The Ascent of Humanity

¶1THE

¶2ASCENT OF HUMANITY

¶3THE ASCENT OF HUMANITY

¶4*an essay on*

¶5THE EVOLUTION OF CIVILIZATION

¶6FROM GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS

¶7THROUGH INDIVIDUALITY

¶8TO SUPER-CONSCIOUSNESS

¶9*by Gerald Heard*

¶10HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

¶11NEW YORK

¶12COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

¶13PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC., RAHWAY, N. J.

¶14TO

¶15E. M. F. AND K. W.

¶16"Nothing is more certain today than the fact that in the realm of living things, the whole is something different from, and more than the sum of its parts. No amount of knowledge concerning the anatomy, physiology and psychology of individual termites would enable one to predict that a group of termites would, as a group, construct the kind of nest that it does. The nest is a morphological attribute of the group as a whole, in the same sense that the mouth parts are a morphological attribute of the individual."

¶17RAYMOND PEARL, *The Rate of Living.*

¶18CONTENTS

¶19Introduction 3

¶20I. The Pre-Individual 18

¶21II. The Proto-Individual 67

¶22III. The Pioneer Individual 107

¶23IV. The Arrest of Individuality: The Monastic Age 154

¶24V. The Upper Individuality: Humanism and Humanitarianism 182

¶25VI. The Lower Individuality: The Revolutionary Age 214

¶26VII. The Enlargement of Individuality: (A) Psycho-Physical 262

¶27VIII. The Enlargement of Individuality: (B) Psychic 295

¶28Index 327

¶29[page xi] INTRODUCTION

¶30THOSE who reflect on the present condition of mankind, so different from any known to us in previous history, must be conscious both of a great hope and a great fear. Powers are within our reach which we have never possessed before; but we seem as likely to use them for destruction as for creation. Which we shall do may seem a question very remote from our philosophy or our religion. But it is possible that science, as it is transforming life by its inventions, may also transform it by its spirit: that from its separate disciplines there may emerge a view of the world and of man’s place and purpose in it, capable of inspiring a general creative effort, and making the quarrels in which, for so many centuries, we have been murdering one another, appear at last the childish follies that they really are.

¶31This book is one attempt to elicit such a synthesis; and serious readers are likely, I believe, to find in it much food for thought. But it is difficult and requires patience before it will give up its secret; and I am glad to do what I can, by way of introduction, to enlist the reader’s interest.

¶32The position taken rests upon science, not upon philosophy or logic. The author is attempting to elicit a view of the whole process of life, as we are getting to know it by detailed observation. To do this he must of necessity cover a much wider ground than any specialist, and specialists are naturally suspicious of generalizers. They have reason, for charlatans abound. But I have no fear that Mr. Heard will be classed among these by any candid reader. And if the generalizer is not a charlatan, he has an important function. While the specialists are engaged each in studying his own tree, he ascends a hill and takes a view of the whole wood. In doing so he necessarily neglects the particular trees.

¶33But the wood exists, just as they do, and knowledge of it is still knowledge. Nor can it be seen as a whole without getting above it.

¶34Next, Mr. Heard’s account, just because it is based on science, is one of a process. In that sense it is history, and historians are invited to take account of it. But this they may, of all men, be least willing to do. For they have for a century past, and in spite of Mr. Wells, almost abandoned any attempt at generalization. They have so much material to investigate, so much that is unpublished to publish, that more than any one they are impatient of philosophies of history. But they might remember that the question is always waiting at their door: “What is the purpose of all this? Is it a science? Is it an art? Is it practical counsel? Or is it only a way of passing the time?” Mr. Heard thinks that it may be a science. But it can only become one if it will relate itself to the whole movement of science. The synthesis sought lies outside history, as history is usually conceived. But only by a synthesis can history be understood. It might therefore, I think, be worth while for the historian to take a turn up the hill. He can always come down again; at the worst with a feeling of irritation, at the best with a new vision.

¶35But a prospective reader may fairly ask: What is this dish you invite us to taste? In summary, that is not difficult to say, though a summary can give no idea of the detailed knowledge embodied in the book. Briefly the course of the argument is this. The human consciousness is engaged in a secular process, spiral in character. The most primitive societies, of which, in their original form, we have only scanty hints, are undifferentiated herds in which individuals have not yet developed. They are like what we suppose the communities of ants and bees to be. Later by degrees, in different ways and different places, individuals begin to

¶36[page xiii] emerge. They become priests, kings, monks, philosophers, men of science; and the more they develop the more they slough off the social and corporate sense, until in our age at the period we call the Renaissance (this emergence of individuals has in man's history taken place at least once before), they stand alone, intellectually sublime and morally monsters. But this development is involved in an inherent contradiction. The more the individual seeks and acquires the less he is satisfied, and Hamlet succeeds Caesar Borgia.

¶37Then, when the movement has run into this impasse, if it has not destroyed civilization, there begins to emerge a new form of consciousness. It is above the individual as the earlier form was below him. Henceforth it begins to be the business of man not to acquire but to understand, and to understand by a co-operative effort. The age of science has dawned and at its dawn we stand. The problem before us is whether the higher consciousness thus emerging will be able to control the lower, that is bursting out all about us, with the cry of individuals newly released for the fruits that have turned so sour in the mouths of their predecessors.

¶38This view of evolution, it will be observed, lays stress not on physical but on psychical factors. The question of the relation of the two sides is still involved in obscurity and I do not know that Mr. Heard endeavours to clear it up. Beyond what he here sets forth, lie other problems, soluble or insoluble. He would not deny it. He asks only that some candid attention should be given to this attempt at a general survey.

¶39In conclusion, as a practical course in following the argument, I would suggest to the reader that he might do best to begin with Chapter II, where the historical summary starts, and return later to the rather difficult Chapter I. This latter I regard as an Appendix to the argument, rather than a commencement, and I think the reader will find it

¶40[page xiv] convenient to treat it as such. If he derives from the book as much interest and vision as I have done myself he will not regret any trouble he may take in mastering the author's meaning.

¶41G. LOWES DICKINSON.

¶42THE ASCENT OF HUMANITY

¶43[page 3] SUMMARY

¶44THE idea of Progress has become unpopular because the idea is too small. The idea itself is growing, is progressing. It arises in the seventeenth century because then the advance in human consciousness reaches a condensive point when it must project its own sense and need of advance as something which is consciously effected. The idea therefore has first to take on a politico-economic form. Hence we can understand and trace how, as the “projection” becomes less, the ideal of progress will become less economic and more psychological. Hence there will be increased sense of discontent because progress will be more directly in man himself, in his psyche and not in his works. This discontent must increase until men realize what it is, their growing-pain. With that realization will come the knowledge that the pain will grow less as they consciously face change in themselves, that if there is psychological progress, if that is the heart of progress, then their individuality is not final, they themselves are evolving into a new type of consciousness.

¶45INTRODUCTION

¶46WHY has Progress as an idea become unpopular? Yesterday to the educated world it was self-evident fact: today an equally obvious illusion. A few still maintain it, but largely because they are too conservative to go back. They hold to it as a faith delivered to the Economic Fathers, definite and unalterable—evidence that the idea among its defendants is decadent—and so explain the general defection as due to moral decay, to a greedy impatience with living for the future. The rest are content to dismiss it as self-deception

¶47[page 4] of the self-satisfied, too manifest to require further analysis.

¶48The case cannot, however, be allowed to go by default. Our age, perhaps better than any other, has understood alien faiths with a new sympathy and has realized that none has lived solely by illusion or died save to hand on its life to a larger idea. The matter is a practical one, also. The collapse of Liberalism can be accounted for by the revulsion against Progress, for Liberalism is the resultant condition, the works consequent on the faith, of Progress. Only if there is belief in Progress can freedom be permitted. Fascism and Bolshevism—the logical extremes of our less consistent Conservatism and Labour—are united in their contempt for Liberal Democracy, because both deny any process of improvement outside the dictatorial will.

¶49It is worth, then, going below the conventional defence and the indifferent dismissal, in an attempt to discover the real reason for the change. Certainly Liberalism will never be rehabilitated until the idea of Progress is again accepted: ¹ but enquiry into the problem soon shows that larger issues are involved. It is true that freedom as a political aim can be pursued only if men believe that there is a power not themselves which makes for human happiness, that in all mankind lie creative forces which only emerge when there is liberty, that man is not so much the Master as the Means of things, that Progress is objective. Yet such a view embraces more than politics, even in the Aristotelian sense. It brings into consideration something deeper than conduct. It is to re-focus the mind on a new perspective of evolution: evolution, first biological, then economic, now psychological. Once this aspect is disclosed, it becomes apparent that the growing disbelief in Progress, far from showing that Progress itself is illusory, is on the contrary the consequence of its acceleration and intensification. Professor Bury in *The*

¶501 See Ramsay Muir, *Politics and Progress.* "Liberalism needs homogeneity."

¶51[page 5] *Idea of Progress* has shown that the idea first became clearly conscious in men’s minds in the seventeenth century. This century, as will be shown later in this book, is a critical one in man’s history. During it there began the disintegration of the purely political era—the era during which, however many individuals there might have been existing, individual consciousness was sporadic; the common sort was the homogeneous consciousness to which an existence without subordination to an ever-present State was unthinkable. Where, before, a minority, however numerous, had only thought of itself as different from the State—alien, hostile, or dominant—now a minority still (of all the persons who composed the community) nevertheless felt that theirs was a conscience other than the *mores* of the State and to which the State must conform, that the State must in its life have a comprehensible and worthy aim even as every one of its constituents ought to have, or, at the least, that it should not be stagnant, it should be getting somewhere. This notion that the State must justify its existence is a new thing—for it is in accord with the standards of self-conscious individuals that it is to justify itself—and springs from the new sense of individuality which demanded this return for its self-sacrifice, now for the first time become self-conscious. In consequence the doctrine of Progress became necessary and was conceived. These circumstances also necessitated that it must first find expression in politico-economic, not, as was its true interpretation, in psychological terms. The criterion of Progress was assumed to be the advance of the community in power, resources, numbers, and extent: a twilit vision between the static darkness of the unprogressive state and the full enlightenment of the self-conscious spirit: a temporary conception of something worth the new individual’s while to live and be spent for, between the spiritual selfishness of the alien, hostile, sporadic individual—whether monastic or humanistic—and the full deliverance of a higher

¶52consciousness, later to be developed from humanitarianism.

¶53This recognition of why the idea of Progress first emerged in the seventeenth century and why it had to take the topical form of a belief in economic advance, both as objective fact and as subjectively satisfying, gives new insight into the fundamental nature of the idea. Progress is disclosed as a movement in the human mind, a standard which as it changes gives an accurate path of the evolution of man’s consciousness.

¶54The disbelief in that movement resolves itself, therefore, into this: that thinking men can no longer believe that economic advance or any political destiny, however grand, can satisfy the individual, and as, obsessed with economics and suspicious of psychology, they still take the individual to be final and insoluble, their outlook is either of black despair or of such air-thin idealism that the ugly facts of life stare through at them and strike them as harshly as they strike the unthinking. The individual has, first, broken up the old static homogeneous State, has, next, rejected the compromise of the economically progressing state, and will now be driven by the fact of his own unresolved individuality (no more an End in Itself than the State) to create a community in which he may resolve himself, compassing a real progress from the original co-consciousness (out of which his individuality originally condensed) through the painful transition, that is that individuality, to the superconsciousness of a purely psychologically satisfying state. The thinking world is progressing from economic to psychological values because of progress in human consciousness, but because that progress is still unself-conscious, it still assumes symptoms to be causes, still projects what is in reality its own psychic evolution as an economic evolution, and naturally mistakes symptomatic change for the failure of the underlying principle. The present rejection of the first standard of progress, the standard of the State’s advance,

¶55[page 7] is evidence of progress in the spirit of man, the very place where those who deny progress maintain it could alone be real.²

¶56If this diagnosis is correct, if the present confusion and arrest are caused by a trouble projected from its real seat, the threshold of consciousness, a further analysis of the immediate obstacles which are preventing recognition of the true nature of progress may help. There are today three contingencies which make it particularly difficult for those who are fulfilling the principle to recognize their rôle. In consequence they suffer from loss of vision, and though they progress, do so as blinded men who might reach the day from a foul cavern not by following the light but by flying from a stifling fume. (1) In the first place, as all growth tends to be spiral (if only because so much of the energy for advance has, so long as the aim is not consciously envisaged, to be drawn from the violence of reaction), so when we are carried by it away from the position of our immediate predecessors we find ourselves directly over, and to that extent on the same side as, the position their predecessors occupied. The advance today from an economic to a psychological focus has brought thought back again to a religious standpoint, and as that, on a lower level, had belonged to a static mental condition (either of a static community or of a static individual), any notion of progress was alien and distasteful. (2) So, too, the mere fact that the economist had arrived

¶572 The development of the historian himself gives some confirmation of this process. He begins with the “drum and trumpet”—the most striking incident as the efficient cause. He penetrates deeper and finds, below, the economic influence. But that, too, is discovered to be symptomatic. So he reaches the psychological level. Cf. Prof. A. M. Carr-Saunders in *The Population Problem*. Though such a work might be expected to advance an economic interpretation, this is repeatedly rejected for a psychological. On the critical question of the causes of migration, after having examined and dismissed all other reasons, he concludes: “Migration is undertaken in response to some idea” (pp. 297-304). The tendency among all historians is to seek for a steadily larger and more comprehensive whole, a fundamental interpretive process of the surface phenomena of human actions and individual caprice, and psychology is found to give a closer clue than economics. For further discussion of this point see Ch. VI.

¶58[page 8] at the notion of gradual betterment made the idea démodé and the elder cataclysmic alternative attractive. The Revolutionist and the Apocalyptist suffer from and are inspired by a common suppression. (3) A more powerful prejudice, and even less realized, springs from the gallant feeling that Progress, if true, would degrade the entire past to an intolerable Means toward the present, for however poor and provisional things are now, the present, on this showing, is the best there ever has been. Such a feeling, however respectworthy as an emotion, can be shown to arise from an illusion.³ The very men who reject the economic standard of progress are, by a rationalization, applying it to the past. Unable to recognize psychological evolution, and in particular the recent and temporary condition that our present individuality is, they imagine a Past without our economic protections, yet composed of fully self-conscious individuals, and think that because for us in our present phase it would prove intolerable (as indeed it would) it must have been so for our predecessors. They have not yet escaped from the rationalizing mistake of Hobbes,⁴ because though their knowledge is profounder than his, their sensibility has correspondingly increased—an interesting example of how, contrary to the usual complaint of idealists, our progress in feeling has been not less remarkable than our progress in understanding. Combined with this new and noble concern for the past, which will be shown to be provoked by an unanalyzed concern with the fundamental problem of progress—individuality—there is also (4) its complement, a sense of bafflement in the face of the future. This springs from the same, still unconscious, concern with individuality. It rises from a dawning realization that individuality cannot survive and yet that the survival of consciousness is essential. It leads to an intensifying desire to escape from

¶59³ The whole question comes up for discussion in Ch. VI.

¶60⁴ See page 243.

¶61[page 9] individuality’s fluctuation, particularity, and limitation, to despair at the thought of continual movement through unending change: in short, to a demand for progress in individuality itself.

¶62Nor are those still focused on the economic standard unaffected by the advance, though even less able to diagnose their condition. That they, too, are being changed by a Progress which has advanced from their works to themselves is evidenced by their fear that after all, Progress is failing. Their ignorance of themselves conceals from them that an advance in their standards, not any shrinkage in what they are measuring, accounts for their discouragement. Theirs is a repetition in the world of values of the pre-Copernican condition, for they are mistaking what is really movement in themselves for an opposite movement in the objects they watch. Even less than those focused on psychology can they understand the fundamental nature of their progress: how there is progress in the very standard of progress.

¶63So considered, the secular politico-economic development, which has so far passed as the whole of history, becomes no more than a chronicle of contingent phenomena only capable of interpretation when recognized as symptomatic of an underlying psychological evolution. Certainly all efforts to interpret human events in economic terms have failed to produce a philosophy of history. The real advance, consistent but elaborate and concealed, is in man’s spirit and can only be disclosed through the evolution of his standards. We are so repeatedly informed, “Human Nature never changes,” that we might suspect the cynics of a certain nervousness about their fundamental premise. Certainly there is accumulating evidence that would tend to show that nothing changes so fast. The entire socio-political shift can be understood, and only so, as an attempt, cumbersome, because the real purpose is not yet recognized, incessant, because the deep pressure of growth is always increasing,

¶64[page 10] to adapt civilization to a rapid, continuous, unrecognized change in consciousness itself. Fundamentally our discontent is not because our environment has changed too quickly for us. It is we, fulfilling the law of our growth, who have changed it. The fault—more in the geological than in the moral sense—is not in our States but in ourselves. A change so basic we naturally fail to see; the consequences arrest our attention. Today, however, we should be able to recognize that all more superficial attempts to interpret history, to explain our own distressing condition, and to present any intelligible future, are vain. Only the recognition that the long trial mankind has endured and the present acute crisis through which we are passing are nothing less than an unremitting progress in human consciousness, can give us the double solution necessary to reconcile at once understanding and conduct, can yield the two essentials without either of which life ceases to be worth living: the re-establishment of the supremacy of value together with the recognition of advance.

¶65The writer is aware that this is to put forward something which might be developed into a philosophy of history and that to outline, however tentatively, a vast secular process is presumptuous. The hypothesis of this book is revolutionary. It means, looking back, a reinterpretation of the past, and forward, a new destiny for man. And yet, if it could be established it might go far to solve difficulties no other theory has surmounted and which cannot be left unsolved any longer. Our crisis is undoubtedly acute, and this theory—should it prove in the main to be substantiatable—would supply solutions to three of our most painful problems. As an hypothesis, then, it is submitted for that expert examination which the present writer has not the capacity to apply.

¶66As a conclusion of this Introduction he may therefore summarize what, if it were established, this hypothesis would

¶67[page 11] yield. In the first place it would rehabilitate our faith in the Present, for the want of which many are no more than derelicts and those who still make headway do so weighted down by a complete scepticism: they obey the drive of their emotions: their intellect can indicate no goal as the objective of that drive.⁵ Progress would be shown to be a fact, moving fast enough for us to take part in it, for ourselves are the process of that progress, our expanding consciousness its medium. In the second, it can lighten the tragedy of the Past. As long as the essentially psychological nature of Progress is overlooked, the whole of history appears as filled, generation after generation, with complete self-conscious individuals, lonely, sensitive, apprehensive, ourselves stripped naked of all our accumulated scale, under which we have developed a proportionately sensitive quick. That prospect is such that, as we have seen, though it is illusion, it has undoubtedly driven noble characters, the very men who should have had comfort from their vision, to reject the evidence for progress, to exaggerate their own disabilities and to degrade their station, that they might not seem to benefit by the past sufferings of others, refusing to recognize their elevation if it means acknowledging that we are raised on prostrate generations wholly subservient to us as their end. If, however, our present intensity and isolation of consciousness can be shown to be a very late and passing consequence of man’s psychological evolution at its acutest; a swift transition between the complete insensitiveness of the absolute individual and the new collective being; a growing-pain or birth-pang of the larger consciousness; then we may be able to recognize that co-conscious lives, though they made possible our stage of evolved consciousness, and are by so much means, being co-conscious were also ends in themselves, for co-consciousness has its own eternity. In the

¶68⁵ But see Ch. V, p. 202 *et seq.*, on the validity of the emotions as themselves a rudimentary observation.

¶69[page 12] third place it suggests a future which scientific facts do not deny but suggest and which the spirit of man can approve. The problem of our future, it is increasingly apparent, is quite as much one of psychology as physics. The cooling earth which so concerned our Kelvins, the dissolution of bodily death which has daunted scientist and poet alike, are now seen to be problems not more acute than those which the crude wish-solutions of Resurrectionism, personal immortality, and every individualized eschatology down to today's spiritism, have raised. The individual is not solved by being made immortal. He remains, as the myth of Tithonus foreshadowed, a problem of arrested elimination. But should he be part of a vast psychic evolution, should he have condensed out of a co-conscious group and if he is now to be enlarged into a consciousness not less intense than his present experience but far wider than the broadest of the low levels of the original awareness, then there is evident a destiny in which he can see how in himself the means and the end which have been reconciled in the past may be reconciled in the future. His present individuality is a means to that end, but such is the psychic economy that in effecting that end, his individuality is transformed and taken up into it. The cell grows by division. It splits and the original cell is perfectly assumed in the two resultant. Individuals, psychology suggests and the spirit of man approves, grow by fusion. When two or three are gathered together in the spirit of the future it begins to dominate them, to break down their isolation, to confer new powers, and finally to deliver them into a new unity as real as their former separation. Mysticism has often suggested such a goal, but mysticism has been charged, and it has not cleared itself of the accusation, of wish-solution, though it is worth remarking that the usual survival-prompting wish resents the mystic emphasis on the necessary dissolution of individuality little less violently than it resents extinction. Not till all the evi-

¶70[page 13] dence that points to the evolution of individuality can be marshalled, not till it can be shown emerging a rudimentary thing in the historic past, and unstable, restless, and expanding in the present, is it possible to maintain that its progressive development into a larger consciousness is the solution and destiny of the future.

¶71The chapters that follow set forth some of the evidence; enough, perhaps, to show how the hypothesis occurred to the writer, not enough, he is aware, to establish it without far deeper investigation. They are issued because that deeper investigation can only be given by those who have qualifications, both general and special, which he does not possess. So, though no more than a rough and broken outline, it is left in the hope that others may not only fill it in, but correct and enlarge it. Any attempt with this authorship to make it more final would be false. If there is anything in the hypothesis it is of general application and will be worked out by many minds. If the notion is only subjective it is not worth even the writer's time to labour it more. That the general idea may not be illusory, that some such psychic evolution underlies all our other developments and crises, and that its recognition, long delayed, is the supreme impending revolution of civilization, may be herein established; its full proof, it is more sure, demands more room and a wider range of knowledge to develop.

¶72This book therefore does not pretend to be more than an appeal from one of the public, general but concerned, to the experts, asking them to investigate a possible solution of our problem and to tell us whether deliverance might lie in this direction or whether we must continue seeking even the possibility. It is for them to tell us, whose lives depend on a way out being found, whether the facts here brought into association really do lie connected with one another, whether by chance a track through the morass has been caught sight of by a random but anxious survey, or whether these points

¶73seem to have association only through a subjective foreshortening and the path that they would indicate is no more than an illusion of one of the many who have gazed so anxiously that the wish has created an unsubstantial way.

¶74NOTE TO INTRODUCTION

¶75IN this essay it will be obvious that however many of the detailed connections and associations may be provisional, however many ideas have been followed up because they seemed in themselves significant and not because they are here entirely incorporated in the main hypothesis (indeed it is hoped that some may serve to enlarge and develop it), there is one which is fundamental: Man's consciousness was once pre-individual, a group consciousness, is now mainly individual, and is becoming super-individual.

¶76To express this unequivocally, I have in Chapter I—where the pre-individual condition is considered—called the original psychic state of man co-conscious. I am aware that this term has been employed by some psychologists to describe contemporary morbid psychic conditions, i.e., dissociated personalities. (See the work of Dr. Morton Prince, the Doris case and also the classic Miss Beauchamp case; both these are referred to later in Chapter VIII. See also Prof. H. Driesch, *The Crisis in Psychology*, p. 211 et seq.—but in this last example the author points out that consciousness is often being *shared* with controller or “control.” In fact we have a condition approximating to the primitive, a psychic throw-back or laying bare of layers which were once the “surface” layers of consciousness.) Nevertheless I think no term better describes the condition to which our present anthropological knowledge seems to point as the truly primitive. For that first human unit is the group, not the individual, and self-consciousness is then a field which only exists when the constituents are together. On the other hand each constituent is united to the group (and undivided in himself) by the fact that the threshold which now,

¶77[page 15] in all individuals, divides the conscious from the subconscious has not yet risen. We know therefore that the constituent must have been in constant telepathic communication with the rest of the group (see Chapter VIII), and that such a connection not only gives a group sense but also prevents any consciousness of individual separateness. That such a state may be impossible for us individualized beings to conceive does not affect the question of its existence, because by the nature of our individuality we are incapable of being conscious of the “subconscious,” though it is always present with us.

¶78There is, however, besides the use of the term co-conscious, one other possible misunderstanding to guard against in this matter. Though the term co-conscious is used of the primitive, I emphasize that the primitive condition, though its existence can be deduced, is now nowhere surviving. This age is, we ourselves are, the individual phase of human history: of that let there be no doubt, although already there are glimmers, across the threshold, of a larger field of illumination. In the whole of this essay I have not attributed anywhere to society as we now experience it any nature other than that which might be accounted for by full psychological knowledge of all its parts, its individuals. This has to be noted because so many sociological authorities, from Lazarus and Steinthal to Durkheim, Wundt, and McDougall, have given different degrees of approval to the attribution to the individual-disintegrated society of today of a psychic unity which can only exist among pre-individual groups, or in a society which is post-individual. Therefore with the criticisms of Dr. Ginsberg, who in his lucid *Psychology of Society* reviews and passes judgment on these theories, I am in agreement. There is, however, one respect in which I could wish that he had been able to extend his conclusions. He finds that there is no evidence that the spirit of any society of which we can have contemporary knowledge is other than the sum of the spirits of its individuals and he searchingly deals with *ad auctoritatem* arguments advanced to support mystic nationalism, etc. He shows that Dr. McDougall, though a cautious advocate of the “group mind,” goes too far when he would argue that highly organized societies attain a degree of intelligence

¶79[page 16] and morality above the level even of that which their loftiest members can attain (*The Group Mind*, McDougall, p. 53, quoted by Ginsberg, p. 61). The group which can surpass the highest individual is certainly not yet evolved. He rightly maintains that “universal human nature” is misconceived as an *individual* (p. 88). But it remains to be asked: Is this, as the author seems to assume, the only form of consciousness? He does not even mention the possibility that as consciousness has degrees and grades, so societies, like hives, termitaries, and anthills, may have true psychic “fields” of their own (made by individuals when there are individuals); though different from that which an individual recognizes as his own consciousness, yet something which is neither physical nor tied strictly to physical limits. In fact he seems to have accepted the epiphenomenalist assumption, and when he speaks repeatedly of “the irreducible kernel of consciousness” it is legitimate to ask: Does he really think of the individual within his physical frontiers as a unit, one and indivisible? As Dr. McDougall has said (see Chapter VIII), the fact of multiple personalities definitely disproves this. It is clear that the psyche is not a fixed quantity: indeed it may be conceived with least violence to the facts as a stream of immaterial energy which at present we perceive as coming to a focus in our individuality but which is streaming into that from a far wider field and spreading thence into another, certainly not less extensive, field. We may therefore conceive it as continually building up more elaborate unities and attempting to realize fully states of consciousness which may retain the intensity and penetration that is effected through individuality while recovering the breadth and stability once possessed by the group. While, therefore, I would allow, as Dr. Ginsberg urges, that most societies which we can now study behave in a way which might be accounted for by a knowledge of the product of the sum of their individuals’ actions and wills, I would here guard against two assumptions which seem to be apparent in his work: In the first place, that we know how insulated and how individual those constituents even now are—they may even in the present be making a field which while it lasts is something different from themselves or

¶80[page 17] from the sum of their conscious intentions. In the second place, that we should confine ourselves to the belief (as Dr. Ginsberg approvingly quotes from Professor Hobhouse, *Morals in Evolution*, p. 13, in *Psychology of Society*, p. 108) that “after all, society is ourselves and those *not so greatly differing from us*, and custom must have grown in the past much the same way as it does now. What happens now is that opinions and judgments radiate from some individual centre, impinge on the opinions of others . . . modify or are modified by them . . . and eventually there emerges a more or less stable opinion. . . . Always we have individual centres.” That seems to contradict anthropological evidence, to deny psychic evolution, and to extend to the past and the future, from a study of the present which is just and right, assumptions about the individual which can only be proved from that present.

¶81CHAPTER I

¶82THE PRE-INDIVIDUAL

¶83SUMMARY

¶84THE problem of the interpretation of the Past. Only possible if there is a change in ourselves: an approximation to the Past’s position. This, the doctrine of evolution seems to have denied but now to suggest, for Evolution is now conceived not as a straight line but as a spiral. The new concept of evolution as it includes our minds as well as our bodies suggests that mental evolution, too, is spiral and not straight, i.e., from the diffuse to the condensed and then again to the diffuse. Of this general evolutionary deduction as to our minds, anthropology gives actual confirmation. We can calculate the change in ourselves by noting the change in our anthropological findings; the change between our fathers’ findings and our own is really a record of a change in ourselves, an evolution in our consciousness from their individuality to a less insulated condition now. The facts were always there, but our fathers were unable, because of the state of their consciousness, to recognize them. Even fossils could be misread; how much more customs and behaviour. These can be hopelessly distorted (1) because anyhow they are not material, (2) because they are a vaguer condition of modern man and so he defines and condenses them into what he has become. This distortion has affected even animal study; how much more the study of backward men. Even the few anthropologists who could sink themselves to the earlier levels—could throw back—could, from their descent, bring back nothing to the nineteenth century, for the nineteenth century was still too alien and its lan-

¶85[page 19] guage could only misrepresent, decategorize, the actual experience of the explorers. Both the behaviour of extants and the gear of extincts could only be interpreted in terms of individuality. We should, therefore, even without positive proof, be prepared to correct the findings of earlier anthropologists because men at that state could only find a reflection of their own intense individuality. Because of our new psychological knowledge of ourselves we ought to be able to find an alien consciousness among the backward. The mistake of this earlier anthropology is now acknowledged. It was made because the researchers were not able to apply the fact of evolution to themselves, and this again was due to the dominance of physiology in evolution. This corrected by the advance in psychology, an advance itself made possible by an evolutionary change in our consciousness; for the effect of having knowledge about the spirit is to change it. We are only on the threshold of this discovery. It will be opposed, as are all advances in evolution and evolutionary insight. It will prevail because it is a natural development over which we have as much control as over the growth of our bones. Our vision is extending. Our new knowledge of our past is indicative of new growth in the present and so of the possibility of a new future. So the remainder of the chapter traces our new anthropological knowledge of the growing diffuseness of consciousness as it retreats towards the primitive. Need of care in defining this term, because (a) all existing societies are equally old and have no doubt changed, if not into individualized communities, into hierarchic-differentiated ones; and (b) all may have been infected with individualism from chance migrations, for individualism is more catching than culture. Can we then have any knowledge of the primitives? We have seen on first principles we may assume them, and actual anthropology, by the facts of diffusion, shows that extants go back steadily in consciousness as they approach the

¶86[page 20] rim, the maximum of diffusion, where the most backward, most rigid, have taken refuge. The first step out are, on each side of us, the Eskimo and the Bantu, high types and far from primitive, but the Bantu has a mentality not nearly as condensed as ours, though he has developed war, a very important threshold in psychic evolution. Below the Bantu standard war does not exist as it exists above. Below and outside the Bantu we find the Bushman, more primitive, whose culture, though shattered, we can correlate with the Aurignacian and so presume that the Bushman's culture is a stage through which we passed in our evolution. This culture seems to show an even more collective consciousness than the Bantu. The Fuegans come next but have not been studied with the psychological insight that is necessary to recognize a psychic condition. We get no better report of them than if an economist were sent to study an asylum patient. However, there are pockets of backwards all along the stream of culture, and some of these have been studied with the essential understanding. The Amazonian natives yield evidence of a very undifferentiated psyche, while the Polynesians, because of the psychological advance of those who have investigated them, give perhaps the most striking evidence of a group mentality, of individuality in its most rudimentary form. They came under the attention of the third stage of anthropological inquiry, the psychological, the first being the missionary, the second the school of "nothing but." The Polynesians, though not primitive, give clear proof of mentality quite different from the civilized. There were more backward peoples, but either like the Australians they have largely been tampered with, or like the Tasmanians, the earliest of whom we have record, they have been exterminated. As we trace back the extants they point to a primitive condition, and people earlier than extants have left their records, which we can now, with evidence of actual behaviour of backwards to help us, read with an approach

¶87to correctness. Art, literature, ritual, all go back to pre-individual conditions. They have all been changed, but they do not change as fast as the psyche.

¶88We can then say we have an outline of the evolution of consciousness. From complete co-consciousness (nowhere now) it rises to collective representationalism (still existing in backward societies), and consciousness still exists in the masses today in a state of not-full-individualism, a third, a last, stage immediately prior to self-consciousness. Of this stage we all have memory if we recall childhood. Child psychology is therefore the final evidence of the evolution of consciousness, because what takes place in the growth of each one of us has to some extent happened in the growth of the race. New knowledge of the prehistoric period of our race suggests our real evolution. The next chapter must consult history to see how and why consciousness breaks up. So we may interpret and so prepare for the future.

¶89CHAPTER I

¶90One must emphasize that human society does not so much result from the coming together of individuals, as that human individuality results from the liberation bit by bit of individual initiative within groups.

¶91Prof. H. J. Fleure. *Presidential Address, Anthropological Section, British Association, 1926.*

¶92The main difficulty of interpreting evidence lies in distinguishing between the evidence and the interpretation. Too often we translate without being aware that we are translating, and the more dead the language, of necessity the more free grows our rendering. If we really understood the tongue, could feel all that the now silent speaker tried to express, we should know that translation is impossible (unless it were that we ourselves should be for the moment

¶93[page 22] translated back into the past), because no being and no thought can be present in two places at once. As Sidgwick said of philosophy, so we may say of all the psychic side of man: "There are no synonyms." The physical relics, the economic entail, remain, and these we can interpret in terms of our own usage. The spirit itself must have vanished, become completely transformed, or there could have been no change, no one could have been aware of the difference of past and present, there could have been no question of translation. Indeed the past would have nothing to teach us, for by our nature we could learn nothing from it, were there not a change in ourselves. Into that kingdom we could not enter save by becoming children. This problem has indeed been recognized by some historians. Professor Gwatkin once said of the Middle Ages, in whose clothes so much of our religion is actually still arrayed, and among whose personalities he moved with a familiarity uncommon even among historians, "We shall never quite understand them. We possess their work, but we are of a different spirit." The problem stated by Nicodemus seemed insoluble. Any possibility of such "recessionalism" the fact of evolution, as the nineteenth century understood it, seemed to deny. But today, though not through simple recessionalism, Evolution would seem in itself to suggest a return over our tracks, whereby while retaining the gains of the present, we may be able from our new position to gain an insight into the primitive mind, which had to be denied to its immediate successors.

¶94Certainly Evolution itself we no longer assume as an ever further unqualified departure from primitive conditions. All Evolution, from the archaeozoic to art, from the first life to the last language, is now conceived as a spiral, not as a straight line; as the path traced by a force constantly striving more freely to express itself, and through its means feeling towards and discovering its ends. At first stirring, the mass is affected but slightly; as penetration continues,

¶95[page 23] a middle condition is reached; when, as it were, the force and the resistance are at their greatest, there is the greatest disturbance, the maximum of complexity. In the last term the force has fully informed the mass, resistance falls rapidly, the current flows freely and so leaves ever less evidence of its passage. To use more teleological language, for the sake of illustration, Evolution may now be viewed as beginning with an accumulation of simple means to compass a limited but still not clearly conceived end. Then, as the means improve, and so the effort of approach becomes in itself less engrossing, the limited end is so clearly realized that further satisfaction has to be sought in advancing to a more radical solution, a more embracing end. Thus a double process may be said to be in action and Evolution can be described either medially (or symptomatically), as a process of constant elaboration, or teleologically, as a process of constant simplification. It is increasingly observed that accumulation of tissue (as in the Mesozoic with the Saurians and in our own age with Neanderthal man) *per se* is evidence of decadence, an indication that Evolution has ceased to work in that form or species. Whether deflection of force leaves tissue to accumulate, as a weak current silts its own bed when a stronger would scour it, or accumulation of tissue dams back the current, making it flow out into other channels, we cannot say. The whole process is doubtless observed much distorted by our localized time-sense. What we can realize is that Evolution is more fully conceived with our present knowledge as, graphically, a spiral, a process of advancement whereby perfectly achieved ends become means to a larger end in an indefinite series, and, dynamically, as an invisible energy continually informing an apparently static and stubborn material, until the quickened matter would seem to sublimate; when once again the energy, with this fully leavened ferment, plunges the yeast into masses still remaining inert. The perfection of new means to compass old ends is the way

¶96[page 24] in which new ends are discovered. Evolution moves from the simple to the complex and thence from the complex to the resolved, with an ever growing intensity.

¶97From this last consideration there has come to light another important fact about Evolution. We now realize that however intense and insulated may seem our individuality, however psychological the problem of our existence, that does not (as, we shall have to note more fully later, it was supposed to do, by a generation who had learnt of Evolution wholly in terms of physiology) remove it from the evolutionary order. Not only, then, must our consciousness be subject to Evolution, but as the course of all Evolution is a spiral, so the growth of our consciousness must have been, and still must be, spiral. Such a conception is unsettling, but it is obvious that we can on general principles no longer debar even our consciousness from the universal process.

¶98But apart from general principles is there any evidence that we are changing? Certainly most people are unaware of it and would resent the idea. Yet it is equally certain that a fundamental alteration is going on in us of which we may only be able at first to become aware by noticing a change in our observations, in our point of view. From that the objectively minded will be able to deduce a change in the final invisibility, their own consciousness. This is the vital significance of the new anthropology. As the astronomer can deduce the movements of his own system from the apparent movement of different stars, and by comparing two records—his own and that of his predecessors—can estimate how far he must have been carried from their standpoint, so the anthropologist by comparing his readings of anthropological data, the evidence of man over vast periods of time, with those of his predecessors, can tell how much he has moved from their position. To use again the spiral

¶99figure: To realize how we come by the insight we now have, to understand the blindness of our fathers faced with the same evidence, we are driven to presume a curving process in the development of our minds, a process which has carried us on till, as we have advanced beyond our fathers' station, we have come directly over the position of our far lowlier ancestors. Our change of insight is due to the fact that our spiral advance allows us to see "vertically" down into their minds, while the "horizontal" displacement of even a generation ago was so great that, attempting to view the primitive mind from such an obliquity, the whole benefit of a superior elevation counted for nothing—the observers saw little but the distorted reflection of themselves. Our fathers looking back over history could not see, as we may, Evolution changing over from physique into the quick medium of the psyche. Lacking that insight, they could not conceive consciousness as having a development in which (as formerly its organism) it condenses and again expands, focuses and refloods, intensifies and re-embraces. Had they had this vision they must inevitably have recognized the human spirit as something convergent from a general consciousness into the separate intensities of our present psychic state. On the contrary they made a picture of mankind, its evolution over, stranded, a huddle of unhappy individuals, left with the slowly waxing light of reason, as quickly as they might to devise modern civilization or to become extinct.

¶100It is clear, then, that this revolution in our knowledge of humanity is of such incalculable importance because it alone can reveal the full extent of the change that is going on in ourselves. It is of such importance because by carrying us back over the place where the child mind of the race lay, we glimpse, in the secular sweep of this mental evolution, a future for humanity utterly beyond the vision of our

¶101fathers, whose insight in this matter was cut short by their individualized focus, a future of which we ourselves can only perceive the promise.

¶102It helps us to realize the fundamental nature of this whole shift—that it is nothing less than a profound change in ourselves, in the very instrument of measurement, man, the measure of all things, himself—if we recall that many of the anthropological facts, which pointed to the unsettling conclusion that consciousness is undergoing evolution (as form had once), have been on record for a couple of generations. The men who collected them could not recognize their meaning because of their own alien position. Some gauge of the aphelion of sympathetic insight is given by the fact—now often commented upon—that it was actually those who made no attempt to understand, who distorted least: that at that stage, the stage of still unresolved individuality, still dominant in the nineteenth century, any attempt at translation and interpretation meant, and could only mean, hopeless mutilation. That "the eye can only see that to which it brings the power of seeing," that scientists, faced with evidence their general thought was unable to accept, could not interpret aright, the Gibraltar skull is proof. This Neanderthal head the mid-Victorian naturalists could not recognize as a forerunner of modern man. Had the unfamiliar thing been a custom and not a fossil, the unconscious prejudice of its discoverers would have so distorted it that today we should have a specimen certainly not Neanderthal—perhaps evidentially quite useless. So much then depends on this new anthropology, the idea which its evidence adumbrates is so strange, that though the general trend of evolutionary thought does tend increasingly to favour that idea, it is necessary to trace in outline its growth; for not only is the mind of the layman unaware of the new notion, but many researchers and field workers have yet to realize the full implications of their findings. This natural conserv-

¶103[page 27] atism and caution has to be noted because it has very serious effects on the collection of the facts before any conclusions begin to be drawn. If Neanderthal man failed to be recognized, though the stone-hard fact of his skull stared ¹ Sir Charles Lyell (the geologist who above all set clear the secular field up which the ascent of man might be traced) in the face: if Schliemann, breaking down on to the Trojan thresholds, confused the several superimposed cities, we must not be suprised at the difficulty of detaching from the imposed print of individuality the trace of an earlier, far less definite condition. The softness of the material, the explorer's rigid ignorance of its true, pervasive extent, had to lead to great distortion, so that, like unskilful looting antiquarians, the early seekers after the nature of primitive man rendered nearly useless very valuable, for till then almost untouched, areas. No stuff needs more gentle handling. Less than a breath may dissolve it beyond recovery. The very fact of too intent interest may be enough to spoil it utterly. In fact, for inquiry into a psychic condition it is essential that there should be a mind of something of the same quality—however different in quantity—if anything is to be found save that which the explorer has unconsciously put there. How difficult inquiry even into an animal's mentality may be, we are beginning to realize. Most animals which can be closely studied must be domestic to some degree. This means that the behaviour we are considering is not that of a "pure beast mind." The domestic animals probably have in their make-up (for so many wild types have seemed to resist domestication, however attempted) something which might be called psychic parasitism, and it is this factor which renders them tamable when others have remained untamed. (The native English wild cat, though there are several species, has never been domesticated. The domestic cat had to be imported from Germany, somewhere in the fifteenth

¶1041 See Sir A. Keith's *Antiquity of Man*, p. 130.

¶105[page 28] century.) The dog seems to view in its master the pack personified, but what a different pack! In the natural state each constituent gives something to the group: it is made up simply of such constituents, and every one is equal in it: they will all take a lead and they may all give a lead.² But when the pack loyalty is transferred to a man, the dog is made a sort of manling. The overwhelming mental superiority of the master produces an even greater change than that of merely reducing the animal to a level of helpless unquestioning dependence. It transmogrifies the beast, distorting its nature into as much of a man as may be contained in animal compass. A striking illustration of this was the "talking dog" of Mannheim,³ where the psychic dependence of the animal on its mistress was almost telepathic. There seems also evidence in this case and in the kindred more widely advertised cases of the "talking horses" of Elberfeld ⁴ that the dominance, intrusion it might almost be called, was so great as permanently to damage the minds of the creatures. As though their simple mentality had been overstimulated, their small reserves, sufficient for their lives' modest demands, all too hastily realized, they soon collapsed into a stupidity so much below their species' level that they could only be said to have become imbecile.

¶106It is evident, then, that the very fact of attention, quite apart from the presupposition of the mind attending, may distort the mentality observed. It is necessary to recount these difficulties, for they are all present in the study of mankind, and all intensified by the very fact that makes us unconscious of them—our proximity to them. The original problem, how to prevent the presence of the researcher from

¶107² The herd's submission to the old bull is simply to the best summary of itself. Any bull may become the leader.

¶108³ See *Proceedings* of the Psychical Research Society, 1913.

¶109⁴ See *Clever Hans*, where the animal's hyperaesthetic dependence on its master and trainer is shown to be the explanation of its apparently intellectual powers.

¶110[page 29] deranging the behaviour of the subject, has added to it another. We still have present, as in animal study, only behaviour. We imagine, however, that we have a peculiar access. The opening for direct inquiry which human study seems to offer is in reality an illusion. Any attempt to ask leading questions can only open into a vicious circle and result in the answers which the anthropologist has unconsciously suggested. Yet so has anthropological inquiry been conducted until our generation. Ignorance of their own psyche, the fact that they took for granted that they were wholly rational, led the early researchers to impose their rationality on the savage, not only reading reason into his behaviour but forcing his conduct and explanations to be in some sort rational. The savage is not prepared for cross-examination. He does not understand either why the question should be asked or why it should have an answer. The less he has ever envisaged an end, the more he feels fixed by this new dilemma and that he must be helped out. Under suggestion he invents one where there has never been one before, for, with his different time-sense, his short-ranged spontaneous motive has never needed such a goal-concept. He must please the inquirer. His mind, isolated and alienated by this new intrusion of teleology, becomes like the talking animals, parasitic on the mind that can and does constantly envisage action as a purposed deed toward a definite, personal, self-conscious satisfaction. As far as he may, he gives the answer that he divines is expected of him, and anthropological inquiry may have done something to civilize the savage but nothing toward understanding him—rather it has done its best to destroy the thing which it intended to understand.

¶111Even with researchers who were themselves by nature patient and humble enough not to dredge and drag the submerged semi-fluid layers, but who sank themselves to the levels they wished to study, little could come to light. Their

¶112[page 30] very kenosis required that they should become incapable of criticism. Returning, as till lately they had to return, to a society which never questioned the invariability of its own intense individualism, they could bring back as little of their actual experience as could Thomas the Rhymer; they could only report everything was far different from what any words of theirs could convey in the sharply delimiting terms of their individualized speech.⁵ So anthropology must, until this generation, have presented an insoluble problem. In those mists of the past either the record becomes lost, or the recorder. The sharp-edged shadow of individuality cuts like an acid print into the vague surface of the earlier consciousness that lies behind. How is the researcher to avoid casting this transforming shadow? The subject he studies lies directly behind him, in the very path of his past evolution. Because of this, the force of our unconscious assumption does actually suggest the “savage,” the living object of our interest, into some semblance of the misconception. The nearer, racially, the object is to ourselves, the more ought we to be on guard against the tendency to distort and to interpret in terms of ourselves. To use an astronomical simile, before we record the path of such an object, we must calculate to what extent our own presence—a body far more advanced in condensation—is (to carry the simile a step further) a factor in displacing what we observe. To some extent we must be dragging it out of its path, pulling it after us because we are ahead of it in the same path of evolution.

