constantine the Great -- if so much --
doubted Unity. The utmost range of their heresies reached only
its personality.
| 22 | |
| This persistence of thought-inertia is the leading idea of
modern history. Except as reflected in himself, man has no reason
for assuming unity in the universe, or an ultimate substance, or
a prime-motor. The a priori insistence on this unity ended by
fatiguing the more active -- or reactive -- minds; and Lord Bacon
tried to stop it. He urged society to lay aside the idea of
evolving the universe from a thought, and to try evolving thought
from the universe. The mind should observe and register forces --
take them apart and put them together -- without assuming unity
at all. "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." "The
imagination must be given not wings but weights." As Galileo
reversed the action of earth and sun, Bacon reversed the relation
of thought to force. The mind was thenceforth to follow the
movement of matter, and unity must be left to shift for itself.
| 23 | |
| The revolution in attitude seemed voluntary, but in fact was as
mechanical as the fall of a feather. Man created nothing. After
1500, the speed of progress so rapidly surpassed man's gait as to
alarm every one, as though it were the acceleration of a falling
body which the dynamic theory takes it to be. Lord Bacon was as
much astonished by it as the Church was, and with reason.
Suddenly society felt itself dragged into situations altogether
new and anarchic -- situations which it could not affect, but
which painfully affected it. Instinct taught it that the universe
in its thought must be in danger when its reflection lost itself
in space. The danger was all the greater because men of science
covered it with "larger synthesis," and poets called the undevout
astronomer mad. Society knew better. Yet the telescope held it
rigidly standing on its head; the microscope revealed a universe
that defied the senses; gunpowder killed whole races that lagged
behind; the compass coerced the most imbruted mariner to act on
the impossible idea that the earth was round; the press drenched
Europe with anarchism. Europe saw itself, violently resisting,
wrenched into false positions, drawn along new lines as a fish
that is caught on a hook; but unable to understand by what force
it was controlled. The resistance was often bloody, sometimes
humorous, always constant. Its contortions in the eighteenth
century are best studied in the wit of Voltaire, but all history
and all philosophy from Montaigne and Pascal to Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche deal with nothing else; and still, throughout it all,
the Baconian law held good; thought did not evolve nature, but
nature evolved thought. Not one considerable man of science dared
face the stream of thought; and the whole number of those who
acted, like Franklin, as electric conductors of the new forces
from nature to man, down to the year 1800, did not exceed a few
score, confined to a few towns in western Europe. Asia refused to
be touched by the stream, and America, except for Franklin, stood
outside.
| 24 | |
| Very slowly the accretion of these new forces, chemical and
mechanical, grew in volume until they acquired sufficient mass to
take the place of the old religious science, substituting their
attraction for the attractions of the Civitas Dei, but the
process remained the same. Nature, not mind, did the work that
the sun does on the planets. Man depended more and more
absolutely on forces other than his own, and on instruments which
superseded his senses. Bacon foretold it: "Neither the naked hand
nor the understanding, left to itself, can effect much. It is by
instruments and helps that the work is done." Once done, the mind
resumed its illusion, and society forgot its impotence; but no
one better than Bacon knew its tricks, and for his true followers
science always meant self-restraint, obedience, sensitiveness to
impulse from without. "Non fingendum aut excogitandum sed
inveniendum quid Natura faciat aut ferat."
| 25 | |
| The success of this method staggers belief, and even to-day can
be treated by history only as a miracle of growth, like the
sports of nature. Evidently a new variety of mind had appeared.
Certain men merely held out their hands -- like Newton, watched
an apple; like Franklin, flew a kite; like Watt, played with a
tea-kettle -- and great forces of nature stuck to them as though
she were playing ball. Governments did almost nothing but resist.
Even gunpowder and ordnance, the great weapon of government,
showed little development between 1400 and 1800. Society was
hostile or indifferent, as Priestley and Jenner, and even Fulton,
with reason complained in the most advanced societies in the
world, while its resistance became acute wherever the Church held
control; until all mankind seemed to draw itself out in a long
series of groups, dragged on by an attractive power in advance,
which even the leaders obeyed without understanding, as the
planets obeyed gravity, or the trees obeyed heat and light.
| 26 | |
| The influx of new force was nearly spontaneous. The reaction of
mind on the mass of nature seemed not greater than that of a
comet on the sun; and had the spontaneous influx of force stopped
in Europe, society must have stood still, or gone backward, as in
Asia or Africa. Then only economies of process would have counted
as new force, and society would have been better pleased; for the
idea that new force must be in itself a good is only an animal or
vegetable instinct. As Nature developed her hidden energies, they
tended to become destructive. Thought itself became tortured,
suffering reluctantly, impatiently, painfully, the coercion of
new method. Easy thought had always been movement of inertia, and
mostly mere sentiment; but even the processes of mathematics
measured feebly the needs of force.
| 27 | |
| The stupendous acceleration after 1800 ended in 1900 with the
appearance of the new class of supersensual forces, before which
the man of science stood at first as bewildered and helpless as,
in the fourth century, a priest of Isis before the Cross of
Christ.
| 28 | |
| This, then, or something like this, would be a dynamic formula
of history. Any schoolboy knows enough to object at once that it
is the oldest and most universal of all theories. Church and
State, theology and philosophy, have always preached it,
differing only in the allotment of energy between nature and man.
Whether the attractive energy has been called God or Nature, the
mechanism has been always the same, and history is not obliged to
decide whether the Ultimate tends to a purpose or not, or whether
ultimate energy is one or many. Every one admits that the will is
a free force, habitually decided by motives. No one denies that
motives exist adequate to decide the will; even though it may not
always be conscious of them. Science has proved that forces,
sensible and occult, physical and metaphysical, simple and
complex, surround, traverse, vibrate, rotate, repel, attract,
without stop; that man's senses are conscious of few, and only in
a partial degree; but that, from the beginning of organic
existence, his consciousness has been induced, expanded, trained
in the lines of his sensitiveness; and that the rise of his
faculties from a lower power to a higher, or from a narrower to a
wider field, may be due to the function of assimilating and
storing outside force or forces. There is nothing unscientific in
the idea that, beyond the lines of force felt by the senses, the
universe may be -- as it has always been -- either a
supersensuous chaos or a divine unity, which irresistibly
attracts, and is either life or death to penetrate. Thus far,
religion, philosophy, and science seem to go hand in hand. The
schools begin their vital battle only there. In the earlier
stages of progress, the forces to be assimilated were simple and
easy to absorb, but, as the mind of man enlarged its range, it
enlarged the field of complexity, and must continue to do so,
even into chaos, until the reservoirs of sensuous or
supersensuous energies are exhausted, or cease to affect him, or
until he succumbs to their excess.
| 29 | |
| For past history, this way of grouping its sequences may answer
for a chart of relations, although any serious student would need
to invent another, to compare or correct its errors; but past
history is only a value of relation to the future, and this value
is wholly one of convenience, which can be tested only by
experiment. Any law of movement must include, to make it a
convenience, some mechanical formula of acceleration.
| 30 | |
|