Maybe there's a limit to how far a civilization can advance and then it has to stop.
>>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
phiIosophy and theology; the mind is itself the subtlest of all known forces, and its self-introspection
necessarily created a science wh.ch 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.
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 1900., 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.
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 appa- rently 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.
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 Cceli, 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.
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.
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.
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 mo- tive. 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 un- certain 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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