¶113With the evidence of extinct peoples the case is no better, for though the researcher cannot distort their evaporated consciousnesses, he cannot avoid reading their relics in the light of his own awareness. He must unconsciously impute himself. These relics obviously served the same uses as are

¶1145 Cf. F. H. Cushing on Mentality of the Zuñis among whom he lived naturalized, initiated, an integral tribe-unit.

¶115[page 31] practised today. The behaviour of Magdalenian man, of the contemporary Papuan, and of ourselves, equipped with the same instrument, would appear the same. Ergo, the sensations and sentiments of all three must be the same. Yet religion should have taught us that though the rite may endure, the meaning is always undergoing change.

¶116With such prejudice present and unsuspected, the finds of anthropology should need a very thorough retesting, and when revalued we ought to be surprised, not if the conclusions are strange, but only if they are not strange enough. In psychology, more than in any other science, the warning is wise: Beware when you find what you are looking for. Realizing the distorting rationality (that they assume themselves to be norms of consciousness) of researchers, we ought to decide, as do textual critics, in favour of oddness, against the limited distorting fancy of "making sense." Until our own day all anthropologists were, psychologically, either Hobbesians or Rousseauans; they went either to weep or to rejoice at the spectacle of early man. They crushed delicate finds in the mould of their cramping individuality. They thought they were quite uncontroversially smoothing out a tangle, sorting random efforts on the part of the savage to compass the full purpose of civilized man, and the subtle essence of the life they studied escaped them. Had anthropologists been able to give weight to the element of irrationality in themselves they would have been able to appreciate its extent in the backward and have been able to estimate the completely different quality whereby the savage lived his life and was happy, that sense of identity with the group and of assurance of the rightness of its interpretation of things, which can take the place of self-assertiveness and self-gratification. Had they really accepted evolution they would not have unconsciously excepted their science from its working but would have expected to find not only customs but consciousness different from and less differentiated than

¶117[page 32] their own. As it was, a false assumption of sameness kept the savage and civilized uncomprehendingly apart. There could be no real understanding, at least by the advanced of the backward, until a real difference in their consciousness was recognized and reconciled. There it lies, and after the obliterating tide of civilized assumption has withdrawn, after the devastating invasion of cross-examination, more scientific inquirers are tracing, still not quite erased, the outlines of a mentality so different from our own that it can only be interpreted as springing from a consciousness far more diffuse than, and quite alien and invisible to, complete individuality.

¶118Of the anthropological advance here traced, Professor Lévy-Bruhl gives an instructive review in his work, *Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures.* He points out that the English school to which the science owes so much was unconsciously dominated by a desire to rationalize, in terms of their individual consciousness, the evidence of "primitive practice" they so patiently collected. They attempted, largely under Tylor's influential concept of animism, to make the thought of the uncivilized purely intellectual. But why did they make this blunder? Fundamentally, because they could not accept evolution. The main obstacle to a scientific anthropology was due to the researchers' ignorance of themselves, to their lack of psychological knowledge and sensibility. They took for granted from the physiologists, who had elucidated parts of the anatomic outline, that evolution was "straight," must always mean complication and intensification, that it had certainly stopped as far as they were concerned and anyhow had nothing to do with psychology.

¶119Such assumptions about evolution have today been corrected, and to confirm that we are on the right path, comes the great revolution in contemporary anthropology. We are beginning to be able to see what, because of the common

¶120[page 33] nature of the seer and the seen, had to lie invisible until we rose to a sufficient height to be able to look back into it. That great discovery is that primitive man in his consciousness was more different from civilized man than any disparity, however great, in their conditions. It is evident that such a discovery is impossible without some approximation in ourselves to that condition, impossible without a change in ourselves. The vastest change in man’s evolution has not been in his anatomy or his environment or his gear but in himself, in his consciousness itself—the fundamental term of experience and the last to be estimated. Beside this change, all others in his condition have been no more than faint symptoms of the underlying revolution. Today for the first time, civilized, self-conscious, critical man is able to recognize a pre-individual condition, and the fact that he can so recognize it is evidence of an evolution in himself which has carried him whither he can perceive that individuality is not final, that other states lie behind him in the past and may await him in the future.

¶121We are, however, only on the threshold of this discovery. As the Darwinian hypothesis of physical evolution was resented and resisted, so this further extension of the evolutionary idea, as it comes ever closer to ourselves, must be resisted even more strongly. The passions that Darwin roused have been redoubled by the investigation and hypotheses of Freud, for psychology comes much nearer the quick than physiology. We are faced with a revolution, a change too fundamental and too swift not to shock. Yet those who are distressed by it may comfort themselves that it is a real revolution; it is not merely a perverse change of taste, an unnatural fancy, but a change which could not be avoided, one to which we have been moving inevitably since the rise of self-consciousness.6 The peculiar virtue of civili-

¶1226 "Thought is almost as blind a force as the forces of nature."—Bertrand Russell on Newton. But is this word scientific? It has a dangerous look of anthropomorphism.

¶123[page 34] zation—tolerance—is symptomatic of an uprooting from one's generation's time and place, of a detachment which, in its turn, is due to the oncoming of a wider type of consciousness. This tolerance has often been noted as a mark of civilization's coming of age, but can only be understood if it is realized as a symptom of the growth of consciousness. Certainly our present growing allowance for the immense place unconscious assumption has held in our judgments is an extension of tolerance even to our own past, a thing without precedent. For the uncivilized always claim to be consistent and can do so because they are incapable of real recollection. Certainly no other age has been able to discount its prejudice to this degree and to see, in Lecky's words, why imagination has so often been wrong because it has found it more easy to realize an action than a state of mind. Such words from the pen of a supreme rationalist show how the mentality of our age has been approaching its revolution unawares, and how, by going beyond all others in restraint, its refusal to react on a lower level leads to the brink of a new apprehension. We need then to review the advance of anthropological insight, not only to demonstrate that it has led to a revolution in our opinion of primitive man, but to gauge the alteration such a change indicates in ourselves. Every extension of anthropological inquiry, from the beginnings in the mere tolerance prepared to observe and not out of hand to destroy, is balanced by a correspondingly profound change in the observing mind which at the moment of realizing, by the act of realization, itself is advanced into a new state which is the complement of that far earlier one of which it has achieved understanding: a state which is a solution of that immediately previous condition, individuality, out of which insight has delivered it. Our fathers

¶124If there were deeper insight, would not nature only appear blind at our present focusing? Myopic individualism sees everything as aimless that extends beyond it.

¶125never questioned the elemental character of individuality. No one in the western world doubted that it was *quod semper, quod omnibus, quod ubique*. They could therefore never reconstruct a real past nor realize a possible future. With our new anthropology we may conceive a new eschatology.

¶126The remainder of this chapter therefore traces the growth of our knowledge of the progressive change in human mentality, as it retreats towards the condition which can be called primitive. The actual word is often used, even by experts, in so loose a way that it is necessary to define it. Throughout this essay the term is confined to those peoples of whose existence we can be reasonably certain, but only through deduction. No real primitives are or could be extant. All surviving societies are equally old, and though some, as will be noted, have, through circumstances and stolidity, changed little in the direction of intensifying self-consciousness, they have instead evolved an elaboration of social structure, while others, such as the negroes, have specialized, though in other directions, both physically and perhaps psychically, more than ourselves. Psychic and social evolution follow the path of the physical, and as Neanderthal man, though a predecessor, may in many varieties (Hrdlicka and Verneau think that some of this race's blood may be in surviving peoples) 7 actually have become too specialized to persist, so in psycho-social evolution advance may have been brought to a standstill by an overelaboration in the social structure. The simplicity of the *economy* of many such societies, that they are living under conditions and with uses which can be paralleled from the Palaeolithic, no longer causes the trained anthropologist to assume a correspondingly rudimentary stage of psycho-social evolution. We ought therefore to look, in every extant backward society,

¶1277 See also A. N. Burkett on modern "Mauer" jaws amid Loyalty Islanders, *Nature*, September 28, 1928.

¶128[page 36] for the peculiar evidence of the complexity which results because, of equal age with ours, it has to have evolved an elaborated structure to contain the intensifying psychic pressure, a pressure released in us in individual self-consciousness, with its corollary, social freedom.8 We have specialized in individuality—probably that is the main path of human evolution—and the outward sign and consequence of that is independence. Backward societies, not releasing individuality, have evolved not only a social complexity, but, in consequence, a hierarchic structure of such elaboration that there results a psychic differentiation (cf. the caste system of the Polynesians) which is certainly not primitive, though it is not individual as we understand it,9 because not self-conscious, not free. Such constituents are not primitive any more than they are modern civilized individuals. The age of any social organism is shown by the complexity of the pattern the whole organism makes. While ours shows its complex of age by the pattern innumerable more or less independently moving constituents may make, backward societies, though they have prevented the individual from making the society his means, though they can keep him so that he has no existence apart from his society, have by the necessity of their evolution elaborated him far beyond any undifferentiated, i.e., primitive, condition.10

¶129There is another consideration which compels us to con-

¶1308 A contemporary illustration of this process is given by the atavistic state of Fascist Italy, where we see the suppression of the individual is complemented by an elaboration of the social organism.

¶1319 The analogy from general evolution, of the differentiation of primal "Trial and Error" into (1) Instinct and (2) Reason, may be helpful. See p. 58.

¶13210 See also note, p. 110. There it will be seen that French anthropological authorities maintain that all communities we have knowledge of have either had to expand into empire, or condense (so as to suppress the potential individual) and become the petrified groups we now find backward savage communities to be. Indeed, Durkheim (quoted, p. 83, Moret and Davy's *From Tribe to Empire*) points out that the Australian clans are always elaborating by subdivision; an alternative development to the production of individuals.

¶133[page 37] fine the term “primitive” to the extinct. While evolution in the group cannot ever have been wholly arrested, but rather followed alternative paths, every group, however backward and segregated, must at some time have been infected with an alien, more advanced state of consciousness, i.e., some degree of individuality; for higher consciousness is more infectious, precipitates more swiftly, than higher culture. Every tongue which we can understand bears the same witness. All the languages of which we have the keys, though, as will be noted later in this chapter, they give valuable evidence as to the evolution of our present highly-focused state of consciousness, are far removed from primitive simplicity. They, even the earliest, are every one at the pole of complexity. Since we have record of it, grammar has been becoming constantly simpler.

¶134How then can we hope to have any knowledge of really primitive conditions and of our psycho-social evolution? We have seen that the spiral path of our own evolution ought to be bearing us back to a standpoint from which the past, as never before, becomes visible, shadowed through to us; as from an aeroplane, sites of centres on ground-level so long lost as no longer to be a legend, as the observer rises, grow evident. The most obvious proof, however, lies in the actual anthropological evidence when it is arranged in a spatio-temporal sequence, when we order out the extant societies of the world according to their geographical distribution and note the concentric gradations of their cultural levels.

¶135The present theory of human diffusion favoured by anthropologists is that which botanists and zoologists have in the main adopted: 11 that the development begins at some centre and that by pressure the less adaptive types are continually being pushed to the periphery. It is obvious that a society which develops as a mass and not towards indi-

¶13611 For a lucid summary, see E. A. Hooton, “Where Did Man Originate?” in *Antiquity*, June, 1927.

¶137[page 38] viduality will be far less flexible and adaptive than one which does, and it will be pushed further out. If this diffusion of mankind from one centre is a true notion and if that diffusion was caused as in other organic diffusions, say, such as wheat, by many varieties appearing in the homeland and the more specialized and set being forced out to the rim, then it is possible to generalize that a natural selection has put aside our savages, the slower types moving away, or being thrust away from the centre of effervescence and, until that centre spread over the earth, able to preserve an earlier quiet and lack of intensity.12 Of such we know that their condition of consciousness approaches more closely to the layers of our subconsciousness than to our conscious state. Therefore when estimating the evolution of consciousness and trying to plumb the mentality that existed in the really primitive, we must presume a condition wherein the conscious concentration of individuality was lacking, and in its place existed not only a sense of identity with the group but also, as all thought was common and traditional, a common coordinated behaviour and feeling which, whether brought about by hyperaesthetic instantaneous apprehension, as with talking animals, by “telepathy,” as will be discussed later, or even by a “pre-established harmony,” completely excludes the self as we understand it.

¶138If we trace these diffusions in detail we can obtain a detailed confirmation of the generalization. Wherever the actual centre of diffusion, the force of expulsion must have continued to act on either side of any line of human ascent, from the steadily steepening slopes of which each less aspiring type rolled down to its appropriate level in the cool se-

¶13912 Where the unindividualized social organism could continue to elaborate, without being driven by natural selection to evolve individuals and to give them freedom to exercise their self-consciousness, a move to which the state is compelled when faced with new circumstances, for new circumstances can only be tackled by self-consciousness.

¶140[page 39] questered vales of life. As our race made its way across the continent and there piled itself up to the modern serrated, toppling ridge of individuality, there were thrust, as it were from a watershed, layer upon layer of less adaptive types. We can trace the main terraces of that descent today and as we look down to a level which is the same as that from which we were upthrust, our eye ranges over a steady, ever more extensive retreat carried out by the races who were resolved to preserve the stability of homogeneity, of unself-consciousness.

¶141To the north lie the Eskimo, probably 13 the descendants of the harpoon and reindeer culture of Chancelade. On this side we should not expect to find lower layers. The ice barred the way to an earlier or more extensive diffusion. To the south lie the Negro 14 races, probably specializing physically so as to endure increasing heat and so able to retain a more primitive culture—or at least to maintain a slower rate of advance—while the paler types went north following the bracing climate in which they could push forward their psycho-physical evolution.

¶142Certainly when we can trace the Negro race in historic times it is tending to go south down Africa, and there is reason to suppose that it only reached the Cape areas probably two or three centuries ago. Of this race, the last to draw off in the still rising contest of human evolution, we may take the Bantu to be typical. They are an adaptable

¶14313 See Sollas, *Ancient Hunters*.

¶14414 In this very generalized outline the Berber is omitted. To keep the simplicity of design, what may be called the watershed ridge of actual diffusion is taken here to coincide with its present geographic apex, i.e., the main east-to-west line of Europe. This line itself, however, seems to have moved north with the genializing of climate, and the original site where man began to rise, and whence the north-and-south expulsion of lower types commenced, is probably what is now the Sahara. The exact placing of such intermediates as the Berber and even the lower Mediterranean is therefore one of a very nice adjustment. Here we can only glance at the main steps where the trowel of the anthropologist is laying bare a complete slope of laminae.

¶145[page 40] and varied people. They have covered their retreat from the rising storm of civilization remarkably well. They can endure alcohol, syphilis, and alien religion. They have to their credit the production of a monster militarist in Chaka,15 who made the Zulus, and having made them, in a generation destroyed some million of their race (and that with nothing more efficient than the assegai), and the extermination of a widely-spread artistic culture, the Bushman's.

¶146Before descending to the next layer of racial diffusion it is necessary to discuss a little more fully the significance of war among the Negro peoples and all other races on the same culture horizon, for when we penetrate to an earlier culture, to one which moved off an epoch before theirs, we shall find that this characteristic of civilization—organized warfare—*is* not so easily recognizable, is in fact no longer characteristically present. We are so used to the intellectualizing assertion, "War is a state of nature," that without defining what we mean (without realizing that we are trying to shift on to impersonality the blame for conduct which we already feel to be an intolerable disgrace), we set up a principle and bring all practice, however rudimentary, under our particular, extreme application, even as Hobbes, the timid father of all militarists, having asserted fear to be the spring of every human action, had to enlarge his term until it could embrace the love of fame and even self-sacrificing devotion.

¶147As a matter of fact war is a modern thing and its emergence is undoubtedly a very accurate indication of a new

¶14815 The case of Chaka is illuminating. He learns "objective" war from seeing English soldiers drill at the Cape, whence he had fled home after an attempt to assassinate his overlord, takes service under the inventor of the Impi, Dingiswayo, reorganizes it, for its sake remodels tribal life, conquers all his race, but cannot secure himself against superstition (he begged hair-dye from a European visitor to conceal the white hairs which signaled old age and the time therefore for the tribe to sacrifice its king), and is himself assassinated, still in middle life, a prey to his own "realism" that destroyed the tabus which, with the aid of hair-dye blinding the peep of treason, might have hedged him safely into a divinity of old age.

¶149[page 41] and sudden condensation of consciousness.16 Indeed we have been prevented from recognizing the curiously rapid development of organized aggression, we have projected a very transitional, inter-social disturbance (naturally resulting when and as long as individuals are being precipitated) as a law of human intercourse, because we were unable to recognize the modernity of individuality and behind it what has been the norm of humanity, when man, being without self-consciousness, had of necessity no conscious objectives. It is evident that with a shorter time-sense, a more intermittent and dim sense of individuality, the means must become the end; with an ever more generalized consciousness there is even more satisfaction in the performing of an action in perfect accord with tradition, than in envisaging a possible purpose and pruning the performance so as to attain that and nothing else. Departure from consecrated usage, even when entered on as it must be by tribes which are on the move and whose survival depends on power of change, will still be minimal. For war is still, as is every other activity, an affair of magic more than force. It is the right magic that gives victory, and to infringe its functions by originality would be to guarantee not only defeat, but also repeated disaster (as befell the Israelites at Ai). The voice of timeless tradition spoke last in our tongues on the field of war when Count Daun cried triumphantly in defeat: “I would rather have lost the battle”—which he had, as completely as was possible, to Napoleon—“than win it as has that young man!”

¶150The full consequences of this discovery cannot here be discussed. Some of them will come up for consideration when, in Chapter II, the emergence of the individual is approached. Here it is enough to note that the fact of war is by itself

¶15116 Some have thought that the discovery of speech marks that revolution, but speech seems to have gone through a “group-holophrastic” stage and so, as a faculty, to be older than individuality.

¶152[page 42] a sign that we are dealing with a people who by aggression reveal themselves to be on the move and who, by thus provoking an accelerated selection, must be abandoning the conscious, homogeneous, if not equalitarian, condition for the individualized, which leadership and its crystallization, hero-kingship, must develop. M. C. Burkitt, an authority on the material of Prehistory, who indeed by his great book on the subject introduced the term a few years ago to the English public, but one who has not committed himself to any hypothesis of social or psychic evolution, notes that "on the rise of Neolithic civilization the conception of property, now introduced for the first time on a large scale, involves automatically the conception of war." 17 Max Müller had already years before pointed out that among the words that are common to the various branches of the Aryan language, and which therefore belong to the very early period before the separation of these branches, there are not found the words denoting war and conflict and the weapons of war. As is well known, Professor Elliott Smith has gone so far as to maintain that man until the introduction of agriculture and irrigation enjoyed peace. The latest evidence is that of Sir John Marshall.18 Describing his latest excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in Sind, he remarks with surprise how few weapons he finds among the rich deposits of this "Indus" civilization which was flourishing six thousand years ago and which seems to have grown up on these sites straight from the Neolithic. He exclaims, "It looks as though these cities were little acquainted with war."

¶153We may put this another way; we may say that until there was conscious foresight and invention—evidence of individuality—society was stable because unindividualized. Perry has attempted to show that the practice of warfare was spread across the world by the very same unstable, in-

¶15417 *Our Early Ancestors*, p. 52.

¶15518 See *Illustrated London News*, January 14, 1928.

¶156[page 43] ventive individual-producing societies, and certainly in a document which may in parts be contemporaneous with one of the crises in this transition of human society (I Samuel 8: 2), the establishment of the Israelitish monarchy is declared to be the prelude to a regular army and war.19 The Golden Age of Hesiod finds some support in Dicaearchus’ statement that there was a time when there was no war. So seen, warfare is the end, not the aim—not the objective of states, but their termination, and must result inevitably in revolution. War may be initiated by individuals (which comes first, consciousness or change, is a hen-or-egg priority problem for the solution of which we must at present, in lack of direct evidence, make our choice in accord with whether we hold economic development to be the cause of psychic, or *vice versa*), or individuality may be developed by the natural selection of war, as the community’s only way to postpone extinction; but it cannot be denied that even if a proto-individual kindles the spark, the conflagration itself will keep on throwing up fresh individuals. War produces individuals whose production it is that undoes that general psychic unity, lacking which the state itself dissolves.

¶157Seen in secular perspective—putting the millennia of co-conscious tradition-preserved peace against the crowded hours of unhappy annals, the aeon of the prehistoric against the moment of individualized history—it is evident that every community when it is about to end, when co-conscious homogeneity begins to granulate into individuals like an astronomic nova, bursts into aggressive war. We think, if even for a moment it seems to expand, that it has attained a larger life, and imagine that its outburst of energy is creative: it is, as far as the state is concerned, a sudden degenerative convulsion. We are told that it has attained a

¶15819 Moret and Davy sum up: "Among all the peoples whom we have passed in review the cult of the King accompanies military chieftainship" (*From Tribe to Empire*, p. 112).

¶159[page 44] new security. Compared with the original secular solidarity it is nothing; the life-span of an individual is being set against the aeonic immutable group-stability.

¶160The Bantu, then, being men of war, are in no sense primitive. They have long possessed agriculture, the knowledge of iron-working, and an advanced form of kingship (i.e., when the king has become almost entirely a raid-leader 20 and carries hardly any of the static limitations of the priest-king 21). Of late a large part of the race has been under the protection of Europeans in South Africa. In the great Trans-Kei reservation they are continually tutored. They are immensely influenced by the Native Commissioners (who are devoted to them), and not a little constrained by the government of the Union, which is embarrassed by them. They are nearly all now “Nonconformist” Christians. Yet these, our apparent contemporary individuals, still make the most curious mistakes as to identity. The Commissioners have their confidence in a way which even their fellows cannot have, for these men are their Providence and their Protagonist. Still the Chief Commissioner has said that when a Bantu is describing, casually, and not as any question of legal evidence, some incident as happening to himself, he will quite frequently correct himself halfway through, saying, “No, it did not take place with me but with my brother,” and by his brother he means any one of the large group within which—it is one of the largest exogamic degrees extant—marriage is forbidden. Can it be doubted that such a state of mind shows a condition of individuality rudimentary

¶16120 In other words they are in the Heroic phase. That this is so there is interesting psycho-physical evidence. Norman Leys in his *Kenya* (p. 58) remarks: “The Bantu peoples have, like Homer's Greeks, no exact words for the primary colours.” See also Ch. VII for the evolution of colour sense *pari passu* with evolution of consciousness and its dominance of all other more immediately reactive and “useful” senses by sight.

¶16221 See Ch. II.

¶163when compared with that which we now take for granted as normal and which most of us assume to be secular? This at any rate the Chief Commissioner considers it to be.

¶164The line of diffusion which extends from the evolutionary centre through the Negro ends in that direction with the Bushman. Unfortunately, as a community, he was shattered beyond recovery before he could be studied. Enough fragments of his corporate life remain, however, for us to be able to see that his geographic position, farther out from the centre, does tally with his cultural level, as more archaic than the Negro's, and this supports the theory that the most conservative types are to be looked for on the rim. (The Hottentot and the savage coastal kitchen-midden “Strandloopers” of the Cape may not have been unchanged representatives of as early a stage of society, because while a steady retreat from the rising centre of civilization brought the Bushman overland to the Cape, the coast is always one of the earliest highways. On the seaboard the most conservative types are not often found.) We know too that the Bushman’s warfare was more sporadic, more robbery with violence than strategy: that he practised an art which gives us evidence of this fighting 22 and links him stylistically with the later Palaeolithic (Aurignacian or Magdalenian); and that this art was executed by an order of artists separated, held in honour, and working, it would seem, by a group convention. There is therefore just sufficient evidence to say that his consciousness shows signs of being a stage less differentiated than the Negro's, for he apparently had not reached the Heroic age, his art is group art, and if the connection with the Palaeolithic is sustainable, as that style had been preserved through millennia, by continually bearing it away from civilization’s rising apex and spreading flanks, and so preserving its essential level, so too the spirit

¶16522 *Vide* The Cattle Raid in the Cape Museum.

¶166[page 46] of the Stone Age may have remained present to the end among this artistic race.23 Of the importance of this point there will be more to be said when we come to attempt to apply the interpretation advance in this essay to the evidence of the Palaeolithic ages themselves.

¶167The Bushman, then, though he can give little direct evidence of the actual state of consciousness that endures at his level of culture, by showing the culture's place in the diffusional lamination of humanity, indicates that in the periphery of civilization in any direction, at an equal distance from the centre, we should find similar and perhaps better-preserved societies. Extruded groups, shaken, crushed, distorted, must still preserve in concentric layers of social "talus" the record of early states thrown out and down as the mountain-building of civilization began, till at the foot, at the furthest threshold, we should find a belt which still represents that human condition of level stability before the first stirrings and stresses of upheaval.

¶168In confirmation of the theory of diffusion used as a geographical chart in this chapter, the Fuegans are naturally valuable. At that other great world's end we find a people of very uncommon rudimentariness. Unfortunately we cannot use them as further evidence. The degradation of their condition, which was of course very bad—that of a people at "food-gathering" stage, forced down into worse climatic conditions than those into which the Tasmanians were driven 24—attracted more attention than their degree of consciousness. Diffusion is, however, like a current which flows along valleys and is always throwing out along its length layers of alluvium. Anthropology is therefore always recovering pock-

¶16923 Earlier it has been suggested that a people may continue to employ an economy evolved by a primitive consciousness when their own has already become individualized. Art, however, especially Palaeolithic art, is something intimately expressive of the mentality that employs it. As language, we know, responds to psychic changes, so too does Art.

¶17024 See pp. 53-54.

¶171[page 47] ets of such earlier states, many hidden away comparatively close to the centre. A good example of peoples still socially unbroken, though at the Bushman level, is the group system common among the natives of the Upper Amazon. These have been studied with some care,25 and it is now unmistakably evident that there is preserved among them still a state of consciousness hardly to be rendered in the terms of our individualized vocabulary. These groups, retreated into corners where they have escaped from the direct influence of civilization consciously developed by individuals, are in the state which Lévy-Bruhl has named that of the “pre-logical collective representation of concepts.” The first field-researchers, or rather collectors, unable to question the irreducible permanence of their own individuality and so generally concerned for the salvation of individual souls, were compelled to inquire how the savage conceived the spiritual life. This primary question led to complete confusion, and commonly the inquirer records of peoples of this stage that they maintain that they have many souls. The Amazon tribe called the Borroro maintaining even against the argumentative, logical opposition of inquirers that all its members are actually red parakeets is an exact example of this early lack of definition. The universal extension of Totemism—it now seems to be acknowledged as a condition through which every human society has passed—bears witness to a time when humanity’s consciousness was so undifferentiated that even its distinction from other species was not clear, while the correspondingly extensive custom of exogamy at least suggests, when the Bantu evidence is remembered, group homogeneity as once the unit of consciousness.

¶172Still it must be repeated that the recognition of psychic conditions differing from our own is one of the utmost difficulty and delicacy, the complete destruction of them, their precipitation, on exposure to ourselves, into something value-

¶17325 Cf. Von den Steinen, *Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens.*

¶174[page 48] lessly like ourselves, almost inevitably easy. Indeed only by men with such knowledge of themselves that they have already developed beyond crude individuality can such recoveries of earlier consciousness be made. This is still very rare. The history of field anthropology has gone through two stages; it is entering, only when it is almost too late, into the third, the only truly scientific. The first was the missionary determined to find a soul, to shatter its prison, and to save it. He carved the living body of the tribe into separate salvageable little units and the organism bled to death; its cells, such as did not turn cancerous and plague their releasers, died. The second stage was that of the unpsychological, "nothing-but," rationalizing anthropologist, unconsciously assuming his own individuality. The third stage, of the psychologist at field work, alone can give really scientific results. How rare this must be! Only in a few fields have the actual workers, the men on the face of the seam, been equipped both with the full critical apparatus that can discount the individual self and also with the sensitive insight which through the power of recognizing something most rudimentary in itself can answer to something vestigial even in the most backward.

¶175For this reason, because it has been studied in the modern spirit, the last field-records quoted here must be taken from Polynesian anthropology.

¶176But first it may be asked whether such peoples (it is the pale Polynesian who in the main seems the peaceful and stabilized element in the Oceania populations; the prognathous Melanesian, the war-maker), showing no backward physical features, can be at the same stage of the evolution of consciousness as the Bushman and the Amazonian native. As to this it should be noted that islands are so much the best segregating spots (witness the physical evolutionary survivals in the Galapagos 26 and the dodo's survival till a century ago

¶17726 *Vide* Darwin and Beebe's *Galapagos*.

¶178in Madagascar, while many otherwise unknown species of the lemuridae still find refuge there) that a people finding refuge on them might not only be sheltered from the steadily rising pressure of civilization, but might actually resume a less strenuous condition. Certainly the Polynesians seem to have lost the knowledge of shipbuilding.27 Having fallen upon the narrow bound of an Eden they have resumed their primal innocency, relinquishing knowledge which could only serve to bring them to less happy isles: Eden regained, the restless world well lost. Whatever the path by which they came to their strange and lovely estate, whether by retreat back from a consciousness in which they felt too keenly, too lonelily, or simply through a masterly inactivity, there can be no doubt that until lately there lived widely scattered, and now still husbanded in some few garden islands there survive, a people beautiful and uncommonly happy—still at the food-gathering stage, without metals, living a life of dancing and singing and feasting. It is of them we have some of the most careful studies ever made of alien communities, and because observation has been so patient, it is from these that we can produce the clearest evidence of a different state of consciousness than ours.

¶179For some time it had been noted that these people were apt to die out rapidly when touched by civilization. Its autotoxins, drink and syphilis, introduced into a body which had not acquired resistance, were first blamed, and no doubt accounted for many casualties. But when these had been guarded against, the failure to maintain themselves was still so apparent among the Polynesians that total extinction has long been recognized as their probable fate in this century. It cannot any longer be doubted 28 that there is a failure to

¶18027 See Rivers' essay on the decay of useful arts among these peoples.

¶18128 The latest authority is convinced, after careful inquiry among them, that the cause of their oncoming extinction is not physical, but psychic (*The Clash of Culture and the Contact of Races*, by A. E. Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, D.Sc.).

¶182[page 50] reproduce and even for the present generations to live out their full lives, and that this rapid dying off is due to some sort of *taedium vitae* which sets in when the tribe tradition, through outside interference, has been shattered and the community dissolved. Its units cannot become individual. They cannot rationalize their experience and select what is of particular benefit to them as private persons. Civilization requires too great a leap, and though it offers them many freedoms, wonders, and delights, they cannot pass over to these; they must die, for their vital cord has been severed and they have not learned to breathe.29

¶183As the late W. H. R. Rivers has pointed out, the characteristic feature of such peoples 30 is their high suggestibility, owing to the fact that they are gregarious. They are not blinded to that wider field of illumination by the dazzling "spotlight" of individual self-consciousness. These peoples' psychic condition we may perhaps best describe as one in which each constituent has access to "his own" subconscious and so to the tribe's feeling. No "limen" has risen to shut off this way to the larger whole. It is this that accounts for their great and constant suggestibility and that leaves each not only continually open to the voice and conscience of the tribe but indeed unable to disobey it. As an example of their psychological condition Rivers describes how his boat's crew of Melanesians—who, we have seen, being more war-like, are more forward than the pale Polynesian—would take their places spontaneously, without any previous discussion and without any friction as to who, for example, should have the easiest position, that of coxswain. He adds that when studying the warfare of the West Solomon Islanders he could discover no evidence of definite leadership and is sure that "in

¶18429 If the Polynesian is a "recessionalist," that fact, though it may show him to be pre-eminently unsuited for civilization, may also render him more responsive to sympathetic understanding than such as had never attained nearer to individualism and then retraced their steps.

¶18530 *Instinct and the Subconscious*, p. 94.

¶186[page 51] the councils of such peoples there is no voting or other means of taking the opinion of the body." 31 Such evidence is all the more interesting because it is certain that these peoples are far from primitive: they are behind the Bantu, but, the war tribes, perhaps beyond the Bushman.

¶187As evidence that this condition of consciousness is no mood of mere relaxation, to be thrown off when the individual is roused, but a real stage in the evolution of consciousness, that though a backward state it will, before vanishing, and so dissolving the tribe, actually resist the first onset of change, Rivers can again be quoted. Even when unforeseen circumstances have arisen and there is need to frame a course of action, "the people seem to recognize instinctively, using that much abused word in the strict sense, that some definite line shall be taken." He continues: "Those who have lived among savages and barbarian people in several parts of the world have related how they have attended national councils where matters in which they were interested were being discussed. When, after a time, the European observer has found that the people were discussing some wholly different topic and inquired when they were going to decide the question in which he was interested, he has been told that it was already decided and that they had passed to other business. The decision had been made with none of the processes by which our councils decide disputed points. The members of the council have been aware at a certain point that they were in agreement and it was not necessary to bring it explicitly to notice." 32 Rivers adds that in his opinion, in "thought reading," in the avoidance of collision by foot passengers in crowded pathways, and in social tact, which consists in not touching upon socially unpleasant topics, are vestiges among us today of this common consciousness.

¶188The example of the Polynesian—to return to the "purest"

¶18931 *Op. cit.*, p. 95.

¶19032 *Ibid.*, p. 96.

¶191[page 52] type in this anthropological field—is, then, interesting for three reasons: In the first place he may be a reversion; in the second, whether he has reverted or no, he shows how backward psychological conditions may exist with advanced physical features, and so that the psyche is not merely a symptom of the physique but follows its own parallel evolution; and in the third, his physical harmony with the aesthetic standards, if not the actual appearance, of his investigators, quite as much as his general gentleness, permitted an informed interest and understanding study which hardly exists of any other people in so backward a condition.

¶192Of the true people of the rim, of races whose physiological backwardness seems exactly relative to their unadvanced psychology, of societies both by position and standard in the penumbra of the primitive, we are without careful records. Undoubtedly “outside” the Bushman belt lie the Australian peoples, and Spencer and Gillen 33 with their great studies

¶19333 Spencer and Gillen in their classic study of the Arunta (*The Arunta*, Sir B. Spencer and the late F. J. Gillen) show that though this people is mixed in stock and social heredity, nevertheless in their views on such a vital point as survival they still show a collective conception of consciousness. The women, for instance, may not go by the knolls that lie around the camping-places because behind them hovers like a mist the reservoir of unincarnate tribe-life. Every one in the tribe “reincarnates” the “dead,” so there is no death, but only two ways of living; the physical tribe is simply the phenomenon of the field of psychic force which is the invisible creative tribe-spirit. Quite obviously people who can so think and feel are not far from the kingdom of the co-conscious. That the Arunta are decadent or advanced from primitiveness this problem of the woman reveals. Among them she once had a more important place and has ceased to play the religious part she did. This was first thought to be explained by the fact that her obvious physical inferiority, when war became the test of tribe value, increasingly told against and finally outbalanced her importance as a being of more-than-male magical significance. It seems, however, a less rationalizing analysis of this phenomenon to say that she is left behind rather than deposed; as individualism starts with the men (because man is the physical and psychic aberrant) they devise not only war, for which she is unfitted, but, before that, new and distinctive magics. We might say that the priestess is sacred because she is conservative, because men feel that however they err into change they may return to her unchanging rightness: the priest is sacred because he is a wonder-worker, one who does new things. As an example of the two ways of interpreting anthropological evidence, take also woman's toil: Rationalism says she performs the agriculture because man is strong enough to make her: field knowledge shows that she does it because,

¶194initiated an anthropological inquiry in this field which has been carefully followed up. But the Australians themselves were gravely disorganized by the time that the white disorganizer thought to study them. These black peoples had been steadily extruded from the north. The white settler, sea-carried from the west, came across their southern line, and so, being first a man of action, he obliterated as it were the lowest deposit of the black. It was not to be expected that a rough, colonizing people in a not too friendly environment would spend much patience in trying to understand such strangers. Indeed the settler can never understand aborigines, for as he wishes to occupy their position, his whole intention must be to remove them. In consequence the more primitive series of the black Australian diffusion is now lacking, and even of the northern, and therefore in the line of descent the higher, part of this line, the strangeness, ugliness, and general difference of these blacks has rendered psychological study extremely difficult.

¶195Still there is enough to show that they are in a condition of consciousness in keeping with their place in the scale of racial diffusion and their economic standard. More vigorous than the Polynesian, reacting more violently to intrusion, they nevertheless seem to find the psychically focused intensity of civilization equally disruptive. They are now being preserved by state anthropologists as carefully as if they were the duck-billed platypus, but nevertheless, guarded from alcohol and syphilis, their extinction seems in sight.

¶196This fate has already overtaken the one people whom the Australian aborigine himself thrust out and down, clinging to an even lower level—the Tasmanian, the lowest race whom our own, though, alas! with unseeing eyes, ever looked upon. Of their amazing economic backwardness we have record.

¶197being the fruitful one, "naturally" if she works on anything that grows it will profit by her "mana" as much as by her labour and therefore that her work must be more productive than a mere man's.

¶198[page 54] Pressed down evidently from a climate which permitted a food-gathering condition, on to a Land’s End—for on their arrival Tasmania was probably not an island—with a climate increasingly resembling Ireland’s, they had not, at the time of their disappearance, even invented a roof, but cowered behind rough hurdle “wind-breaks.” Of their physical backwardness—or blind-alley development—we have pictorial evidence. Of their psychical earliness we have an exasperating glimpse in the record of the old woman who, asked as to the nature of the marked “azilian” stones with which she was concerned, said they were absent friends. We can, then, say of the Tasmanian that his condition, as far as we may know it, reveals nothing that contradicts the assumption of, and much that suggests, a pre-individual condition. He was certainly the deepest stratum of human society which survived into the modern age, remaining constant to an original level, everywhere else to some degree more elevated by the constant social “mountain-building” going on in the homelands of humanity. And so he might have remained for some more centuries, had not the mountain itself moved down upon him and crushed him. We cannot, then, hope to discover any more backward peoples whose actual states of consciousness we may study, but there is a line of evidence, which though more limited than psychological anthropology, gives, within its own compass, findings not less remarkable to those who have psychological insight.

¶199In the first place there is the evidence of Art. Though we cannot find any people living in a sub-Tasmanian state, we can, from the remnants the Bushman has left, correlate his culture with a stratum of the Palaeolithic. The art of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian peoples is representationally highly developed, and, in giving graphic illustration of the fauna among which they lived, is of unique palaeontological value. Though known for two generations, it remained for a great living art-critic to point out that these paintings ex-

¶200[page 55] press, in spite of their vivid representationalism, a peculiarly alien vision, they reflect a strange and extinct psyche. Briefly, they reveal a mind of direct percepts, a pre-conceptual mentality. Their very mastery of form comes from an immediate, almost photographic apprehension, only possible if power of generalization had yet to be attained. The mind cannot select, group, analyze, conventionalize; it can only record each actual experience as it flashes upon it. In this earliest art there are no types. The purpose of the work is magical.34 35 Such a mentality, we can see, has no individual character, for were individual self-conscious memory present, even if the intention of the worker remained magic, worked for the tribes the stylistic method would develop into a convention, for each artist would be a separate unit consciously advancing his technique.

¶201Art in this direction leads to writing, and from the languages 36 of the peoples who are at the level of collective representation we can obtain even clearer, though later, evidence of the continued survival of a psyche alien to individualism. Even among living tongues there are many now known in which there are no abstract terms, for there is no analysis and its complement, generalization. Terms express-

¶20234 The pictures were drawn not only over each other, but the same picture many times over the original rendering (the act of drawing—the dromena—not the representation, being the “mystery”), and Burkitt thinks were executed by an artist group who therefore were working magic not for themselves (they were often mutilated and so would be ill hunters), but for the tribe. See also Miss Garrod’s Lecture, Royal Society of Arts, February, 1928. She also maintains that this “school” of art spread from a very small centre somewhere in southwestern Europe.

¶20335 See Burkitt, *Pre-History*.

¶20436 The most primitive we have, either spoken by backward peoples or in the most archaic tongues we can decipher, are all at the second, the complex stage of evolution, from which today we are evolved to the third, the deliberate, generalized, “mathematic” simplicities and severities of civilized speech. Of the rudiments of language, of the onomatopoeic, we have no trace. See for its probable existence Paget’s Address to the British Association, 1928, where he claims that verbal roots are sound reflexes interdependent with a general spontaneous gesture of the whole body, and gives evidence of this. The prance and the howl would thus develop into the dance and the paean.

¶205[page 56] ing individuality are therefore not native to such speech, and we have seen into what pluralistic confusion the missionary must get when, trying to allot for purposes of salvation to everybody one psyche, he arrives at the conclusion that the "savage says he has many souls." 37 These languages cannot express our logic, our concepts, our clear-focused separations between ourselves and the outer world, our selves, and our fellow men. From the convergent trend of this evidence there can be no doubt that if we could trace back to the tongues of "pre-war" communities we should at the "holophrastic" level find every expression for individual experience lost and only such terms as convey a group intention left.

¶206Certainly dead languages in their more archaic forms have presented a similar problem of transition to the individualist, the same discovery to the post-individualist. The literature such languages preserve contains also the same illuminating, or confusing, conceptions. The massacre of Achan's family with him because of his theft of spoil from Jericho, an act of senseless injustice to the individualized, to the pre-individualized seems obvious equity, and the approval with which it is said by missionaries to be accepted by backward peoples, shows that they are still in real sympathy with a condition the early record reveals to have once been normal among the Hebrews—a people who a few centuries after were to attain a degree of individuation wherein personal responsibility and its corollary, personal salvation, become the supreme problem.

¶207This passing reference to religion brings us to the third line of evidence. Language, literature, ritual, all change, but far more slowly than the psyche they are framed to express. They all, therefore, carry in them many survivals, and such of them as are no longer living, but of which we have sufficient record, reveal, to those who can read the alien evidence, much about the primitive psyche. Rites, perhaps, mark the

¶20837 See Lévy-Bruhl, p. 89.

¶209[page 57] revolution from the general to the particular, from the undifferentiated consciousness to the individual, more clearly than either grammar or literature. Broadly speaking, we may see up to a certain stage everywhere man practising fertility-rites that the community may be fruitful, have plenty, and multiply. Then there comes a moment when men suddenly become concerned with personal salvation; the old religion becomes foul; sex, once sacred, becomes horrible (the pig, because it had once been holy, becomes unclean), and man looks not for his community to survive here, but for himself to survive elsewhere after death. Such a change can only mean that up to it there had existed a consciousness which bound in predominant community-sense each community's constituents. Here it must be enough to raise the point and leave to a later consideration (Chapter III) what it is that causes the change, provokes the Revolution.

¶210It may, however, here be urged, even by such as would allow personality to have been a far less individualized thing in the past than it is today, that the above statement of the case has greatly overrated the dominance of the group psyche over its constituents. Surely if it ever extended to such individual-obliterating lengths among humans, animals, at least gregarious ones, should have no personality at all? Even the talking horses and dogs had a personality, and every one who has kept a domestic animal is aware of its psychic idiosyncrasy. That term is, however, the precise term, and with it and not with individuality we approach a definition of the animal psyche. The animal is a variant of its species, not an independent offshoot. There is, however, an intrinsic reason for thinking that primitive man—however undifferentiated the animals we can study may be—is peculiarly integrated. This is made clear by a glance at the development of the idea of Instinct. This was first thought to be a primal condition, which attained its full development and then made way for intelligence. It is now seen that in-

¶211[page 58] stinct itself is an alternative development (of which reason is the other term) from a common and original “trial and error.” Both reason and instinct, as we now know them, have developed to their present complexity: behind man today there lies no period of perfectly reacting instinct, any more than ahead of the bee a time when it will develop—instinct having supplied it with all it may—a critical understanding. The large-brained, soft-surfaced creatures, when they took another line from the hard-surfaced (who could carry safer from outward interference the deposit of tradition within their corticed bodies)—they, if they were to advance, if they were not to be utterly distracted by the stimuli which would come pouring in on them, had to hit upon some method whereby they might preserve and accumulate experience. The most useful undoubtedly was the original psychophysical device of gregariousness.38 The animals which adopted this went forward beyond the rest, but at a price, and an increasing one. If the unit were to benefit from the group he must yield proportionately to the group. If he were to depend on the quicker, subtler gear of social heredity, he must strip himself of the old armour of physical heredity. And so when we come to humanity it seems increasingly difficult to find an intact instinct remaining in it. This is not to say that man never had that capacity for storage, not even to say that he never developed it, but, simply, that the two ways of life are not compatible and that as evolution is complex, man has stripped to conquer, divesting prior to a new enduement. If we apply this idea to the psychological study this chapter pursues, we see that it suggests that the child psyche born into the group today has certain animal capacities so repressed that we may plot a time when the group was at its strongest, when man was progressing rap-

¶21238 Of course on this hypothesis, among the gregarious insects the tropism and individual instinct of each constituent of a group must also have been mutilated and modified by the group instincts, i.e., the inherited behaviour of the group as a morphological whole.

¶213[page 59] idly away from the animal pack, through social heredity taking the place of instinct, and when therefore the child psyche would actually discard some of the individuality which lower consciousnesses, less integrated, would naturally have attained. In order that it might share to the full both the strength and the flexibility of the group, the child might be depersonalized and as a separate individual sink to a level below that of some of the large-brained solitaries. The evidence about “wolf-children” confirms this in two important particulars. In the first place, these creatures, although (as most well-authenticated stories of them come from India) they cannot be recruited from stocks which by any means can be called primitive, nevertheless fall back to a subsimian, quadruped life. In the second, by their attachment to a pack they show that the gregarious “instinct” is the one that in such abandoned creatures remains peremptory.

¶214We may then conclude that the group psyche must for a space have overtaken and encysted the individual psyche until this latter, freed from instinct, could break out, because, now not lower but higher than the mass, it could surpass its achievement. Certainly without the hypothesis of some such alternating development, it is difficult to understand how in man was effected that discarding of the instincts and that substitution of social for individual psychophysical heredity to which the unparalleled speed of advance and the height of attainment of humanity is due.

¶215We can now say that there is anthropological, philological, literary, and religious evidence of earlier stages of consciousness; and it may be suggested here—what will become increasingly evident as the argument of this book is elaborated—that these stages show three distinct degrees of condensation.39 Of the first, fundamental, and pure condition,

¶21639 Henri Berr, Director of the Bibliothèque de Synthèse Historique, in his Introduction (p. xx) to Moret and Davy’s *From Tribe to Empire*, maintains that there are three stages, but he would have them be: (1) the really primitive—the completely suggested group, acting without initiation or edu-

¶217[page 60] complete group identity, when the constituent is incapable of separate existence, separation being inconceivable, so that he shares the aeonic life of the community and requires no other future life, and exile results in death—of this long Eden state of man we may say that though it is no longer anywhere actually being lived, not even now by the most integrated and homogeneous groups in the world’s most isolated areas, it undoubtedly not only once existed but was universal. Of the second condition we can now recognize plenty of societies surviving in the world today. That is the stage of “collective representation,” when the units of the group, although they may not be completely subordinated and undifferentiated, are still incapable of recollective experience other than the community’s. They may occasionally be troubled by individual percepts; their concepts are still wholly the tribe’s. An odd fact may temporarily disturb, but it is almost immediately eliminated from the system, which is still, through group communion, able to tolerate only traditional meanings. They are in the state in which we are when dreaming: facts do intrude, pain is in a manner felt, but experience hostile to the drift of the dream is either com-

¶218cation, each for all, like the peccaries and other group animals when attacked; (2) the most backward societies we have today (such as the Arunta), where terrific initiatory inhibitions have to be laid upon the individuals, because individualism is really present, though unrecognized by the savages themselves, and its force is proved by the counter-forces that society uses against it. This he calls the anchylosed state of society. And (3) the individualized society we call civilized. As to this classification it may be said that while it confirms broadly that used in this book, it does not attempt to give any reason for the advance of the group, either into the paralysis of the conservatism of savagery or into the convulsions of civilization. If we allow that the inevitability of individuality is the *causa causans* of all the states of society now known (whether the savage that resists and is paralyzed or the civilized that succumbs and is transformed), we shall then be able to see that in the first stage, so complete and undisturbed may be the group consciousness that there may actually be a group progress. In the second, that suggestion may grow weaker owing to the presence of potential individuality, and the group suggestion then therefore becomes, like all dying moralities, merely negative, blindly conservative. Next this suppression extrudes individuality. The state, as Bagehot says, becomes “status,” and progress becomes progress at the speed of the individual life, but, alas, convulsive.

¶219[page 61] pletely changed by interpretation in the dream's favour or completely forgotten.

¶220But today this condition, wherever it survives, is everywhere threatened by the third stage, that which is characterized by the emergence and eventual dominance of the proto-individual. Yet even this stage has a right to be classed with the co-conscious and not with the fully individualized state as we in the intenser levels of civilized communities experience it. For Society—be it an isolated community, a subject people, or only a lower class—in which individualism is sporadic, retains for the mass out of which the individual is emerging, and to some extent for him too, the most important element of the earlier condition, the sense that the group is more than right, is inevitable. Though the group faculties which naturally impress the observer most, and which have built up this sense of impossibility of opposing the group—such as instinctive common understanding—may already be gravely impaired, the structure of mind which they shaped in the brains of the group, rigid and unsupported though it now is, remains. Indeed it is to the survival of this sense, when the faculties which caused it are already decayed, that is to be attributed the otherwise inexplicable power of endurance that has been possessed by states in historic times, and the power of recovery they show from the disasters which they bring upon themselves. Psychology now recognizes that nothing but the survival of a condition of mind in the masses alien from anything which rationality will produce can account for "modern" states still existing in this modern world. Though the majority of their constituents seem to be exploited and have no longer any immediate sense of identity with the state, still the rudimentary condition of their individuality—their own imperfect sense of their personal separateness, of their sole and lonely experience of one place, where they actually have to pass their unimaginative lives, and one time, some ineffective glimpse of a thousand months

¶221[page 62] about the close of the Steel Age—renders them, though often exasperated, unable to revolt. When not exasperated they even arrogate the successes of those at the top. But as their constant sterilization and anaesthetic they have this sense of endurance, the eternity of ignorance. Their time-sense has not grown to feel the vast span of aeons in which the modern world is a point, and though they work at tasks which only some sense of that span on the part of their masters could have made possible, they work blindly.

¶222Though this is the last and faintest or rather the least objective phase of the pre-individual condition, from a study of this survival we should be able to recognize that it is an actual link between two states, one of which can only develop out of the other by completely destroying even the memory of its predecessor: we should be able to see how the emergence of true individuality in such groups—whether submerged groups of routineers at the base of the modern structure or outlying peoples on which the vast Babel of modern civilization has not yet been reared—not only dissolves the old unit but makes the notion of it inconceivable—how individuality, however poor and starved, becomes the only channel through which consciousness can conceive its fulfilment. Individuality, looking back, has nothing but pitying contempt for the slaves of the past. It can see their condition; it cannot conceive their consciousness. As long as that psychological boundary is not crossed the units of the flock are safe. In spite of their physical state becoming daily more alien to their notions about it, and often daily more precarious, elements of Eden remain about them. In this matter of consciousness the rule seldom fails, that the stable condition is happy, not acutely pleasurable, but endued with an ample sense of content and right, while it is change in itself which causes distress and disease. Those who have yet to become acutely self-conscious and individual

¶223enjoy that sense of peace and are really aware only of an eternal present.

¶224Of such a condition we have all had experience in childhood, and our memory of it is kept open to some extent by the constant reflection on how ample then were our resources of time, and if we were not flagrantly interfered with, not psychologically Caesarianed into manhood, how ample, too, our pleasures. The child’s secret is its lack of consistent identity; it changes its very nature as fast as its future. It cannot say:

¶225Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast And in a little while our lips are dumb. Let us alone, what is it that will last! All things are taken from us and become Portions and Parcels of the dreadful Past,

¶226for itself is taken up and perfectly assimilated in the future. It is only when, like an old cell, we begin to accumulate a stubborn residue that will not be taken up, cannot be perfectly subsumed, that we become aware that all that is alive in us is going out of us and we are, at an increasing pace as the amount of clinker accumulates in the fire of life, being left a cooling, hardening slag behind.

¶227And as the prenatal physique is the final and unanswerable evidence of our physical evolution, so childhood is the best clue we have to the state of the precivilized psyche. Of such, it is now obvious fact, must be the kingdom of heaven, for they cannot lose their Edens. How grotesque, then, is it that we, who, because we have been expelled, have had to build ourselves elaborate protections against the outer desolation, should now rush to the still sheltered and offer them our absurd cover. Heaven, said Confucius, is not a place but a principle. Eden, we can now see, is not a garden but a condition. Economic conditions are only to be understood when interpreted psychologically.

¶228[page 64] In child psychology we find, then, the third and final proof of pre-individualism. That is not to say that the child is exactly similar 40 to the true and extinct primitive any more than the foetus actually recapitulates extinct physical ancestors. But as in the latter, features which disappear after the embryonic stage illustrate ancestral forms, so in the child’s consciousness there is a large element of something only to be interpreted as the recapitulatory reference to a pre-individual psyche. Stanley Hall in his *Adolescence* has noted that throughout childhood to the close of adolescence there is a series of well-marked crises at various ages, which correspond with the ages at which backward races attain adulthood; they are highwater lines or storm beaches left by lower floods, on which today the tide of life breaks, checked for a moment, until it sweeps on in us to unprecedented height.

¶229In the tracing of the evolution of consciousness child study takes the place which comparative anatomy took in confirming the evidence of physical evolution, to which palaeontology pointed. Until our generation’s advances in psychology, the child was treated as a miniature adult.41 The success of modern methods of training shows that the hypothesis that it differs from us as remarkably in psyche as in physique is not mistaken.

¶230To sum up, then, we can no longer take for granted that we ourselves are unalterable, indivisible, inassimilable “kernels of consciousness.” Anthropology in all its branches

¶23140 The passionate revolt against authority should not, however, be taken as evidence of individuality any more than the unteachable effort of the bee to rejoin its swarm shows it to be individual. The intractability of the average child of three years is said to mark the rise of self-consciousness, but until much later, if this secessionism is allowed freedom, it leads the child to join itself up with a group which exerts a tyranny far more suppressive than any the parents exert. See the studies in child psychology of boy gangs.

¶23241 The blindness to obvious difference is well illustrated by the primitive Flemish masters who persistently drew the infant Jesus with the proportions of a man reduced to fit the mother’s lap.

¶233leaves no doubt that the individualized psyche is a comparatively modern thing. Philology, literature, and ritual confirm the discovery. Child psychology supports it. Alienistic study also reveals the same. The evidence of telepathy and "splintered personalities" shows that even at this moment, behind our assertion of separateness, of our oneness and indivisibility, lie shades, uncertainties, and blends in which we merge back to an undifferentiated consciousness. This final point is only referred to in this summary, for it belongs rightly to the future rather than to the past and must be considered fully when we come in a later chapter to view the lines on which the expanding individual is again resuming a larger consciousness.42 Here it is mentioned because in the study of such states we find that some may better be classed as rudimentary than as vestigial and that therefore in them is to be found the explanation of our growing ability to discern earlier states of consciousness, out of which we have all come, but which were invisible to our fathers, as in the evening men may see the mountains they passed at dawn but lost sight of at midday.

¶234We have, then, from our glance backward, a revelation of a vast cycle of evolving consciousness. We see how momentary, in comparison with that immense pre-individual period, has been our individualized state which we took for granted as constant, eternal, the one fixed point in a moving universe. We see, too, that our power to recognize that earlier condition was withheld from our immediate predecessors because of the intensity of their phase, their individuality, and so we calculate that it is because our individuality is become somewhat less intense, because we are opening again to a larger, less engrossed, less urgent awareness, that we are able to recognize its lower expression in all that extent of our ancestry that lies below the level of history, of civilization, and of self-consciousness.

¶23542 See Ch. VIII.

¶236This is as far as anthropology and its ancillaries can take us. It reveals an earlier condition, and the development of the science itself suggests some sort of approximation on our part to that condition. We must, then, next ask of history itself whether it can throw any light on how if not why that primaeval state of consciousness broke up. If we study history to find out how individuality emerges we may be able to discern the path of its development, obtain proof of the law of its phases, see at this closer range whether it is ever stabilized, is not always attempting to turn spirally back to a higher general consciousness, and whether in our own day our social and psychic condition may not require to be interpreted as a crisis in the breakdown of separate consciousness and in the attainment of an awareness as calm but infinitely more wide, as content but far more dynamic, than that which was the happy and general estate of man.

¶237[page 67] CHAPTER II

¶238THE PROTO-INDIVIDUAL

¶239SUMMARY

¶240HISTORY is comprehensible only as the story of growing consciousness. The first individuals we can recognize in it are evidently emerging from sub-individual societies. The hostility these (priest-kings and witch-doctors) awake shows that they are a new emergence. Because they are unnatural the community looks on them as victims. Stages of the individual's condensation are evidenced by the "inspired" stage of religion—the god-intoxicated prophet—enthusiasm—succeeded by the organized authoritarian stage. The Proto-individual emerges spontaneously and becomes the priest-king. He survives because, though weak, his emergence is probably occasioned by tribal change, and change makes the tribe weaker even than he. But his own psychic evolution continues. It is true that self-consciousness means a new power to deal with tradition, but it also means that the priest-king must finally translate his own sense of group consciousness into belief in personal survival. By tracing intensification of this belief we have, therefore, a second scale for extending the record of consciousness' evolution. But first the priest-king must go through intermediate stages, and passing through them, he reorganizes the community, and so fresh individuals are released. These successive stages are: priest-king, hero, fainéant, mystic or monk. This last stage, if those before have not already done so, is never attained without bringing civilization crashing, and so is brought to a premature end the development of all the later-emerged individuals. Of the Heroic stage we have evidence in sagas

¶241[page 68] and epics, now recognized as a definite and perhaps universal stage of society. If the Heroic phase can be passed through without society's destruction the proto-individual, i.e., the ruler, must become, in his own psychic evolution, fainéant and then mystic. Of the Heroic phase we have almost contemporary narrative in the epics; of the next stages we have immediate history which turns into autobiography. The New Empire in Egypt takes us actually through this cycle: from a revival of the Heroic phase, past the indulgent and mystic phase, to a collapse of society. Egypt continues to work out this theme of individuality's emergence, but each time the fissiparity is more complete, until native society can no longer be made to cohere. Then the rise of "salvationism," long arrested by organized religion and hierarchy, marks the desertion, by all the higher types, of the community, which is left to fools or knaves—lower individuals, or routineer conventionalists, hardly to be called individuals. So in Egypt we have a type of all human social evolution. The next stage of history shows the disintegrating process continuing to work down and spread among the masses and to turn them into private individuals.

¶242CHAPTER II

¶243The essential in History is conditioned by the Nature of Ideas. WEGELIN.

¶244IN THE first chapter it was necessary to trace back from our present individualized state of consciousness to the Palaeolithic, because the contention that our consciousness evolves is so unfamiliar that it was necessary to show it changing from the fully self-conscious type, which is now normal among the intelligent civilized, to ever more dimly differentiated states. Having by this regress revealed the existence of a curve of consciousness, we can with this central clue at-

¶245[page 69] tempt to trace up through history the rise of individuality and the path of its development. As we trace that path we may begin to discern that its rise and fall—for it is no steady slope—can be correlated with, because they inform, every ascent, collapse, and recovery of civilization. We see thus presented the possibility of a philosophy of history, for all history, political, social, economic, is symptomatic of the evolution of the psyche.

¶246In the first place, however, it may be noted that a study of the earliest individuals we can definitely isolate, gives yet another proof of an original stable, unindividualized condition of human society. These lonely beings, when we consider their appearance and surroundings, show clearly how alien is their condition to that of the people among whom they have to live. The well-known hostility with which the magician is regarded in backward communities discloses that here is a new sort of consciousness, a creature for which the community has no place. He makes himself essential, if not useful, in the end; but that is his triumph, and otherwise he would not have survived at all. There must have been many failures before the first individuals established themselves by focusing on themselves the magic-feeling of the tribe. It has been noted from nearly every continent that the least disturbed peoples seem to be without priests or ritual; magic is general, it has yet to condense on a magician.1 There is no doubt, too, that the magician himself feels an outcast and hostile. Frazer 2 has summarized evidence from almost every anthropological field to show the enmity with which the medicine-man and the priest-king are regarded and also how they return the dislike. It has often been urged that magic cannot but be black, for essentially it is the individual's unhallowed effort, a conscious turning-away from the group practice,

¶2471 Have individuals, then, not condensed? Perhaps careful examination may yet reveal communities in which individuality is still so incipient that none are aware of being different or alien.

¶2482 Frazer, *The Golden Bough: The Magic Art.*

¶249[page 70] which is religion, to seek, like Balaam, the prostituting wizard, "enchantments in the wilderness." Freud has suggested that the elaborate tabus with which the lives of priest-kings are made little better than a pestered imprisonment are the outcome of a profound subconscious jealousy based on a feeling of fundamental difference—a difference in quality—between the group and its peculiar individual. As the evolution of human society proceeds ³ the individual learns how to outwit the tribe and can substitute others, or even a simulacrum, for his own body, which is intended for sacrifice; but even in these formalized harmless rites can be detected the bloody beginnings of individuality, its inevitable alienation, its struggle to survive, the power it wins, the price it pays.⁴ However jealously the crown he wears may be viewed by his group, the loneliness and suspicion to which the crown-wearer must be the prey are evidence enough, without the bloody fate that overhangs his end, to show that no man would raise himself above his fellows did not a power not himself, a sudden involuntary condensation of consciousness, a focus that contracts him from the tribal thought, drive him on to a destiny the end of which he cannot suspect. This matter becomes clearer when we consider the office which the proto-individual invariably assumes. The priest-king or

¶250³ See *The Golden Bough: Attis, Adonis and Osiris*.

¶251⁴ The Baganda—negroid in race, "heroic" in stage of social evolution—represent their kings after accession as "eating the country." This throws light on the earlier kings' part and shows how the hero has escaped it. He has reversed the priest-kingly rôle. Eat or be eaten are the only alternatives offered by an emotional relationship which is so intimate that it can only be expressed by physical absorption. It may be the continuance on the human level of that same blind effort, to re-assimilate part of oneself that has somehow become separate, that makes many mammals eat their young if these are interfered with. That it is not cannibalism but this reabsorption that is desired is shown by the fact that it is satisfied, if the king won't be eaten by the community, by the king pretending to eat it. It hardly matters which, to the mystic mentality of the tribe (though no doubt the difference is very sensible to the Hero). What does matter is that from whichever side it comes, at-one-ment must be attained again. For ritual murder of the King, see also Moret and Davy on the Sed festival in Egypt, which they think (and Flinders Petrie agrees) is a simulacrum royal sacrifice after which the King came alive and lived for ever.

¶252witch-doctor is regarded by the early community as its victim, a creature marked out by a mysterious unnaturalness as an obvious sacrifice to the unknown. It is a curious fact, unless we allow that it is the dawn of self-consciousness that, by the new sense of isolation, gives its experient an original sense of wrong, how ready the sincerer witches and wizards have always been to denounce themselves.5

¶253The history of the evolution of religion is outwardly in the main an account of the manner in which they succeeded in passing on yet again the community's vicarious punishment, a deadly game of beggar-my-neighbour. That evolution points to the rise of individuality as its directive cause, for in the early stages when the proto-individual feels most acutely his loneliness and has yet to learn through his constantly intensifying self-consciousness, which reveals his imminent danger, to behave as a complete cynic, we find that the victim is so shocked by his own state that he often seems to suffer his own immolation quite willingly.6 Then his sense of sin becomes complicated with questioning. Is he really evil? At that stage, if by evil is meant malicious, certainly not, but he draws on himself evil treatment because he is strange.7 When he cries, "They hated me without a cause," he is halfway to retaliation. So it becomes apparent that in

¶2545 See Ch. VIII, Witch Trials. The present theological controversy over the Doctrine of the Fall illustrates this and shows that as always the abnormal merely exaggerate and magnify the experience of the normal, for all anthropologically educated theologians are beginning to teach that the sense of sin which was by *their* predecessors taken to be proof of a Fall is in reality indicative of this simultaneous consciousness of self-will, separation, and mortality which must attend the emergence of self-conscious individuality. The tradition of Primal Innocence, Fall, and Expulsion is anthropological evidence of an original co-consciousness.

¶2556 See *The Golden Bough*.

¶2567 No doubt, later this was rationalized, when the children said, "What mean ye by this custom?" into an opinion that the king was old and his magic power must be failing, or that there were actual examples of his failure: pestilence, famine and defeat; and he had better be killed. This later reason has been taken to be the origin of the custom, but there is reason for doubting the reason because, in the first place, it is well known how blind to proof that the tribal magic is not working even our present

¶257the priest-king we are viewing a double personality. The sacramental hymn, “Himself the victim and himself the priest,” and the well-known saga reference to Odin—that he hung on the tree pierced by his own spear—foreshorten into one person at the least two. The first is the spontaneous victim. He is an outcrop of a new sort of consciousness—the individual. He cannot help being different, and the tribe cannot help destroying him. In the second stage his place is taken by the priest, the peculiar being who realizes that unless he can somehow mystically and sacramentally offer up himself and so make the tribe believe not merely that he dies for them but (the real problem) that he has discharged their dislike through this sacramental performance, they will undoubtedly and really kill him.

¶258Such contrasts of behaviour can only be rendered consistent and comprehensible by the hypothesis of the evolution of consciousness. Only if we assume that we are witnessing the slow condensation of an individual consciousness is it possible to understand such changes and perceive the causal connection. Probably the proto-individual becomes aware of his condition before it becomes apparent to the tribe. Conscious of the falling of a veil between him and the meaning of his life, he naturally seeks in ecstasy to recover that state of full communion in which the remainder of the tribe still lives. He feels excommunicate and seeks for reabsorption, to slough off this numbing sense of separateness. So he attains to conditions impressive to the onlooker and suggestive to himself. This is the inspired stage of religion.7a

¶259laggards are (as blind, and for the same reason, as hypnotic subjects are to contradictions of their “suggestions”), as blind as they are sensitive to and alarmed by anything new in the tribal life itself. In the second place, we know that ritual murder may not be provoked by age or failure but become due on certain dates—probably lucky days on which with true completeness something alien may be re-assimilated, or to use later language, when the alien has recurred and become obdurate and anger has awaked, something detestable may be clean ridden without any revenant dangers.

¶2607a At this stage the vision-giving drugs must have been discovered. See Leuba, *Psychology of Religious Mysticism*, Ch. II.

¶261There follows the organized phase. This latter always results when the individual’s natural alienness has been by hostility and suspicion turned into counter-hostility. Now he is conscious that he is alone, that he can never go back, that there is enmity between him and the tribe, which spares him only because it fears him. Will he not in self-defence add in every way to that fear? Will not every action make more clear to himself what he is and how, if he would survive, he must behave? He can afford no soft illusions or gentle loyalties. He realizes that ecstasy does not return him to the bosom of the tribe, nor does it give him the powers which the tribe desires him to give and believes he can bestow. Very soon he cannot help realizing that they simply desire physical plenty, and this, whatever other planes he explore, he cannot bring them. He shams, he cheats, he watches, and should suspicion awake, he must strike first and destroy those who question his power. So the rise and degradation of religion can be explained by the painful growth of the spirit of man out of co-consciousness into individuality. We can understand equally why the lonely, innocent alien soul cries, “Who have I in Heaven but Thee, and who on earth that I desire in comparison with Thee?” and how the organized Church always evolves a Holy Office. The rites, too, the priestcraft,8 in themselves throw a clear light on the evolution of the individual; for they all have to do with intensifying phases of survival. At first they are purely concerned with the eternal life of the tribe, the preservation and continuity of procreative plenty. Then imperceptibly death-fertility rites—performed for the dead and their influence on the crops—begin to be gone through for the living.9 Perry asks,9a “How came it that a ritual performed on behalf of [though would it not better express the intention to say “against”] the dead, was transferred to

¶2628 Cf. Ch. I, pp. 52, 56-57.

¶2639 Cf. *The Isis Mysteries at Rome.*

¶2649a “Death and Resurrection,” *Hibbert Journal*, January, 1927.

¶265[page 74] the living?” Is it not likely that a rite first performed purely as a precaution by the group, to “lay” the dead, came with the (general) emergence of individuality and its inevitable consequence—a completely new realization of death—to be performed no longer for the surviving group, but for the doomed individual? The first person to feel this, to have the power and the wish to transform the meaning of the rite, while preserving its form, is the proto-individual, the priest-king who is raised to represent the tribe in his person and to be sacrificed for it. As Perry has pointed out,10 survival is first a royal obligation.11 Afterward, with the spread of individuality and indicative of individuality’s expansion, it becomes a common privilege. “In Egypt the King is the first person to possess what we would call a soul.” 12 Of the most backward extants, communities whose language and social order seem to have changed little, Lévy-Bruhl summarizes on this important question.13 “Originally the idea of a soul is not found among ‘primitives.’ 13a That which takes its place is the representation of one or more co-existent and intertwined participations as yet not merged into the distinct consciousness of an individuality that is really one.” Some

¶26610 *Op. cit.*

¶26711 Dr. Woolley (*Times*, January 12, 1928), reporting on the first royal burial found at Ur and on the sacrificed attendants discovered, considered that this holocaust inhumation—though so early—must be regarded as a survival because there are no evidences of similar sacrifices in graves of contemporary commoners; but the facts may equally well mean that as only the King had a future life, so he alone required attendants. It is in a religious literature on the very threshold of individualized salvationism that we read, “The dead praise not Thee, neither they that go down into silence.” The King went to grow crops: the unfertilizing commoner went out. The latter is not a person at all. As Dr. Woolley has pointed out, all these attendants are laid out with none of their own possessions. They are not personal enough to exert the tabu of possession on the things they used in life. It is doubtful even (see Lévy-Bruhl, *Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures*, Ch. VIII, “Primitives’ Idea of Death”) whether their slaughter was intended to send them over to serve below their departed lord. As his possessions here, they were simply tabu and had to be disposed of.

¶26812 *Op. cit.*

¶26913 *Les fonctions mentales*, p. 89.

¶27013a *Ibid.*, p. 38.

¶271[page 75] such explanation of the rise of the priest-king must be found, for why should one member of the group more than another be picked out to assume the fatal prominence unless in some way he already attracted attention? Later, when individuality has become common, the choice can be directed by descent (though it should be noted that the witch-doctors among the Bantus, certainly in the Trans Kei, seek for and adopt a successor whom they choose as a child, it would seem for the possession of certain peculiarities) or by lot, but the original unstratified group must have found its first leader-victim by his spontaneous extrusion and have found the will to kill him, however they afterward rationalized their dislike, because he was outrageously different.

¶272In this long duel the individual must, at the beginning, generally have fallen a victim. But as the process was the aim of man’s psychic evolution, others were always taking the place still wet with the blood of their predecessor. And gradually, though the odds seem against him, his position grows much stronger than it appears. The nature of his evolution decrees that he shall ever become more consciously resourceful, more cynically free.14 From desperate dupe he turns to conscious cheat, and such psychic powers as he may have shared with the community and, for a moment, in the stage of transition from group to individual, have been able to employ deliberately, intentionally, and for his own ends,15 very rapidly are lost as self-consciousness, and especially the clear sense of the risk and strain of his position, increase.

¶273On the other side, the mistakes into which “collective representation,” which is nothing less than a complete inability to view any present experience save through tribal concepts, must lead the co-conscious, are so great that matched against an individual, especially in the changing environment which

¶27414 *The Golden Bough* contains many references by field workers to the growth of this cynical scepticism in the medicine-man as to his own psychic powers.

¶27515 Cf. Mediums.

¶276either drew forth the individual or favoured his survival, the co-conscious are much in the position of an animal relying on instinct matched against intelligence. The final issue cannot be in doubt. The one will never learn, the other never ceases learning, while the very changes in the environment which rouse the individual disorganize the tribe and make its traditional wisdom, slowly built up as an answer to certain stable conditions, completely inapplicable.

¶277The individual also persists because he has proportionate compensations for what he has lost. It is true that he has ceased to be able to view the Universe through the whole thickness of the tribe and so to find it comprehensible. Driven from the circle of life wherein no sensation reached him save filtered and refined so as to produce its appropriate and satisfying reaction, he would, should the process have taken place at a blow, have found himself with an experience irrelevant, interminable, paralyzing. So faced about, so wrenched from his environment, he would have died as certainly as a bee kept from its swarm. The transition must therefore have been gradual. The Polynesians, Melanesians, and some other backward peoples, it is true, die out, touched by our civilization, but it must be remembered that the fact that they have remained under almost primitive conditions so long (or even perhaps returned to them)16 shows that they could ill tolerate any interference, and our own civilization, as it reached them, was still so acutely individualized that the gap between the two ways of life might have engulfed even a more resolute leaper.

¶278Though, then, the proto-individual goes exploring into exile, with the *qui vive* which may so soon turn into a mortal challenge, he takes with him, like Aeneas, portable gods. When Eden vanishes, every man takes his share of what he contributed to the mirage, for, toward the end, the group

¶27916 See Ch. I.

¶280[page 77] consciousness must increasingly be kept going by individual, though still unconscious, help. The weak may have given so little that they die at once. The adaptable attach themselves to the strong, giving to the prophet what once tradition evoked. The strong take as their due sufficient to eke out the gap which will now, until individuality is finally resolved, open between what they see to be—on the clearness of which vision their ascendancy and even their physical survival depend—and what, as descendants of unquestioning loyalists, they still cannot help wishing with all their hearts might be, possible. The approval of their congregations helps them to confuse, with what the onlooker calls hypocrisy, the harsh choice between the power that comes from seeing things as at the individual level they are and the sweet weakness that arises from a memory of identity with the everlasting community, a memory subconscious and therefore now intellectualized as a personal survival.

¶281So by tracing the intensification of this survival-belief we have one scale of the condensation of consciousness, a chart of its evolution toward individuality. The process is, however, complex even in an abstract, which is all that this essay can present. In actual history contingency must have rendered it far more intricate. From the rise of the priest-king there is present at least a double development. In the first place there is the condensive evolution of the priest-king himself. We have now the main crises of this strange career: the victim, the priest, the magician “smelling out” his enemies, and then the hero who flings off the magical disguise and openly challenges the tribe to ordeal by battle. Finally 17 he will come back to salvation and the desire for

¶28217 It may appear that I have missed out an important phase in this cycle, *viz.*, the wise lawgiving king who after conquest settles down to rule for his subjects’ good; shepherd of scattered flocks, he brings them to one fold. This phase, however, is very rare and not part of the typical process. Of such may have been Khammurabi. In the Appendix, at the close of this

¶283[page 78] at-one-ment, for as in his prenatal physical life he has shadowed forth the life of the race, so in the history of his soul he must describe in little the vast sweep of the evolution of the consciousness of humanity. In the second place there is the effect on the community of this emergence. It causes outbreaks of fresh individuals up and down the social line, for not only does the emergence of the proto-individual show that the community is breaking up and therefore that ever more individuals may be expected to appear spontaneously, but the proto-individual himself needs them to effect his new purposes; he will therefore not crush them but encourage them. On this hypothesis, then, we ought to expect, after the proto-individual medicine-man has stabilized his condition, a corresponding elaboration and alteration in the life of the community. The leader will become a deliberate exploiter of his people, and the more self-conscious he becomes, the more will he organize them so as to carry out his restless designs.18 His new intensity necessitates change quite as much as the danger of his position advises it. Stratification must therefore appear in the community. Nor will the leaven which, working in the mass, produced the first individual, cease working. The human community has never organized itself with the completeness of the hive, where the supply of queens is dependent on a diet given by the workers and where when one queen has successfully emerged she goes round methodically and puts an end to the few other selec-

¶284chapter, there are reasons given for doubting its presence in the cycle illustrated by the eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty. Hadrian and Charlemagne may in some sort represent the phase. Napoleon, in spite of his St. Helenic claims to the position, certainly never represented in his career such a beneficent phase of kingship. He lived all his time as the gambling adventurer that the Hero must be.

¶28518 This is the other side of the problem that individuality presents: how if the community was always composed of completely formed individuals, the Hero was ever let obtain his absolute power, needed to wrench them out of their rut and take them off raiding. As Durkheim has said: "It is incomprehensible how primitive populations could have been subjected to the despotic power of the chief if individualism was really inborn in mankind. On the contrary hypothesis everything is explicable."

¶286tions, whose services will not be required. As has been suggested in Chapter I, some societies may postpone individualization by social elaboration, but in most it is only a preliminary stage in the community's dissolution, for the elaborations invented by a leader are not for the community's welfare but for his own.

¶287Individuality, we may therefore say, will outcrop anywhere in the group once it has appeared at the top. Because man is of polymorphic stock this strange psychic mutation may appear at any spot, and once it has made good in its initial effort, it will find it ever easier to emerge. The community may dread it as much as at first, but the community more and more will be in the hands of the individuals at the top who will want further individuals to carry out their purposes, to be their tools, although they too will require the undifferentiated mass as their base. The fresh individual, however, remains a problem though he may have his use. He is a danger, especially if he emerges in too great numbers. Posts will have to be got ready for him or pounds. He will have to be bought up or shut up. Hence the development of priesthood and, in a later corresponding curve of the evolutionary spiral, with which Chapter IV deals, the rise of monasticism, which, it must be noted, is a later development of priesthood, a more radical effort to find a remedy against the rapidly rising flood of individuality.19 So with organized religion society seems to stabilize; a real attempt has been made to meet the individual, and, there can be no doubt, the conservatives are right: in organized religion is the one hope of preventing psychic evolution from becoming general and the state from decomposing. There is an elabo-

¶28819 As evolution proceeds the production and survival of individuals increase and so, whereas at their first phase they were all taken up into priesthood or exterminated, in the phase that lies immediately behind us, though priesthood employed many, monasticism, a mere lock-up, is the form evolved to deal with the increase, which quantitatively was too great to be contained by the priesthood and qualitatively too intense to be satisfied with anything save complete concentration on personal salvation.

¶289[page 80] ration of parts, a rationalization of caste; and hierarchy—the very word for all ordered delegation and organization reveals its priestly origin—grades the individual according to his originality, i.e., according to his power of being of use and his complementary power of being a danger.

¶290However, stabilization on such a basis cannot be permanent: that has only been possible for the unself-conscious. The leader himself cannot be kept from psychic evolution. We have seen that as a priest-king he will become cynical. War gives him his opportunity to escape—from his own spiritual conflicts and the tribe's suspicions. Though in one case, cited above, a story undoubtedly edited,²⁰ the witch-doctor is required by the people to appoint a hero successor, in the same collection of tribal histories, when we go back another stage, though we find a purely heroic, unpriestly figure (Joshua) taking command when the Hebrew peoples enter a true raiding stage, he succeeds to a leader (Moses) who seems in his own person to be transitional between the priest and the general.²¹

¶291Up to this point we have had to depend in the main not on history but on the anthropological interpretations of the customs of backward peoples and of a few references from a dawn literature often edited. The priest-king stage of the proto-individual belongs largely to that stable happy

¶29220 In the particular example of transition which the Samuel-Saul story gives, some interesting confirmatory features have survived the editing. Saul, though technically a Hero, cannot lead his people on a successful raid, as he should if he is to get himself and them free of witch-doctor influences. The Philistines, not the Hebrews, are the raiders and keep the initiative, though Jonathan takes Jerusalem from the aborigines. So Samuel can continue to rival Saul: (1) on the day of anointing, brings thunder to prove divine displeasure; (2) asserts his superiority when Saul tries to offer sacrifice and when he saves Agag. So Saul can attain no magical status to compensate for his militarily defensive rôle. Finally Samuel raises up a boy usurper.

¶29321 Aaron, brother of Moses, is the “chief-priest,” but it is Moses who has the direct communications with Jahweh in the tabernacle and on the mountain, raises up the Golden Serpent, and in the battle against Amalek, does not himself fight or command, but works magic for victory.

¶294society which has no annals and so is prehistoric. The recurrent tragedy of the king himself is not so regarded by the people. It soon becomes a custom so regular and right that it is no more worthy of record than our daily meals. Even to the priest-victim himself, we have seen, there seems often to be such a sense of due (owing to the tribe’s certitude and his own self-doubts) that he feels there is nothing of particular note in his ending. It is inevitable: for himself perhaps even a relief.

¶295But the next stage 22 is of necessity a documented one. When, at last, the priest-king decides to act, he is doing something original, he is an innovator, he is making news.

¶296So it is from a new study of epic literature, correlated with evidences of revolutions and sudden alterations in ritual, that modern archaeology is now able to discern that these documents and customs are traces of a short, violent, vivid period in the advance of human culture, a period which seems an invariable stage in the growth of all human societies, an universal Heroic Age. It gives rise to sagas and epics, *klea andron*, glorious deeds of men, of individuals,23 the tales of whose achievements remould the old sympathetic-magic, food-production, impersonal ritual dances. "The glorious heroes are for the most part kings, but not in the old sense, bound to the soil, responsible for its fertility. Homage paid them is devotion for personal character."

¶29722 This transition is anthropologically recognized as "the transition from Totemic cult to hero cult." See Moret and Davy’s comments on Haddon and Rivers’ work in the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits. *From Tribe to Empire*, p. 79, Note 1.

¶29823 The association of a further acute contraction of individuality, with the passage of the proto-individual from the stage of the priest-king to that of the hero, is confirmed by the anthropological observation that the transition from matriarchy to agnatic descent ("the transformation of the system of kinship favoured the individualization of power by making authority masculine," Moret and Davy. Part I: "Social Organization," *From Tribe to Empire*, p. 97) marks the shift of authority from female to male, a shift which is probably the fundamental cause of the rise of war and which war, in its turn, emphasizes and extends.

¶299"Another noticeable point is that in heroic poems scarcely any one is safely and quietly at home." 24 The community is on the move. It is moved and can only be moved by an individual, but in moving it, too, becomes to some extent heterogeneous, inter-individualized.

¶300We may, then, say that the Heroic stage marks a distinct second phase in the evolution of the proto-individual. On first emerging he takes the form of the priest-king witch-doctor. Then becoming more individualized, more fully self-conscious, and failing to find heaven but foreseeing violent death, he (or his spiritual descendant) resolves, partly from craft, partly because of the original energy of the man, violent, crude, and uncanalized (as is the lesser force of the other constituents of the tribe), to engineer raids, for these not only break his own deadly entail—as priest-victim, if he stays at home and obeys tradition—but also break the people from their home rites, precedents, and customs. So the people become wholly dependent on him, for he is no longer a passive incarnation of their group life, to suffer that they may live, but a man of action without whose dictatorial decisions they will be defeated and destroyed. Later 25 it will be shown

¶30124 Jane Harrison's *Art and Ritual*, pp. 158, 160. See also for the whole subject H. M. Chadwick's *Heroic Age*. The author shows that an Heroic Age is an almost invariable characteristic of the movements of peoples and must come to an end prior to their re-settlement. In consequence the Heroic Age in Greece—the Homeric—and the Heroic Age in the European Dark Age (for the one is only heard through the music of Homer, the other seen through the eyes of the victims) really resemble each other so closely because they spring from the same spirit. "The passion for praise" which Chadwick notes as the Heroic characteristic is surely indicative of an acute crisis in individuality (similar to the small boy's crying "Look at me, look at me!") and that the Heroic Age is a crisis violent and short-lived is shown by the narrow period with which the sagas and epics deal. The Dark Age Heroic phase can be dated between 370 and 572 and the Homeric may cover even a smaller period. Certainly no Hero traced his descent more than three generations. As to the shattering of the old society (which the Heroic Age indicates), Chadwick points out that early Teutonic custom made no provision for the murder of kinsmen because within the group all were one and therefore compensation could only be to the whole group, from itself to itself. The Heroic Age loses this sacred kinship, and murder of kin becomes well known.

¶30225 See p. 84.

¶303how, the raiding stage over,²⁶ the re-settled peoples will, to some extent, return to magic as they will have gone back to crop-raising and will once again be obsessed with fertility; the generalship will break up, and so on the secular side will arise an aristocracy ²⁷ (Vico held that aristocracies become of their nature so tyrannous that they are overthrown) internecine and lazy: after which the tyrant, a recapitulation of the proto-individual.²⁸ As there will now be a definitely secular side to life, so too will appear, complementing it and as clearly defined, a religious one. Priesthood will re-establish itself, but as a profession, a specialization of the community rather than its climax, no longer the type of all its life, but only one of its activities. This priesthood will not have to pay the old price, and neither will it be paid the old reverence. The Church and State policy of historic civilization is in fact a synthetic reconstruction of the prehistoric Holy State.

¶304However, even at the prehistoric stage we must already recognize that not only the head but the whole graded social order is itself, in all its parts, however imperceptibly to them, on the move. Not only is the proto-individual requiring for his own purpose other individuals, but they are bound to emerge whether he can find uses for them or no. Social evolution is a constant, unconscious, *en échelon* advance. Every member throughout the order is set on the same spiral development. All are in process of becoming, first, men of action, and then men of reflection, if not of thought. Finally

¶305²⁶ If, as Carr-Saunders adduces evidence—see *Population*, Ch. XI, Section 19 (also Introduction)—economic pressures do not cause racial movements, movements led by heroes will end when this phase of individuality is for the moment no longer present.

¶306²⁷ Chadwick (*The Heroic Age*, p. 227), tracing the disappearance of the Epic—the Heroic form of poetry—says: “The great development of original poetry in the age of Callinos and Archilochos was connected with those political and social movements which so greatly affected the Greek world during the eighth and seventh centuries, changing almost every kingdom into a republic at first oligarchic.”

¶307²⁸ See P. N. Ure, *The Origin of Greek Tyranny*.

¶308[page 84] they must all become introspective and fail to act, through this sublimation of the will into contemplation.

¶309The difficulty in recognizing this process in history, though indeed it is human history’s fundamental theme, is mainly due to the fact that society periodically relapses and falls back from the path of its evolution—whether into the physical discomfort and economic scarcity of a community conquered by one more backward in these respects, or into the reverse conditions of a community which conquers one in these respects more advanced, matters little from this psychological standpoint. In consequence, historians who have judged mankind’s success by its economic persistence and elaboration doubted if humanity had any goal. Yet in the past, if we examine carefully we find that the reason for relapse is nearly always to be found in the too swift psychic development of the leader. This must jeopardize the same advance (still rudimentary, i.e., still toward and not away from individuality) of the rank and file. As the Hero has drawn his people after him, not only geographically but, to some extent, by breaking them out of their "cake of custom," by the example and the mere presence of his individuality, up the path of his own evolution of consciousness, when that evolution leads him, as it must, beyond the Hero stage (as it has out of the priest-kingly), the people fall back, and the outward sign, the economic consequence of this, is that they settle down again, either to be counter-attacked and conquered or to stabilize on the new land, and so relapse into practices over which a priest-king properly presides. When the economic interpretation of history held the field it used to be said that the raiders settled on the richer lands of the weaker peoples they had dispossessed and themselves became in consequence weak. We now see it is not the rich land that makes its possessors weak; it is the disappearance of the leadership which had made them strong, a gradual abdication of the head, which has to pursue its own evolu-

¶310tion toward contemplation. History shows many examples of raiders who ceased to be a danger not because they themselves were at all softened by civilization but because their spear-head, an Alaric, an Attila, a Genghis, or a Timour, disappeared and had no successor.29 There are even more examples of that very unpleasant phase for civilization—not less pleasant than his first appearance, and perhaps more destructive—the return of the Hero; of a people having long conquered and settled a district, suddenly producing a Hero—such as Charlemagne or Napoleon—bursting their bounds, overrunning their neighbours, and founding an Empire.30

¶311So already the prehistoric gives the clue to history. Through the infinite complexity of all our million individual *acta*, the spirit's search for itself is the explanation of our whirlwind hurryings, our sandhill heapings-together. The record of civilization, its risings, its internal upbreakings, its civil wars, its sinkings and inundations from without, can all be correlated with this underlying course of the evolution of consciousness, of that evolution beginning at the top and there running through the phases of priest-king, hero, fainéant, and simultaneously penetrating down through the

¶31229 To whom Egyptology is now inclined to add Khian, the great Hyksos. From his capital Avaris (perhaps Pelusium), it seems possible that for a dozen years he dominated the Fertile Crescent, which sweeps round from the Nile valley into that of the Euphrates—a horde domination that evaporates immediately on his death.

¶31330 According to this hypothesis the Hero cannot reappear unless the resettled community has had its religion deranged, its ancestral fertility-rites—even if sublimated into a God of Plenty approached through a peaceful priesthood, a stability in which the just man's reward is to see his children's children and peace upon Israel—challenged. So Charles the Great may have been using, and have owed his success to, an energy which Boniface and Martel set free when they destroyed the vegetation religion and its tabu among the Germans, and Napoleon (but see Ch. VI for the unprecedented circumstances in which this "Hero" played his grotesquely atavistic antics) may have been exploiting a later release of the same energy, loosed by the Revolution's derangement of the people's cult. See A. Aulard (*Christianity and the French Revolution*) for evidence that this was not Christianity but a Catholicism which had taken up so much of the fertility-rites of the soil that the peasant's practices were "pagan."

¶314[page 86] whole social mass and at each level recapitulating these phases in the three successive conditions of conventionalist, adventurer, mystic. That, under all the recriminations of the conservatives and their talk of decadence, is the secular inevitable process. The outcropping of individuality, intensified by the constant changes which the proto-individual in his restlessness provokes, must continue to increase until, even if the system was itself sound and never questioned its own right and power, even if the king and those in authority never themselves evolved further, it is doubtful whether it could any longer contain such a number of self-consciousnesses. As a shrewd conservative thinker has pointed out,31 the chief task of a modern community is to find places for the increasing number of its constituents who are determined to be "some one" or to give trouble. It cannot be done, for even if a community could be so constituted and still be economically possible, when the whole of it had come to be composed of officeholders who looked upon it as existing to keep them, these individuals would rapidly divide into the lower who would destroy each other in the struggle to gain disproportionate wealth, and the higher who would retire, finding that their real needs, being psychic, are not to be satisfied with the community divided between its members; that these needs can only be satisfied through a higher community which could take up and transform its individuals. Economics is the aim of the state, but only the means of the psyche, and any attempt to satisfy the individual with "part of the loot of the state" is as vain as to feed an animal on rich earth. It will grow the vegetable on which the animal can live; that is all.

¶315To demonstrate this as actual history we must, however, return to the proto-individual's evolution, to the stage of the sublimation of the Hero. We have seen that we have, when properly interpreted, in epics and sagas, the record

¶31631 Mackinder, *Democratic Ideals and Reality*.

¶317[page 87] of the Heroic phase of proto-individualism, but as that phase must be one of an extrovert, of a man of action, incapable of reflection, though the Hero may be celebrated in song, we can have only his deeds, not his thoughts; we have him at second hand. He cannot of his nature leave behind him a psychological document, or any autobiography. But as soon as this phase ceases to be “pure” we shall have first-hand evidence.32 We are coming to the level where we find actual contemporary “modern-minded” documents, for civilization *is* self-consciousness.

¶318So it is for this last stage of the still mainly homogeneous community, of the community individualized at the top but still able to prevent the fissures from spreading, that we have no longer to rely on detailed reconstruction from social survivals, fragmentary literature, and the pieced-together observations of field workers among backward peoples, whose condition by its nature prevented them from being able to attain the full complexity and extent of which that stage is capable. It is of the greatest importance and value that we should have actual record here—when society first reaches modern complexity, when actual individuals are affecting it, but when it is far enough away still to be seen as a single unit. For here, at a distance at which we can focus clearly on it, we can see the manner in which the state saves itself from immediate dissolution when individual self-consciousness appears, how in the effort it throws out a wonderful complex to balance the development, and finally how this sudden uprising in man’s secular session, this hour of amazing shifts and unsuspected inventions, comprises all we call civilization, a moment’s wild balance achieved between stability and serenity.

¶319Of this, the first recorded imperialism gives an initial ac-

¶32032 “In Greek poetry the epics sung by bards before and about heroes are superseded by lyrics such as Archilochos’ wherein the poet is wholly concerned with his own emotions.”—Chadwick, *op. cit.*, p. 226.

¶321count and a classic epitome. We see, millennia distant, foreshortened in the tract of time, what has been ever since repeated with a thousand complexities until the present, the triumph and tragedy of man the individual. We see this strange force, individuality, countered but not crushed by the self-preservative instinct of the group, giving rise to a new complexity of the social order, new works in the arts and the sciences, and an unprecedented extension of the state's area and term.

¶322Of all this the New Empire of Egypt has left an actual and vivid record. Prior to this, Pharaonic polity had given rise to a great kingdom; but as one of its historians has said, "Great as it was it created no Empire outside the Nile valley." 33 Prior to this, the social organization seems to have fluctuated between a feudalism which was no more than the rule of the tribal chiefs (each under its nome-totem banner), where the range of the senses is the limit of the emotions and traditional reflex is adequate for social action, and a kingship, which is still no more than the rule of one race by its chief-priest. But with the rise of the Empire something new has appeared. Alien peoples were not only to be raided but dominated and even to some extent Egyptianized.34

¶323Such a development is only possible through a new growth in complexity of the social organization itself, the essential requirement for which is not only the full emergence of self-consciousness at the top but the release of a considerable number of individuals throughout the system.

¶324It is obvious that this individuality, though essential to any state which was to pass the traditional bounds, would

¶32533 Modern archaeology seems to show that the Egyptians were invaders. They may have entered the Nile valley under prehistoric heroes (see Appendix)—or under heroes the valley may have been united, settled down, and then the evolution of the ruler must have restarted. When the light of history breaks on the valley the priest-king is preparing to make his bid for freedom.

¶32634 This fact alone would show that this particular Heroic outburst is probably not primal but is that of a second stage of consciousness' evolution from the mass up to the threshold of individuality.

¶327[page 89] nevertheless have been fatal to it if the egotism inevitable in a self-conscious being had not been provided for by organized religion. The Egyptian units were able to become an Empire because of the unprecedented development of organized religion in the valley of the Nile. Pure religion—contemplation—for these purposes, is worse than useless. Pure action—simple reactive strength—is helpless. What Egypt attained in the middle of the second millennium B.C., when she arose from the Hyksos inundation, was the first mixture perfectly balanced for political expansion. One ingredient is the “pure” religion 35 which at its extreme in India still keeps that country politically helpless, an ingredient which is essential to satisfy (drug, if you will) the now essential self-conscious individual, but which, left unmixed, unbalanced by pure activity, by a state will-to-action, rapidly disintegrates the community. Of that other element, sheer action, the pure form is found in the early Nordic peoples, whose aimless, unorganized turbulence was to keep them savage millennia after less restless peoples—truant laggards of civilization, unable to renounce childish heroics.36

¶328For imperialism is required an absolute ruler who is a man of action, one who has psychically emerged from the static priest-king into the mobile hero, who sees his escape, salvation, and *raison d'être* is war, and who wields the whole force of the state as a weapon of offence: while this weapon, to be adequate, must be shaped by men conscious enough to meet and overcome unprecedented conditions but whose self-consciousness can somehow be kept from its natural anti-social tendency.

¶329In the first, the pure Heroic, phase, when for the first time

¶33035 “Pure religion” is used here in regard to the individual just emerged from the mass and so concentrated on a continuance of his own life, a concentration caused by the new realization and fear of death.

¶33136 Of course when their time came they did, but their religion, never evolving an organized priesthood, kept them backward until it was destroyed by another alien religion which could provide this essential link for social evolution and political elaboration.

¶332[page 90] the priest-king turns himself into a hero and goes off raiding, he may be helped in his breakaway by the partial emergence of other proto-individuals in the group. On the other hand it is more likely that they never develop to the same degree as himself—the raid would be almost impossible if they did—and though they advance a little toward objective and individual vision, toward seeing things as they are and understanding a new experience (which gives them the power to depose him if he proves an unsuccessful leader),⁸⁷ they are probably seeing in their leader (as the dog sees in his master) not so much an accountable person as an impersonation of the old group.

¶333In the heroic stage we are in this place investigating—this secondary emergence of the hero—the social conditions at home are already so complex, the problems of foreign campaigning—often against societies as advanced—are so varied, that (a) there will be no swarming; the hero, however far afield he goes, will be operating from a base to which he will return; and (b) at that base there must be men who organize victory but who do not go with the armies and are not warriors. Hence the proto-individuals from the lower strata need not themselves go through an heroic stage, for in the true first heroic phase they are grouped round their Hero, while in this second phase (illustrated here by the Egyptian New Empire) they do not become heroes, but, being forbidden expression on that stage, pass on into an early condition of that interest in a future life which will terminate in salvationism.

¶334In short, there must be a priesthood who for social rewards in this world or through promises about the next are kept

¶335³⁷ Apposite to this is the remark of Ammianus Marcellinus that the Burgundians, who were then going through their heroic phase, but possibly with a tendency to settle, deposed their kings if they were unsuccessful in war or if there was famine, and did so through the agency of a permanent high priest. An interesting illustration of a mixture of priest-king and hero with duplication of office. (*Am. Marc.*, XXVIII, 5, 14, quoted by Chadwick, p. 366.)

¶336[page 91] loyal, essential individuals who yield that combination of clear and original thought on which unstable expanding societies must depend, together with the traditional conduct—loyalty and subordination—without which any society collapses. Because of their belief in their personal immortality 38 they are willing to be the means of a man who, functioning completely on this plane and having the best of it, remains in a lower state of consciousness than themselves.39 To meet the requirements of the condition nothing but a highly organized religion is adequate, and it is this fact which explains why Egypt, which had the most complete religious structure ever reared, was the first society to succeed in passing beyond the economic and territorial limits to which society organized on nothing more complex than a tradition derived from the habits of group-conscious homogeneity must remain confined. Yet the co-ordination of the entire substructure, however perfect, could not prevent the natural process of disintegration from proceeding, as it must, at the top. *Quis custodiet custodem?* Who can assure that the End and Aim of Society will not himself discover the active life's aimlessness? The Hero, like the Heroic Age, is himself a phase, and at each return he has a shorter run. Through this hypothesis of psychic evolution we can review a society of which we have still the main records and even the actual bodies and witness it, in conformity with this law, describing its complete life-cycle to the dissolving end. From the quiet, stable condition of traditional reactions it passes into violent, far-flung action. This is followed by a secondary stage of accumulation, and this in

¶33738 By the time of the New Empire certainly the priesthood had asserted survival rights. See *The Nile and Egyptian Civilization*, by Prof. A. Moret.

¶33839 Having less intelligence and probably more will, owing to his lack of speculative faculty. Probably no group can stand more than a very few heroes. Accident apart, the most wilful gets the crown; the more reflective, the tonsure. The little grain of conscience, a slight paling of the native hue of resolution with the cast of thought, selects true priests from blood royal. (See Frazer on science and religion, as both sprung from magic, for an analogous development.)

¶339[page 92] its turn changes into contemplation. Sheer delight in overthrow and destruction modifies into lust for the accumulation of loot—a by-product of the first phase becoming the purpose of the second.40 Man then sates himself with possession. But focusing on possessions, he begins to realize values. Action need not be self-conscious and may never be aware, but possession has to guard, and looking for loss, sees that time is the master thief. In the gradual realization of how little and for how brief a moment he can actually possess, the possessor passes into complete self-consciousness and is driven into liberating or disintegrating contemplation.

¶340Thetmosis I stands as the dynastic type of the final phase of the man of action, the Hero in decadence, when new means to supply his essentially archaic ends begin themselves to introduce new qualities. His restless “pure” activity the equal energy of Hatshepsut the Queen and Thetmosis III cannot surpass; they only elaborate its expression. They are succeeded by Amenophis III, a type not less selfish but more reflective, more self-conscious. Campaigning less, he settles down the more deliberately to enjoy his ancestors’ spoils. Sheer action is being followed by deliberate enjoyment: war by art. The spontaneous effort to wrest things changes to the conscious intention to relish them. He is immediately followed by the final term of analysis and reflection, the religious mystic. The question inevitably occurs to the ruler: May not the subordinated individuals have been given the better part? Is it better to act and order than to know? Why should Pharaoh be left only the highest creature on the material plane, the thing of will and not of understanding, as far as he is a spiritual being surviving simply to replenish his people, a psychic means to their physical continuance, their slave of the lamp in the under-

¶34140 It is instructive to note how often the Norse and the Mongols, when their time came, destroyed, for the love of smashing, what they might have kept. They were still at a stage of such short-range consciousness that they could not live far enough ahead to accumulate.

¶342[page 93] world? One of the undoubted dangers of profiting by illusion is that he for whose profit the device seems framed himself often falls a victim to it. Amenophis IV may, too, have felt—for the evolution of the emotional life is not exactly to be synchronized with the intellectual—a certain concern for others. He has been called the first individual in history; his religious enterprise almost suggests that he may have been the first humanitarian. The stimulus for his reform could, however, also have sprung from nothing more advanced than a wish to recover from the hierarchy of Amon the spiritual powers which once had been the Pharaoh's and without which, it was to be proved in later dynasties, political power could not be retained. Yet there is, about his vow never to go outside the sacred inclosure he had dedicated to Aton, something of the monk's wish to escape, perhaps even of the mystic's sense of the vanity of space. The words of his gospel, whatever its motives, are known. He becomes Akhnaton. He will "live in truth." He will understand, will purify religion, will give to all the vision that will set all free. He naturally neglects the dispatches imploring aid from his outlying imperial governors. He disregards the implacable hostility of the organized religion. He fails. His boy heir lives only to recant. But such revolutions cannot be reversed by recantation. A cycle in social experience had been completed. Church and state had broken, if only for a moment, and human chaos poured through the gap. Horemheb, the general, marches on the throne, and seizes it, and the dynasty goes down into darkness. The preliminary essay in a revolution of civilization is over.

¶343It is hardly necessary to have autobiographical evidence of these men's motives. The hypothesis of a rapid evolution in self-consciousness alone explains such a history. Each in turn is driven to act on that level which his degree of consciousness can envisage. The Way of All Flesh is here traced

¶344[page 94] more than three millennia ago by the first trickle of individuals thawed out from the unchanging, unmoving mass, and has been preserved, like the track of a long-vanished stream, through their imprint on the rock. These lives, pyramid-pinnacled, in their day focused such attention that today their record reads as kinship-clear to the unnumbered individuals who with a sigh of misplaced pity look across the gulfs of unindividualized living that lie between. It may be something more than chance which has preserved the critical history of this Eighteenth Dynasty more fully than that of those before and than that of many after. Before, there had been growing up unpurposed the necessary relation of Church and State, of Religion and Polity, a perfect subconscious symbiosis, a balance, which, while it could allow gradual advance, would always preserve the complete continuity and dominance of the organism as a whole. Individualism began its combustion, but the structure of society was always strong enough not only to contain it but to direct and exploit the new energy. Like a vast continental divide the life of Akhnaton stands across our survey. Up to him all human life, even in such an uniquely advanced community as Egypt, flows back down the slope which leads to the calm, eternal levels of complete co-consciousness. After him, however many obstacles may block its path, however often it may seem to fail and lose itself, the spirit of man will wind on until it comes to the precipice edge of individuality over which it must go divided by the plunge, like the waters of the far-falling Lauterbrunnen, into discrete drops of consciousness, to come together again, but on another plane. The decomposition of society at the apex was the sign that evolution was ready to attempt (perhaps even then not for the first time) the fatal experiment for which it has thrown away civilization after civilization and will continue to do so until its purpose is achieved. “Life like all fine growths dies off at the top.” “Unless a corn of wheat

¶345[page 95] fall into the earth and die it remains alone.” Civilization naturally finds difficulty in regarding itself as a means. We see the past; the future we do not see. We cannot imagine that we, too, are to change; for we do not realize how much we have changed. Becoming aware of the process, we resist it, not understanding; because we have not learned how all the past that died willingly lives in us, that we too by changing and only by changing may persist. When the despot reaches sufficient self-consciousness to say, *L'état, c'est moi*, he is not far from solipsism; the paralyzing loneliness of the unique is upon him. He feels the full strangeness of the one against the co-conscious many. He is driven to madness or religion, megalomania or mysticism; it has often been noted that the only Roman Emperors who never misbehaved like madmen were the thorough routineers. In either event the state is left rudderless. It must either break down to the simpler structure and smaller dimensions which the co-conscious level imposes, or it must go on for a time through ever more conscious artifice and deliberate exploitation. Such in brief is the subsequent history of Egypt. After each period of chaos comes a recapitulation: the man of action, the conqueror; the man of leisure, the indulgent; the man of full self-consciousness, the mystic. But in every dynasty of which we have record the voice of the ruler seems to grow more egoistic,41 the co-operation of the religious more cynical, until at length self-consciousness in the Pharaoh and in the priesthood makes loyalty to the state no longer possible. Pharaoh is a man exploiting other men. Why should they work the miracle of government, of making into his means the selfish vast masses and the clever conscious individuals, for a man who grudgingly gave them as small a share as he could and squandered the rest on himself? They short-circuited the current, cutting out the royal palace, which sank into night. Having never renounced the

¶34641 Rameses II seems to surpass all egoists before or since.

¶347[page 96] right of procreation or killing, the High Priest of Amon Ra could do as many a capable Pope must have longed to do, cut out his vicegerents, depose his deputies the kings, and proclaim himself, as poor excited Boniface VIII actually declared himself, supreme ruler spiritually and temporally. In Samtek the Pharaoh is once again High Priest. A whole cycle of civilization has passed between the parting and coming together again of those offices. But though they are again blended, that blend is no longer the strong amalgam which could bind together a society and compass an Empire. In the earlier alloy there was a spiritual element, but it was unconscious and not predominant, it existed to make society capable of more elaborate growth, it was a true state-and-mass religion practised for the state. In the later, the two elements, the life of the community and that of the individual, having begun to separate out, they are brought together again for private individual ends. The individual is now dominant (though of course still a minute minority of the mass: the thing that matters is that Pharaoh is as self-conscious as his councillors). He is consciously planning certain state devices for his own benefit. The end is certain. The state is ruined. The only choice is now for him. It is: Will he go on, ever more consciously cynical, exploiting his subjects till among them, too, spring up so many individuals that they can neither be bought with a share of the body of the state 42 or deluded by religious deceit? Or will he himself be caught by religion, and for the sake of finding another and eternal life, lose the immense position religion gave him in this? 43

¶34842 As we have seen, there must be a strict economic limit as to how many sinecures the state can provide. (See p. 86.)

¶34943 Prof. A. Moret's outline of the Eighteenth Dynasty does not disagree with that given more briefly here (see *From Tribe to Empire*, Pt. II, Ch. II), but he would seem, more than is necessary, nationally to rationalize the successive Pharaohs' motives. About the statesmanlike incentives of the Thetmoses we may have doubt. Is not the power to think clearly on world

¶350Meanwhile the state grows each generation more helpless. It may come to lack even the energy to break up into little lusty kingdoms, but lie inert, its life carried on by a blind momentum of routine. Devices of government, once wrought by intelligence to shape a policy of initiative, now become bureaucratic formalities whose due performance depends on the exact observance of precedent and are no longer directed against an actual objective. Such a formalized society is a common final term of nations. The whole structure has become a brittle shell. At a blow from without it falls to dust. So Egypt broke when the Persian touched it, and so, an area not a society, it lay under Greek, Roman, and Arab occupation. The Persian system in turn was by the middle of the fourth century B.C. as hollow: sociologically, it is no more than a vast bound kept vacant by the temporary lack of any will without to remould or to shatter it, and disappearing at the first challenge.

¶351Indeed some such cycle it seems is discernible in all early empires. Egypt, shut in between its walls, sealed by the sterile desert, laid down the most complete track this inner force directed, and has had its bed least disturbed. In societies

¶352policy and empire a peculiar symptom of the modern type of mentality? Must not the despot, down to Louis XIV, be unable to distinguish between himself and the state and so be incapable of questioning whether it be glory or national security he is out to win? However that may be, when it comes to making—as Professor Moret does—Akhnaton an imperialist who initiates a religious revolution in order to give a new unity to his empire, the motive seems as absurd as the method. Such a notion of so employing religion is pure modernism, and even today an imperialist would know that empires succeed in proportion as they preserve "with an antiquarian's passion for the inessential" the religious notions and forms of each area. The two cities outside Egypt which Akhnaton founded, which are the sole evidences of his having any interest in the outside world, but which Professor Moret says "could have no other meaning than *cities of Empire*" (the italics are his), can far more justly be called Missionary Cities. Gem Aten was in Nubia, near home. Khinateni was near Jerusalem. How far they were from having anything to do with a statesmanlike Imperialism is proved beyond question when we read the actual words of Akhnaton's governor in Jerusalem, Abimelek, who writes, "All the King's land is rushing headlong to destruction," and yet Pharaoh did nothing. By the end of his reign the Empire had been lost. Pharaoh never sent any of his governors the help they implored. Which hypothesis, statesmanship or quietism, the better explains such conduct?

¶353more exposed to interference from other societies not at the same stage of evolution, or by pressure and derangement caused by a rapidly changing environment, the expression of this inner development becomes complicated and confused as the simple co-ordinated pattern of a flower will be distorted by the pressure of another growth or a dead obstacle.44 There, however, at the heart of every society, the pattern of this process seems discernible, and through that trend seems indicated the purpose for which civilizations are built up and the explanation why they are destroyed. Egypt too, with its immense length in time, stretching like its once fabled Nile from a source too deep ever to be found to the Great Sea, threads the whole history of man from a level when individual self-consciousness must have been unknown into a world lit with the concentrated spiritual illumination of the Hebrew and the flashing brilliance of the Greek. A review, however brief, of that world of contrasting and contrasted individuality, of a civilization in which self-conscious human beings, no longer kings or priests but private persons, first attempt to solve the mystery of their presence and of the consequences to themselves and to society, belongs to another chapter.

¶354APPENDIX

¶355THE RISE OF THE HERO OUT OF PRIEST-KINGLY CONDITIONS

¶356IN THIS outline, the Eighteenth Dynasty has been taken as typical, but as there had been Heroes before Thetmosis, so there had been prior experiments in priestcrafted social structure. Many political devices nearly as elaborate lead up to it, as many imperial efforts nearly as vigorous succeed to it. In Egypt we can trace in some detail the length of the transition between the social state the priest-king stands for and the full psycho-social revolution of which the Hero is symptomatic. Every stage of the slow unification of the country entails some

¶35744 See Appendix.

¶358proportionate modification of pure priest-kingly conditions. After the various migrating groups had settled (coming perhaps in the beginning in so vagrant and tentative a fashion and into areas so amply empty that they would hardly know they were making for any goal, would experience no opposition, and so would not need a leader) each into a separate nome-conscious district, such men as the Scorpion and Narmer must have had to exercise high originality in organizing power and to have trained specialized and enterprising priests to make their achievement possible. But it should be noted that these enterprises are limited. Indeed the Scorpion, Narmer, and Ahamin may all have been one man Menes, after whom there is no extension, the dynasty disappears, and kingship passes to another people—in Egypt, but with another origin (the grain-growers of the Middle Nile). These were probably more backward than the Deltans who had invented the calendar. (See Meyer on Sothic Calculation, showing that it must first have been made at Memphis, and before 4241 B.C.) This Second Dynasty in its turn, and without achieving greater extent than the First, gives place to the Third, which also probably represents a different people. The great king of this, Zozer, "the Holy," would seem to show by his name that he is certainly retaining a great deal of the priestly nature, though he can develop the kingship sufficiently to make possible conquests beyond the earlier limits (i.e., south of the First Cataract and also in Sinai). So the brief Dynasties follow one another, and though the record is meagre, two important points seem to emerge: one, that the imperfectly fused peoples of the Nile seem to throw up in turn a leader who can sufficiently modify the priest-kingly office in the Heroic direction to attempt the firm union of all Egypt; from this we may conclude that each people is still so primitive, so unspecialized and unresourceful, that it is exhausted by the effort and has to yield the task of initiative to an untried group, unable itself to push on, to complete and render permanent that unity for which they are all ready; two, that already the obsession with the future life, which has such essential use as far as the "secondary priest," the priest-servant, is

¶359[page 100] concerned, is becoming as far as the priest-master, the "primary priest," is concerned, not only a limitation to political expansion but a drain on the internal resources of the country. The Fourth Dynasty is not one of military expansion but of superstitious expenditure on a scale unprecedented and—amazing thought when we consider its modest economic and engineering resources—unsurpassed. "During the whole period the land was at peace and most of the Pharaohs spent nearly all their time and energy in preparing stupendous tombs to hold their bodies after death." Such a development leads inevitably to the cynical usurpation by the priest-servant of the throne left vacant by the priest-master who even in life had preferred the tomb. The usurper who founds the Fifth Dynasty (Userkaf, c.2750 B.C.) was High Priest of Re in Heliopolis, "the first Pharaoh to claim divine origin if not divinity." This fact is significant because it shows that (1) the usurper is a priest, i.e., drawn from the specialized class become cynical, i.e., self-conscious, and (2) the usurper, because of his cynicism, claims what the earlier king bore. That Egypt had outgrown her strength of unity the end of this dynasty suggests. A more advanced evolution in psycho-social structure will be necessary before she can with safety spread wider. The Pharaohs still build Pyramids, but evidently no one believes them to be very much worth while. In those "at Abusir (Fifth Dynasty) it is noted that the masonry is far from being the fine type used in the Fourth Dynasty, as these later ones are constructed round a core of rubble." Contrast this with the standard of the Fourth Dynasty, its classic Great Pyramid—"though each side measures 750 feet, the error is less than 1/10,000 of the side in equality, in squareness, and in level. The stones are set together with joints of 1/1,000 in thickness, involving edges and planes equal to optician's work of the present day." In such a construction, the making, quite as much as the achievement, must have been vital. No order of the priest-king, no overseership of the priest-architect, could have attained such exactitude had not every one concerned felt in some obscure manner that this precision was profoundly significant and necessary.

¶360It is obvious that as the work of Khufu is one of magic-working exactitude—all the detail of a chemical formula—that of the succeeding dynasty is merely a perfunctory imitation made by master, architect, and workers who conceive as their aim merely the production of an impressive appearance. There is another aspect from which we may regard this tomb-building: it, maybe, reveals a people depending too largely—more than the solidarity of the State required—on Magic: as long as the King's body is safe, he, the incarnation and focus of Egypt's luck, exists among them, and beside that nothing matters. This perilously complete reliance on superstition unadulterated by practical provisions it was of course the task of the ruler unostentatiously to supplement with real defences. The Pharaohs seem always to fall victims to the pervasive superstition, and it needed the cynicism (or self-conscious analytic power) of a professional priest to discover how much magic was necessary to hold the people together and how much practical modification to prevent them from becoming a pious prey to outsiders. *Coram populo* they trusted wholly in God—behind the scenes they kept their powder dry. It is a difficult rôle: priests play it better than laymen: but in the end the Sphinx turns on them too, for the analysis of cynicism is not deep enough to answer the ultimate question. In the Sixth as in the Fifth Dynasty the Priesthood of Re continues to provide the Pharaoh, and "during the Fifth and still more during the Sixth the power of the king which had been paramount during the Third and Fourth Dynasties had been waning." It passes to "the great nobles to whom had been entrusted the command of punitive expeditions." So we see the first stage of empire—the control of alien peoples—requires too advanced a specialization—the king having, perhaps because of his priestliness, to stay at home—and the generals abroad with the tabu-freed, hero-loyalized legions. Consequently the Old Kingdom collapses. "During the last days of Pepi II the noble generals became disaffected and his successors were unable to control them." But the king cannot work without them, and they, though they can overthrow him, cannot any one of them take his place. The cement which would

¶361[page 102] hold together a tribal society could not bind an empire. A mixture more complicated is required, but instead even the old mastic evaporates. “After the death of the last king of the Fifth Dynasty (2475 B.C.) these nobles struggled among themselves for the supremacy, and the chaos that followed left the country a prey to outside invaders, the Negroes from the south and the tribes of the Judean plateau from the northeast. These overran the country, and history is almost silent for several centuries.”

¶362Some further light is thrown on the psycho-social evolution which slowly releases the proto-individual from the pallium-noose of the priest-king and gives him his opportunity of escape under the form of the Hero, by what we know of the development of the priesthood. Indeed it is obvious that the social specialization which allows the rise of an holy order is essential if the priest-kingly stage is ever to be transcended. The king can avoid specialization, can remain the “general,” the man of resource and enterprise and finally and inevitably of adventure, *because* ritual, routine ceremonial, and order have definitely been adopted by surrogates. It is a long duel in Egypt, and perhaps that millennial length of history may be due (like the see-saw elastic constitutionalism of Britain in our own age) partly to the fact that neither side for so long was able to win decisively. The priesthood were always lassoing the Pharaoh, bringing him back from far-ranging military freedom, remaking him their slave-totem, ordering when he might eat and even cut his nails; and on the other hand, royalty as often went to their heads, and they forgot in their cynicism that though their magic could not coerce the stars, it could mankind, that the wand was in reality much mightier than the sword. They “imputed themselves,” took all men to be at least as rationalistic as they were, and fancied that with weapons they would be more terrible than with rites. Vain illusion: the priest-Pharaoh was not more free than the priest-king. But in spite of fluctuations and the final upshot (Samtek, with which in this Appendix we are not concerned), in the Old Kingdom we may see the steady specialization of Society in order that there may be

¶363freedom at the top. And not only is that development instructive, but a consideration of the elements that combine to permit it helps us to understand the psycho-social evolution of mankind. The Egyptian priesthood is evolved into its final form by the blend of two types which have arisen at opposite ends of the social scale. We have seen that during the Old Kingdom there can be traced the growth of the theory of a future life. At first the dead are buried with their gear simply because that gear, having been theirs, is tabu. The king alone has eternal life and that is more subterranean than heavenly, more fertilizing than spiritual. Then gradually the king's vicegerents begin to share that life. For some time the king had ceased to take all his servants with him. They remained behind on the upper earth and served him through spiritual communication. They were becoming his court-chaplain mass-priests. Then, as he had been served, so also must his representatives be served, and big priests have little priests to mass them. Hence must arise a lower order of priests—really slaves or servants, whose master, being dead or conditionally immortal, required their services in this life in order that he might survive in that. So it may not be humanitarianism that ends human sacrifice at obsequies; on the contrary human sacrifice may have been merely a rationalization of a tabu. Once the force of this failed and men began to believe in a personal future life they would and must conceive it as wrapped up with this one, and they would therefore wish their servants to stay as mass-priests to keep them in touch with life. The king might well reflect, “Better a live priest-slave than a dead warrior.” Thus is a lower type evolved up to priesthood. At the same time, as we see, there must be a descent from a higher social type, from men not slaves or servants but nobles and princes for whom no direct rulership could be found in this world: possible heirs of Pharaoh, no doubt, and by so much the more dangerous, though, because of their originality, essential to the ever expanding requirements of his government. Such men would be endurable only if degraded from the steps of the throne and marooned on those of the altar. We ought therefore to expect

¶364[page 104] to find at the close of the Old Kingdom a vast priesthood which has won itself the position of an universal order—not quite royal and not quite spiritual, for Pharaoh still has about him trailing vestiges of the priest, and with these now and then his priests trip him, and the priesthood not only is not celibate (and such a fact must tempt them to physical power), but more than once attempts the throne, as we have seen. And this priesthood will be of its nature composed of two elements: (1) the servant ordained, (2) the princeling enfrocked. Such is the finding of history: “The earliest temples seem to have been erected at the tombs of kings and later at those of great nobles: many of the priests were but attendants at these temples, engaged to see that the material and perhaps spiritual wants of the deceased were attended to. Other priests there were, but these seem to have been noble laymen who acted in this capacity, a position reminding us somewhat of the patesis in the Sumerian cities. Each city or village, as in Sumer, had its patron deity and a sign or crest, usually in the form of an animal [totemism], which was displayed in early days on a banner. As the country became unified these deities became associated, each presiding over special activities and each represented by a human figure with the head of the heraldic beast of his city.” “By degrees these local gods were combined into a system . . . treated as members of one family, and an elaborate theological system was raised on this basis. A priesthood of a special class began to arise during the Fifth Dynasty. The Uer Maa, the Great Seer of Heliopolis, was a noble more priestly than lay, and the same was true of the two High Priests of Ptah in Memphis, who both bore the title of Uer-Khorphemtui, Great Chief of Artificers. As time went on the priests became more a class apart from the laity, though never a distinct caste as Herodotus suggests.”

¶365Thus the Egyptian record is both so little complicated by external interference and so fully preserved that we have actual evidence of almost every stage of the evolution of the individual: of priest-king, of hero, and even of the secondary types that attend the main development.

¶366Sumeria, at present the only known contemporary of Egypt, though its actual history was more complicated by external interference as its record is far less well preserved, nevertheless has yielded lately to patient reconstruction evidence not less valuable than Egypt's. For here under conditions far less segregated we can, however, detect the same process of the evolution of self-consciousness at work—the epic of which is the priest-king's release into the Hero. Sargon of Agade undoubtedly gives the classic illustration for Mesopotamia. He arises (2752) at Kish, one of the Sumerian City States which had already held the hegemony of central Mesopotamia but had temporarily yielded this (and its own independence) to Lugal-zaggisi of Umma. Sargon, it must be noted, is not of royal descent; his father was a commoner. He is therefore free of the *damnosa hereditas* of the priest-king. Cf. this with Chadwick's observation that the Hero can seldom trace his descent more than three generations. We see, too, in this case the "extended variant" of the priest-king-hero development: Simply, the priest-king realizes his danger and turns into a Hero to avoid his sacramental end. In the complication of actual fact the stage may be accomplished by not one but several persons and the full hero never have been a priest. If that is so, then the Hero will have to start, after his material conquests, a long spiritual battle with the priesthood he has warned off this world and left only the next. The investiture controversy of mediaeval Europe is the last atavistic echo of this millennial conflict. Such seems the clue to Sumerian history. Up to Sargon's time there had been temporary ascendencies of one city state over the rest. Before the middle of the Fourth millennium the city states seem to have been ruled each by its priest-king or patesi, but as early as 3320 the king of Hamasi was ruling over the southern districts while Erich held sway over the cities of the river mouth. We have thus a partial development of imperialism and a consequent need that the king should be a little less priestly and his place taken by men who were more definitely and ordainedly so. When at last the term reaches its full development with Sargon (*Saruk inilubani*: "The legiti-

¶367[page 106] mate king is indeed created"), "the priesthood became rather a religious magistracy under the king. Later comes the development of a priestly caste." It does not seem possible to doubt that here, whatever its local variants and complications, we have the same outline which is traceable in Egypt. In conclusion it may be remarked that the greater fluctuations of imperial power and shiftings of its centre in Mesopotamia may be due to the fact that religion was apparently never so well organized there as in Egypt.

¶368For the historical summaries of this Appendix, I have used Moret and Davy's *From Tribe to Empire* and Peake and Fleure's *Priests and Kings*. The quotations are from the latter essay.

¶369[page 107] CHAPTER III

¶370THE PIONEER INDIVIDUAL

¶371SUMMARY

¶372CIVILIZATIONS do not decay: they explode when the increase of individuality goes beyond what the organism can employ. That it is psychic change and a change in the direction of the condensation into individuality and not economic cause that brings about the end of civilizations the contrasted history of the Chinese and the Semites illustrates. China endures because the people's temperament is stable. The Semite is not stable. He passes through the stages of political power so violently that he finishes with it for ever and is succeeded by the Persian. This end of Empire in the homelands of civilization marks a crisis in man's psychic evolution and may be correlated with a revolution in religion, the marks of which can be traced from Italy to India. The ordinary man begins to seek personal salvation. Fertility-religion begins to be soul-survival religion. This must be symptomatic of condensation of individuals out of the "unofficial" masses. In Israel Josiah ends the fertility-religion with that sudden passionate revulsion against procreative rites which always attends such a termination and must show an abrupt amnesia of its own past which only a change in consciousness, in the human psyche, from the general to the particular, could explain. In Persia there may have been a similar condensation which the name of Zarathustra marks. Here as formerly in Egypt—the Persian being more backward—the personal-salvationist doctrine may have allowed an extension of Society through the growth of a priesthood (the Magi), and so the Mede-Persian combina-

¶373[page 108] tion may have given to that later and outer growth the succession of Empire. Even in India the rise of Buddhism seems to be a possible extension of the same revolution. In Greece proper the change of the Dionysiac into the Orphic is certainly a change into complete salvationism. In Magna Graecia it is Pythagoreanism. In the Greek lands the movement was premature, a half-breed development. It is driven under ground and must bide its season. Indeed in all lands it is to some degree premature. In Judaea it has to make terms with the old religion. So the very vital group of the Hebrews continues by inventing compromises. One branch takes to trade (Phoenician) ; the other (Judaism) continues pure religious development. After the shock of the Babylonian captivity the Persian toleration allows an unprecedented development of salvationism. But Jewish spiritual genius won't be spiritually unsocial. Hence no clear doctrine of a future life. Though morality continues to develop, in trying to avoid narrowness of personal immortality, an ethic is extended without any proportionate sanction. This proportionate extension of the other part of man's spiritual development—his cosmology—might have caught up with his ethic, had not all spiritual development been temporarily put back by Maccabean revival of nationalism. Then the sordid reality of the national hope forces on individuality's development, and the Jew, too "racial" to take to ordinary personal immortality, took to Apocalypticism. This had to break down. The Greek parallel development had also led to individuality, but "this-worldly," because of the Greek's temperament and circumstances. He was able to enjoy and explore this world. Though, as shown above, underground salvationism was lurking, as long as the Greek was successful he was not interested in saving his soul. Hence the intensifying of self-consciousness leads to Democracy and so to the community's complete dissolution and even on the part of the "outcast" to Science—a concept of the outer world

¶374[page 109] at the same time "this-worldly" and also super-anthropomorphic. This development, however, is just as disruptive in its way as the Hebrew's and soon over. Greek life sinks to the level of salvationism when the Mysteries have their opportunity, welling through, and philosophy exists only to commend these drugs to the intelligent, to make their case. Two factors cause the change. (1) The outer: the end of the political international calm causes the undone city states to succumb to Macedonia. (2) The inner: the Greek psyche had gone as far as it could without a corresponding supporting extension in sensibility. So a dichotomy results. Greek philosophy takes to salvationism (Zeno and Epicurus) on the one side and to pure physical science on the other (the Museum). This shows that his feeling was probably only squeamishness and not, what was needed, new and sincere sensibility, humanitarianism. Science is soon suppressed, as in such circumstances it must always be, and philosophy turns into superstition.

¶375CHAPTER III

¶376Some of us are inclined to think that civilization is a kind of disease, which the various races of mankind have to pass through . . . but if it is a disease, there is this serious consideration to be made. . . . The development of human society has never yet passed beyond a certain definite and apparently final stage in the process we call civilization; at that stage it has always succumbed or been arrested.

¶377EDWARD CARPENTER.

¶378IN THE old Empires, we have seen, individuality was not absent. It could not, however, pass a certain point. Beyond that it was bound to bring down the structure of Society in ruin and so, like blind Samson, to destroy itself. That it is the *vera causa* of the ruin of civilization after civilization there is little doubt, for this child cannot but be fatal to its

¶379[page 110] mother. On the other hand, that all the easy talk of decadence is ill founded ¹ is apparent when we consider this inevitable upshot. Social dissolution is not akin to senescence but to birth-pangs which bring forth a new type, ushering in—a sudden psychic mutation—an intensified phase of evolution. Is childbirth unnatural because the mother travails, often perishes in the act, not seldom fails to bring forth a live child (or but a creature that cannot live), and must in the natural course of things long predecease her offspring? The continual ruin of civilization has not turned evolution from this purpose. We may trace round the girdle of the earth the rent structures which mark these crises, and since history began to be written men have speculated why civilization should reach a certain standard and then, having won what seemed an impregnable position, fall prey to an inadequate attack or even to inward decay. The word “decay,” however, is gravely misleading. It is doubtful whether civilizations have ever really decayed. Their economic system does fall into ruin, but psychologically, when their time comes, they perish in convulsions. Religious reform nearly always assails. The firm worship of ancestors, the tough compromise of seeing the children’s children and

¶3801 Although modern historians would very improbably support the explanation advanced in this essay, it is worth noting how such are not inclined to sustain any conservative notion of decadence. As Mr. R. G. Collingwood (*Theory of Historical Cycles*) sums up, in an analysis of the evidence of “Dark Age” Art: “Once you have come to see what a supposedly decadent school is driving at, you see that it has a legitimate problem of its own and is handling it in the only way possible. Before, you can only account for the facts by a theory of mere decadence, by supposing that later people were trying to do the same thing as earlier but were unable to do it so well.” Indeed some French anthropologists and sociologists (see *From Tribe to Empire*, p. xx, and note Ch. I in this book) would maintain that Savage Societies as we now know them are really the only decadent ones. They have repressed individuality and have set hard in the effort. It is not, then, civilization and its peculiar vices that are bringing human Society to dissolution but the law of its own growth. Either through individualism and the further evolution of self-consciousness we have to build a new society or as mankind we perish—the savage is already fated, though we may preserve him from himself a little longer. We, if we do not lose our nerve, have at least a chance if we will take the leap.

¶381sleeping with the fathers, becomes disturbed with hopes of a more individual, less genetically, socially incorporated survival. Weakened by these schisms, rent by these conflicting loyalties, societies strong enough to have become rich and envied become weak enough to be attacked. By this time the community is generally distended far beyond the limits which the group consciousness can sustain. It has, as we have seen, been enlarged and still held together by the artificial and temporary restraint and service of the individuals at the top. These escaping, only the lowly individualized left in possession, the unsupported structure would be bound to crash even if it did not offer a prey to the raiding hero-led communities. No attack from a more primitive, less co-ordinated people could overcome a more highly specialized and equipped society had not the integrated system become deranged.

¶382There is no better illustration of this—of how it is an inner psychological condition, the pace of their spiritual evolution, that sets the term of civilizations, and not outward circumstances—than a comparison of the Mongolian and Semitic cultures. The Chinese are perhaps the most pacific people in the world. They have exalted the life of quiet reasonable enjoyment and have despised the destructive. Never developing the extremes; toward pure values "equally removed from enthusiasm as from indifference"; following Confucius, though able to appreciate Lao-Tze; they may be said to have poised for some seventy generations between the life of Amenophis III and that of Akhnaton. In consequence they have been able, clearly realizing their purpose, both to fence off an immense area of fertility and also to preserve a continuity of civilization only to be compared with Egypt. They always had at their gates, and these were often forced by, the very Tartars whose one long-range raid inflicted a mortal wound on the Roman Empire. But when they could not exclude, they absorbed them. They did not

¶383[page 112] wish to attack but to appreciate; they aimed at developing as much as possible and altering as little. In consequence they have generated a culture which has been able not only to hold them together for aeons but completely to assimilate any intrusions; they have made perhaps the most successful compromise with life, and until this day the Sphinx has avoided their quiet but spacious paths. The secret of their success no doubt lies in that restraint of the extreme of individuality which projects its demands on to another and an eternal plane. It was Confucius who said, "After you have learned to serve man I will teach you how to serve the spirits," and though the masses remain superstitious, the cultured, from whom, it will be apparent, the real peril of the state always comes, were able to content themselves with a social and not an individual ideal. Though they have highly esteemed religion, they always kept it closely identified with the Emperor, who alone, till the end, could perform the state-preserving sacrifices.

¶384We saw, in Chapter I, that this phase of compromise in religion, which they managed so long to preserve at such an advanced stage of culture, a religion hardly at all individualized, is certainly a symptom and may also in part be a cause of what the West has called stagnation and what a scientist would call stabilization. Had they fallen on the device of birth-control—that they dimly realized its importance the preservation of infanticide is evidence ²—they might have become almost as eternal as the ants. But here even their incipient degree of individuality betrayed them, as in the end it must all. The family wish to have its own representative to carry on its preservative rights led to inordinate breeding, and their peaceful philosophy failed to perceive that a pressure of births is in the end hardly to be distinguished from one of bayonets.

¶385² See Carr-Saunders, *Population*, for the universality of the practice among peoples who cannot indefinitely expand their resources, i.e., all peoples not living under conditions of constant discovery.

¶386[page 113] On the other hand, the history of the Semites is of an unarrested precipitation. They appear as a restless warrior people pressing on the almost Mongoloid Sumerians. For this latter people, who still divide with Egypt the honour of civilization's invention, has in its social heredity—if not in race—something "celestial." It is hard not to entertain some such notion when looking at their smooth, round heads and their favourite pose, those clasped hands so different from the straight-sided or along-lapped Egyptians'. Certainly they seem to have advanced the social state with the same pacific thoroughness, worshipping the cow, organizing agriculture, and inventing astronomy. The Semitic blend, under Khammurabi, with such a stable society, would appear to have given settled conditions for a little while longer, but as the warrior race dominated, Empires begin to rise and fall until with the emergence of Assyria a society exists of almost unparalleled destructiveness and cruelty. So great was the lust to destroy and to torture that, not content with a constant repetition of wholesale atrocities, the kings must have themselves carved on millennial rock tearing out the tongues and gouging the eyes of their miserable prisoners, as though with hearts as hard as their record they would brood on a revenge in which the very weakness of flesh and blood could permit only a momentary indulgence. And though their record has lasted to become their unanswerable accusation, their royal lines, their Empire, and the terror of their race, have vanished,³ while the Chinese, who were probably their not less powerful contemporaries, are a civilization today. For the Semite lived too furiously not to reach the road's end and to go headlong over the precipice. The Assyrian Empire crashes in ruin, brought down by a desperate union of all its rivals, and after a brief attempt of these to co-ordinate into something equally vast,

¶387³ Indeed the actual empire only lasted about a century. Its Realism was too crude even for the seventh century B.C.

¶388[page 114] Babylon, the heir-apparent, is overwhelmed by the free-riding, far-ranging Persian, still a loyal tribesman following his lord; the Mede, his more individualized servant, giving him the devices of government. So again a blend of higher organization (the Mede) with, and under, a simpler, less self-conscious energy (the Persian), makes possible conquest and empire. In passing it is worthy of note that the last king of Babylon is already far gone in that doubt of the present as the one certain good, which doubt it is that makes action impossible. Narbonidus was, we know, an antiquarian, essentially one of the latest types of human culture, one who explores the past, finding it more fascinating than the present—and safely set forever, as the future cannot be—and who, wishing to restore it (the last two years have uncovered archaic temples he rebuilt), loses the present.4

¶389The collapse of autochthonous empire in the native lands of civilization—for the Persian power under Cambyses pushes on almost without check from Mesopotamia to the Nile—can perhaps be correlated with the first great mass religious revolution of which we have actual record. Up to that time the unofficial man, the *paganus*, had been unaffected by the evolution of religion. For till then the psychic condensation toward individuality had affected only a fractional part of any group, and it is that condensation which causes religious change. Of the few who were affected—outside the actual kingship—we have seen that they passed into the organism of religion and became the priesthood. However the rulers and the hierarchy might interpret or even

¶3904 The antiquarian spirit is itself evidence that individuality is a phase, for the antiquarian's passionate love of the Past is confession of his acute sense of isolation in a separated present. The modern and temporary thing that individuality is also explains why living art (which possesses this unconscious sense of identity with its whole development) seems to the Antiquarian always to have been a vandal to preceding work. Art having the continuity of Spirit knows that it can and must remake the old forms, for it knows the old masters would so reform if they were alive. The antiquarian clings to the form (and can but do so) because he has not the Spirit.

¶391alter fertility-rites so as to assure their own personal survival and salvation, the ordinary cultivator (when he was not being “pressed” by a Hero and made for the nonce a hero-worshipper) was content with reproductive plenty. Not only was he sufficiently up against things not to be able to see spiritual horizons beyond the physical objectives it took all his time and strength to win, but he himself was probably not sufficiently detached from the tribe matrix to be able to conceive a separate destiny, far less its extension into another world. Now, however, somewhere about the seventh century, when Empire is failing in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the northern invaders of Greece are settling, and the swarming confusion along the coasts of what was to be Magna Graecia is also beginning to find social stability and order, some sort of precipitation of individuality must have taken place. The area over which at that time the change to an individualized intensity of religion may be noted is so wide that it might be hypothecated that perhaps this seventh century B.C. marks a general crisis in the evolution of the main mind of humanity—a widespread condensation toward individuality—as we shall see later (Chapter V), the seventeenth century A.D. seems to have marked a corresponding expansion of the human soul again toward a larger consciousness. Undoubtedly over this vast area the procreative religions are suddenly changing into ones of personal salvation. At this date there is the puritan religious reform in Israel under Josiah. His slaying of the “holy men” and “holy women” who had, while the religion was still in its primal fertility-stage, served vicariously for the fecundating god, his breaking of the phallic symbols (the pillars and the “groves”—shortly before, Hezekiah had broken the phallus known as the Brazen Serpent), marks the passing of some threshold of consciousness.5 The present

¶3925 Stanley Hall (*Adolescence*) speaks of that greatest of all religious reformations of which we have hardly a documentary trace, when the universal

¶393[page 116] knowledge of all evolution, that mutation takes place by sudden breaks, suggests, and the knowledge of the abruptness of all change in the psyche, confirms, that such changes, however long they may be preparing, take place with a revolutionary suddenness and are so complete that the experient sees the world with new eyes and so can only misrepresent and reprobate his past practices. The sacred of yesterday becomes the disgusting of today, and, projecting his horror, the “converted” destroys his former associates. Hence these revolutionary puritanisms, these violent purgings of religious custom.

¶394Further east the rise of *Zarathustra*, preaching a personal salvation, is dated by the Arda Vira as “three hundred years before Alexander.” Here the religious revolution may have helped to build up the Magi system, allowing, through the doctrine of a future life, a priestly class—as in Egypt earlier—to sit more loosely to the soil, to cease to be mere magic-working automata or sacramental victims, to become individuals who by their self-consciousness can make the tribal state complicated and adaptable enough to become an Empire and by their privileges here and their right to a personal survival hereafter can be kept from rending it. So the Mede and Persian amalgam would be rendered ready for conquest and empire, the Persian a hero-following raider, the Mede an hierarchic organizer who can build again on the old sites where the man of action has overthrown the primal empire.

¶395Where a hierarchy does not exist to neutralize the salvationist passion of the individual—or should he be more short-sightedly vital, to give him an honoured place in the social order, so that he carve not one for himself—we should, then, expect an unarrested development into “other-worldliness.”

¶396phallus was destroyed or only left transformed beyond any ordinary recognition as the *crux ansata*, the emblem of life, and the “sun cross” as a symbol of sublimated blessedness. Such a change toward the life-force can only mean a sudden revolutionary discovery of individual self-consciousness.

¶397[page 117] So in seventh-century Greece, where sacerdotal organization did not exist, it is not surprising to discover the origin of the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries. The Orphic are definitely to be derived from the Dionysiac alcohol-induced orgy. Intoxication is man's first effort to shut out the cold discouragement, the chaotic meaninglessness with which actuality shows itself to the individual who sees the outer world and the tribe for the first time as alien and even hostile entities. But drunkenness will not do, for no one can stay under always, and at each return to the surface it is clearer that nothing has changed save the individuality, and that for the worse.6 So Orphism and Eleusinianism taught a subtler escape. If Religion is opium it is certainly not for the people. The real preventative against popular rising has no doubt been alcohol. Though, as we shall see in Chapter VI, as all revolutions are begun at the top, there is this much truth in Marx's dictum: as long as the most advanced can be made to seek escape it will be easy to hold down those who remain.

¶398The two great mystery-religions "preached to all Hellenes, if not to all mankind [this shows that tribal exclusiveness and definition had gone for all such] a theory unfamiliar to native Greek mythology and religion, that the soul of man is divine, the body its impure prison house, that by purifications and abstinences the soul might retain its purity and by sacramental methods it might enjoy in this life and the next communion with God. Preoccupied with the problem of the life after death, the Orphic mystics evolved the concept of purgatory."7 In Magna Graecia the movement continues. Pythagoras' date—somewhere about 586 B.C.—links him up with the movement. "The Pythagorean brotherhood had its rise in the wave of religious feeling that swept over Hellas in the sixth century and had much in

¶3996 The same escape is sought by sexual indulgence with the same result: an ever swifter return to an ever narrowing ego.

¶4007 L. R. Farnell, *Outline of Greek Religion*. Duckworth, 1920.

¶401common with the Orphic which by its rites and abstinences sought to purify the believer’s soul that he might eventually escape the wheel of birth.”

¶402Whence came this elaborate eschatology? Is it native-born? We shall see in a moment—when the question of its future is considered—the soil in which it sprang, the conditions which gave it its opportunity. But we may first ask: Is this elaborate “other-worldly” outgrowth, to retrieve the balance of this world, an unassisted invention of newly settled peoples? The Greeks were without organized priesthood and so would become rapidly salvationist, but would they so soon have made this complete system? Probably here we view one of the first of those borrowings—another of which we shall see when the Irish take so thoroughly to monasticism (Chapter IV), which Chapter I suggests must always proceed between peoples at different stages on the same road of advance—which precipitate psychic advance. The Greek mystic, groping for escape, fell down a shaft which weary Egyptian excavators had worked through millennia. We know something of the source of the ritual of the Mysteries, and the knowledge is illuminating. The Eleusinian and probably the Orphic rites ⁸ derive much from the Osirian worship. Itself at first a fertility-rite, it had come gradually to have a purely personal significance. Originally performed ⁹ for the king as crop-raiser, it begins to be done also to assure his personal immortality, then that of his surrogates the priests, and so finally of private believers whose survival and activities in the under-world can have no significance for the community as a whole. That is the great break, the revolution, when the last element of reproductive magic and tribe-and-soul identity disappear. As long as the rite was performed for an official, whatever private spiritual benefit he might take from it—as a psychic payment—the

¶4038 See Frazer, *The Golden Bough: Attis, Osiris, Adonis*.

¶4049 See Ch. II.

¶405community could look upon it as a duty performed by or on him for its own benefit. But when the last general official link is broken, then we are faced with naked salvationism without a shred of social obligation. The individual is determined to survive regardless of any social issue. What shall it profit if the community is eternal, if the individual goes not on? Perhaps such a degree of "holy selfishness" could be attained only through complete social death. If so, it should be possible to correlate complete Osirian salvationism with the collapse of Egypt as a living power—however long the mummy would lie before Cambyses rifled it.

¶406However that may be, it is certain that arising from a corn-fertilizing rite—the figure of Osiris himself is generally painted the vivid green of the springing corn; his outline images were often actually sown so as to sprout a few ears of wheat—Osirianism kept as symbol of another-worldly personal resurrection what had once been sympathetic magic worked to insure the next harvest here. This ear of corn held before the initiate as token and surety of his re-emergence out of the dark of death was also shown at the culminating moment to the Eleusinian, and it is on the very same analogy, in terms which can hardly be coincidental, that the Corinthian Christians were instructed to rely.

¶407We may now return to the Greek lands and ask why there this seventh-century movement did not continue to its end but was postponed until the third. The answer is that as long as the community is unshattered and unexhausted, private salvationism is not permissible—"Not till the fire is dying in the grate, look we for any kinship with the stars." Even in the later cycle of history there will be the two ways of life: either a man is a citizen or a monk; if he chooses the higher life, he dies to this one. To the Greek salvationist of the sixth century, therefore, there were open two ways only: either the practices could go under ground, becoming mysteries into whose secrets only with much testing would any

¶408[page 120] be admitted, or, as “private religious organizations had no part in Greek life” (it may be asked where such things had any part at such a date), there might be the way of the Pythagoreans who maintained themselves openly in the city states of Magna Graecia (they were centred on Crotona) by *coups d'état* and a “rule of the saints” which, of course, like all such rules, is an absurdity both in its standards, which are double, and in its methods, which are inconsistent, and so must lead to their overthrow and suppression.

¶409So in more vigorous, less formalized communities we can see three reactions to this premature emergence of individuality. In Magna Graecia it becomes political itself and is stamped out. In Greece proper it saves itself by going underground, where as we shall see later in this chapter it found currents to amplify its volume, a secret river that will run below until the surface of society as a whole is sufficiently disintegrated for the thing to percolate through, dissolve that “crust of custom” which is the state, and leave humanity a “thaw jam” of individuals to organize itself on frankly religious, salvationist, escapement lines.

¶410In Judaism it is hard to trace exactly what happened. Evidently the prophets would have destroyed altogether the sacrificial worship 10—“I will have mercy and not sacrifice”—but after the concentration of temple worship at Jerusalem, the sacerdotal influence seems to have had too strong a national heart. The prophets of morality—whose writings we begin to have (we have no books of sayings of the dervish-thaumaturgists Elijah and Elisha)—begin in the Northern Kingdom about the close of the eighth or beginning of the seventh century. Their appearance heralds and may have contributed to the Northern Kingdom's fall. The first two, Amos and Hoshea, are obvious individualists, and the latter,

¶41110 See the immense influence of Jeremiah, “the first supreme genius which Jewish spirituality produced”—Dr. Kennett.

¶412[page 121] like every emergent self-consciousness, is engrossed with the problem of the old fertility-customs and the new sense of personal responsibility and separate identity.11 The prophets are challenging immemorial general custom on the grounds of private rights, a new sense of the individual's direct and lonely relation to God. Their teaching evidently is popular, and the Northern Kingdom, no doubt weakened by such psychic disintegration, succumbs to external pressure.12

¶413When therefore the prophetic-individualist ferment comes south to Jerusalem it comes as a refugee; it comes to the stronghold of sacerdotalism where the priesthood, as it were drawing in its scattered forces from the many unco-ordinated sacred "high places," has concentrated for a last stand in the centre of racial life; it comes, perhaps, too, with its contribution to the Northern national failure not wholly unsuspected. History cannot be brought to a standstill, but it can be delayed. The priesthood could not prevent the emergence of salvationism, the Josiahan suppression of the old fertility-rites, but they could prevent the whole sacrificial system with its stipends, sinecures, and dignities from being abolished. Feeding has as little to do with spiritual worship as has fertilizing, but whereas the latter was abolished at a blow, the former has been allowed a millennial atrophy, from flesh and

¶41411 The passages which deal with his wife's adultery are considered to be protests against the fertility-custom, an origin of the *jus noctis primae*, whereby both men and women when newly married had to resort respectively to the holy men and holy women in the temples in order to insure fertility. See Dr. Kennett's *Amos and Hoshea*.

¶41512 The teaching of the prophets also confirms the hypothesis that their rise is indicative of a sudden condensation of individuals. Their stress on ethical conduct—and not on sacrifice—as the one thing needful to restore the unhappy individual to spiritual peace, shows (a) that there is abroad an acute and miserable sense of alienness, and (b) that the cure, conduct which expresses the will to love the neighbour as the self, is an abandonment of self and devotion of life to the beloved community. Such teaching, however, could not save the state, because the problem remained—as it does still today—the disparity between the beloved community and the actual state, heterogeneous and atavistic. Hence the rise of Churches, Orders, Secret Societies, and Class Consciousnesses.

¶416blood to bread and wine, and in the most “evolutionary” church to the wafer only, for the laity.

¶417The priesthood must wisely have made terms with the prophets, for the canon closes with Malachi promising, in an entirely priest-kingly manner, to the people fertility if only they will contribute liberally to the sustentation funds of the temple.

¶418It is worth noting, before continuing the line of our own cultural descent, that the wave of seventh-century individualism may be traced perhaps as far as India, for the story of the Buddha’s conversion attributes his change to his seeing death and realizing its certainty. This is the surest sign that man has become an individual. He has passed out of the simply reactive life which through the paramount act of reproduction is linked with the aeonic life of the race, into the reflective, which is concerned with the self and its little while. The thought of death, therefore, takes the place of the act of life. As Freud has said, as soon as man ceases to be engrossed by the interest of sex he becomes concerned with the apprehension of death. Certainly the further development of Buddhism seems to confirm this. There the new double realization—of death’s intense personal significance and personality’s complete insignificance for life, that every procreative act is from the individualist standpoint in some sense an act of death, that life has won its way and escaped from us,¹³ a realization which *is* the new individual and drives

¶41913 In confirmation of this it is noteworthy that the earlier Eden stories identify Eve and the Serpent, symbols of the two sides of sex. It is the act of reproduction that is fatal to the individual man who, even in the later liturgical story, is immortal and does not need to procreate until he falls and learns of good and evil—a clear rationalization of the appearance of self-consciousness and of the fact that man in his “innocency” is unconscious of procreation. The wave of life rises, floods him, and passes on so completely that he is left unaware that it came and went. Aristotle, too, remarking that “after coitus all animals are sad,” anthropomorphizes into the vacancy of the animal vessel, out of which urgent life has passed, the sense of being left behind, of abandonment, of purposelessness, which, in the same circumstances, must attack a self-conscious procreator and is the most frequent cause of *taedium vitae*.

¶420him to escape—makes Buddhism a continental success and leads—inevitable development—to the rise of monasticism.14

¶421On this hypothesis India must be more advanced culturally than Europe, a conclusion which economic evidence certainly sustains.15 By the sixth century it must have gone through the successive stages: of general extrovert action, disillusion with such action, satyriasis, and asceticism, the latter part of which psychic volatilization Europe will not enter upon for another eight centuries and then tentatively and with relapses.

¶422We must, however, return to the direct line of our social heredity and psychic evolution and take up the thread at the fall of Babylon. By then, the priestly-prophetic compromise in Israel had broken down and the evolution toward individual salvationism was proceeding. The destruction of the temple and the deportation of the people left the prophets with

¶42314 Some authorities think that Jainism, which would seem to have arisen at the same date at the other end of India, is an independent growth. It would be interesting were that so, for Jainism has the same passionate scruple about life for the same reason as Buddhism: the fear of reincarnation.

¶424It should be inquired how far a tropic climate tends to accelerate such volatilization, by making the human stock, differentiated from the simian probably in a temperate climate, incapable of its full expression and term of physical action, and so hurrying it past this stage to brood on that of *introvert* action—i.e., *satyriasis*—and thence to *asceticism*. Monasticism is really never happy in the North—for the ascetic needs as his spring and counterweight the satyriac, and this the South undoubtedly commonly produces. Its European distribution follows the isometric line from Egypt northwest to Ireland. The only places where it seems to disregard the climate line is where the Mongolian influence is present. Cf. the Russian Basilian monasticism and the Tibetan and Chinese. It is worth inquiring how far these are *relapses* (not advances) to an earlier group or collective basis. Certainly in Tibetan Lamaseries there seems (E. Phelps) a condition of collective concubinage, which, if it is not "primitive," is at least one of the social variants of which early groups without keen individualism are capable, the condition which gives rise to Matriarchy. See also the intense grouping of the Alpine stock, which is supposed to be the Mongoloid side of the Caucasian. This, the central of our three European stocks, seems in its lake villages to have practised an economic communism, and at present illegitimacy and other evidences of departure from monogamy seem more common in this stock than among the Nordic or the Mediterranean.

¶42515 See evidence (quoted in Ch. I) of Sir John Marshall on his excavations of the "Indus Civilization" which is already dated back to 6000 B.C.

¶426[page 124] a fair field, the priests without a base or *raison d'être*. The return to Palestine allowed the rebuilding of the temple, but as we shall see, the prophets had gained a decisive lead and even the most traditional had to own that the magic had vanished, the glory departed, the Shekinah had not been rekindled. Individuation could not be undone.16

¶427But the general evolution, for it is the experience of no one people, however gifted, can best be traced through a review of the general political development.

¶428The burning out at its centre of the great Semitic power left it still incandescent on its borders, and on the Levantine coast we can watch, advanced further than ever before, the disintegration of society. Part of that energy, it is true, avoiding the ultimate sublimation, fleeing from its pursuing fate, deserts the land, renounces empire, and making all its assets liquid, creates the first epic of overseas trade. The Phoenicians, pioneers in the three abstractions, eminent in language, writing, and money, make a new way of life. They will avoid the illusion of militarism, they will find a subtler power than violence, they will lay up a very portable, very potent, very unspectacular treasure. It is significant, this halfway-house which the trader then first made and in which he is still trying to abide between the two worlds of things and of ideas. It owes its building to a certain original clearness of vision about the past and a complete lack of it as to the future. He is too shrewd not to see that the hands of the mighty have found nothing, but he is too earthy and active not to feel that something might be found here and held now if only men were sensible enough to go the right way about it and to know what they really wanted. He illustrates well that interesting stage of psychic evolution when a few men are becoming sufficiently self-conscious to realize that the traditional ways of attaining satisfactions are singularly

¶42916 The recrudescence of nationality in post-exilic times permits a repetition, though brief, of the prophet-priest Concordat. Hence Malachi.

¶430[page 125] inefficient and that the percentage of actual individual gain in any of the customary group activities—"deeds done for Empire," whether one be soldier, general, or king—is amazingly low, no longer to be compared with the pleasures of appetite or personal profit. The great mass of mankind still point to their group like magnets to their pole, although that group is already swollen and ruptured by individuals into something in which they can have no part. They are still pointing to the old group, and the Leviathan which has taken its place takes their service as man takes the honey that the bees frantically gather for the mysterious but blind and outwitted spirit of the hive. The explanation that the activities are really of value only to the state and that the individual satisfaction is the lowest wage that can be paid without rousing the constituents to break up society in the resolve to loot it—that the individual demand to "count" is quite a new thing and quite fatal to society—individuals cannot begin by discovering. They take for granted that the state's objective will be equally satisfying to the individual; they assume that the disparity between the actual self-conscious satisfaction in performance of social acts and the height at which this is traditionally rated is simply due to maladjustment, quite lately and for some mysterious reason intruded and quite easily removed, while all the time it is due to an irrecoverable change in themselves; it springs from the profound and irreconcilable difference that must exist between two types of consciousness, that of the group and that of the individual, of the unit that is stabilized in its environment, and so on its plane aeonic, and that which is rapidly evolving, unstable, moving in worlds half realized, responding to conditions which must translate or destroy it.

¶431So one Semitic branch takes to trade, to which strange road between two worlds it has held. It deals with a credit which is almost faith and values which are so abstract as to

¶432[page 126] be almost spiritual and generates for its strange tokens, pledges, and symbols a strength almost animal in its tenacity, almost divine in its devotion. The other carried on man's psychic evolution to a greater height than ever before had been possible in our spiritual ancestry.

¶433When an Empire fails, it has often been noticed, the finest growth of the spirit, which success seemed to stifle, not seldom flowers among the ruins. On the hypothesis of individuality's inevitable evolution the explanation is obvious. It is the degree of individuation that dissolves an Empire. And what is true of Empires must be even more true of the Nations that resist their assimilation. As long as the group unit—the homogeneous tribe or nation or individual-exploiting Empire—is alive and growing, the individual either does not exist or is bribed not to continue his governmentally fatal spiritual development, but when that has broken out and rent the social organism, and in consequence the group has been conquered, if its foreign conqueror will tolerate this individuality (and he will if he is wise), it can develop further than ever before was possible when it was and could be no more than the servant of that state to which it belonged and from which it sprang.¹⁷

¶434And in these later stages of Empire-conflict it is exactly this statesmanlike tolerance that we meet. The conqueror begins a new political policy. He permits individuality among his subject peoples,¹⁸ unconsciously realizing, with the practical genius of a statesman, that individualism among its former constituents is the best guarantee against the conquered state's recovery, and taking for granted that such introspective morbidity will not spread among his followers but only among those disheartened by their political

¶43517 This condition was described during the late war when, owing to the fact that the subjects of neutrals were better treated by states than their own nationals, it was often said, "If you would have any freedom live in a state other than that to which you belong."

¶43618 *Vide* the proclamation of Cyrus.

¶437collapse. So it is that the Babylonian captivity sees a rapid evolution in Jewish religious thought. Ezekiel, essentially the great prophet of the exile, develops a religion so fully individualized that it comes into complete contradiction with the Mosaic co-conscious code,19 and such is the advance of individuality that though authority would not alter the law, neither could it suppress the prophet.

¶438Yet the new Judaism, though on its return to Palestine it still endured that strange condition of national arrest which is the opportunity for the individual's further evolution, would not sever itself from the past and wholly devote itself to its new calling and future. Essentially it was Judaism, the organization of a people who, as their social structure had been taken away from them, preserved their unity through their religion. Nor was this wholly a loss, as will become apparent when reviewing the parallel evolution of the Greek. Indeed it is possible to think that had there not been value to the soul's evolution in the retardation of psychic enterprise caused by a nationalistic church, the forces of consciousness, which are working through the phase of individuality, would have proved as swiftly fatal to the church as they had to the nation, to the priesthood as to the kingship.

¶439The Jew rapidly began to develop a lofty morality, of such a height indeed that it could only be carried on a foundation that went far below the present appearance of the world. However, he did not advance a corresponding theory of a future life. As Archdeacon Charles says, "Yahwism annihilated all existence in Sheol. The first stage of this conflict [between early and new concepts of religion] is destructive, but only with a view to a higher reconstruction." 20

¶440The Jews' conservatism was unfavourable to any notion of private or personal salvation. But the tradition, dating from

¶44119 "I will not punish the children for the sins of the fathers" (Ezekiel 18).

¶44220 Archdeacon Charles, *Between the Old and New Testaments* and *The Doctrine of a Blessed Future Life*.

¶443[page 128] co-conscious times and having naturally no provision for the still unknown individual, would probably have been modified, had there not been something in the pioneer spirits of the Jewish Church which made them unwilling to press this claim. What this was—an unformulated feeling that individuality is not the final term of consciousness—they never worked out. In consequence there was the very real danger for some considerable time of a morality which has outrun its sanctions, a condition which easily leads to hypocrisy among the ordinary and to despair among the pioneers. Always equally valid is it that the ethic which does not depend on a cosmology is untrue and the cosmology which does not result in an ethic is meaningless. The lack of psychic evidence to support spiritual behaviour must always embarrass churches which will not advance beyond individuality. The evidence, it would seem, is always obtainable, but because it tells against individual survival and the narrow cosmologies to which dogma may have adhered, it is forbidden.

¶444This strange maladjustment might not have endured for the period that it did, the evolution of self-consciousness could hardly have been arrested for so long, had there not been a sudden relapse in the environment. The indifferent protection of individuality by an alien overlord—a consequence of the dissolution of the nation without the destruction of its constituents—was abruptly ended. Antiochus Epiphanes inherited Greek forms without a suspicion of the spirit. In a grotesque attempt to Hellenize the Jews he not only lost a province of his kingdom but revived the militant nationalism which is most hostile to the growth of individuality. For a short time with the success of Judas, the Hasmonean house seems almost as though it would return upon history and recreate the priest-king as it had the hero. But here exactly history helped history. Judas was neither of the house of David nor a Levite, but, of all tribes, from the "ass bending between two burdens," Issachar, which had pro-

¶445[page 129] duced only the uncelebrated king Baasha. In vain the court psalmist would sing, “Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek;” 21 the conservative knew that it could not so be, and the progressive, however loyal, must have rejoiced that it could not. There was not long to wait before those who had hoped to settle down in a political paradise realized that they were being driven on once more up the path of their spiritual evolution. Simon, last brother of Judas, reigned not as the Lord’s anointed but as an oriental despot, founder of a dynasty, invested with absolute power. To the spiritually minded the shock was decisive. They had doubted the righteousness of Judas in pursuing political power when religious liberty was assured: now they were certain. A stage of psychic evolution was definitely passed. There is evidence of a very rapid and searching examination of the situation. Where can the chosen people have gone wrong? They had kept the law; their faith had been challenged; they had resisted unto death; they had been granted complete deliverance under the hand of a saviour-king. And now when the kingdom should have unfolded in peace and righteousness, here was manifest in the king himself an unspirituality little less fatal to their hopes than the paganism which had threatened them from without. The examination showed that they could only have erred in one thing. They had taken the weapon in their own hand. They had, giving Yahweh the glory, won the victory for Him. Could it be this that made Him turn victory into something as bitter as defeat?

¶446It does not seem possible that such a doubt could have arisen—as undoubtedly it did, for from this date springs the extreme pietism of the Chasidim who taught “resist not evil”—had not the discouragement of nationalism, so soon again to be put under foreign arrest, once more allowed in-

¶44721 Psalm 110, which, it has been shown, is constructed on an anagram of Judas’ name.

¶448[page 130] dividuality to continue its advance. Men were becoming sufficiently self-conscious to be concerned not with success, however noble, here, but with their spiritual destiny. What would it profit a man if the Jewish kingdom became an Empire and gained the whole world, if he lost his soul? As long as he might, the Jew had avoided any narrow conception of that destiny. But he had gone through a trial, he had given all for victory and had seen, while the graves of his fallen were still too boldly in relief, the thing which so great a price had purchased. He saw of the travail of his soul, and he could not be satisfied. He had to turn from this world—to touch it was too obviously fatal—and seek from another the power that might remake.

¶449So the passionate vitality of the Semite that drove the Phoenician branch to create that queer world between matter and spirit, between goods which moth and rust corrupt and the treasure in heaven, causes the Judaic branch to pause in the strange limbo of Apocalypticism. The temptation, which we shall see the Greek—when his hour of trial came—so ill resisted, to day-dream of private Elysian fields where a man might forget the confusion and failure that life has been and all that have gone under, where might be expanded and lived out all the personal desires for which the common life had no room here, that the Jew did resist. But as he would not build private castles in the heavens, he had to bring down something from heaven to earth. So there is a “good time coming.” Somehow, if only man can, as it were, hold his spiritual breath, abstain from all action, offer the patience of God an equal patience, yield a faith strong with passive resistance against the worst provocation, pure of the least questioning, then suddenly everything will be changed—not only man's nature but animal nature, yes, and the inorganic, too: the arbitrariness of evil will and appetite, the inhumanness of the vast indifferent outer world, will become a law of peace and love. . . . That world, though, would

¶450still be this one of time and persons. The Jew had made a gallant attempt not to be allured by personal immortality, but he had, by failing to pursue the evolution of consciousness, fallen the victim of an illusion not much less noble and far more easily disproved. That, though, was perhaps really an advantage. Apocalypticism was bound to fail. For the belief in a personal future life every death may be used as an argument. Men vivid as ourselves are all the while passing over into the dark silence. It is so natural, so inevitable to imagine them carrying on the lives we knew. The most puzzled has only to wait a little while. That question's answer, one way or the other, is the one supreme certainty of life. But the good time that is coming for the faithful community here cannot be postponed. The fact of the constant falling out of individuals who looked forward to it as vividly and with as good a right as their survivors makes it increasingly necessary that the day of deliverance, of justification for all, be not delayed. This was the Jew's one reward. Apocalypticism and a blessed personal future life are alternative ways of making the world bearable: the one excludes the other. The Jew had chosen a good time coming. By that choice he had resisted the temptation to believe in private survival in a future immaterial world. He was therefore compelled again and again to fix the date and again and again to be disproved.22 At last the gallant attempt

¶45122 The Jew's spiritual evolution was no more completely segregated than was his political. As Greek thought—the self-conscious salvationist philosophy that gave intellectual expression to the mystery-religions—began to penetrate, it drew off certain numbers toward its individualistic obsession with private salvation. By these, gradually, a Resurrection of the Just was tacked on to Apocalypticism, but it is obvious that this is a stop-gap. Later, as that gap widens, as men remember how many have died without seeing their hope dawn, how often that dawn has proved false, the Resurrection of the Just becomes the main hope, and the "good time coming"—true Apocalypticism—hangs on as Chilianism. The reign of the Saints on earth after the Judgment is merely a vestigial remnant, the true interest having become the life in Heaven. Of those who increasingly inclined to a Resurrection of the Just it must be asked what was the lofty ethic of the Chasidim doing with salvationism? How does the morality of Quietism become associated, as an essential preliminary, with a personal future life? May an

¶452[page 132] could no longer be sustained, and about 200 A.D.—a date whose importance in the evolution we are trying to trace will be noted again in Chapter IV—both Church and Synagogue condemned the hope as undesirable. For four hundred years men had looked up, and now they must look in. No doubt the hope had been in vain, no doubt it became mischievous, but when the aspiration that the beloved community should as a body and very really attain clear and lasting happiness faded, when a personal salvation, not freed from sweeping exclusionism or from projection of individual limitation, took its place, a long step and one very difficult to withdraw had been taken toward “spiritual selfishness.”

¶453This outline, in tracing the effort of the Hebrew genius to resist the narrowing effect of individuality while evolving a higher spiritual consciousness, has of necessity gone beyond its chronological parallel. Before, therefore, passing on to a similar outline of Christianity and Mediaevalism from the point of view of the evolution of consciousness, it is necessary to trace the contribution given by Greek history. It may seem that so far this chapter has been too theological; it may seem to have dwelt too exclusively on the spiritual, in the narrower religious sense, and to have been too little psychological. The phraseology is that, however, imposed by Hebrew thought, whose psychology was theologic. In dealing with Hellenism, the spirit of a people without a centrally

¶454ethic outrun a cosmology? May it actually sense a new cosmology? Apocalypticism would, then, if that were so, be simply the “projection-thought” (crude, and decategorizing the actual “conviction of experience” of a higher condition), but put out to give sanction to an ethic whose true drive and proof of objectivity resided in the “need-response” of the evolving psyche, which first apprehends a change in itself, and so in its standards, before it can perceive it in the outer world. (See Ch. V, pp. 207-208.)

¶455These developments, important as they are in the individual’s spiritual evolution, can only be dealt with here in a note, as detailed steps whereby Apocalypticism turned into Monasticism. Lastly, in this respect, it should be noted that the ethic of Apocalypticism is almost Monastic. As Professor Burkitt has said, in the future this teaching presents, no grandchildren are thought of. Thence it is a step to celibacy. (British Academy, Schweich Lectures, *Jewish and Christian Apocalypses*, 1912.)

¶456[page 133] organized priesthood and with a temple worship dominated by beauty, broader aspects of man’s psychological evolution should be evident.

¶457We have seen that individuality can at first emerge fully only in societies which have become unnaturally relaxed. Some accident in external conditions, arresting for a short time the action of natural selection among states, allows evolution to focus on the intenser form of life—the individual. The Jews owed their remarkable psychological progress to the interference of a foreign power which while destroying the national unity deliberately preserved its constituents. The advance of the Greeks depended equally on the complete absence of outside pressure during their critical years. The two extreme conditions led to the state’s dissolution and the assertion of the individual; but the different circumstances, perhaps as much as the different heredities, account for the contrasting types of individuality resultant. In the one case the state was shattered from without and, as it were, a Caesarian operation prematurely delivered the individual from the womb of the state. The state succumbing by the operation which brought him forth, the individual had no centre round which to concentrate on the political plane, and in consequence the psychic development, what *may* be called the volatilizing of consciousness, was exceptionally accelerated. The Jewish genius began to live almost entirely on an Utopian plane. Here, in the present, all its thinkers taught, we are strangers and pilgrims. “They said openly that they sought another country.” “I am a stranger and pilgrim before Thee,” said the Jewish private proto-individual when he thought of the community and its God going on before he appeared and after he had passed by. But the very same words can continue to be used, so complete is the silent revolution in meaning, when consciousness has come to realize that growth and progress are in itself, not in its surroundings, when the holy state has gone and the individual is sur-

¶458viving through the toleration of the “unanointed” Persian. The fully individualized Jew ceases to think of himself as passing by Reality, from the shade to the shade, but sees himself as passing out of that shadow into the light where Reality continually dwells. The community is only a phase of evolution, followed by its successive phase, the individual, for whom the Apocalyptic community of “just men made perfect” is projected, a community which the finest thinkers begin to suspect may be a foreshadowing of a state which will combine the value and experience of both.

¶459In the second case, that of the Greek, the individual was able, owing to the relaxation of communities unpressed upon by foreign aggression, to deliver himself without completely and instantaneously rending the body politic. Foreign interference drove the Jew to advance on a spiritual plane. The complete lack of such pressure left the Greek free to explore, as none before him, the physical. Not that the Greek was without a natural bias toward the material, “this-worldly” side of things. There was an under population, chthonic, downtrodden creatures, driven like the Lemuridae (to which in some sense they gave their sad name) to a night life, who had to prefer the darkness, worshipping deities once simply gross and now in the dark grown horrible; 23 a “little people” who recovered, in the night-terrors from which even their clumsy masters were not immune, some sense of equality, perhaps even of superiority (for were not the devils after all *their* devils?) ; who in their dark rites felt not only a dreadful kinship with the unknown but also a spiritual compensation for all the brutal material hardships of the day. Dr. Farnell 24 thinks that much that is “unheroic” in Greek religion can be attributed to these. According to him there gradually took place a mixture of the “Aryan religion” with the

¶46023 See the evidence that all witch cults are simply the rites of the “older” religion of the conquered. See Miss Murray's *The Witch Cult in Western Europe* and Ch. VIII.

¶46124 *Greek Religion.*

¶462“female” (predominantly reproductive) religions the Achaeans found in the Mycenaean-Minoan world they broke in upon. No doubt in this mixture-misery some psychic individuals, perhaps actual physical halfbreeds, would be precipitated, and from these might have sprung (in that seventh-century crisis which we have noted earlier in this chapter) the Dionysiac alcohol-induced orgy (developing in its turn into Orphic salvationism); for the immemorial rite of the god killed and eaten can now only be undertaken by creatures homicidally intoxicated.25 Certainly the worship of Dionysus was at first persecuted and probably admitted only when purged. As certainly it is the origin of Orphism, and we have seen how this and its companion mystery-religions will flow underneath Greek life till the Greek proper has himself worked through his psychic evolution and is ready for salvationism.

¶463The ruling Greek (it must be remembered that it took about nine slaves to sustain each free Hellene) was then, as far as his religion went, predominantly Aryan.26 This theology did not greatly fear its gods, for as it held kings to be *primi inter pares*, men who are not *sui generis* mysterious epitomes of the community’s invisible life, and whose particular qualifications have nothing occult about them, but are simple obvious endowments of courage, strength, and cunning, so divinity itself was allowed to claim no oriental seclusion and hierarchic deputation. The lack of organized priesthood—for such an outlook sees no necessity for such intermediaries—means that the most important organism for the continual secretion and compression of individuality is lacking. In a political body so unprovided, self-conscious-

¶46425 Cf. the rites of Dionysus Zagreus, wherein the cannibalistic worshippers tore a living boy to pieces and devoured him.

¶46526 Aryan kingship crystallizes out at the Heroic stage of royal evolution (see Ch. II). If a king is not an efficient general any man can take his place. Divinity does not hedge. Every man can and must judge whether the leader has the actual qualifications necessary if the group is to win and not be defeated and destroyed.

¶466ness, as soon as it appears, must run a very rapid course. The leaven will leaven the whole lump swiftly. The state will disintegrate. Should all pressure from external conditions be withdrawn so as to allow full play to the process, there will be an unparalleled fissuring. Such the city-state system—or rather the persistent dispensing with any—displayed. For hardly more than a couple of centuries Greece and Magna Graecia, indeed the greater part of the East Central Mediterranean, exhibited this unstable extreme.²⁷

¶467There is another feature peculiar to the Greeks’ development. As individuality among them was born by internal effort, not snatched by external violence, from the body politic, it retained for a considerable time a strong political, instead of a religious, aspect. The individuals when they emerged did not feel themselves strangers and orphans. They took for granted that the state belonged to them—not they to the state—and, extending their growing interest, that the whole world was theirs to enjoy, with their vivid, original senses, their new focus, their feeling of seeing things for the first time. This concentration led in the first place to democracy ²⁸ and afterward to science. True democracy is direct democracy, is democracy invented to give individuals power over the state, to make it express their will, to be their instrument. That actual democracy cannot work at all save through the city state. Representative democracy, the only form we now know, is in reality not democracy at all. It is simply a device to give individuals or groups not control of but defence against the state, grown strong by vast size and intricate centralization, necessitated by the natural selection of national competition. Representative Democracy is a de-

¶46827 Whatever their race, the Etruscan power seems to have been the same city-state affair. See “The Etruscans,” *Antiquity*, September, 1927.

¶46928 In Ch. I reference has already been made to Chadwick’s outline of the Greek Social development, in which he shows that the original kingships in the Greek States of the eighth and seventh centuries become oligarchies as individualism spreads down. When it has leavened the whole lump we get inevitably, as final term, Democracy.

¶470liberate compromise, not a natural evolution. As will be shown later, with the collapse of the hierarchic-monastic system, the individual again imperils the state. The body politic is too powerful, the other states too dangerous for any one state to become advancedly disintegrated 29 save for a moment, and after each discharge of individualism, as we shall see when considering the Age of Revolution, there is a contractive reflex of appalling power. A compromise therefore has in the main been made with the individual and he is permitted to group himself into *imperia in imperio*, unions which have more consideration for him than the large “foreign-policy” unit, the national unit whose size is conditioned not by internal comfort but by external danger. So we see something like the *liberum veto* is being evolved in our day ; the state is preserved, but in a condition of such instability that the slightest external strain must precipitate the full revolutionary convulsion. In Greece this was not so. Every individual felt interested in the state as a whole and competent to guide it. Instead of the present indifference to foreign affairs and concentration on private liberties, privileges, wages and hours, there was not a citizen without a passion for foreign policy. The dimensions of the state were limited therefore not by the power and pressure it could exercise against its rivals but by the limits which active individual participation set to its size. Aristotle rules that the state cannot consist of more than 10,000 people, for they must all know each other by sight; and the territory must be proportionate, i.e., such that a citizen may have direct knowledge of it. Again the range of the senses is the limit of the emotions. The state exists for the full life of the individual, therefore the state must be limited. Considerations of political survival, of the psychologically limited state’s ability to maintain itself in a world of empires whose limits are only set by economic and military considerations, are omitted. So

¶47129 Note the case of Poland and the *liberum veto*.

¶472[page 138] completely, to the full limit of unconscious assumption, has the claim of the individual to be the end of the state become accepted. And for a short time circumstances permitted such disregard of all other factors save those of the individual's evolution. He exercised himself to the full, and democracy showed how little it has to do with the state, how its emergence is to be interpreted not politically but psychologically. For not only was the size of the state limited in a way which has no sense from the political or economic standpoint, in a way which, on the contrary, is economic folly and political suicide, but in these absurd divisions were parties which were continually subdividing them. Pure democracy could only function through (its gentlest device) ostracism, or hemlock. Of these ingenious inventions more must be said later when considering the Greek spirit in katabolism. At the point we have now reached the Greek is still building up. True, he has built far beyond any limit of political stability or common safety, but owing to the happy accident of his time and place he is still building a political structure. Undercut with an almost complete individualism, wrought into every extravagance which idiosyncrasy (the demand of the private consciousness to express itself) could devise, without new religion to sublimate it or an immemorial tradition to control it, the Greek in the City State built a structure psychologically so wonderful, so daring, so fantastic and essentially unstable, that beside it the cubic temples, the sound sculpture that stands so firm, so immobile, so muscularly rooted, seem but calculine precipitations of his almost intoxicated genius. The true legacy of that Dionysiac democracy was not the art that was in love with proportion, and taste that taught "nothing too much," but Science. The Jew had, under the compulsion of his new individuality, sought for heaven, at first in the future and then outside time. He could find no place for himself here and now. The working of democracy among the Greeks presented the same problem to

¶473[page 139] not a few of the individuals which it produced. The incessant restlessness and exclusiveness of political ambition meant that non-participation or exile was the choice of the more balanced, of those whose thought did not immediately break down into action.30 The Greek, we have seen, was not naturally a mystic. His state's evolution—that is to say the evolution of the common consciousness out of which he was evolved—did not provide a religious system out of which mystical experience might be developed by the individual. He had, therefore, when he turned deliberately from the state, to turn not to God but to Nature. Hence the immense progress of natural science. From the incessant restlessness of an individuality which did not understand its condition and so could never cure but only inflame itself by constant political change, the mind of the advanced turned to Nature, to a concept of reality both "this-worldly" and at the same time super-anthropomorphic. This turn directed consciousness away not only from politics but also from religion. The Jew, from his desert monolatry, had developed monotheism, an ultimate hypothesis not wholly unpleasing to the scientific mind. But the Greek, owing to his lack of interest in theology, had left on a polytheism, which his aesthetic taste—which would have found small purchase on theistic abstraction—so decorated as to give to it an artificial value. Round each of these low germs of life the artist precipitated layer by layer a crystalline beauty, changing crude, dynamic, primitive notions into static forms. The philosopher saw through this lovely disguise to the queer, petrified germs lying at the centre of each statue: the anthropomorphic fresco flaked away from the raw surface of reality. The progress made toward objective vision was, therefore, of unprecedented directness and speed. First the Ionian cities begin to cast search-light beams into the darkness which

¶47430 As the King often ends as Mystic, so the disillusioned oligarch might become a Scientist.

¶475[page 140] until then had tented round the borders of mankind. Thales, “though he shows little advance on the popular cosmology derived from Egypt and Babylon,” realizes that those dim movements without, if watched with patient detachment, are regular and indifferent. The western coasts of Asia Minor become troubled and the steady platform (αταραχια) essential for observation, is found on the rocky islands of the Archipelago. The Copernican theory was wholly anticipated by Aristarchus and the method of Tycho Brahe by Apollonius, both of Samos.³¹ It is amazing to what a distance of objective observation these early philosophers attained without instrumentation or more than a rudimentary process of calculation, and in so short a time. In seven generations the development was over, the thread split, and while science still pursues a pensioned, court-circumscribed inquiry at Alexandria, full science, science of unrestricted reference, cannot be permitted under royal patronage. It is impossible for it to promise not to submit state and government to the same analysis which results in such revolutionary conclusions when applied to Nature. So the co-ordinate progress of every branch of natural philosophy, which the genius of Aristotle had compassed, is, after his death, divided and dissipated. The remainder of the Greek inheritance relapses into religion. It is no longer looking the universe in the face but only for an escape. Katabolism has set in. Pure curiosity, the conviction that there is a universe waiting to be understood, is on the wane. Individualism is turning to self-pity and when frightened must take refuge in salvation. What causes the retreat? Two factors, an external and an internal, coming into combination, were decisive. There was on the part of the Greeks themselves what has been, by several authorities on Greek cultural history, recognized as a psychological change and called a “failure of nerve,” ³² and there was also

¶47631 See Sir T. Heath, *Concepts of the Cosmos in the Classical Period*.

¶47732 Dr. Cornford uses the phrase which is approved by Gilbert Murray. Bury, too, uses the same term.

¶478[page 141] an end of the accidental international calm which between the senescence of the Persian and the rise of the Macedonian Empire had permitted the Greek city-state to disregard any law of growth save that of the individuality of its citizens. The Greek had never made and indeed could not make any provision against the ending of this strange short day, and when it was done he was overwhelmed. He could make no provision because he was making, though he could not consciously realize it, a desperate experiment in psychic evolution. For this the state had been reduced and kept well below any limit of political safety. It might be that he would touch the happy isles, it might be that the deeps would wash him down. As it was, he failed to get through from full self-consciousness to superconsciousness. He was still fatally individual when the day of accidental opportunity ended. Nor, had further time been granted, a wider calm ensued, can we be certain that he would have achieved the most difficult of all metamorphoses, that of the human spirit; a crisis wherein we too may perish. Through the growth of consciousness his time-sense had been extended until he was completely cut off from the eternity of the savage and the child—the timelessness of the co-conscious. He could look backward and ahead. He could compare this lustrum with those before and after, he even attempted to compare his own civilization with those which had vanished.33 He had not the historic knowledge, far less the psychological insight, necessary for such a judgment, and he began to sink in gloom. His own vivid sense of individuality, the sharper it grew, emphasized the more his fatal separation from life. He was no more than an offshoot doomed to certain failure from the moment that it became conscious of its separate existence. In front clearly, less than a thousand months distant, stood the blank wall of the tomb, every day growing more evident at the path's end.

¶47933 Spengler on the lack of time-sense in the Greek is deliberately perverse. See *The Decline of the West*.

¶480How could such an individualist escape despair? How could such individualism fail to be fatal to any community? It may be questioned whether, even had not the more primitive surrounding communities at that moment come to a sufficient stage of coalescence to move upon the city state and crush it, it had a future, or whether malaria 34 more than *taedium vitae* was the inner cause of decay. It is arguable that the disillusionment of its constituents had gone so far that they would have denied it any further support, themselves no more desiring to live and sustain a corporate way of life than the Melanesians and other backward peoples whose social systems have been dissolved by European interference. When the co-conscious stage of pure suggestion is over, morality depends for its continuance on the constituent individuals of a group being able to live to a certain degree in the future so that they may realize the consequences of their actions and the force of rewards and punishments. But developed beyond a certain limited degree, this time-sense changes over from being a stimulus to social action to being a deterrent from it. If I realize that I shall most probably be alive next year it is wise for me to save and work together with others at labour the results of which we shall enjoy. If I see with equal clearness that I shall be dead next century, social service is daunted, the sensitive are paralyzed, the tough look for immediate satisfaction. Naturally Aristotle has to say, "Every man must work as though he were immortal." Such despair may evidently seize upon any society at this crisis in its growth. The individualized, faced by the next stage above them, the super-individual, are probably not a whit less immune from disheartenment than are the group-conscious, faced by the stage of individualism. So civilization is doubly endangered by the process of its development, for not only will the lower individuals revolt and devour it, but the upper individuals, lacking the will to go

¶48134 See Jones on this hypothesis.

¶482[page 143] on, despair and desert. The Greek required for his continuance a parallel development of sensibility to match the increase in his sense. The Jew required the converse. They neither attained nor combined, and when they did at length come together, it was only a combination of failures.

¶483This failure of Hellenism either to get back to the social strength of a co-conscious community or to go on to a higher consciousness, made the ultimate dominance of Greece by Macedonia inevitable and drove the Greek to religion in search of a private salvation. The Macedonian dominance, the definite subjugation of the city state, ended that freedom which with all its faults, with its ostracism and its hemlock, was still more inspiring than the most tolerant and indulgent tyranny. The spirit of Alexander, like some huge migratory bird, scattered the rich Greek seed it had gorged in the overfruited lands of Hellas, so that he caused to spring up even on the confines of India a hybrid asphodel. This, though, was of its nature sterile. It had no virtue to draw the mind to thought, and the native field, whose harvest was so cast abroad, was itself rendered barren.

¶484Philosophy begins to have a modern sense—something that has more to do with the *will* than with the *understanding*, a spirit more of self-control than inquiry, a discovery of how a man may bear himself with as little damage as possible in an uncontrollable universe, rather than of how he may grasp and control it. Aristotle, the tutor of Alexander, "has no successors, only commentators." Zeno and Epicurus 35—

¶48535 Again there is no room in this essay to show the detail of this descent, but a steady decline can be traced from Aristotle past Epicurus down to Zeno and thence to Catholicism. Epicurus, though already over-concerned with the observer and not the observed, with the apparatus rather than the field, still by his *ataraxia* expressed the intention to free the mind and to leave it independent and clear; by rational dispatch of the body's business (cf. the Buddha's attributed saying, "He who is mounted on a beast from which he cannot dismount will not exasperate it") to attain that steady platform from which the mind may dispassionately observe the universe and so become its mind. A difficult art, no doubt, needing balance, sanity, above all a scientific lack of self-centredness. Zeno's doctrine was lower: "He caught the practical spirit of his age, the desire for a popular phi-

¶486[page 144] their cosmologies are *ad hominem*. Theirs is the fatal success, as far as they are scientists at all, of finding what they set out to discover. They only frame theories of the universe in order to find sanctions for the rules of conduct they wish to impress and which they believe will render unhappy men more resigned. Knowledge is never so advanced: there are too many assumptions, dogmas almost, in such theories. They take for granted, a fatal assumption, that they know what humanity is, that the individual must be protected from experience, must follow a rule of renunciations, and may then come to serenity where the outer world can no longer touch him. If man does not reach out toward the universe with undaunted curiosity he can only end by projecting his present self and relapsing into anthropomorphism. If he thinks of ethics as something for which the universe must be carefully picked over to give support, he will no doubt think that he finds it, but the ethic will become rigid, the sanctioning universe will not stay still; soon the ethic is left without any support and breaks. The two sides of real value, cosmology and ethic, can neither be degraded to be the means of the other. There must be a constant interaction, for reality and

¶487losophy to meet *individual* needs." *Apathia* is lower than *ataraxia*. It cultivates deliberately an indifference to the outer world. It is only interested in its own deliverance from accident. Epicureanism failed; Stoicism fared worse with a shallow success due to the fact, which that success revealed, that Stoicism aimed at something lower than Epicureanism's true objective. Stoicism was really attempting something easier—the ascetic, rather than the sane, life—and so in the end was appealing to something less noble. "In all they [the Stoics] taught there breathes enthusiasm for righteousness, which has been traced to the Semitic spirit." Here we have a clue. Zeno himself is a Cyprian descended from Phoenician stock. "The Semitic spirit," so used, means, we have seen, the individualized salvationist ethic, reasons for the rise of which have been given. So we have the dispossessed individualism emerging (in our Mediterranean, spiritual evolution) first in the Semite, seeding westward and taking root when an equal condition of discouragement appears in Greece (and the mystery-religions are outcropping), and so in due time spreading to Rome. So we might estimate the political condition of communities by the philosophy current. Out of the Near East first comes our spiritual disillusion—and probably the Near East caught the mood from the Far East, for we have seen that India is probably the pioneer area in spiritual evolution, an hypothesis which is sup-

¶488value are two sides of one experience, no more to be separated in actual living than will and understanding. The cessation of interest in the structure of the universe goes with a cessation in the growth of individuality. It begins to set hard, and its further evolution is endangered. It is true that the Stoics, though intellectually sterile, advanced a little in psychic evolution on the emotional side, though, as we have seen, because that was a one-sided evolution, it had to be strictly limited. They made conscious and promulgated the belief that all men do belong to one another, but their uncritical assumption that each individual is of transcendent value lacked any scientific conception of how evolutionary individuality is, and was in consequence full of danger to the system and to those it inspired. In consequence, we are not surprised to learn that as a matter of fact the Stoic, like the monk, who is his final term, “always had some good excuse for withdrawing from the political life in which he found himself.”

¶489We have seen what efforts the most advanced Jewish spirits were making to prevent individuality from becoming set and incapable of further development. The Greek did not

¶490ported by Flinders Petrie in his analysis of Egyptian Religion, which he thinks did not spontaneously produce its doctrine of personal survival but was infected from India. Such a conclusion does not affect the general hypothesis of Ch. II, for Societies only catch those advanced ideas for which they are ready. (Cf. *Doctrine of the Future Life in Egypt Prior to Christianity*, Sir W. Flinders Petrie.) This spiritual disillusion spreads, naturally, among the advanced types, and then, in its train, comes mass superstition. . . . Expressed by Epictetus, that disillusionment has become purely resignationist; so mortification becomes a benefit in itself and individuals are ready for monasticism. For Stoicism, in its turn, as people became more self-centred (individuals whose further development is arrested) and so more timid, more superstitious, had to yield even the moderate independence it claimed in the inner world. Having yielded his power to question the Universe according to reason, man has to cede the right to dispose of himself according to reason. That this descent is due to no personal factor, that it is a secular process, is made evident when through another line of philosophy can be traced a parallel decline. There is a direct descent from Platonism through Neo-Platonism to the pure magic of Jamblichus. But while Platonism runs parallel with Catholicism—the practice of virtuosos who only comply with orthodoxy—Stoicism runs into Catholicism.

¶491[page 146] make this struggle because of his temperament and his political evolution. When individuality was sufficiently developed, the search for a future life inevitably began. The mystery-religions are religions of escape. The individual will deliver his own soul alive, leaving the world and the vast process of humanity to go like a driverless train headlong with all its freight. Such abdication is fatal, for, apart from the question whether any individual can so singly deliver himself, whether salvation does not lie in exactly the opposite direction, it is certain that such systems, framed really not to understand and to control but because men were frightened and were therefore afraid of making a difference, of changing things, cannot give the protection they pretend. Ostrich-exercises in subjectivity will not change the outer world, and as long as man stays in it, it is wiser to walk with open eyes than blindfolded to run headlong into unaltered fact. Nor is he surrounded simply by an indifferent universe. The self-blindfolded man advertises to all that he is afraid to look. Suicide is the one rational escape for such; otherwise they must, they have always, become the prey of lower types. Yet from suicide they come particularly to shrink, for once the right of private judgment, the gallant indifference to consequences of the true lover of understanding, has been yielded, men must shrink back to providentialism. Stoicism, it is true, had advised suicide when life could no longer be lived fittingly, and Chrysippus actually taught that of such disabilities old age was one, but as soon as Stoicism was taken over into Christianity (as we have seen it was bound to be dissolved), such independence had to be yielded. Men do not dare to take any decisive action. Their desire is to be taken care of. They lie in fear of offending some power. They feel that safety—and it is this for which they have come alone to care—a passion which soon becomes insatiable—a panic *sauve qui peut* of a sinking civilization—

¶492might be endangered by any action on their part. The individual has passed through his entire phase.36

¶493A few perhaps escaped into a larger consciousness, but the brief opportunity passed. By the third century B.C. most are preparing to be sunk again in a society where the centre of gravity will lie far nearer the co-conscious level. Before, however, passing into that valley, out of which to an equal elevation of release the human spirit will not come until our day, it is necessary, the better to understand the sequel, to look back at one significant symptom of the Greek culture, which ran parallel with their scientific advance, the rise of humanitarianism, and then, in contrast, to follow the last outrunning reef of its intellectual genius in Alexandria. Individualism in its pure state is of necessity terribly insensitive. Of this there will be all too much evidence when the Renaissance comes under review. There it appears, as it is, the other pole of that sympathy which feels directly its kinship with its kind and therefore cannot inflict or permit cruelty.37 Yet the Greek showed many symptoms of what might arise from true humanitarianism. That criminals condemned to death should be permitted to commit suicide with a soporific; that torture should so seldom have been used and then nearly always to elicit evidence; 38 that political disturbers should be exiled by a referendum instead of being assassinated or imprisoned—on the face of it such things seem to be acts of true humanitarianism. There is, though, another element in the Greek character, so highly developed,

¶49436 For a modern parallel compare J. H. Newman's constantly repeated "Where shall I be most safe?"

¶49537 Of course to any outside its group it is completely insensitive and to any who within the group have become different it feels a repulsive horror that ejects and destroys what has become a foreign body. "Kaffirs will call to all their kin always before eating, inviting them to share, but will let a stranger starve on their threshold."

¶49638 The point is of importance. Many jurists (see Ulpian) who condemned the practice yet saw no other method whereby the law could obtain essential information, and the safety of the state was supreme. For fuller treatment see Ch. V.

¶497[page 148] of such curious intensity, that until it is allowed for we cannot say that the avoidance of cruelty was wholly due to a super-personal sympathetic realization of suffering in others. Undoubtedly the Greek had a sensibility unequalled, save perhaps among the Chinese. The comparison may illuminate the matter, for the Chinese throughout the period in which they were producing art which both for its technical control—such as the finest glazes—and its mastery of design is almost beyond a European's appreciation, were content with a code of justice containing penalties which would keep most English people sleepless had they witnessed one of its enforcements. "The man of honourable idleness" isolated himself from the system in which he rested. That, the Greek could not do. His was not an empire but a city state. His sensibility, unable to encyst itself from the suffering in his surroundings, may have taken the place of a true humanitarianism, which his place in psychic evolution seems to preclude—he was still so purely individual. Praxiteles, carving his faun, could not bring himself to give the creature its appropriate goat legs but simply crossed human limbs so that a certain whimsicalness of carriage should suggest the secret strangeness of the hybrid nature. That other sculptor who graved too deeply the lines of the countenance intended for Zeus was able to call it, with no further emphasis of explanation, a Pluto. An eye so sensitive to form that the temples' thresholds had to have their stylobates curved and every pillar its appropriate delicate distortion and displacement, of entasis and columniation, such could not suffer extravagance, and to it flagrant deformity was intolerable. How then could such hypersensitiveness endure witnessing torture or indeed any violence or horror? Ugliness, we know, was to the Athenian an outrage. They doubted if moral goodness could be associated with a complete lack of physical attraction, and the cruel custom—an archaic survival—of offering on occasion an aged couple to the sea by drowning,

¶498[page 149] seems to confirm this suspicion by showing that they were capable of real cruelty provided that the object was already disgusting and its further increase in unpleasantness—its struggle for life and its decomposition after—would be hidden. The question, however, is one of considerable difficulty. The spirit of man, as will be pointed out in the much clearer light of our own age, passes very quickly from the extreme of individuality and begins to recover on a larger and nobler scale (than it can compass on the co-conscious) that intuitive feeling for others which is the basis of humanitarianism. Socrates, his group, and his spiritual descendants, were certainly capable of almost every fine and altruistic feeling which the most advanced humanitarian can experience, and a couple of centuries before their appearance, in India a prince felt that transforming passion for all living which shows that consciousness has passed the aphelion of individuality and is once more, at ever increasing speed, making for the general consciousness out of which it came.³⁹ It may be that before pressure of external political events drove the Greek mind to take refuge in a private other-worldliness, he passed that maximum condition of separation and repulsion which pure individuality is. Whether that is so or not, the continuation of scientific discovery in Alexandria would show that any sensibility or incipient humanitarianism soon vanished. The persistence of a reef of research, when all the rest of the Greek world had gone under the reflooding tides of a more lowly conscious civilization, is a curiosity of the mind's evolution.

¶499Until the close of the second century B.C. the Museum will advance knowledge in a way so familiar now, so incomparable then. In fact a continuous succession of purely scientific men will carry on discovery until, in the same country, science dies as monasticism is born. The full signifi-

¶50039 The case of Buddha is, however, as we have seen, a difficult one. Quite apart from the impossibility of arriving at the historic Gautama, the Buddhist Spirit is undoubtedly one of escape and yet not of personal salvation.

¶501[page 150] cance of this can only become apparent in the next chapter when the rise of monasticism and its meaning is discussed. Before, however, passing on to that, it is necessary to note the complete detachment of this scientific interest from any sensibility. This is terribly illustrated by the fact that the experts in anatomy asked for and as far as is known obtained living criminals in order to practice, in the interests of a completely callous science, the most horrible form of vivisection.40 Such a fact seems to confirm the suspicion that the Greek did not attain true sympathy, was not merciful but squeamish, and once the latter weakness was overcome, he had no more bound to his callous lust for knowledge than had a monster such as Frederick II. The death of Aristotle may then be taken to mark a decisive change.41 Philosophy ceases to be an attempt to be master of all the processes of mind, to be no less than the unifying and co-ordinating wisdom of the understanding that dare look deepest into outer nature, and only postulates of man that his nature is his highest capacity. Then it could give its commands to kings and its authority to thinkers, for it appears as the spirit of civilization, the inspiration and goal of all government. But the obedience of force depends on the certitude of knowledge. If philosophy is to preserve its authority it must be evident that at the least it is more fearless than the rash, the adventurers, and the turbulent, more powerful than the men of mere will and appetite. From longer range and wider compass it must draw a tenacity which outlasts not only fury but the largest individual ambition, as well as an insight that overreaches the cunning (who can but impute themselves) and forestalls any device calculated on a human lifetime. Such a concept of philosophy is bold, but it is evident that nothing short of this comprehension is safe. Philosophy must

¶50240 They are said to have complained that their victims always died before the explorations could reach points of real interest.

¶50341 But see Dr. Santayana's judgment. In his *Three Philosophic Poets*, he maintains that the disruption can be traced back to Socrates.

¶504[page 151] rule or be destroyed. Its history shows, however it may fare with those who may have claimed to be its practitioners, the spirit itself can never be tolerated. United it dominates, inspires, and is the end of living made noble. Divided it becomes means to the degradation of mankind and the destruction of society. It is here that the post-Aristotelians failed.42 Philosophy broke up and whether through scientists amusing a degenerate Ptolemy and vivisecting his victims, or through moralists aiding tyrants more effectively by teaching men through a false concern with their private salvation to be indifferent to the larger welfare of their fellows and the advance of civilization, helped the forces of disruption to cause far greater damage than by themselves they could have worked; for violence can only pass from the bestial to the demoniac when science inspires it, and as pure vice needs an alloy of virtue before it can be wielded upon a scale vast enough to crush the whole range of human well-being, so degraded moralized philosophy, on its side, prepared for demoniac possession the duped spirits of its salvation-lusting victims. Into these, tyranny (a thing contemptible in its origin) entering, is enlarged by unthinking loyalties and authoritative reverences, until it becomes a terror that may enslave the world and extinguish its happiness.

¶505These teachers were alarmed not by the narrow and degrading tyranny of man but by the vast indifference of Nature. The eternal silences so frightened their little chattering spirits that they preferred to be bellowed at by any sergeant-major. Like dogs they would rather be kicked than lost. They shrank back from the danger that was threatened to their little systems by the expanding immensities of the outer world. They chose safety first, the safety of the

¶50642 The Peripatetic school after its master's death divides, for Theophrastus is a scientist and Eudemus a moralist; "both are diligent scholars rather than original thinkers." "There was another tendency in Post-Aristotelian thought—to lean upon authority and substitute learning for independence and research."

¶507[page 152] dreamer who believes that if he can sleep it does not matter if waking he is a slave. Because their systems concentrated on saving their followers' souls, they lost them. As true as the Hedonistic Paradox (which indeed is only part of this main issue) is the fact that to attempt to escape the self, from the selfish wish to be free of it and its involvings, is to insure a more subtle, less extricable entanglement.

¶508Emotionally the Greek is therefore ready for the great change which will open the monasteries and close the Schools, a change which will turn the very name "Greek" from the supreme associate of art and science to the synonym for a Church backward even among churches and a crooked bureaucracy.

¶509With that prospect before us we should not, however, lose sight of the fact that though the Greek failed to solve his psychological problem and to advance consciousness beyond individuality, he nevertheless was not wholly defeated. The contribution he made to science was wholly recovered and the steps which the world in the modern age had to take were accelerated by the fact that, though the Greek tracks were silted over, again and again, men found footholds of the mind that they had cut. They co-ordinated knowledge, they began and sustained the science which for the first time was a thing both intellectual enough to require self-consciousness to direct it and also collective enough—of a common, unindividual, unidiosyncratic nature—to be handed on from man to man, from generation to generation, and when the succession had been broken for centuries, again, the moment the mind rose to the necessary level, to flood it like the level beams of the sun. Unconsciously in intelligence (however far they lagged emotionally) they had attained to the first stage of superconsciousness. If there is social evolution at all, then their advance to this point and their failure to get beyond it are equally illuminating. In the psychological evolution of every living creature, cognition comes first,

¶510conation succeeds, and the full awareness—affection—comes last.43

¶511The Greek attained a collective understanding; he grasped intellectually the universe—he could not (the world was not ready for it—the separation of Jew from Greek was too wide) attain to an equally intense collective sympathy. Professor Whitehead said in 1925: “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention” 44 (though surely this supreme invention was made in the seventeenth; it only becomes *popularized* in the nineteenth). Mr. W. B. Yeats in 1922 said: “Discovery was discovered by the Academy.” Both epigrams are true, and together they illuminate the conclusion of this chapter. They show that twice in the history of man, in the seventeenth century A.D. and in the fifth century B.C. the human consciousness attained the intensity essential to understanding one side of its entire process; it stood for a moment intellectually outside the particular individual. The minds that rose to this level could see clearly and convince others that there existed a common impersonal thought, working anonymously, in which the individual could be absorbed and transcended. Beyond this in its first essay it failed to go, and it is necessary now to trace the descent from that first climax in order that there may be understood the crisis in which we ourselves have been involved since its second.

¶51243 The comparison of social consciousness' evolution with that of the individual's is A. St. J. Heard's.

¶51344 *Science and the Modern World*, p. 141.

¶514[page 154] CHAPTER IV

¶515THE ARREST OF INDIVIDUALITY: THE MONASTIC AGE

¶516SUMMARY

¶517IF CIVILIZATIONS depend on psychic energy, economic conditions being only its vehicle, we must look for the explanation of the fall of the Roman Empire long before its decline, even (as the Roman Empire is the latter part of Graeco-Roman civilization) before the actual rise of empire. Empire is of its nature a retreat; the individual is let go off salvationing, and the state retreats on to a lower, more politically stable level. Such a society will tend, because of its low level, to give off fewer new individuals, especially if a machinery exists to clear out of the way such individuals as still outcrop. The first step to this is religious toleration, an essential feature of empire. So seen, the Roman Empire is the last stage of that process which began politically with the Greek City-State. It is also the second vehicle of that religious process which began with salvationism among the Greeks and Hebrews. Therefore the Empire falling to pieces has, when it has carried this phase as far as it may, to release the Church—Greek in its passionate individual salvationism, Hebrew in its iron organization. The Church (still faced with individuals too numerous for the priesthood), to carry on, as it could not permit the toleration of the Empire nor provide posts for all the individuals, had to sanction a new elaboration of social life—monasticism. The individuals are taken up in the monasteries, the rest relapse under heroic kingships or even forms of fertility-rule. But never is the relapse complete. On the other hand the monastic spirit itself sinks

¶518[page 155] back from pure individualism. It spreads outside the Empire because a more advanced culture always accelerates a lower, and so Ireland goes straight from Heroicism to Monasticism. In most countries, however, monasticism is not allowed to exceed a balance of the individual and society. By the thirteenth century civilization begins again to elaborate—and, proof that the causes are psychic and not economic, the monasteries experience a similar recovery in individuality to that which the outer world was experiencing. The general recovery from the group submergence leads to monastic reforms. Cf. the Carthusians. To this general process, the Black Death gives a jerk. The man in the world is rapidly individualized and becomes either a private salvationist or a materialist. Cf. the change in lay religion from group to particular devotions. Materialism is a symptom of the emergence of the “lower individual.” Mysticism is a symptom of the emergence of the “upper individual.” The monk tends to turn into a mystic, the layman to become a materialist. The link that had kept the two sides together, the sacramental system, goes. Monasticism, as it had become conventualism, was shattered by such a return of individuality. Wyclif by attacking the mass brings the monastic age to an end.

¶519CHAPTER IV

¶520THE periodic failures of civilization, which have so concerned historians, have, on the hypothesis of this essay, an explanation. On any other theory save that of the evolution of consciousness human society cannot be shown to be governed by any law or conformable to any evolutionary growth. If, however, the explanation of economic and material change lies in psychological development, we must look for the causative spiritual trouble, the decisive social crisis, many generations before decay can become apparent in the structure of things.

¶521Movements continue on the economic level long after the psychological stimulus which started them has ceased or even when that may have begun to flow in an opposite direction. So it was with the Graeco-Roman world. The modern age has been constantly impressed with what it has called “the Fall of the Empire.” We have seen that the turn in the tide of consciousness, the climax in individuality (with its failure to evolve a complete superconsciousness, emotional as well as intellectual), certainly was passed by the time of Aristotle’s heirs and, some have thought, was attained as early as Socrates. Thereafter civilization was gaining nothing in intensity but only in mass. The spirit of man was in retreat, though the body politic was still gaining in size; the sap was ebbing though the tree still spread. Indeed the mere growth in size was fatal to any advance in conscious force.¹ There are two reasons for supposing this. In the first place the analogy of physical evolution suggests that empire, in the Roman sense, is inherently the final term in economic elaboration.² It is not an advance in the good life but a mere growth in tissue, because the vital energy is waning. Human organizations, like physical organisms, have a vital limit of size, and for an analogous reason. So great an increase in elaboration is needed for every dimensional advance that finally the society breaks down through the complexity and sheer

¶5221 “Democratic excesses cause the rise of Empire,” concludes Vico, but we must go deeper. Democratic excesses we have seen are caused by the emergence of individuality, and so democracies disenfranchise themselves and pass under the sway of larger, less highly advanced states.

¶5232 That from the economic point of view alone the Roman Empire was not an advance on the earlier civilization it absorbed (that loosely articulated cultural system which begins about the seventh century B.C. and extends from Ionia to beyond Italy) Professor Rostovtsev shows when he concludes that it became practically a closed system of economic relations. He shows before the Imperial period the advancement of Graeco-Roman society had been brought about by the special development of certain industries in certain centres for a wide market, and how, under the Empire, the high standard of production in these centres was gradually reduced as the semi-barbarian hinterlands learned to produce mediocre imitations. The economic factors, however, he regards as only secondary. “In the case of the Roman Empire, a steady decline of civilization is not

¶524[page 157] weight of the machinery involved in running it. The Roman Empire ³ certainly after the first century, i.e., as soon as bureaucratic complexity was developed, fell out of the hands of the Romans into those of the Greeks who alone had the mental subtlety to carry the elaboration in their heads (our society alone has been able to file its complexities) but lacked the character, the sense of identity with the state, to make it serve any larger purpose than its precedents and their employment. In passing it should be noted that this Imperial phase is different from that initiated by Thetmosis over forty generations before, because that was religious and so could control individuality; this, purely military, depending on pure force, not suggestion, could not. Religion has tasted salvation, and the "soul hydroptic with the sacred thirst" cannot be used or controlled but wrecks the Empire. The profundity of the change in the nature of Empire can be realized by an examination of the difference in the character of the essential term of each. In the Egyptian, self-conscious administration was achieved through a priesthood, who, in so far as they were administrators and not mass-priests, were superior in rank and probably by birth to the people they controlled. In the Roman it was through a class of manumitted slaves.

¶525In the second place human history shows that up to the present, the last, the highest, and the fatal term of human

¶526to be traced to physical degeneration, or to any debasement of blood in the higher races due to slavery, or to political and economic conditions, but rather to a changed attitude of men's minds. That change was due to the chain of circumstances which produced the specific conditions of life in the Roman Empire; and the process was the same as in Greece. One of these conditions, and very important among them, was the aristocratic and exclusive nature of Ancient Civilization [i.e., individuality inevitably resulting in disappearance of social solidarity]. The mental reaction and the social division, taken together, deprived the Ancient World of power to maintain its civilization, or to defend it against internal dissolution and barbarian invasion from without."

¶527Therefore the Roman Empire was a foregone failure, of its nature a decadent form of society.

¶528³ See Dr. Heitland, *Agriculture in the Roman Empire*, and his essay on the causes of the decline.

¶529[page 158] society is the emergence of complete individuality. Empire, denying to the individual the full exercise of his powers, is an attempt of society to retreat on to a more stable basis, and as the individual cannot be extinguished, to let him go off on the hunt for personal salvation. The full exercise of individuality—which might lead to its development into something less socially hostile—it is clear can only be attained through a most critical relaxation of the community. How urgent is this intention can be seen by the premature stage at which it provoked the dangerous delivery. Civilization crashed, the individual was thrown down, because on far too narrow a base had it risen to the unstable height necessary to release him. On the very first occasion offered, individuality emerged, though it had little more chance of completing its growth and coming the full round of its cycle than has a February daffodil.

¶530If then we conclude that the city state was at that epoch the only environment in which individuality could be released and still have opportunity of further development, escaping the fatal blind alley of other-worldliness and personal salvationism, the Roman Empire cannot be viewed as a further advance in the evolution of civilization. On the contrary it appears as the first retrograde step back to barbarism, and we see, too, why one of its essential characteristics was the complete toleration of every religion, only excepting those which were not open to the State’s inspection.4 So from the city state, concerned (to the complete exclusion of “a real policy”), with the evolution of the individual, the Empire is a retreat. It is a compromise in face

¶5314 Christianity refused to comply with this essential requirement. If the State was to profit through its religious toleration, every religion must be open to inspection. If “to the Magistrate all religions were equally useful,” these safety valves must always be letting the individual escape. If, on the contrary, they were holding him in, organizing him, becoming compression chambers, they were worse than useless; they became *imperia in imperio*, materializations of treason.

¶532[page 159] of actual conditions—a world still in the main peopled with tribes in the most dangerous state of aggressiveness, entering their heroic age, when they put themselves under leaders who have just attained that mood of violent and exploratory action which is the symptom of impending self-consciousness. Increasingly, through the centuries of the Roman Empire, this seems the social condition of the transliminal peoples. Indeed geographically, as well as physically, the Empire might be described as the frontier between the City State and the Tribe.

¶533So viewed, the barbarians only overthrew Rome in the sense that flood waters may overthrow a house. It did not suddenly crash down from a pinnacle of culture to a sea-level of savagery. When the Empire, through an increasing demand for safety (political safety, for the “lower individual” who was too terrified, first of civil war and then of the barbarian, to resist militarization; spiritual safety for the “upper individual” who was too terrified of death to care for life, of the other world to care for this), reached, in the gradual subsidence from the city state’s standard of freedom, the barbarians’ level, they percolated through its sunken system and finally dissolved all that had remained of it. Individualism, though still existing detached within its territory—the Stoic, even he the penultimate term of individualism, as we have seen, “had always found excuse for non-participation”—had been almost entirely eliminated from the system by the time that Odovacar took over.

¶534How this process of separation worked itself out must now be outlined, and as the outline becomes clear it should reveal that the decline as well as the rise of civilization is caused by the same informing force—evolving consciousness. Its stirrings must first raise society: its maximum motional activity, create civilization; then suddenly, as a liquid boils, the force volatilizes, an invisible revolution has taken place, individu-

¶535[page 160] ality releases itself, passes into a higher form of activity, and material civilization, like a mud crust from which the informing steam has escaped, falls in.

¶536The Roman Empire gave to the whole of the Mediterranean world very much the same curious condition of national arrest and individual protection which the Persian Empire had given to the Jews, and with results not dissimilar. Such a condition drove the Jew to other-worldliness, to a development of theology, or rather eschatology, at the expense of psychology; to a projection, instead of an evolution, of individuality. The Roman Empire allowed the extension of this peculiar unsatisfactory process over the entire southern part of its dominion. To quote again Professor Rostovtsev: 5 "Roman civilization was hardly more than a central bureaucratic protectorate over a series of cities"—the Greek city-state, with its problem of foreign policy not solved but arrested, preserved in a fibroid growth of roads, ramparts, and legions; and like all preserved organisms, prevented from developing, prevented from structural decay, it shrinks to a useless relic of itself. There was no general patriotism, no sense of loyalty to civilization—simply petrified provincialism. Caesar, as had Cyrus before him, tolerated, and for the same state reason, all religions, because he forbade and they prevented any politics.

¶537The psychic history of such an age can only be of ungeared individuals, detached from the community, which is kept from collapsing by external forces and in which therefore individuals are anomalously, irresponsibly preserved. Inevitably the generality must take to lust. The ends of living are denied them. They can only reiterate purposeless appetite, and when exhaustion intervenes, react into religion. The process is vividly illustrated in the *Satyricon*, where the last scene of Trimalchio's banquet is of the host having his own funeral acted. Throughout the book lust is always being

¶5385 *Social and Economic System of the Roman Empire.*

¶539[page 161] spurred—sure evidence that it is overwrought—by the remark, “We have so little while to live.” It has been pointed out that what has been called the satyriasis of the ancient world shattered it and led to monastic asceticism. The association is undeniable. The one extreme causes the other. But with the psychological interpretation of history there is exposed a deeper cause in which both lust and asceticism, the irresponsible individual in the autocratic Empire and the “holily selfish” ⁶ monk in the Dark Age, are symptoms of successive stages in the evolution of consciousness. Sex obsession must appear at one period of individuality, for it is the initial stage of that inflammation of the ego, the next phase of which is asceticism; of a single spiral process, which, after sex-mystery religions have passed into pure salvationism, will intensify from pleasure to pain, from deliberate and persistent indulgence in the keenest pleasure to a revulsion, to a desire to save up wholly for a future individual life which alone can satisfy a nature so indulged and so exhausted that normal satisfaction is no longer possible.⁷

¶540It is a period which must end, as Gibbon concludes, with “the triumph of barbarism and religion.” ⁸ Individuality, not being solved but shelved, is not evolving but petrifying, and it is this fact that gives the clue to the secular decline

¶541⁶ Jerome, P. L. Vol. 22. Col. 542.

¶542⁷ The algolagnia to which excess leads, through the blunting of normal sensibility, leads, in its turn, to the projection of a hell, to avoid which, as much as to compass heaven, becomes the ascetic’s aim.

¶543⁸ Of course the Emperor was himself no more immune from the process of psychic evolution than were his subjects or had been Pharaoh. The succession of good Emperors who gave the Empire its one stable period—Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius—show a steadily increasing detachment of the Princeps from vital interest in the polity, however conscientiously he persisted in working for it. The attempts of Marcus Aurelius and Heliogabalus to escape have become classic. More interesting are the pseudo-archaisms of Hadrian, as these are unself-conscious evidence of the spirit’s attempt to stand outside its own time. It was not strong enough to go on and to create new types to express a complete eclecticism, so earlier styles were copied, and, relishing the contrast, the soul snatched a moment in the cool dark outside the hot glare of its own overcrowded, aimless day—as the Chinese have continually done and some Europeans now do.

¶544and fall. The Roman Empire is the precipitation of the volatile essence of creative energy which had formerly possessed the Greek, a precipitation which, still unstable, must in its turn decompose into barbarism.

¶545The economic or outward completion of this process, whereby the city finally dissolves, we need not follow, for we are tracing the psychic evolution, not the economic collapse when the energizing spirit has been withdrawn. Professor Rostovtsev summarizes: “The army in the third century destroyed the bourgeois civilization of the towns and prepared the way for a culture based on the villages.” And Dr. R. G. Collingwood ⁹ in approving this judgment adds: “The fourth-century Empire was characterized by an utter loss of creative energy.”

¶546We have seen that the decline dates from before the evident rise of the Roman Empire. It is the last, inevitable phase of a process which enters on this development about the seventh century B.C. Its doom was prepared before the actual form came into being: “The first morning of creation wrote, that the last dawn of reckoning had read.”

¶547So, too, in Palestine and Hellas, as we have seen as far back as the same seventh century and taking rise from the same root cause, centuries before the great syncretic effort of salvationist organization—an amalgam of Jew and Greek—was launched, the greater part of the destiny of Catholicism had been worked out. Judaism, inspired by race, struggled against private salvationism, but because the inspiration to resist the lure of that blind alley sprang from group vitalism, the Jew was driven to other-worldliness—a projection of the nation. Hellenism, intensely self-conscious and unsympathetic, falls into the other mistake, personal immortality. Combined, these give Catholicism. The Mystery-Religion, of Orphic and Eleusinian descent, provides

¶548⁹ *Antiquity*, 1927.

¶549[page 163] the personal side: 10 the Judaic projected nationalism provides the corporate: so a curious synthesis (which solves neither the problem of the individual nor that of society) is preserved. The two ways of life, the higher and the lower, are defined, and by a constant transfer of those who begin to give trouble on one level to the other, the social balance is preserved and development postponed. It is to this fact, more than to any other, that the peculiar character of the Middle Ages is due.

¶550At the beginning, however, we have seen, Catholicism has another element and emphasis, taken over from Judaism—Apocalypticism—the belief not in another world, but in another future for this world, contrary to the ordinary man’s expectation and compassable only through violent divine intervention. It is easy to see how such a hope was natural to the Jew, who never wished to abandon this world and most of the time was longing with the ineffectual passion of a beaten people for some particular oppressor to be overwhelmed in a cataclysm. In Catholicism and indeed in later Judaism, Apocalypticism does not long survive, but for opposite reasons. The Catholic found it unsettling in a world where the spiritual rulers were already beginning to discover that this life yielded many attractions if one could rely on the unquestioning service of numberless obedients. The Jew renounced it with a despair which in any less vital race must have led to extinction. 11

¶55110 Dean Inge in his Essay on St. Paul (*Outspoken Essays*) says that the Apostle to the Gentiles claimed that he had taken the first step to deliver Christianity from Judaism, but that he also took the first towards paganizing it. See also *The Golden Bough: Attis, Osiris and Isis*, for close parallel between I Cor. 15—the passage used in the Anglican Burial Rite—and the Eleusinian ritual. Cf. Ch. III.

¶55211 As we have seen in Ch. III, the Synagogue and the Church condemned Apocalypticism about 200 A.D. and thenceforward that form Pseudepigraphy ceases. (Burkitt's *Jewish and Christian Apocalypses*, and Archdeacon Charles's Introduction to his edition of the Pseudepigrapha.) The weaker Jews had also (see above) been provided from external sources with a Resurrection of the Just, but it is, throughout their history, admirably remarkable how few avail themselves of this alien anodyne.

¶553It is then that a most significant development takes place, a development the importance of which has escaped notice because the inevitable psychological evolutionary association of the two types of thought has not been recognized. As Apocalypticism is banished, Monasticism appears. The one is the succeeding alternative to the other. The Monastic order is recruited from the forbidden expectants who had been the congregation of the Revelations. The "ethic of the interim"—the complete abstentionist doctrine, which, we have seen, arose first (in this line of succession, for Asia is outside this sketch) in the pure Pacifism of the Chasidim—is definitely ruled by authority no longer to apply to all the faithful. The world is not going to come to an end; so men cannot go on holding their breath in the belief that that is all that is needed to bring about heaven. Yet the Church is unable to extinguish altogether the passionate desire in many religious for another order. To put it less rationalistically: There were still enough individuals left in the sinking social order to give trouble. Indeed that order was still high enough not only to produce certain numbers but also to be unable to infanticide them. It chose, therefore, (as do many primitive groups, when they cannot rear their children and won't kill them 12), rather to abandon them. Something had to be done with them. They could no longer function socially. City State and Ecclesiastic Nation had gone. Even their last activity as prophets of a group future had become undesirable. Catholicism, as Dr. Coulton has shown beyond dispute,13 is no friend or sponsor of Monasticism. By his name the monk marks himself as a solitary, not a corporate member. No Council initiated that life. The movement to the Thebaid can be interpreted rightly only as the spontaneous reply of the extreme religious to the condemnation by authority of Apocalypticism.

¶55412 See Carr-Saunders, *Population*, p. 217.

¶55513 *Five Centuries of Religion*, Vol. I.

¶556[page 165] But authority learned how to turn the revolt to advantage. Though the Church did not invent monasticism, though that was due to individuality, she very soon saw how essential a feature it was in the new socio-religious structure, that Holy Sequel of Empire which she was to build. The first phase of Empire had been the most secular state—perhaps the only secular state—the world has ever seen. In the organism of the state itself, religion had been reduced to an Emperor cult little more devout than an Empire Day celebration. In consequence, authority, having no spiritual demands to make, had been able to permit the widest religious toleration, and by this device, by leaving these channels of escape deliberately open, had got rid of the disruptive danger of the individual.14 But when the Empire became ecclesiastical this was no longer possible. The only elaborate social organization in the Dark Ages was bound to be religious. Religious organizations cannot be tolerant in matters of religion. Toleration impossible, individuality irreducible, Monasticism was essential. Individuals cannot but make trouble. If the state is secular it will turn them out to save their souls with individual religions. If the state is religious it must provide an orthodox escape, it must shut them up in a system which it has approved and modified so as to carry off their dangerous force.

¶557But it may be asked: Why this social departure? Could not, as formerly, the priesthood have contained these individuals? For two reasons it was impossible. In the first place the hierarchic organization of the Dark Ages was too rudimentary to take up but a very few (and the numbers must have been considerable). The Curia was a very moderate affair: the Imperial Church at Constantinople probably

¶55814 The upper individual, the man capable of devotion. Of the lower individual's development we have seen that, denied political expression, he suffered from satyriasis and so finally came to asceticism. Being a stage lower, he takes one stage more to reach the same goal: salvationism. See Ch. III, pp. 123, 131-32.

¶559employed as few. The priesthood of Egypt could bear some proportion to the psychic discharge of Egypt.15 But the Vatican was not a bureaucracy large enough to contain all the detached individuals even in Italy. The entire outlying clergy cannot be looked upon as a true hierarchy, privileged, closely ordered, sacred civil servants; but rather as authorized, very loosely organized magicians.

¶560Secondly there is the psychological fact that each time individuality emerges it is somewhat more complex, more advanced, than in its earlier phase. The passionate salvationism which necessitates and created monasticism, may have existed at the end of Egypt’s independence,15a but the, proportionately, far vaster hierarchic organization may have encysted it. It seems to have left a trace in the Essene organization in later Judaism, and to it the force behind the underground cults of Greece has been attributed. But in all these cases it is a rudiment, something we suspect more than detect. In the Dark Age it appears in such force as to make its expression, monasticism, the essential feature of that Age, and of that Age’s sequel.

¶561From the standpoint of the general psychic evolution of our whole culture this change, this new organization, is symptomatic of a crisis in human development. The third century after Christ is a turning-point in the ebb of consciousness in all the Mediterranean lands. It will not recover and pass this degree until thirteen centuries have gone. Individuality has had its opportunity, rudimentary though it was, to develop further, and it has failed to achieve the complete metamorphosis into a permanent superconsciousness. Had men attained emotionally even to that level of superindividual consciousness which some had attained intellec-

¶56215 In Judea the Sadducean priestly order so completely satisfied the individuals it contained that they did not even have to believe in the resurrection of themselves or any one else, but here we are dealing (as outlined in Ch. III) with an almost earthbound race.

¶56315a See Flinders Petrie’s *Doctrine of Future Life in Egypt prior to Christianity*.

¶564[page 167] tually at Alexandria, civilization might never have lapsed but have gone on straight to its supreme crisis, which today we face.

¶565Failing this, it must relapse to a condition more stable because more nearly approaching the level of co-consciousness. Individuality can never last. As a social condition it must always be the briefest of phases, the crisis—till today always mortal—in the secular life of communities, for an individualistic society is a contradiction in terms. Monasteries are the material evidence of the escape of surviving individuals from the steadily subsiding civilization which, as it submerges, can have no place for those incapable of living in the lower medium. But, in its turn, subject to the general collapse, monasticism itself fails, for it cannot remain monastic. Under the universal pressure the eremites draw into cenobitic organizations, and these into close orders. Even the desert is deluged and the solitary swept into a community more close, more uniform, more tyrannical than any social life in the sinking civilization without.

¶566The monks who swarm out of Egypt are creatures of a pack. Cyril, the Alexandrine Patriarch, had about him bands scarcely human; and the example of the Patriarch is to be of inestimable value to the Papacy. To such a level and so quickly had those who would have escaped the deluge found their ark sunken.

¶567Nevertheless the individual is withdrawn from society, and so civilization rapidly resumes such a level of social pressure as can be sustained by leaders whose consciousness is still short-circuiting in violent action—still below the first step of that ascent which runs from accumulation to invention, thence to research and so to contemplation—and by a rank and file even nearer to a group consciousness.

¶568The return to barbarism is such a familiar phrase in our own dissolving time that we are apt to forget how various such bed-levels may be: the ocean floor shelves from tidal

¶569waters to the abyss. Certainly the Dark Ages cover a social condition quite unparalleled in the history of the world—a state as unique as was that civilization's over which its shadow fell. As certainly is it the lack of documentary evidence which contributes half the darkness, for this twilight is as much of the dawn as of the evening. The Age's silence is not wholly the dumbness of the beast but is also due to the silence of the spiritual, of individuals who mused, inly revolving the doom of Rome, and so left unrecorded the deeds of the topical heroes.16 And as far as the average lot can be estimated, it may well be asked whether in many parts of Western Europe life was any easier under the dying Empire of the fourth than under the rudimentary kingships of the fifth and sixth centuries. Roman Law—as, for example, Ulpian left it: Theodosius and Justinian worsened it—considering its magnificent elaboration and its lofty principles, was astoundingly cruel, burning alive being the punishment for some dozen offences; torture was part of its procedure in the attainment of evidence, to be employed not only on the accused but on the witnesses, if they were not free; and crucifixion was as carelessly inflicted as was hanging in the eighteenth century. Much of the penal system which revolts us in the civil and canon law of the Middle Ages is only Roman Law still grinding humanity. The benefits which the dying Empire could give grew ever slighter and the price it demanded for them proportionately extortionate. The taxation rolls had not been thoroughly revised since Hadrian; many districts had become almost

¶57016 Lord Acton wrote of the fifth and sixth centuries' being filled with real saintliness. Though a Roman Catholic, as little as a Quaker did he confound goodness with orthodoxy. It may be that men lapsing back nearer to group consciousness, though incapable of an advanced society, regained some virtues which as individuals they had lost; while deserted individuals, unable to find any society to serve, developed a lonely spirituality all the more intense because of its isolation. Chadwick (*The Heroic Age*) has shown that the Epic literature of the Dark Ages is mainly lost, but its extent can be estimated from chance preservations such as the Beowulf preserved by the English Saxons.

¶571deserted and unproductive. Yet the hereditary tax-collector was held responsible for the full original return and had to make it good so long as he himself possessed any property. No wonder laws had to be made 17 to prevent such wretched survivors from taking refuge in the Church. The dissolution of this oppressive, completely inefficient system must have been a relief not only to the violent and wilful but also to the weak and quiet. Society, long in process of segregation, but outwardly made a unit by the name Empire, in a few generations separates out. “The sum of happiness” may even have been increased. Brawling children and hypochondriacs are better apart; they are too different to add to each other’s pleasure. When we have allowed for the toughening quality of the main population and the dignified and influential retreat provided for the tender, we can recognize that the “higher” and the “lower” lives represent the attainment by two psychically different types each of an environment more suited to its nature than was to either the dying Empire, whose dregs of culture wearied the spiritual little less than they bored the barbarian.

¶572That the Church appears like a moth out of the cracked and withered body of the Empire has often been remarked, but the curious spread of Monasticism, not only in the territories of the Imperial Church but in areas beyond, is the really significant feature of this time. Monte Cassino begins the Middle Ages. Up till then the movement had been wholly one of escape from a dying civilization. Now it becomes a refuge from a boisterous barbarism. Henceforward there will be two ways of life. Outside there will be the majority, sustaining the short-range society which suits them, a violent lusty life, full of action with little settled purpose, a life therefore of much fighting and hunting, little building and less thought. Inside there will be individuals with the aid of strong walls and the superstitious weakness of strong men

¶57317 Theodosian Code.

¶574[page 170] without,18 sustaining a much higher life, higher in thought, in conduct, and in self-consciousness, but unfortunately a life arrested. Sooner or later the outer world, much lower at present, but free to move, will begin to rise and pass the level of the monastic world, and, as with the Roman Empire before, the Cloister will be inundated—this time not because the system is sinking but because life without is rising above it—and the monk will be floated out into the new world.

¶575That the monastic system more than the Church itself is the essential feature of the Dark Ages, that it is the reply of the individual, now a much reduced minority, to a change in his conditions to which he cannot adapt, is shown by the extraordinary extent and diversity of the thing. It spreads rapidly from Egypt to Ireland, and everywhere it springs up we find it has sprung from a society in which individualism has appeared, is irreducible, but still cannot establish itself fully. Why in countries like Ireland, which had never gone through the long social elaboration of southeastern Europe, it should spread as easily as in the lands of its origin, is interesting. Two reasons may largely account for it. In the first place the system itself is an arrest of individuality. It is supremely salvationist: personal survival is its *raison d'être*. The monk is not concerned with the salvation of anything save his own soul.19 Such an outlook has undoubtedly a strong appeal to those proto-individuals who may see little chance of asserting themselves in this world and whose uneducated minds are easily persuaded of

¶57618 An illustration of the hierarchic evolutionary structure of society. The man of action, as he increases his power, has to extend his range i.e., extend his time-sense. So as he controls the purely destructive man of impulse, he himself falls under immaterial influences, which the lower type he can master would itself sweep away without hesitation or scruple. The king must either be a priest-king and so victim of his own superstition, or simply a hero, a military commander, and leave the other half of life to the weak priests whose strength is his weakness. Cf. Charlemagne and Knut.

¶57719 See Coulton, *Five Centuries of Religion*, Vol. I.

¶578[page 171] the supernatural reality of a system which comes to them with the spirituality of the Hebrew, the subtlety of the Greek, and the prestige of Rome to recommend it.20 The Keltic Culdee is the Shaman baptized. The Dark and Middle Ages might therefore be called the Monastic Age. That strange dual system of life is the time's unique and fundamental characteristic. In one way, however, the Middle Ages are justly named—they are no recapitulation of barbarism. The economic level may be as low as before the rise of the Graeco-Roman civilization, the spirit is utterly different; for mediaevalism covers this curious, unparalleled epoch of arrest—a society pausing halfway between co-consciousness and an individualized condition, balanced by constant transference of the individual, as he emerges, to reserves where his outburst of higher energy may least affect society. This compromise worked as long as the release of individuals, the outcropping of full self-consciousness, did not outrun the limits of the system. The fact is that monasticism (outside Asia) was an original invention arrived at by desperate individuals in a dying society—in the Southeast—and then adopted by a rudimentary society's individuals—in the Northwest—not vital enough to make places, not fortunate enough to find them, as a way of escape, a short-circuit of the original process that runs through Priest-King and Hero to Eremite. This fact reveals the second reason for monasticism's success in countries whose imperial phase seems to have been of the most rudimentary character,21 who seem hardly out of the Heroic. As in Oceania in our own

¶57920 See Bury, *St. Patrick*.

¶58021 That Ireland itself had an Imperial Phase, however rudimentary, there is evidence. Dathi, who acted as an ally of Aetius on the Rhine, Niall, his successor whose operations are ended by lightning in the Isle of Wight, and Leary—the third *really* effective Ard-Ri, though perhaps already wielding a decadent authority—are figures the extent of whose influence shadows a wider social organization behind them than has existed in their country either before or since. See Bury, *St. Patrick*.

¶581[page 172] day, in Northwestern Europe of the fifth century, the intrusion of a more advanced psychic development inordinately precipitated the differentiation of the lower.

¶582Indeed in Ireland the monastic system became the civilization. Something very like little sterile city-states appear. Flaugherty, the incessantly warring abbot, and Cormac, priest-king of Cashel, are typical proto-individuals.²²

¶583The religious houses are as disrespectful of any central authority as were the lay kings of the Ard-Ri or the Greek city-states of the Amphictyonic Council.²³ They produce their art and live their lives of incessant mutual repulsions with the same intense individualism, the same complete disregard of external consequences, as the city-states of Hellas a millennium before. Yet they might have known of the impending Norse invasions as well as Greece might have known of Philip's threat, for they were constant travellers; indeed their incessant restlessness is noted satirically by a contemporary Walafried Strabo, who writes that they did not travel for sanctity's sake but from *consuetudo peregrinandi*.²⁴

¶584However, in countries where strong governments were growing up, monasticism did not overbalance the system. It was kept (though with what need of constant vigilance the Plantagenets' praemunire and quo warranto are evidence) to its side of the compromise; and so a stable condition, with a centre of "psychic gravity" amazingly low, is preserved. It is possible, indeed, to gauge the intellectual activity of each phase of mediaevalism by the number of orders that are being founded. Through the Dark Ages, for

¶58522 That the general state of the culture in which they lived was that in which in other parts of the world proto-individualism is found is shown by the great "aboriginal" document of this age, the *Book of Rights*, which, it has been said, is an amazingly late outcrop of "purely magical practises and procedure." These two men are bad monks: their vitality is sufficient to make them still enjoy the lower stages of individualism's evolution and not desire to be short-circuited into sanctity.

¶58623 Council and High King had this in common impotence, the power to proclaim a peace during "secular games."

¶58724 See H. Zimmern, *The Keltic Church in Britain and Ireland.*

¶588Western Europe the great system of Benedict sufficed, as in the more stable East the order of Basil has remained without serious rival. Then with the release of psychic force which takes place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the last wanderings of the peoples are over, and, settled, the immense energy of the North turns to essay creation, the systems of Bernard and Bruno are devised. They are attempts to crush back something which is breaking out in spite of vows. Bernard is the spiritual father of the Puritans. He will have no embroidered vestments, no coloured windows, no carved or painted walls. The Carthusian movement is even more austere. Benedict’s rule was the simple life; this is the living death. There is something strangely oriental about the whole rule. It seems impossible to escape the conclusion that the founder realized the convent’s failure. It had not delivered the soul. The religious lived their life, and though in some ways it had deprivations, in others, even on the side of material security and comfort, it had privileges and advantages over the lower life without.25 This, St. Bruno was certain, was fundamentally wrong. What were they doing, living in this arrested fashion? In God’s name they should go on and settle the matter one way or the other. So with true mediaeval violence, instead of inquiring about the objective, he set out to drive his flock with every urgency of threat and goad. Their lives should be protracted suicides, and how terrible the system was may be gathered from the fact that in the thirteenth century there were only fifty houses existing and it is said that it is difficult to find in the records any reference to a brother still in the cloister alive after forty. Such an effort to cure individualism by torturing it was bound to fail. Buddha may be right; the act of suicide may be one of such intense self-

¶58925 See the Chronicle of Salimbene, edited by Dr. Coulton under the title *Between St. Francis and Dante*. This autobiography shows a man living a life no more cut off from the world than is an English clergyman today.

¶590[page 174] regardingness as in most cases to throw the spirit back instead of loosing it, as every frantic struggle a man makes in a quicksand sinks him more deeply.

¶591Beyond this point monasticism could not go. If this new style would not solve individuality, then monasticism itself must be abandoned for something more psychically sound. Nevertheless, though the individual did not find his destiny and development there, for three centuries more the system was to immobilize him and so preserve a society almost as static as the Chinese, i.e., a society developing its main lines by convention, by group process, and not by conscious individual invention. Set an enthusiast to catch an enthusiast, is the moral of mediaeval monasticism. From the socio-political standpoint the monasteries are flush-tanks into which individuals could be run off and society saved from a dissolving inundation.

¶592From this standpoint, too, we can understand and interpret the Carthusian effort. With the gradual return of civilization monasticism is also being affected. Indeed it is, and must of its nature be, the first part of the social system to feel the changed condition. It imagines that it is cut off from the world, but the same tide of psychic evolution as flows without also rises within the convent wall. No screen of stones will insulate the human spirit from this influence. The period of individual submergence, which began in the third century in Egypt, is drawing to an end, and monasticism, the refuge of the individual, monasticism, which, as we have seen, was itself percolated by the lower consciousness, so that the *monachus* became himself *conventus*, returns to its original nature at the demand of the proto-individuals from whom its constituents are recruited. It is Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, writing some forty years after the foundation of the Carthusians, who notices the throwback to an earlier form. "The brothers live," he

¶593says, “in separate little houses *like the ancient monks of Egypt*.”

¶594The Carthusian movement is, however, only the first symptom of individuality again intensifying. It cannot satisfy or check that movement. Thence onward, for generations before there is any secular interference with the system (such as became general in the sixteenth century), monasticism will itself be decomposing, first returning to cenobitism and then developing mystic practices, which in themselves seem to point to an attempt, unsuccessful but inevitable, to advance the evolution of consciousness beyond the fatal limit of individuality. The shock given to Western civilization by the Black Death precipitates this development and makes very evident the change that is in process. Cardinal Gasquet, an authority little inclined to an evolutionary interpretation of history, has in his book on the Great Death noted the change in religious practices after that cataclysm. While, within the monastery, the Carthusian development had indicated the recovery of individualism, now, in spite of the monastic provision for such types, individuals in the outer world are becoming a grave problem for organized religion.26

¶595The Plague proved the occasion of a new attitude toward death, an attitude which indicated a new sense of individuality. We have ample, unquestionable evidence of this from the contemporary funerary memorials.27 Up to that time men had been depicted, and had no doubt imagined themselves, in the other world as in this. In Hell a woman still wears the hats which were so fatally captivating on earth, and a Bishop goes to Heaven in his mitre—though during

¶59626 See Gasquet, *The Great Death*, for reference to change from corporate to private worship.

¶59727 The dominance of the Dance of Death, a completely pagan fancy, as a theme in Church decoration, is from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The great one in St. Paul’s was executed in 1430.

¶598[page 176] the transition in a napkin, he may for the moment wear little else. But during the fourteenth century a change becomes unmistakable. The tombs no longer depict, the epitaphs no longer speak of, beatification or punishment, but simply dissolution. “Here am I given up to the worms,” is ever more frequently the address. Such a statement was of course both irreligious and untrue. The personality might be dissolved; it could not be eaten. These expressions, however, reveal a change in men’s consciousness which they could not more accurately define. In the earlier state they had not, in reality, thought about death. The Church, drawing on the algolagniac fancies of the professed religious, with ever increasing horrors tried to curb the animalism it could neither cure nor tolerate. The threats, as their rising violence shows, produced little effect. The Black Death (like the late war) gave a jolt to social evolution. The process was going on, the cataclysm was a precipitant. Within eighteen months Europe was stripped of perhaps half its numbers and many districts were left deserted. Men saw death in such excess that the social system was no longer able to cope with it. It went beyond a reduction of numbers; society itself began to dissolve. Throughout the Middle Ages “life was cheap”: individual deaths made and can make little impression on a people living with a very short time-sense—in other words, lowly individualized. But when death increases until the social structure begins to fall apart, that produces a completely different effect. It is not the numbers dead, it is the few living; not the full, overflowing charnel houses but the empty offices, that shake man at that stage of conscious evolution and make him think for the first time for himself. The social suggestion relaxed; men began to ask questions which before they had been unable even to frame. Formerly all save lonely heresiarchs had taken the current teaching for granted and, welded in the body politico-religious, though private life was very uncertain,

¶599had thought as little of death as does a child. The church said it would come, and as the church nagged about it one had to fancy it, but the fancy showed how slight was the realization. The post-Black Death reflections are real ones provoked not merely by actual experience of sudden, mysterious, innumerable deaths but by the realization that society itself might be dissolved through this wholesale destruction. This was a completely new and unsettling notion and indicates another stage of consciousness. The living man began to feel himself alone, began to be able to understand the deep divestiture, the utter deprivation, expressed by the cry, “Naked came I into this world, and naked go I out of it.” 28 The loneliness of individuality dawned on him. Society, in which he lived and moved and had his being, was no more indestructible than his own body. The Church had taught that body and soul were immortal. He had seen bodies innumerable rot down unburied into worms and a foul earth, and the Church itself, its ministers themselves no more immune than the common man, could do nothing for these dissolving creatures; no graveyard held and hid them. One thing alone was certain: obliteration; decay complete and contemptible. Personal immortality, it was then proved—it is probably always true—depended, as the Catholic Church has taught, on the resurrection of the body. Men saw the body dissolve, and the Church was dumb. The temporary dissolution of society drove them to individuality, to a realization almost as keen as the Greeks’ that each one, as certain as he was alive, must very shortly die. The result was naturally a passionate reaction, and the peasants’ rising in England expresses the determination of great masses to snatch something before the darkness comes down on a feast whereat they have been starved. The wormy epitaphs

¶60028 The Book of Job, as we have it, i.e., with its definite statement on personal survival—“Yet *without* my flesh shall I see God”—is the most characteristic document, in the Old Testament canon, expressive of that late individualized Judaism which is noted in Ch. II.

¶601[page 178] may be read, the terrible cadavers scanned, as cases, made by the more happily placed, for taking whatever they chose, as in so few months nothing would matter. A few, however, had not the stomach to eat and drink the more heavily because the worms already were crawling up the tablecloth. These took refuge in a private pietism and there was a revival of anchoritism. Typical of such individuals are Richard Rolle and Lady Juliana of Norwich,29 whose meditations have become widely known in our time, as many are now passing through their stage of conscious evolution. They are, however, of interest in a review of that evolution, because they show that at the end monasticism passes out through the completely eremitic phase in which it began. The action of these anchorites is significant of an advance in social evolution, and their writings take us a stage beyond their action. Rolle and Juliana both claim to have attained ecstasy; in other words they are both aiming at a condition (however their process may have made it impossible to render permanent) of superconsciousness.

¶602The anchorites and their writings have another point of interest for this inquiry. The mystic is ceasing to be a sacramentalist. It is often doubtful whether they communicated; certainly their teaching will lead straight to Quietism with its indifference to sacraments.30 As he ceases to be a sacramentalist he passes out of that long phase which began somewhere in the seventh century B.C., when the Totem victim, slain that the tribe might have life, became under the demand for personal salvation (projection of the new emergent individual) a victim put to death that through this vicarious sacrifice the individual might escape death. For Quietism is indifferent to sacraments for a deeper reason

¶60329 Richard Rolle died 1349. “In his exaltation of the spiritual side of religion over its forms and his assertion of the individualist principle, he leads to the Lollard Movement.” Lady Juliana is sentimentally (as on the doctrine of Hell) unorthodox.

¶60430 The Inquisition condemned Molinos on this charge.

¶605[page 179] than that it can dispense with outward forms: it has gone beyond the passionate personal need, the determination not to be changed, the resolve to save the present small self at any price, which is the authentic stigma of individuality. Quietism is indifferent whether the individual is preserved if the Will of God be done, and concentrating on this super-personal purpose, enters a super-personal plane. The Church might have tolerated a disregard of forms but not such a revolution in spirit, such an advance of aim. The essentially exclusive character of Catholicism marks it as a religion confined to individualism.

¶606So the "upper individual," who once had been a monk, continued his evolution and becomes a mystic, while the "lower individual," who had been a more or less unquestioning, undifferentiated member of the lay mass, becomes a materialist. The link of the sacramental system—the Mass—had been broken, and we can now see how essential that link—that curious amalgam of matter and spirit—was, to hold together the curious Catholic compromise of the higher and lower ways of life.

¶607The weakening of the sacraments—dispensed with by the "upper individual," disbelieved in by the "lower"—left monasticism without defence or recruits. The mystic, the adventurer in spiritual terra incognita, no longer required the system to guide and advance him. The materialist, the adventurer in the modern world, was no longer going to be contained by it. The upper individual either vanishes altogether or he comes back into the world, having learnt that there is no private salvation, that he is part of the general life, and he is saved through salvation of the whole. Hence we shall see the rise of Humanitarianism.31 The lower individual also turns on the world with a new vivid sense of now or never, of "here or nowhere is thy America." Hence, as we shall see, the Modern Age, the Age of Revolution.

¶60831 Cf. the philanthropic activities of the Quakers.

¶609[page 180] Thus the upward shift of the whole belt of individualism—the increased idealism of the upper, quite as much as the increased realism of the lower—is fatal to the monasteries as they had now been developed—barracks of the janissaries of the Papacy. The Church could never approve such flights—the fanatic releasing his energy for his own soul's career instead of retaining it for the Church's use. There are desperate efforts to repair the system, to devise an organization that will retain the human spirit. So as the Middle Ages draw to an end new varieties of orders appear though the old are undermanned. There is constant reform and almost as swift relaxation. The system is showing all the signs of a dying organism, general weakness, instability, and the throwing up of many short-lived varieties. The contained individuals are not being cured of their disease, individuality. Their condition is only aggravated. They are not pioneers of a new way of living, of a fresh stage in social life, of a higher step in the evolution of consciousness. Shut up to meditate on a heaven which would definitely and concretely reward the individual for not touching the earth, the physical passion to survive, not resolved but projected, became insatiable. Individuality was not evolved by the exercise and growth of psychic powers and the development of that intense sympathy and interest which Voltaire esteemed to be the life of spirits, so that with the drawing off of the basic energy, the animal might atrophy with disuse, but by continual provocation the beast was so roused as to engross the whole attention and energy of its rider. Here the providentialist strain in Catholicism seems to have prevented its progress. It feared to interfere in any way with the given system. So on the one hand the development of supernormal psychic powers and on the other the help that medicine might have given, both in that and in the checking of the animal, were forbidden, though why if a man may cut his hair, fast, torture his flesh, and be regularly and copiously

¶610[page 181] bled,³² he may not castrate himself or take opium, only tradition can say.³³ But in spite of authority it begins to be clear that the other world, if it is to be truly another, something more than an exasperating mirage of this, must be different. Men would have to grow up to its level, learn to breathe its air, become native to its nature, and not try to make its eternity an indefinite extension for the exercise of their temporary desires. It must be concrete enough to dare to be different. That there was any such world, from the behaviour of the religious the layman, now that he had begun to think about it, felt an increasing uncertainty. As to the existence of the projection of this life, doctored to the ecclesiastical taste, he was now practically certain it was a lie. A sense of inquiry was abroad among ordinary men. Wyclif and his Lollards were preaching to the public. Wyclif attacks the mass, the very heart of the personal survival system, and the arrest is over. The monasteries are dissolved, the Reformation follows. The modern world has come.

¶61132 The great size of the Infirmary in monastic buildings was owing to the fact that in most orders it was customary to bleed every inmate once a month.

¶61233 The other element in Catholicism, sheer asceticism, may also lend great support to providentialism in this respect. Ascetic religion (see Ch. IV, p. 161) is simply sexual religion reversed. So not only on providentialist grounds must sex not be analyzed, understood, and regularized, but also the awful distress caused by its complete balking must be welcomed as causing pain which in itself in this inverted system is called good and in the inverted nature may even feel good.

¶613[page 182] CHAPTER V

¶614THE UPPER INDIVIDUALITY: HUMANISM AND HUMANITARIANISM

¶615SUMMARY

¶616MONASTICISM is only a device to protect individuality during sub-individual conditions. Wherever conditions are easier Individuality emerges and continues its development as a secular phenomenon. Hence the Communes appear in Europe. The North feels the movement, but it is soon suppressed. In Italy it develops into repetition of the City-State and produces that acutest phase of individualism illustrated by *The Prince*, i.e., the Renaissance temperament. This cynical analysis of society is necessary. It leads first to self-seeking, then to self-indulgence, and so to self-finding and self-examination. Of the first term is *The Prince*; of the second is the *Novum Organum*; of the third, *Hamlet*. The Church counters with the Jesuits: the pride of Order and aristocracy of intelligence to be used against the new humanity. Philosophy becomes overmechanized. Poetry therefore is now the pioneer because of its sensibility. Shakespeare is obsessed with the problem of the individual's inability to overcome the new sensibility. After his death the new thing grows: individuality has to own to a new power of feeling. Individuality's climax is passed.

¶617This reviving, vastly enlarged sense of the community is rudimentary but is a force which, growing in the individual, will nevertheless destroy him. Humanitarianism is opposed, unconsciously, for this reason: ostensibly, because of its rudimentary state and therefore clumsiness of its expression, and so as a danger to the fulfilment of its own wishes, but funda-

¶618[page 183] mentally because the more it succeeds the more it must supersede the individual. Its critics, though, are right that it, too often, is blind and that it does harm to the community as well as to the individual. The real difficulty is that both Thought (Humanism) and Feeling (Humanitarianism) are instincts; both are developing in the upper individuals and at present they are diverging. Humanitarianism is, then, part of the inevitable general evolution. It shares its super-personality with science; it needs Science, and Science it. Though neither realizes the interdependence, neither is safe without the other. They are two aspects of superconsciousness. Can they come together? Not immediately. They look out in opposite directions. A central term is required. Science sees a reality without value. Humanitarianism feels a value it cannot materialize. Reconciliation is possible only on a higher term—of actual super-individuality. This can only be attained by the evolution of actual new senses to fill the gap, a new apparatus of apprehension to perceive more than science has yet been able to conceive.

¶619CHAPTER V

¶620ALTHOUGH it was not till the middle of the sixteenth century that the Monastic system began to show signs of irreparable decay, we have seen that as a social organism it had never been stable. The characteristic features of its structure were as much due to the pressure of external conditions as to the inherent requirements of its constituent individuals. Alter the general circumstances of civilization, raise the common standard of living, tolerate other religions, and though a monastic form will survive (and even that will be with sensible modifications), the spirit of it will be very different; for modern monasticism bears no closer relation to its original than does post-Trentine Catholicism to the actual

¶621Mediaeval Church.¹ The individual had to spin these cocoons in which to pass, encysted, the period during which general social life fell and remained below the individualistic level of consciousness. When that level was again recovered, the individual had again to re-emerge, the cysts to be rent.

¶622If this is the development which is going on among the Religious we must expect to find a corresponding emergence among men in the outer world wherever the rigour of external conditions relaxed. While the monasteries are going through their later development due to the revival of individuality within them, there can be perceived a similar development, rudimentary though it may be, of a secular individuality. The early evidences of this are to be found in the rise of the Italian Communes, afterwards to grow into an instructive repetition of the Greek city-states. As in Greece, so in Mediaeval Europe, the hereditary lord is succeeded by commune government, which in its turn is not infrequently overthrown by the true tyrant—the man whose power rests not on right of descent nor even fundamentally on military force but on the power of money ² and on the weariness of many citizens of aristocratic inefficiency and destructiveness. Here, too, in Mediaeval Italy the commune parallels the Greek contribution to psychic evolution through socio-political development, while the monasteries carry on the individualistic salvationist development, as, in the corresponding phase before, had the Hebrew contemporaneously with the Greek.

¶623The commune movement ³ has been shown to have spread rapidly across Europe—the signal that the Dark Ages were over and that, with any cessation of the full pressure of violence, any relaxation of the conditions for survival

¶6241 The monastic orders of the modern world, such for example as that of St. Francis of Sales, show increasingly the characteristics of social-service organizations.

¶6252 See P. N. Ure, *The Rise of the Greek Tyranny*.

¶6263 *Cf. The Commune of London*, by Dr. Round.

¶627[page 185] which such conditions had imposed, individuality was ready to appear in the civil world. For even the later stages of consciousness, though there may be relapse from them, are never wholly lost, but as it were hibernate, ready, almost too ready, to answer to the first promise of spring. In the North, however, the decay of feudalism—in the main, no doubt, because of external political pressures, but perhaps also because among a people more psychologically backward than those of the South, individuality was not so developed—led to the rise of strong central governments. In consequence of this central governmental opposition to the development, “in northern France the movement for the establishment of Communes is of a revolutionary character” ⁴ and it is soon crushed. Thus the kingly rule as it curbed the monastic development also prevented a city-state secular, social relaxation and postponed the development of individuality until these royal powers themselves were short-sighted enough to destroy the monastic system. Till then there is a psychic condition in the “Gothic” states much resembling that of which Thetmosis’ Empire gave a typical primary illustration—a society in which an autocracy, still in the main at the stage of physical activity which marks the first phase of individuality, still “heroic,” uses other individuals as they outcrop for its individual aims and buys their services with personal rewards. So the episcopal Chancellors of the Angevins are the social parallels of the High Priests of the New Empire.

¶628In Italy as the Papacy prevented the rise of one dominating house, the commune system developed into the complete city-state. In the Italian City-States there can be witnessed the same intensity of life as formerly in the Greek, a creative force attained in Europe only on these two occasions, and in both cases attended, probably complemented, by an equally violent mutual repulsion between the individual

¶629⁴ F. Keitgen.

¶630[page 186] communities. Half of the citizens are generally in exile. Every city is a law unto itself. Men spend their short lives destroying each other and creating masterpieces. This is the consequence of a passionate patriotism which cannot tolerate that any one else should control the state. Such a condition is evidence of a violent aggravation of individuality, an ego enlarged until it is jealous of any one who would share even its country with it. Indeed the city-state is the individual’s projection of the completely exclusive self.⁵ From this point the ego evolution is rapid and attains an extreme unparalleled. For two reasons was it able to surpass the Greek in this respect. In the first place it was the second time that evolution had produced the pure political individual. On the first occasion, in Greece, he was still not wholly detached from the matrix of his community. It is astounding how many atavisms even the Athenian, who seems so often our contemporary, tolerated and even approved in his social life. He had of course a native religion, an autochthonous ethic. Mediaeval Italy was carrying on with an adaptation of a semi-oriental system.⁶ Christianity was only a graft on the European stock and so could be more quickly discarded than could a truly hereditary system. In the second place the Italian repetition of the Greek city policy was not nearly so isolated as had been the Greek. The Italian cities, we have seen, were hardly for a moment free from outside interference by societies in a much lower political condition. The force to resist this interference had

¶631⁵ Compared with the Greek this later phase seems a little more violent, but this may be because we know more about it; also the external pressure was never really relaxed. Barbarossa almost crushed the whole development, and the raids of Emperors-postulant never ceased. The Hanseatic League is the same process working out under different conditions of race and environment.

¶632⁶ Christianity, we have seen, was also a religion of disillusion and personal salvation from a lost world. As the Italian City-States had much of the Greek passion for life in them, a “this-worldliness” which even in reflection turns to science, naturally their allegiance to religion was perfunctory.

¶633[page 187] therefore by so much to be increased, and whereas a moderate egotism was sufficient to keep Corinth and Athens going against the restricted mutual competition of societies all at the same—the city-state—condition of development, in Italy only a sacred egotism could enable Florence both to dispute with Siena and Genoa and also to defy the impending avalanches, the crude masses descending from the Northern kingdoms. At this time therefore is developed the intensest form of individuality ever attained—perhaps ever possible. Man becomes completely self-conscious and so completely isolated from his fellows. Human sympathy is at its nadir. Man is at the cold aphelion of his thought.7 The complete expression of such a point of view is *The Prince*, a book of which the most emancipated Hellene would have been as incapable as would a pietist or a priest-king. Only that unparalleled phase of intense self-consciousness could have left that record of a fully realized loneliness.8 Gladly would Machiavelli approve the Sermon on the Mount, but honestly he cannot. To him it is a truism—and nothing is any longer to be gained by disregarding it—that every man acts only for his own narrow interest, and as by “every man” he could only mean the men of his time, the statement was true. As he had no psychological understanding of other times he could not perceive how transitory the individuality which he knew must of its nature be. He could only imagine that the loyalties and idealism recorded of other ages were due either to illusion among the people or to hypocrisy in the chronicler. The intense isolation of his mind is revealed by the assumption that a society based on the motives which he recognizes could for a generation hold together. In his Italy political accident had allowed for over a century social dis-

¶6347 That this conception of the Renaissance has been familiar to authorities on that period, cf. Burckhardt's well-known dictum that “the Renaissance discovered the individual.”

¶6358 That he is a patriot is but a matter of terms: for the Prince, far more than for Le Roi Soleil, *l'état c'est moi*.

¶636solution. The ghost of the Empire could still frighten away the childish kings from its familiar haunts, and so in Italy a social condition which had no political reality was able to appear under that vast shadow. The complete individuality produced is curious, fastidious, and utterly callous. The forerunner of these men, the Emperor Frederick II, is the Stupor Mundi, whose indifference to his victims' misery was so entire that he could laugh and be at ease with them while watching their torment, as a chemist might smile at some violent reaction successfully brought about in a test-tube.9

¶637This emotional condition is poles apart from the vengeful fury of a savage (social expulsion) or the violent attack of a beast of prey (appetite). It is this pure individual detachment that finds its expression in Machiavelli's quiet, logical exposition of the principles of statecraft. In the artistic world it has left its impress in the unruffled, precise observation of a Leonardo, who could sit calmly on the scaffold absorbed in recording the facial distortion of a fellow human being undergoing an extremity of anguish. So Humanism gives rise to an art which is fascinated with its new power of seeing things, which no longer questions what is good or bad, but only as to whether things can actually be rendered or no—to a science which no longer asks what is the end and purpose of knowledge, but simply how do things happen and how may they be made to happen: to a statecraft which takes for granted that man has always been a completely isolated individual and always will be. The end and purpose of things is completely disregarded. As always happens at a certain phase of human thought, Teleology is at a discount. This had to be. New means are created to serve old ends. A new end cannot be discovered, because individuality—the basic fact of Humanism—is not an end and yet is incapable of conceiving itself as a means. Yet the devising of new means

¶6389 *Cf.* his notorious experiment when he caused two of his court to be disembowelled before him to see which—the one had rested, the other exercised—had digested his food most quickly.

¶639[page 189] for compassing old ends—at each recurrence the principle becomes more clear—is the way in which new ends are discovered. The simple analysis of the objective, which medial efficiency requires, leads to the discovery of a division between the purpose of action and the personal satisfaction which may attend the action. Man discovers that he has not been the director, not even a partner but only a wage-earner, and at that often sweated and defrauded. Self-conscious individuality leads therefore to a discovery that society as it has existed had no place for the individual in its ultimate objective. It could at best only buy him off. This discovery must lead to cynicism, a necessary stage, however unpleasant it may look in retrospect. For the state is on the economic plane; its objectives can only be economic. If therefore it begins to buy off the individual it can do so only in its own currency. Such an attempt must fail, because fundamentally man is not economic, he is so only in so far as he is a fully integrated part of the community. If it begins to succeed in buying him it fails or ever it reach its objective, because it can only make the individual a traitor to itself, the state, for he, not it, becomes the end, and there is not enough to go round for all the individuals. The body corporate is devoured by its constituents, who then perish. Every man has his price, but it is his own soul, and the state cannot pay him that. The cynical analysis serves its purpose, for while it relaxes the state so that the individual can continue his growth, when it is sincere cynicism it leads to the individual's discovering how completely unsustaining to his system the ends of the state prove to be.10 A man may be the means of the state or the state may be the means for a man, but man cannot take the state's place, for he cannot be purely economic. He must go on to superconsciousness or back to coconsciousness. He cannot himself pursue any end alien to his nature, for that would mean that he himself was constant

¶64010 Cf. Blake's "If the fool persevered in his folly he would become wise."

¶641[page 190] while he advanced on his goal, that he was unaffected by the movement and effort. His only progress is in himself. He must change himself and progress psychologically. The cynical stage cannot, then, be permanent. The condition of the individual who awakes to find himself embedded in the state, and realizing that he is being exploited, resolves to find out how the clumsy cycle revolves in order that he may take the cash and let the credit go, extract the maximum of pleasure and yield the minimum of service, is a phase. It is followed almost at once by the discovery of how little the ends of the state can satisfy him. He then falls back deliberately on animal pleasures. Individually man is either a morbid animal or an embryonic psyche. He can never be an Economic man. Wealth and power having proved unassimilable, he will at least take the raw material of reality, physical sensation. This, too, fails, for an animal end consciously pursued must lack its final term. Appetite not only has to be stored to accumulate, but, because of its nature, it is an "alternating current"—self-consciousness is a "continuous"—its discharge must be an effective elimination, while the very fact of a self-consciousness continuous enough to have memory necessitates retention, holds up the cycle, prevents elimination, and so in due course interferes with accumulation. Appetite cannot be other than part of a cycle, and at this one point consciousness, to enjoy it, interrupts it. It should pass from intensifying desire, through the brief climax of satisfaction, into satiety and finally unconsciousness. The stress on the climax leads to disturbance; man remembers when he should, and the animal can, forget. He cannot forget all the weary revolutions that have carried him up and plunged him down. He remembers how he felt when he feels no longer, when he feels the reverse. Shall he plunge back again and try to recapture passion? He cannot, for of its nature it is the reverse of action. Willing cannot create feeling; indeed the emergence of willing is a symptom that feeling, the pas-

¶642[page 191] sive sense of being carried by a wave of emotion, is failing, that the spirit of man is stranded on another level. The effort to recapture deliberately an alternating life is a contradiction in terms. This is the meaning of the "hedonistic paradox." It is merely the conflict brought on by living for a moment across a threshold of consciousness, simultaneously in two states of mind. We are witnessing at the level of the state-sustaining man in the street the same process of which we found the earlier orbit in the royal decadences illustrated in the New Empire three thousand years before.

¶643It is the dawning consciousness of this transition which has left the deepest mark on European literature. As inevitably as Akhnaton succeeds Thetmosis, so the Prince of the Romagna is succeeded by the Prince of Denmark. *Il Principe* is fundamentally the product of a simple mind. It is not subtle, it is only cynical—the "eternal commonplaces" of virtue simply reversed. There are no conflicts, no revelations of different depths. Machiavelli never seems to have a doubt as to his curiously crude cleverness. If "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," does not make for success, then the opposite manifestly must.11 The Renaissance stated its problem and gave its solution, that man is an individual and that he is free to go up and take his full satisfaction from nature and the community. Up to the close of the sixteenth century the most active spirits have not got beyond this simplicity. This, under the thin disguise of a formal assent to religious clichés, is still Bacon's attitude. He takes for granted that the individual is not only final but that he knows with perfect clearness what he wants and what will satisfy him. Nature is something alien which man will watch and will comply with in order that he may master it. The slave will then make his one-time master serve him. Science is to give no fresh understanding of the Universe, no deeper insight into its

¶64411 The appointment of the cutthroat Micheletto to be Commander-in-Chief of Florence shows how little could he perceive the cement which binds society together.

¶645[page 192] purpose.12 This old progress is based on an indifferent, aimless universe. There is no power but ourselves making for anything. There is no purpose. The cosmos rolls on, and the wise man will learn from it just how best the great machine may be made to crack his nuts. And no more than he can ask whether the process has any meaning can he question his own nature, why he so desires to master and whether mastery would satisfy. The force and peculiar disproportions of Bacon's spirit account for this strange limitation of vision. To him man had to be a constant, and he never seems to have doubted that all human difficulties could be swept away with merely quantitative, external, physical changes. The man himself—the maxims by which he lived reveal it—was, considering his mental development, very backward emotionally. Living into the first quarter of the seventeenth century, which saw the rise of Humanitarianism, he remains no more than the last great fruit of the Renaissance, the highest development to which the speculative mind unaccompanied by a proportionate sensibility could attain. From this point of view it may not be unhelpful to see Bacon, as the speculative, cold-hearted, immense appreciator of life, fulfilling between Machiavelli and Shakespeare the middle rôle “created” by Amenophis III.

¶646The insensibility not only of this remarkable scientific genius but of all scientists of that time is worthy of notice. Of this attitude to feeling, science today has not quite rid itself. It was then almost a rule of conduct. The mechanistic concept exaggerated a detachment already provoked by the failure of religion, and the Cartesians torturing animals to show that they knew them to be automata are in reality individuals asserting their freedom against the counter-Reformation's attempt to recapture the world for an anthropomor-

¶64712 Bacon went back on Greek thought when he maintained that science is not speculative satisfaction but “for the reign of man over Nature.” Fontenelle (1729) saw that this was a mistake. See Bury's *The Idea of Progress*, p. 52.

¶648[page 193] phic authority.13 This peculiar attempt on the part of the Church to resist the growth of Humanitarianism is of great importance. Feeling is to be fought by intelligence and the old world of authority preserved, the new world (the heart of which will be a reviving and extended sensibility) resisted, by the agency of an Order which will arrogate intellectual individuality to an unprecedented place. The antithesis is of course false. As will be shown in a later chapter, the common consciousness of the intelligence and that of the feelings can and must increasingly develop together. The Church, however—and all authority—could not entertain any notion of the evolution of consciousness. It was now tied to a concept of individual immortality and could not change. It had therefore to resist any development that might endanger this. The Jesuit Order is then another, the most striking, perhaps the last, attempt to use the individual, to buy him with pride of place and power and intellect in this world and the next, not now that he may not wreck society, but that in the defence of orthodoxy he may arrest the evolution of consciousness.14

¶649While, however, the Church, representing organized religion, was trying to buy back the individual, as it could not advance his evolution, and Philosophy, by Occasionalism, Psycho-physical Parallelism, and Pre-established Harmonies, was managing to omit psychology that it might push on in physics, poetry was driven forward by its own inspiration. It could neither go back to the Church's position—the great poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are

¶65013 "Does God care for oxen?" was undoubtedly the Church's attitude toward all animals, which were disregarded because soulless, but the animal-automatism of Cartesianism was really a thinly veiled general materialism.

¶65114 The modern orders, the Society of Jesus especially, but the others such as the Oratorians, by their more secular rules, show the continued development of the individual within the slowly dissolving limits of monasticism. In Ch. III was traced the monastic development, because the individual was mainly to be found there. In the modern age only arrested individuals are found in the orders. The main stream is now in the world. Yet so powerful is evolution that even among the most backward pools there is a current.

¶652strongly “paganized”—nor could it abandon the world of feeling for that of thought. Unable to think out a solution, sensibility made the poet aware that the physical was not enough, was indeed only one side of the question, and that while the advance in physics could never again be abandoned (as the Church would have wished), a proportionate advance on the psychological side (far more distasteful to the Church) was required if man was not to become miserable through his increased powers. This theme, the fact that individuality, however intellectually endowed, is not enough, the recognition of a rudiment of feeling thrusting through and breaking the smooth surface of the self-contained mind, is the fundamental obsession of Shakespeare. He cannot escape from the fatal irresolution which he discovers developing in his own consciousness and among his contemporaries. The age had been one of almost frantic activity. The country of which he was native had experienced every stimulant, wild adventure in the ends of the earth, threats of destruction from abroad, constant plots within. It was almost accustomed to see religion at the stake and royalty on the scaffold. A revolution of its whole way of life, from its religion to its taste, had swept society in one generation. The individual had arrived in the secular world, breaking out in unprecedented numbers and dangerously far down the social structure, and on every side was winning his way by every uncovenanted means. Society was dominated by new men who fell headlong—so lacking were they in prescriptive right—the moment they ceased to exercise the unsanctioned methods by which they had risen. Yet the poet knows such efforts, though they are undertaken in the name of personal satisfaction, have in fact satisfied their doers less than blind obedience to instinct, though that obedience be fatal. This is no conventional homage which new vice must pay to traditional virtue. It is not the perfunctionary moralizing of a Bacon uninterested to the point of conformity in the current code. It

¶653is the dramatist's recognition of a fundamental fissure enlarging in human nature. As Frank Harris has pointed out, in *Macbeth* Shakespeare, handling the least apposite of stories, begins to reflect upon the problem why the individual cannot enjoy the gains which the exercise of his naked individualism puts in his power. Longing to realize and to enjoy, he finds himself, once a man of action, always having to act. Any attempt at contemplation only drives him the faster to fresh violence. He is driven as incessantly by the compulsion of his former acts as though he were not an individual at all. It must be emphasized that this is no true Renaissance psychology. It is the next stage, the appearance of a new element.15 From the Emperor Frederick II to England's Elizabeth, Europe is furrowed by many lines of rulers who destroyed their rivals and betrayed their servants with the complete ruthlessness of the individual whose insulation renders him immune from conscience. The pure individual cannot experience such conflict. The co-conscious is bound with an hypnotic completeness by every tabu;16 the naked individual breaks them like withes. When, however, the extreme of individuality is passed there begin the first prickings of a reviving sensibility. Paralysis, caused by complete sunder-

¶65415 "Compare the mind of Caesar in his Commentaries, of Marco Polo in his story of his travels, and of T. E. Lawrence in *Revolt in the Desert*, and you will see that the first two belong to the same species of animal, but one which is entirely different from that of T. E. Lawrence. Yet thirteen hundred years separated Marco Polo from Caesar and only six hundred T. E. Lawrence from Marco Polo. The difference is in the whole mental attitude, in the reaction of the mind to things, scenes, events, and the universe. The species to which Marco Polo and Caesar belonged and which began to die out I suppose in the eighteenth century took everything . . . simply at their face value. They never looked round the corner or beneath the surface: they had a peculiar calm and dignity."

¶655The above is a quotation from Mr. Leonard Woolf's review of *Revolt in the Desert*. It is a clear recognition of the psychological revolution that has taken place in the modern age. The facts in this chapter seem to show that it began in the seventeenth and not in the eighteenth century, and the same facts seem to show that for "dignity" ought to be read "detachment." The individuality of the hero of the *Revolt* is of interest because it shows a curiously strong character in dissolution and resenting still its release.

¶65616 Cf. Ch. I and Spencer and Gillen on the perfect observance by the Australian of his elaborate code.

¶657ing, begins to wear off. Feeling comes back again in the torn attachments which once had bound each human spirit to those of its group. Naturally he does not understand his condition. He feels he ought to be able to enjoy all he can desire and snatch. He knows of others who so succeeded. But something changes in him while he acts; he finds himself uncertain of himself, and so the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. The intense rationalization, unavoidable in the ignorance of psychology and caused by the continual reflection on a problem which without such aid grows more insoluble the more it is pondered, expresses itself in the word “thought.” A solution might have been discovered if the author had been able to write instead “feeling.” At the other end of this particular cycle we shall find Hume’s penetrating mind perceiving the assumption—or misplacement of category—which underlay the rationalized humanitarianism of the Naturally Religious and later of the Utilitarians. There was no *reason* why a man should prefer to a pain in his own finger ¹⁷ the happiness of millions, but there was the fact of the new *feeling* that he did.

¶658So the problem haunts the playwright until from Macbeth, whose conscience is a projected thing of witches, phantasms, and ghosts, we reach Hamlet, where the ghost has gone over to the other side; and even then the victim of irresolution, of conflicting loyalties and a double nature, cannot be provoked to an almost dutiful revenge. The distress at the internal conflict is so great, the threat to the individual’s integrity so violent, that again and again the distracted mind turns to suicide as the only solution of the agonizing crisis.

¶659Shakespeare never solved the problem. He stated it with all the force of tortured genius but died without leaving any evidence that he detected the possibility of a solution. Yet

¶660¹⁷ “ ’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”

¶661his work shows how far the painful new birth in man’s spirit had approached its delivery, and he was hardly in his grave before civilization began to give proof that the new sensibility was not a thing which merely balked and distracted the individual but something which might evolve the individual through a clearly conscious sense of a hitherto unsuspected unity and of a purpose vaster than any single life. The emotions are beginning to advance toward the same high and convergent development which under the individual-phase the intellect had already gone far to attain.18

¶662The sack of Magdeburg, when Tilly gave to the sword forty thousand men, women, and children, for the first time rouses what may be called a European conscience. Men suddenly felt—as we all felt during the proportionately slighter horrors of the late war—that nothing so horrible had ever taken place: a judgment which reveals how the gap in their historical knowledge was filled unconsciously by the growth of their social feeling. Within a few years the English, who because of their protected position had never become accustomed to the extreme cruelties of the continent, abandon judicial torture, an advance the honour of which seems to be divided between Charles I and his rival, the Long Parliament. From this stage on, the revolution in sensibility is so rapid and becomes so extensive that it seems possible to conclude that in the generation which saw the beginning of the seventeenth century 19 the spirit of man passed the extrem-

¶66318 Though the intellectual advance sprang forward with the re-emergence of individuality to a predominant position, that acceleration, it must be recalled, was not due to personal interpretation or any idiosyncratic rendering of nature but to a collective impersonal method, the first part of the super-individual development.

¶66419 Professor Bury seemed surprised to discover that the doctrine of Progress was not defined and approved till the seventeenth century, but the fact confirms the suggestion here advanced that at the beginning of this century European civilization began to experience a recovered and enlarged sensibility (Humanitarianism) which would naturally intellectualize itself as the doctrine of Progress: the belief in a super-individual force making for righteousness. See Professor Bury's *The Idea of Progress* and Introduction.

¶665[page 198] ity of individualism, that aphelion of sympathy, and began to make, with the ever gathering speed of a comet on its way to the sun, for a new and larger unity. As Professor Babbitt has said: 20 The age of Humanism passed into the age of Humanitarianism. To him the change is, in the main, loss. For clear sense man has exchanged sentiment. On the evidence it does not appear less just to conclude that the mind of the individual had gone as far as it could develop alone, and a cold classicism, at the best never safe from paralyzing despair, at the worst capable of atrocious indifference, had to be freshly inspired by a recovery and an extension of human sympathy. The human intellect had extended as far as it might without a corresponding and re-enforcing advance of the emotions.

¶666The issue is, however, complicated, and we cannot discern it unless we first realize the forces that were at work. In the first place, in this chapter we are concerned only with the “upper individual” (in the next the advance of the “lower individual” is dealt with). This, as we have seen, is not a class distinction. Height of psychic development, the degree of each spirit's evolution, has little to do with its social situation. Nevertheless there are in the community upper and lower individuals. Equality does not exist, because in the same community there are present so many stages in the evolution of consciousness. The “lower” are those individuals who, rising from the group mass, are still condensing into an intenser individuality: the “upper” those who have passed that pole and are already re-expanding toward a consciousness larger than individuality.

¶667But (and this is the second distinction we have to make) the upper individuals themselves tend now in this modern

¶66820 *Democracy and Leadership*. It is from this book there has been taken, it will be recognized, the use of the two terms, Humanism and Humanitarianism, as descriptive of the two stages of “upper-individual” development in the modern world, the first being the intellectual advance, the second the emotional.

¶669[page 199] age to divide into two classes: the intellectual and the emotional. The intellectual, we see, needs the emotional—cannot indeed continue its development without this other side—but the two aspects are not actually complementary and do not necessarily develop to their full extent, at the present stage, in the same psyche. From genetic evidence we now know 21 that intellectual and emotional advance are not correlated. A man may be eminent intellectually, a moron in sensibility, and *vice versa*. Both factors are necessary for civilization, essential to the growth of the spirit; in the end they must be brought to a parity, but in present development one may lag behind the other.

¶670Nor does this division show signs of growing less. Indeed among the upper individuals the divergence between the two sides was far less in evidence at the beginning of this age than now. We are forced to conclude that as the upper individuals have developed they have drawn apart.

¶671It is true that at the beginning of the seventeenth century we are faced with a new force as positive as intelligence and at the same time instinctive 22 in its blindness and strength, but its true nature is still unrecognized and it works with the advanced super-personal intelligence of all upper individuals. But this is only the first phase in this invisible revolution that must, before there can be reconciliation, bring to bitter division the upper individuals.

¶672At the beginning of this movement we can see how ignorant—as ignorant as all creatures must be of the nature of a new instinct that stirs within them—were the men who experienced it, of the real significance of their new feeling. The jurists, benches, and assemblies who renounce torture as a legal proceeding never give as reason for doing so that

¶67321 Carr-Saunders, *Eugenics*.

¶67422 See reference to B. Russell and Graham Wallas on the "instinctiveness" of thought itself. "Thought is almost as blind as the forces of Nature." (See Ch. I.) And Wallas, *Great Society*: "Thought is the last of the Instincts."

¶675[page 200] it is contrary to humanity, that it is degrading for those who carry out the sentence, that a society so defended is not worth defending, that however bestial, the victim is of our own flesh, however horrible his crime, we are in some sort partakers, we in some way gave occasion by our selfishness or indifference, social injustice, or slackness in social care. Such reasons might have exposed, immediately underlying them, the peremptory force of a growing instinct. Indeed today we can accept them because we are so nigh to a direct apprehension of this force: the sense of the community has risen to the threshold of our consciousness.

¶676But when Humanitarianism first appears it is, and it probably has to be, perversely rationalized. Repeatedly the reason for abandoning torture is given as its failure to elicit the truth. Yet every practical jurist from Ulpian has recognized that it is just in this matter that torture is invaluable. Ulpian recognizes that it is a horrible thing in itself, but he looks upon it as a necessity for the ascertainment of certain facts, as does today the vivisectionist. Therefore it is not against the criminal as such but against the witness that he feels it must be retained and employed. It is not sadism, it is science. Every jurist knows that the better the law, the more it requires the clearest possible proof, the more essential is it to get all parties to the case to speak. Nine times out of ten every one knows that the prisoner is guilty but the proof cannot be locked. The link that lacks, almost as often, is known to be in the prisoner's possession alone. If he could be made to give certain information complete proof could then be produced. The constant struggle to keep police—specialists supremely anxious to obtain conviction and often in possession of evidence which makes the guilt of the suspect morally, though not legally, certain—from exercising covertly "third-degree" methods is proof of this.

¶677So, too, with all other humanitarian changes we find similar rationalizations: bad social conditions make for political

¶678discontent or are injurious to output and trade, or create centres of physical infection.

¶679Thus, to a certain point, the instinct is satisfied without the need of recognizing that it is an instinct, irrational and blind. The opportunity which is thus given it of growth, however, only makes it more powerful and so less capable of rational disguise. It becomes ever more evident how inadequate are the explanations that men are giving for their conduct. They have not obtained better evidence and more convictions through the abandonment of torture. Because hideous punishments have been repealed crime has not become less—though it has diminished through an extension of the sense of responsibility throughout the community.23 So, too, much social betterment has not “paid.” Revolution is probably better guarded against by “strong measures” than by gentleness. More thrones have been abdicated than carried by assault. Even the hygienic argument is probably better met by inoculation and a general raising of the “classes’” resistance than by a much larger expenditure in slum clearance for the “masses” and the release of the more feckless from a drastic pressure of natural selection.

¶680The suspicion that this is so—that we are faced with an instinct and are, like “post-hypnotics,” making an excuse for behaviour that is irrational—dawns slowly on society. Much Humanitarianism is still today justified by utilitarian argument. The division, the change on the side of the emotionalists from such exercise as rationalization might cover, to free expression, and on the part of the intellectuals from concession to opposition, may, however, be put somewhere in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It is then that the penetrating mind of Hume recognizes that men have for

¶68123 With the case of capital punishment we have an illuminating example. Murder has not *increased* in the States which have abolished it. The punishment simply does not seem to be relevant to the committal of the crime. Murder does, however, decrease where the general standard of the community is raised. Cf. *Capital Punishment*, Roy Calvert.

¶682[page 202] a hundred and fifty years been trying to find rational excuses for conduct that is neither rational nor even individual. We have seen that he demonstrates: " 'Tis not contrary to *reason* to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." He concludes: "Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions." Thenceforward the gap opens rapidly between those who in spite of rationality feel that they must obey this inner behest, that even if it ruin society the dictates of sentiment cannot be denied, and those others who are now free to say that there is no reason for such behaviour and therefore grave risk in so behaving.

¶683Serfs and slaves must now be freed not because labour will thus become cheaper, not even because freedom cannot lead to social dislocation (even to employment problems for the very freed), but because humanity demands it. "I would not be a slave, so why should he?" For the moment this, the Romantic, movement wins its way. For a generation it seems that sensibility is the freer and the more powerful because it has dispensed with reason and given up trying to make an utilitarian case. The new instinct, for it is nothing less, has a liberty to express itself, which as long as it had to keep under the cover of rationality it could not have.

¶684Then the excesses, which show beyond a doubt that the force does not necessarily make for a more efficient state, but may actually overturn society, drive moderate opinion into reaction. Reason now becomes the weapon of the conservatives. Humanitarianism is opposed as an anti-social thing.

¶685This dividing out of the advanced layer of society, the splitting of the upper individuals into two camps, is critical for the evolution of consciousness. Up till then there had been no open break between those who felt 24 on intellectual grounds, and those on emotional, that individuality was not enough. The Romantic movement, culminating in the French

¶68624 It was of course, with both, a matter of *feeling* and not of thought.

¶687[page 203] Revolution, defined the difference. In the next chapter that Revolution will be shown as the central in a series of revolutionary waves. Then we shall be concerned with the psychic evolution of the lower individuals, of those who are still to attain to the completest phase of individuality. But here, too, while we are dealing with upper individuals, The Revolution as it has been rightly called (for this, the second of these waves, was the completest expression of the uprush which caused them all) seems to mark a crisis in the evolution of consciousness. As the new instinct for general feeling and the new sympathy grew, it cast aside the disguise of reason, and many intellectuals were no doubt only too glad to be relieved from further homage to an humanity to which they had only given a conventional or a conditional reverence. The emotionalists, those in whom the new force could work most freely (whose children of the spirit they indeed were), though for opposite reasons, were not less relieved, glorying in their freedom from rationality or utilitarianism. They longed to drown themselves in a tide of emotion; they tasted again, after millennia, of that subterranean river of the water of life which could sweep them back into co-consciousness. Their feeling finds its voice in Schiller's cry of love "to the unknown millions." Not so the intellectuals. Their aim, at the utmost, was "the greatest economic interdependence for the greatest psychic independence." Intellectual co-operation was essential that each might produce and enjoy his best, but group feeling even with their intellectual equals, even with such as had something to give them—far less with the mob which could only feel—was disgusting.

¶688It may well be asked at this point: Can there be any reconciliation between these two forces—the intellectual and the emotional—and if there cannot be, if they are really divergent, can there be any Progress? On the contrary, must there not be disaster? The intellectuals have indeed been

¶689[page 204] right in saying that this tide of emotion was dangerous: their fault is that, in reality, they have underestimated the danger. But they should have asked, dangerous to what? It is when we advance the inquiry in this direction that we begin to see light.

¶690It is indeed surprising that, faced with such a strange and perilous phenomenon, modern intellectuals have not more searchingly analyzed the danger that confronts them. The vagueness with which they have defined it, the dimness with which they have envisaged its course and objective, must be due to the fact that intellectuals are adverse to recognizing irrationality even in their opponents. Psychological interpretations seem nonsense to their clear, ratiocinative, objective minds: their objectivity makes them unconsciously project their own unemotional outlook onto any opponent who shows energy. He at least must be clear-sighted, and so a self-seeker, however blind his dupes may be. But this force of emotion cannot be dismissed or cured by charging it as mere sentiment in the mass, mere self-seeking hypocrisy in their leaders. Every one who attempts to think is aware of irritation as the feeling-tone which attends the effort to hold at bay and criticize the topical mass-suggestion. That irritation is a by-product, a strain-symptom. It is no proof that the suggestion which is to be analyzed is illusory. Indeed it has to be discounted, for it generally prejudices the inquirer, making him think, most irrationally, that that, in the presence of which he experiences so much discomfort when he is trying to think clearly, must be opposed to such conclusions as reason may help him to establish.

¶691If the intellectuals so discount their own prejudice they must recognize that the new sensibility has spread by a gradual unconscious pervasion and that they themselves have not been unaffected by the process. For not only did they at its beginning give the cover of their rational defence to its emergence, but also they themselves, now that the rational

¶692case is seen to be but rationalization, would lack the callousness to resume, if they could, the harsh relations of the individualism of the Renaissance and to abrogate the concessions of Humanity.

¶693By what then in reality is the intellectual confronted? By a force which is pervading the whole of society and from which he himself is not free. Of a force as general and as persistent we ought to be able to discover the tendency. It is of a nature which is best described as instinctive, and this instinct undoubtedly aims at the creation of a society not merely larger than any present group but completely different in its constitution, its substance. It is not an international loyalty that is being attempted—though that may be a symptom—or self-forgetting service to civilization—though that may be one of the consequences—but a new state of being where the checks and balances of constitutionalists, the rewards and punishments of lawyers, the exact adjustment of civic duties and their corresponding individual privileges, will be so superseded as to have become unmeaning.

¶694Realizing this, we can understand the opposition. Bentham records with what surprise, after he with youthful enthusiasm had advocated Utilitarianism to an eminent elder statesman, he heard the authority denounce the doctrine as most dangerous. He himself lived to understand that suspicion. We ought not to expect any more tolerance for newer notions of sociology, for though conservatism itself may not, as we have seen above, be really unaffected by Humanitarianism, these newer notions have grown so radical that probably even among the emotionalists themselves it is lack of intelligent foresight, quite as much as their new feeling of kinship, that permits them to press forward cheerfully. They may be right to follow instinct unspeculatively, leaving it to that power to give new strength when the crisis comes, as, after days of restlessness and nights of growing

¶695[page 206] chill, to the running landrail suddenly comes strength of wing so that it, tied through summer to a few fields, may attempt transmarine migration.

¶696Such an attitude cannot be taken up by the intellectuals. Seeing further, they detect not a gentle expansion but a revolutionary gulf, and (cut off from the experiences of the emotional) no earnest of faith in a happy consummation, of the psyche unexpectedly rising to the situation, sustains them.

¶697What is strange, and like most strange notions in rational minds, in the end revealing, is that the clear-minded intellectual should not realize that anyhow society was not safe. Every student of the Renaissance is aware that the danger which faced the modern world was not feeling but the lack of it, not socialism and sentiment but individuality and egotism. That risk was obviously very grave, and had not a new faculty stirred, no doubt, as it had to be, very feebly, blindly, clumsily, by now an unadulterated Renaissance culture would have poisoned itself from off the face of Europe. Society was not safe in any case, and if there is any truth in the hypothesis of this essay, society never could be, unless it could return to a condition in which there are neither conservatives nor progressives, revolutionaries nor reactionaries, privileged nor subordinate, but only the undifferentiated, co-conscious group.25 The only chance of safety is to go on, making step by step a new order which may express the new instinct, believing that if by intelligence we prevent the blind force from perishing with us by the way, it will at last come to rest in a place far larger and more serene than that through which we now struggle.

¶698Why will not the intellectuals allow the true peril of the past? Why are they so anxious to disallow any moral bene-

¶69925 Even groups which have developed caste instead of individualism (see Ch. I) are "in peril of change."

¶700[page 207] fits that may have come from the new sensibility? Why would they make out the present crisis to be due not to a great natural force but to perversity?

¶701The answer is that they are not in reality pure intellectuals. Their intelligence permits them to see the future as the emotionalists cannot, but their own emotions will not let them give the true reason of their fear at what they see. They will not face or at least give expression to the fact that what lies before us is a revolution and that the only choice before us is utter destruction or a metamorphosis so drastic as to the individualist to be hardly distinguishable from death. Fundamentally Humanitarianism is suspect not because it is a decadence but because it is a new, unnatural, revolutionary thing. Professor Babbitt and Dean Inge, to mention but two intellectuals, who, progressive in thought, are reactionaries in feeling, hate it because they are rationalists in method and individualists in aim. The recognition that Humanitarianism is an essential symptom of emergent evolution, that the heart is as valid a detector of reality as the head,26 challenges intelligence's position as the only way of advance and individuality as the final aim of civilization: it even points to a super-personal society. It is really unscientific to refuse to recognize a feeling simply because it is a feeling. Obviously at this stage (of unsubstantiated feeling) the emergent fact is not being clearly focused, but the knowledge that today it is widely felt, while a little time ago men were unaware of it, shows that something is present and is becoming clearer. If we accept the psychological completion of the evolutionary idea we can deduce that as every faculty is the expression and device of a new need (aspiration or appetite) to find its satisfaction, so the emergence of values can be viewed as the first apprehension of an external

¶70226 See Ch. IV for the Chasidim's new ethical sense as detector of a new Reality.

¶703[page 208] reality to which we are about to evolve—toward which we are already evolving—new faculties which will make that reality evident to that other side of the single consciousness, the intellect. Values, freed from any case-making on behalf of the present,27 can be seen as the response-record of the most rudimentary “sense” (most sensitive because the latest: least definable because without experience or categories of expression) to the presence of something in its environment which the “concrete” senses at present do not register. Any attempt to precipitate this definition, to obtain immediate confirmation by these elder, more “canalized” senses, of this reality, is a mistake. These can at present only refuse to deny to this new one the right to experience, neither denying that nor attempting to confine it in their terms. For it is thought, or rather expression (with nothing but these elder inadequate terms to work with), that as often as not makes its father the wish look ridiculous, for in defining and condensing an aspiration, it has almost always decategorized it into an appetite. This is the tragedy of dogma. Our thoughts may well be more materialistic, because more concrete, than our feelings. Mill is right in saying that because mankind has vital need of bread that is no proof that men do not die of starvation. But the consciousness which within each individual witnesses to its own eternity, though it may be intellectualized as a promise of individual survival, and so, being degraded, lie open to every stultification of reason, can, if we resist the temptation to exploit it for temporary satisfaction, slowly become recognizable as part of a whole reality which is breaking through limitations of expression to the discovery of its answer and complement.

¶704So we realize the real objection of the Humanists to Humanitarianism. They fear it (with such a fear that they dare not declare the true reason of that fear) because with their

¶70527 In Ch. VIII the attempt to employ them to arrest instead of to advance development will be examined.

¶706[page 209] passionate intellectual singleness, they see that it points, through emotionalism, to the end of individuality. Better that all advance should be held up, better to die in the ditch of reaction, than to let this last dreadful freak of nature break out. Than this, better society should crash; better back to full-blooded barbarism than on to Nirvana.

¶707We can only understand the intellectuals' intellectualization of their emotion when we realize that what they sense and dread is their individuality's destruction. Than their isolated, though interchanging, consciousness, they cannot feel that there is any other way of life, for though their intelligence is advanced to a super-individual condition, it has by such concentration prevented the development of the emotional side (which, as we have seen, was probably always in such types not of equal strength) and "Science's" 28 point of view has up to the present been so objective that it has realized hardly at all how impersonal it has itself become. The mind of the intellectual shrinks with real emotional repugnance from wallowing in any feeling of oneness. He desires above all to think clearly, to define and distinguish.

¶708So we may understand the present development of "upper individualism"; how and why its two aspects have come apart; the tragedy of Humanism and Humanitarianism. Understanding is, however, not reconciliation nor glozing over. We can say that we have arrived at the point where the intellectuals reveal to the inquirer, under analysis, whither Humanitarianism inevitably is taking us. We can see that at present neither side is attempting to guide that growth: the side that sees reprobates; the side that reacts is blind. It is equally clear that they must come together if there is to be evolution and not, as otherwise, revolution, beside which

¶70928 As it may be thought that Science is overrated here in being taken as the representative intellectual activity of modern man, it is worth quoting Dean Inge's dictum: "We are continually talking of my philosophy, my religion and my art. Of Science alone no one says, my science, and that perhaps is why Science alone advances."

¶710[page 210] the religious, political, and economic upheavals of the Modern Age are but as earth-tremors to universal eruption. The advance of the emotions, the vast modern Humanitarian urge, that unparalleled growth in refinement, beside which the progress even in understanding is not so great, all this is not enough. When as today increasing numbers of people begin to doubt whether "we always have the strength to bear the misfortunes of others," we may have a new sympathy, a new sense even, but without something more, it is a new weakness, not a new strength. With our present standard of feeling, which insists on embracing nothing less than humanity, we have an immense intellectual task before us if we are to develop for such a unit even such awareness of aim and mastery of method as the old group consciousness had attained for the protection and advance of its group. And we see intellect is anything but willing to undertake the effort. It considers such an urge neither inspiring nor desirable. In fact Humanitarianism cannot directly inspire the intellect, rather it repels it; and by itself it cannot guide. It is a force, not a vision; instinct, not understanding. It must be repeated: Though neither side realizes the inevitability of the growth of the other and their mutual interdependence, neither can be safe without the other. If there is to be any reconciliation and any future for humanity, the new sensibility, just as much as Science, demands a new sense. If we resist the temptation to a premature, invalid synthesis (through thrusting the two sides of the modern psyche together), we are led to look—a Bode's law in psychology—for the emergence of a central term between them, which will combine them in a new, embracing, complete unity of consciousness. At present Science sees a reality without value: Humanitarianism feels a value it cannot materialize. Their irreconcilability indicates the potential presence of a new faculty. Here is disclosed an antinomy. Both sides maintain the truth of their experience; neither can rightly deny the

¶711[page 211] other's apprehension of reality. The existence of the antinomy indicates the presence of a central reconciliative term—a new category of consciousness.

¶712This is, no doubt, a bold supposition, but anything short of this is useless. Without some such discovery science and philanthropy are equally the leisure fancies of overeducated intelligence and sensibility. Those who indulge in them are carried on the backs of masses whom they must master, or they will dismount them—masses whose evolution, we shall see in the following chapter, must still be bearing them toward a more intense individualism. Their science gives these masses arms; their philanthropy paralyzes their self-defence. If they cannot advance, their only chance is to come down to the masses' level by resuming that stage of unspeculative violence wherein their ancestors won from the masses the tribute which today keeps their descendants above the battle. If Society crashed now, the new arch which may span chaos is not locked (indeed far from tending to close it, the workers at either end, scientists and philanthropists, seem to be attempting some impossible span, each building so that they can never meet); and the most advanced, the very men who are at work on the parts and springers of it, would, as in Russia, fall furthest.

¶713That this advance of the leaders is not debarred, that on the contrary there is evidence of the emergence of new faculties which will give an actual awareness of a super-personal life, Chapter VII will attempt to show. We must, however, in the next chapter, before passing on to this final stage, return to where the vast number of people are still present: the stage of lower individuality, when they have yet to attain to the maximum of individuality. In this chapter we have been dealing with the upper individuals, those who, whether they are aware of it or not (we have seen that most of them are not), are developing past the climax of individuality, are already in a condition where their lives are without meaning

¶714[page 212] if there is not a super-individual consciousness. They may, it has been fully allowed, be a fantastic experiment on life’s part, a psychic parallel of the impossible physical varieties she has thrown up to die. But whether they fail or not, whether they touch the happy isles of a firm super-personal experience or the deeps wash them down, we must still trace as clearly as we may the path of the vast masses which are coming on behind them. That path will reveal, if not a goal toward which we can press, at least the main current of humanity. We shall at least know what to expect, and, if no more, we can cease to fight against the inevitable. But it may well disclose more—not much, but something of significance to any who accept the spiral concept of evolution. If the upper individuals are making away from individuality and the lower still make toward it, does not the whole sweep of human consciousness disclose itself as a vast process of condensation and expansion? About the conduct of ourselves, over the behaviour of self-conscious individuals, we may be mistaken. Looking so closely, it is difficult to be certain of any general tendency. We are caught by our idiosyncrasies so that we can hardly recognize our commonalty with our own class. Unduly therefore we may incline to the notion that we may be freaks. In watching the unreflecting mass-development this doubt does not arise. We see the vast sweep of a process with a clearness which we cannot have when the focus has to be drawn upon ourselves. If humanity advanced solely through the guidance of its leaders—strange creatures underived from the general—then we might expect these to fail and the goal toward which their effort points to be no more than a dream. But if we can trace the process whereby the leaders—the upper individuals—are produced, then at least we can conclude that they and their dreams are “natural,” and by so much, possible. Nature, it would seem, is preparing for a general advance of all ranks. If the leaders cannot catch sight of the objective, a look back will at

¶715least assure them that the order to advance has been issued. That this is the general social condition today, that quite apart from the speculations of pioneers, the Modern World has indeed become one vast secular wave of revolution that now crests to its final breaking, the next chapter attempts to show.

¶716CHAPTER VI

¶717THE LOWER INDIVIDUALITY: THE REVOLUTIONARY AGE

¶718SUMMARY

¶719THE Modern Age is the Revolutionary Age. Revolution is a symptom of psychic change, of mutation in the mass of society, of individuals being released in unprecedented numbers. Such a view is so unfamiliar that alternative philosophies of history must be reviewed; first, Vico; but he was without the present supply of evidence. The historians of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, were overwhelmed by it. At the same time biological advance made that analogy suggestive and Egyptology gave a range sufficient to try out such a theory. So Flinders Petrie's *Revolutions of Civilization* is a classic example. It breaks down because his biological explanation is not supported by biologists who have studied history. Spengler's great topical success, though it has hints, is simply, at base, the biological assumption with the biological theory suppressed. Its inspiration is defeatism, a last flicker of Apocalypticism. H. Adams's theory, in "Law of Phase in History," though based on an exploded physics—as he did not know that psychology could give him the "volatilizing energy" he required to make his theory work—is more important because he did perceive the unprecedented dynamism of our age and its obvious preparatoriness for a revolutionary change into a more volatile state. Spengler reveals his awareness of this line of advance, which is illustrated by architecture's turning into music and music into mathematics, but he for obvious reasons would not follow it up. Philosophies of history have then reached a state when

¶720[page 215] it is recognized that society is now unprecedentedly dynamic, and the explanation of outward change lies in psychic mutation. Earlier homogeneous societies may collapse from psychic vacuum, but the present heterogeneous ones would tend to show renewal by uprush from below. Thus Revolution is the characteristic of the modern age, and the Revolution has gone through three definite phases. Each phase begins by upper individuals, mainly intellectual, questioning (stage of effervescence), then lower individuals, mainly emotional, challenging: an emotional simplification of the problem. Under its direction the mass revolts and there is a reaction into nationalism as the new men at the top, the frightened upper individuals, compose into a new crust. The three phases have been (1) the Religious (because the mass was leaving its group religion and the new individuals were mainly cloister-breakers). So we have the Humanists, such as Erasmus, general inquirers; the Reformers, such as Luther; the false simplification, the Bible; the Reformation; the Peasants’ Revolt and the reaction into nationality. Next (2) the Political Revolution; heralded by Hobbes, Locke, the Encyclopaedists; crystallized in the false simplification of Rousseau’s *Social Contract*; Revolution and national reaction. Then (3) the Economic Revolution; heralded by such as Owen, crystallized by Marx in *Das Kapital*, and ending in Russia. So the phases appear to end, but the place of ending is illuminating; for Russia should have had not an economic revolution but a political. The economic revolution was, as far as Russia was concerned, an accident. There will probably never be another economic revolution, nor indeed any more of these former revolutions, because each of these phases increasingly tends to overlap its predecessor. The effervescent stage of the fourth revolutionary phase is already present. This shows it will be psychological, and for another reason this is so, because the three preceding stages have each been stages in a cycle from man on the

¶721lower group-relation to man on a higher. This process ends when man obtains direct knowledge of what he needs and what is moving him. So the psychological revolutionary phase will bring men into direct touch with the real underlying revolution of which the other phases have only been symptoms, and so this last phase of Revolution will be the solution of the whole Revolutionary cycle. The process will have at last effected its real purpose. Certainly we are at a crisis and there is no solution save an outbreak in consciousness. Psychologists recognize that the present individualized society is a contradiction in terms. There must be a radical change. But as it is not a pleasant prospect there is a general wish not to recognize it. We must therefore see what evidence, save the force *a tergo*, there is of another psychologically different state ahead of us.

¶722CHAPTER VI

¶723IF THAT epoch in its history which Europe now calls the Middle Ages should with more accuracy have been styled the Monastic, the Modern Age has been named with even less detachment. Yet this age of ours, even while we are still in it, can be seen to have one salient characteristic which marks it off from all which have gone before and which, it seems possible to show, because of that characteristic's complete working out, will not appear again in any other. That feature is Revolution. The Modern Age is essentially the Revolutionary Age. To understand the process of the Past and our own crisis, it is therefore necessary to discover, if we may, the cause of this new thing. On the hypothesis of this essay it can be shown as part of the general process of man's development; it can be linked up with his whole evolution. It can be shown to come at the appropriate place, inevitably. It can be seen, not as a breakdown, an inexplicable failure

¶724[page 217] of natural, healthy man to carry on and behave, nor as a social "sport," a sudden determination by men abruptly rational to break and remake, to shatter "the sorry scheme of things entire," which always, or from some arbitrary moment in the past, has been wrong, and to put in its place a perfect, static order, as square, hard, and abstract as the New Jerusalem. In the main, public opinion has divided between these two views; but if history is considered as psychic evolution, a third and more fundamental interpretation is disclosed. These popular views seem mistaken because they attend to the symptom and not to the underlying cause. Revolution is a symptom of psychological change, it is the modern development of that process which is the *raison d'être* of civilization—the release and the sublimation of the individual. The cause, the essence, of Revolution is the convulsive condensation of a whole stratum of hitherto suggestible human mass into self-conscious individuals.

¶725In the last dozen generations, after a long period of relapse, there has been an unprecedented acceleration, but the process, in resuming its way, has followed the same path as formerly in Greece and Judea, and when it has gone beyond their furthest point, still the fundamental aim and direction seem unaltered—the evolution of consciousness so that, after the phase of intensification which we recognize as individuality, there may be a recovery on an incomparably grander scale of that general consciousness in which the individual becomes immortal, because enlarged out of his separateness, and the community, because its one deadly enemy is reconciled, becomes invincible.

¶726Such a psychological view of social evolution is as yet hardly anywhere accepted. It is therefore necessary, before proceeding to develop an interpretation which the present may not reject *a priori*, to examine any other modern explanations which have been put forward to account for the state of the world today and to forecast its future. If they

¶727[page 218] can be shown not to have made their case, that will make it less unlikely on general principles that the clue to civilization's course may lie not necessarily with the theory put forward here, but at least in the province of psychology.

¶728The great name of Vico, whose speculations have already been mentioned in Chapter I, can here only be saluted. He was a psychological historian, for he recognized—it was easier in his age, for not only did not men as trees walking hide the wood (as in the large magnification now at the service of historians), but also his age was less inclined to resent a “spiritual” interpretation of history—he recognized in Roman Law three stages: the divine (which with present anthropological knowledge may be correlated with the co-conscious) ; the heroic, which has been proved since to be a definite and perhaps unavoidable stage of human culture (it must, however, be extended to cover the whole period of proto-individualism); and the human, which is of course the stage at which individuality is so common as to be taken, by all who have no real knowledge of the past, as the normal and invariable state of consciousness. Such speculations, drawn from nothing more actual than Roman Law, must establish the genius of the man. Even his guess at primitive government—an aristocracy so tyrannous that it is overthrown—may have some prehistoric actuality, if, as is not impossible, several proto-individuals, when they had entered their cynical stage, should have got in touch with each other. These might enter into an uneasy league to exploit the still undifferentiated masses.¹

¶729Yet to Vico, however brilliant his insight into the past, we cannot here give further study, for, living as he did in seventeenth-century Naples, he was practically ignorant of the modern world. He saw human history as a series of cycles, his own age not essentially different from the classic which he took as the normal high-water mark of the tide of

¶7301 See Ch. I, pp. 61-62.

¶731time. This inquiry must of necessity be confined to historians of the nineteenth century, men for whom a critical apparatus was to hand, who not only could test their documents, but could, through antiquarian research, deal with periods which had, in the chronicle sense, no history, and who were, through the possession of such knowledge, aware of the unprecedented character of their own age.

¶732It must, however, be repeated that the very possession of such instruments led at the beginning not to an expanding compass, but actually to limitation. The modern study of history has led to specialization on such minute areas that most of the experts have denied the possibility of a philosophy of history.² That is inevitable. The biologist who confined himself to the study of the minutest variations of a sub-species would not be likely to catch sight of the vast hypothesis of evolution. Only over wide ranges do the repetitions necessary to establish the presence of a process occur.

¶733The historians whom we ought to consult would therefore be those who have been able to study, with enough, but not too much, documentation, superimposed millennia of civilization. Here we find the possibility of a philosophy of history is not denied. But there are other difficulties to be met, prejudices which must be discounted. Even when we find those who are able and willing to give us an interpretation, scholars who not only are familiar with the highway of the past but who realize that it sweeps unbroken into the present, we cannot accept their interpretations without first calculating for the "displacement" caused by their own position. Faced in their day with the fact of Revolution, most men of leisure—no doubt unconsciously influenced by the threat to their own security—can only view it as a sign of the end, evidence of social dissolution. Also, those who have had time to consider the problem are men who were brought

¶734² See Bury's Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge, but himself wrote *The Idea of Progress* and also *The History of Freedom of Thought.*

¶735[page 220] up under the influence of a dominant biology, for this science, with the hypothesis of evolution, alone seemed to have the power to interpret all life.³ They view society therefore as an organism and so are inclined to support, as they imagine, scientifically, the ancient notion that communities, like men, have a limited life, a "Great Year" at the end of which they must all die.

¶736Of these biological philosophies of history perhaps the most striking is Sir W. Flinders Petrie's *Revolutions of Civilization*. An authority on Egypt, he works out his law from the longest known range of human history, and only after some three thousand years' trial run, under almost "laboratory conditions" of detachment given by the Nile Valley, does he apply it to Europe. Set out most briefly, his contention is that civilization is a harvest which must exhaust the human soil out of which it springs, and so there are required periodic inundations by outer peoples, fresher alluvium. When, however, he comes to the modern age, which after all is the crux of the matter, the demonstration is not convincing. The eminent Egyptologist will not pretermit this our unprecedented Society's doom, but he is inclined to think its decline may prove, of all the collapses of civilization, the least catastrophic. But why, on the precedent of all its predecessors, should this, the latest, prove an exception? If it does so prove, then we can presume that human society does evolve; that however the past may be explained, the present cannot be so simply defined and limited; that, as is now suspected, even in biological evolution, something comes into life during the process of living which was not there before; that as the complex structures of the inorganic pass over into the organic, so physique results in psyche, the power of repair and recovery becomes the power of creation. Of this qualitative change Professor Flinders Petrie does not seem unaware. He has shown how each col-

¶737³ See Ch. I, pp. 32-33.

¶738[page 221] lapse is less ruinous than the one before. Less and less is the loss overwhelming. Civilization never returns to an equal depth of barbarism. On his theory, even unqualified by epigenesis, it is therefore possible to maintain that this age's collapse (which on his reckoning is due) might not be caused by change, or even become evident, on the economic plane. It might be simply a bankruptcy of the spirit, some cataclysm in consciousness, of which outer conditions—for instance, the lack of a well-stocked and contingent reservoir of barbarians—did not take advantage. But if as much as this is allowed, is the theory of much use as a guide to our present condition and our immediate future? Is it really adequate for the facts? For two reasons it does not seem so. In the first place, though convinced of some kind of social evolution, Professor Flinders Petrie attempts no definition of what civilization may be. He is therefore unable to project its path—how the form and purpose of society would develop. He takes as gauges symptoms and precipitations: the art, the science, the wealth; but on the ends to which these things are the means, on civilization's vision and growth in social intention—on a widening sensibility, a deepening understanding, and the dawn of self-consciousness—he does not commit himself. In the second place he has been driven, perhaps for the above reason, to accept as an adequate explanation of cultural fluctuations a genetic cause. The re-creating barbarian invader does not bring in new ideas but new blood. The argument would run: Civilization is not producing the mighty work it did a few generations back; it is exhausted, and its exhaustion is due to the fact that so many generations have passed since the cultured were cross-bred with the barbarians. But if civilization is more than its works, if it is a creative, multiform energy, then that energy, though it may not be showing equal results in the plastic arts, may have turned to less material forms of expression. It is therefore not necessarily decadent, unless we can show that it is

¶739producing nothing and all its constituents are weary of themselves and it.

¶740Against the second part of the contention, that on general principles we must be decadent, even if we do not feel or know it, because in any case our time is up, the authority to which Professor Flinders Petrie appeals tells finally against him. In this matter of the age of civilization, he is treating society as an organism which has a natural term. He turns therefore to biology, and in this question, for the present undoubtedly, the decisive opinion must be that of a biological sociologist. Professor Carr-Saunders in his *Eugenics* has written: "No satisfactory evidence has been produced to show that conditions which might be supposed to bring about favourable germinal changes do in fact precede the rise of civilizations"; "differential fertility sets in *after* decline has begun"; and "that differential fertility is not a cause of decay is probable on other grounds. . . . The ups and downs are, in all probability, different aspects of the same phenomenon. That both rise and fall may occur independently of any genetic change seems to follow from the fact, as pointed out by Mr. Huntingdon, that in Iceland, where there has been no infusion of foreign blood and no sign of racial change through differential fertility or any other cause, there have been periods of depression and periods of achievement." 4 Professor Flinders Petrie has therefore failed to prove his case. His fundamental argument is biological, and biology does not sustain it. 5

¶7414 *Eugenics*, pp. 208-209.

¶7425 To Mr. Ellsworth Huntingdon is, however, due the most extensive attempt to show causal relation between climate-the periodic aridity of the steppes-and migration-the nomad hordes so driven into the homelands of civilization. In *The Pulse of Asia* (1907) and periodic publications since, he has gone far to establish this correlation, and it is very apposite to the argument of this present essay to note that finding that each climatic cycle has an average duration of 640 years, "crests" are discoverable about 2000 B.C. and 750 B.C. This is not of course to establish any crude theory of civilization's being *due* to cross-breeding. It would be as exact to say that the Ice Age made man: and not the most extreme "environmentalist" would

¶743Lately, however, other philosophies of history, cautiously avoiding biology, have tried to reach the same conclusion as the earlier vaticinations—that society is doomed because it is exhausted, its inevitable hour is at hand. Of these the most popular has no doubt been Spengler’s *Decline of the West*. But though he avoids the appeal to biology, he does not appear to have found any other fundamental cause which necessitates civilization’s dissolution. It is doomed not because we can discover what has sapped its life or tell the ordained number of its days, but because it is not producing fruits, is obviously moribund; its cultural phase is over. Thus he introduces arbitrary standards. His “phases” seem depressions—to use the Martian analogy—like those dim areas on the planet’s surface which every astronomer draws with a different outline. When we allow for the fact that the author’s country has received a terrible check in the almost successful attempt to achieve the long and generally ambitioned hegemony of Europe, it is not unnatural that he should think that Europe and civilization itself could not long survive such a manifest miscarriage of their destiny and, as no man can put the whole blame on his own country, that he should see as a secular decline what from a more detached stand-

¶744maintain that by refrigerating an animal you get a soul. The cold was, probably, the opportunity to our stock, the final disaster to the rest of the hominids according to the strength of their and our inherent vitality. So, too, with the migratory invasions. They are simply Natural Selection still working, blows to which the inherent vitality of the organism replies either with collapse or with new powers. The New Empire radiating from Thebes was the reaction of civilization to the Hyksos blow: civilization became something it had never been before. The Shepherd King rode in on the horse, civilization was trampled, but rose, harnessed the horse to its chariot, returned the charge, and conquered far beyond its former frontiers. To the later wave of the eighth century, civilization responds by a higher, less material reaction; we get the condensation of the private individual and the exploration of spiritual worlds. Outer conditions, migrational invasions or plagues such as the Black Death, sudden economic change, through discovery or invention, can only be the jolts which, if the spirit is ready, occasion delivery and the birth of a higher type of consciousness. See Dr. Flower’s *Psychology of Religion* for evidence that changes in men’s circumstances, by throwing out and making useless their traditional reactions, precede religious developments.

¶745[page 224] point may appear as a temporary, remediable blunder of specialists who falsely simplified the problem of Europe's political development. It is not to be wondered at, it is to be expected, that he, looking over history with an almost encyclopaedic range, from his present position, should naturally pick out a series of depressions which would seem to lead inevitably to his conclusion: that periodic submergence not only has been, must always, but at this apt moment is about to be, the doom of the West. Such prophecy has a curious parallelism with the Apocalyptic literature; there is the same inspiring wish to call in the other world to redress the balance of this, to defy the victor in the hour of his triumph by declaring that the world in which he has triumphed over "our side" is at this moment due to be overturned by a mysterious outer intervention.

¶746The modern world, however, is not only unlike any other and so renders any calculation on the analogy of "cultures" unsafe, but in itself it is one of such energy and creative power that it is hard to see how any one who is not projecting his own depression can call it by its fruits only fit for the fire. Indeed at first sight it appears such an exuberant break with all that has been that, if the choice lie between the melancholy theorists and the keen men of action, common sense would rally us to Mr. Henry Ford crying, "History is Bunk!" The new vision of science, purged of all anthropomorphism, yet no thing of empty negatives; hard, rather, as ferro-concrete; science which says every day to the simple, "If you can't understand, 'believe me for the very works' sake,' for the powers my way of looking at things alone can give"; the new Humanitarianism, which sees the world as one state, life as one complex kinship, history as one process: these are so vast as to be different almost in quality from all that has been. It is more accurate even on the present showing, even without taking into consideration to what new

¶747[page 225] powers again these powers are leading, to realize that we have entered upon something entirely new, than to attempt to maintain that because this modern world is unlike the past it can have no future save "barbarism."

¶748There has, however, been published an outline philosophy of history, which, though sufficiently sombre not to shock the students of the really gloomy science (History, since it was branded by our English historical Father as the "catalogue of the crimes, the follies, and the misfortunes of mankind," may claim by right this title), recognizes the unprecedented dynamism of this our age. Henry Adams, the New England *curioso*, left behind him in a volume afterward sealed with the title, *The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma*, a short essay called "The Law of Phase in History." He recognized the growing intensity of man's historic life—the broad sea-levels of prehistoric co-consciousness were shrouded from him—and he showed that as the modern world developed, man's activity approached a frenzy of discharge which he believed could only leave society burnt out. Ignorant of psychology, he turned to physics for an explanation of this phenomenon. In the Second Law of Thermo-Dynamics he considered that he had found the clue. He even ventured on a time-chart as definite and as demonstrable as apocalyptic prophecy of the Last Day. In 1917 civilization was to come to an end.6

¶7496 The Russian Revolution breaking out in that year gives a curious hint of confirmation to the theory, as though Adams had disclosed part of a law, other undiscovered clauses of which prevented its complete crude fulfilment. In this note it should also be observed that Flinders Petrie's "law" also went curiously nigh to fulfilling itself to his letter. According to him our civilization was over with the "Gothic," and we of the Renaissance, etc., have lived on in a long, uncreative Indian Summer, an extension explained by the size of our present civilization; i.e., a liner takes longer to sink than a skiff. It is curious to observe that the author does not raise the question where were the inundators which ought to have been on tap to alluviate us. That question would have led to the recognition that it was no lack on their side that has led to our unconscionable extension. The "hordes" ran to schedule. Timour the Tartar—a rejuvenator if ever there was one—

¶750[page 226] The Second Law no longer runs in the way that Adams thought; so it is not that which will bear our civilization to its bourne. But the notion that our society is on the verge of a complete transformation, heralded, symptoma- tized, and, in a sense, caused by its unprecedented increase in energy, is the most penetrating contribution as yet made toward a practical philosophy of history.

¶751Spengler 7 brushes against this notion. He traces the development of Baroque Architecture from the structural forms of the early Renaissance to elevations which were fashioned to appear as though moulded in a plastic, until virtuosity exercised itself in showing “its marble soft like flesh, pliant like cord, vibrant like foliage, and by crowning the whole with domes as imponderable as the rising moon,” 8 until, the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea magnified, that of Cadmus and Apollo reversed, the design had to come alive, form turned into sound, and the energy which had become too intense any longer to be expressed and compassed in material, “passed in music out of sight,” and the great age of the composers succeeded of necessity to that of the decline of the supreme architects. So viewed as a single force (only, as it becomes more intense, changing its wavelength, and so its medium and the sense by which it is apprehended), the expression of man’s creative activity can be correlated with the principle of energy as we now conceive it in the outer world. There is one single force which, as its pitch increases, changes from Hertzian waves (radio) through the “narrow octave of the animal vision” on to X-rays of

¶752flooded half China, permanently desolated Mesopotamia, and thrust his devastation into the heart of Hungary. And this was in 1350, when Europe was undoubtedly exhausted. The Black Death had disarticulated into nations a culture which had ramified from France. France herself was to be wasted by the Hundred Years’ War. Like Tarak the Arab eight hundred years before in Spain, so a single raiding Khan might have touched the exhausted nerve-centre and pierced through to Paris and the coast, and Europe might have followed Russia into centuries of servitude and night.

¶7537 *Decline of the West*, p. 277.

¶7548 R. G. Collingwood, *Antiquity*, December, 1927.

¶755[page 227] such intensity that they escape our finest detectors.9 To us, practically, heat and light are separate qualities, as we experience them with different senses. For the same reason architecture and music have seemed different arts. (Hegel's aphorism on architecture—"frozen music"—is not quite exact. It is "thawing," but it moves so slowly that we see it and not hear it.) Now, apprehending all man's creative activity as one force, we see that at a certain "pressure" that activity can express itself in the comparatively static form of building; comparatively, because buildings move as the styles of architecture change, but so slowly that we have time (at least in the past we have had time) to put them up, look at them with some contemplative pleasure, and then take them down. (This may account for our present distaste with all that our modern architects can put up for us. The fault is not with their fancies but with the fact that they want the thing to "stand put"; we want it to move.) As it intensifies it begins to trouble and contort the simple geometrical patterns of structure which once satisfied it, until the whole wreathes itself into a rhythmic disregard of the static. Material, however, sets its limit, and a leakage of force takes place. The forms of architecture become thinner; the energy is escaping. The Rococo is a rhythmic form out of which obviously the cyclonic bursting fullness of the Baroque has almost wholly escaped. On architectural evidence alone we should therefore look, when Baroque is diminishing into Rococo, for an art of an intenser, more dynamic, less material form to reveal by a sudden access of energy and creative power the passing into it of the force which has escaped from building. This we do find in Music, and so, seeing all artistic creation as one, not only should we expect not to find all the arts flourishing simultaneously

¶7569 See the researches of Millikan, who has now measured a radiation of such intensity that it can pass through sixteen feet of lead. *Nature*, January, 1928, and Ch. VII.

¶757(cf. the backwardness of the Greeks in music) but rather successively expressing according to their ascending immateriality the intensifying energy of man, but we may be even more positive and recognize in Bach and not in Longhi or Wren the true inheritor of Michelangelo. It may be noted in passing that the “daimonic trouble” of Michelangelo’s work may be due to his struggle with plastic form, the weary Titan attempting to hold back the creative spirit of man in a mortal struggle, in the birth-pang of a new order striving to achieve rhythms which his material denied; and the “eternal calm” of Bach may be due to that same force at length functioning in the new freedom which it had won, in the medium which could express it. From this supposition it might be deduced that when music reaches its limit, when the mind of man grows too dynamic even for the swift narrative of sound to follow, it too will become titanically troubled. Are there not hints of this birth-passion in Beethoven, and is not the stage beyond, the calm, supreme perfection of pure mathematic form, foreshadowed in that remark of Einstein’s on music and mathematics lately so much quoted? 10 As to the plastic arts, it is worth while, perhaps, to add that after the last dying eddies of Rococo and the backwashes of revivals, architecture seems hardening into an efficient straightness due to complete delivery from the inner troubling of dynamic rhythm. As to painting, is not the dread of representationalism and the love of pure pattern an attempt still to hold back an energy already too abstracted from material, too dynamic, to be expressed by any plastic representation?

¶758But emphatically, Spengler does not want to discover an ever more dynamic Europe, he does not want to proclaim even Creative Revolution. He desires to demonstrate decay

¶75910 That he obtained from certain elegant demonstrations of Prof. H. A. Lorentz an aesthetic experience comparable to that of music. Einstein is a good violinist.

¶760[page 229] in our age and the cyclus in all ages. He cannot follow this clue of architecture's sublimation into music because it would lead to a very different conclusion. Adams at least was able to recognize two essential facts about the past and the present: (1) that there is both change and continuity, and (2) that Revolution, though it may shatter, does not necessarily break down society into barbarism.¹¹ It may in fact be a symptom that society is breaking up into a freer, more dynamic form and only the crust may be shattered, a crust the greater part of which ¹² may volatilize. Revolution may be indicative of the intensifying force in man, the creative opposite of decay—energy like that which suddenly transforms quiet orange dwarf suns into parousial novae. The generation of that energy is evident in our mental distresses, for, as in an exploding star the outburst seems to be caused by a change in the very atoms which are its innumerable constituents, so society is suddenly and violently transformed when its individuals, after inner revolution, are driven to a new and intenser combination with one another.¹³

¶761"The Law of Phase" leaves the philosophy of history advanced to the point where it is evident that the only interpretation of social evolution is in terms of intensifying energy. The next step is obvious: all the material evidences of civilization being recognized as symptoms of an immaterial evolution, it becomes apparent that the one underlying continuous process in human history is the evolution of consciousness. Delay in discerning this unifying principle has, no doubt, been due to two checks. In the first place the evolution of consciousness could not be directly apprehended. It had to be deduced. There lacked, of necessity, direct evidence of other states of consciousness than our own. Faced with the evidence of past cultures and even the behaviour

¶76211 Cf. Ch. III, p. 110.

¶76312 See Ch. V.

¶76413 The "upper individuals" combine while the *mass*, breaking up into "lower individuals," tremendously increases its output of energy.

¶765of extant primitive, or, rather, backward, peoples, men still could not help assuming, until psychology revealed their ignorance of their own individuality's transitional nature, that this their own phase of consciousness was invariable.14 The second obstacle is more serious. The evolution of consciousness itself is not simple. It does not proceed in a straight line but in a spiral. Man has passed from the diffusion of the coconscious to the intensity of individuality, but individuality is evidently not final. The inner urge of his psyche's evolution will not let him stay there. Individually he is a "transitional creature." He has to attempt a larger stability, a new union. In consequence of these three phases (the last of which, never as yet wholly achieved, is a return, as it were, to the same position horizontally as the first, but higher vertically than the second) the material symptoms of these causes, the deposits of this vortex tide, are very difficult to read. Looking at the accumulation and ruin of civilizations, the simple belief in material progress gives way before a conviction that history can only be interpreted as a series of collapses. With the psychological interpretation of history we can advance further, and it becomes apparent that social decay is a symptom of the spirit of man volatilizing out of its works, and so we reach the conception that this spirit is always attempting a secular deliverance. When we realize that the only true evolution, the only possible progress, is the evolution of consciousness, then we can understand history as a whole and see the periodic rise and fall of civilization as that of a yeasty crust of material rising under the urge of an invisible energy and falling back as that energy, having raised the stubborn mass to rupture, escapes—only to gather again under the crust and again to raise it.

¶766Two conclusions can, then, be drawn from this very brief but perhaps not unrepresentative selection of historical philosophies. In the first place they themselves show a return

¶76714 See Ch. I.

¶768[page 231] toward the psychological interpretation, and in the second they reveal that human history is cyclic but also progressive, i.e., spiral. A final and very brief illustration of this may be given from an authority already cited on his own subject, the Roman Empire. Professor Rostovtsev sees in the gradual collapse of the Roman imperial system Bolshevism, but his time-sense is distracted by his personal experiences and the discouragement engendered. Time is of the essence of the problem. As well say a “swift-motion” film of plant growth was the actual record of an explosion. The forms are similar; the dynamism different. It may be true that “the army in the third century destroyed the bourgeois civilization of the towns and prepared the way for a culture based on the villages,” but that was a declension of generations, while the Russian Revolution completed its cycle in two years. We move toward the same goal, but we move far faster and our chance of achievement is far greater. Evolving consciousness, at each turn and crest of its cycle, discharges with an intensifying force.

¶769Though, then, judged by its fruits, civilization is not dying and neither biology nor any other science sets a term to its life, this, however, is not to cry Peace and to reassure the rentiers. Civilization has shown a sudden activity, as violent as a volcano’s, little less dangerous to sessile organisms, and certainly as much requiring to be accounted for as any quiet ebb or decay. It is not dying, but it is going through an unprecedented metamorphosis. Some fundamental change is stimulating it. To use the analogy purely as illustration, society, once renewed by inundation, is now refertilized by eruption. Though biology gives no support to the crude notion of a physical cross-breeding of cultures, that does not mean that new ideas have not in the past been due to foreign intrusions, and even conquests, when the community was too set to assimilate outer influences without first being shattered. The conqueror may always have been, and

¶770[page 232] certainly is increasingly, a contributor, though the conquered like to cherish the comforting belief that he is always their inferior in everything save cunning and violence. Even Timour seems to have been a military genius who not only won his victories with inferior forces but also had the supreme originality to grasp so early the value of artillery.15 It may be that the homogeneous community, approximating to co-consciousness, could be internally so unified and so sealed against outer influences that it would be able to exhaust completely all its native resources and at the same time be incapable of drawing on any alien. Such a process might give rise to a "psychic vacuum" whereby the bounds of the system would fall in and a more normal, unexhausted condition would take its place. Such a society, because of its complete homogeneity, could never be revolutionized, it could only be invaded.

¶771In the Modern Age, quite apart from the fact that there are not enough barbarians to go round, the civilized community is certainly not homogeneous and so capable of this complete exhaustion by a general process. Nevertheless it does include an upper and a lower class—a mass base and a top fretted with divergent individuality. But though there exists this difference, it is not an impassable division; rather the entire process of humanity is a breaking up of the mass into individuals and the reintegration of these in a new and larger unity. We have traced the development of the leaders to the cross-roads. We must now go back to the mass and witness the leavening of the whole lump—the supreme Revolution, in the last act of which we are today involved.

¶772We are examining a society which has gone further in individuality than any before have found possible. This peculiar psycho-social condition—a society not homogeneous, but containing at its extremes a mass of men well below and a few above individuality, and yet able to let the

¶77315 See Prof. J. B. Bury, *The Barbarian Invasions*.

¶774[page 233] lower force their way up through the system without dissolving it in the convulsion—this seems the fundamental analysis of the modern age. Such a condition must have as its characteristic symptom Revolution: an upturning of society, caused by a great acceleration in the emergence of individuals, will (without any supposition of a vast and radical cross-breeding between classes) result in a great release of psychic energy, and in this way revolution is the prelude to renewal. Renewal, however, is not a prelude to repetition. Even in the past it has not been so. Increasingly, for an understanding of the process is required a concept of the objective. The only objective which seems discernible is the more general diffusion and ever higher evolution of consciousness obtained via the emergence and process of individuality, until every one of the constituents of civilization has reached at least individual self-consciousness, a new extended time-sense, a realization of the one and the many, and, in consequence, the state is completely relaxed and its machinery, the government, ungeared and disarticulated in the stage of "philosophic anarchy." Unprecedentedly accelerated psychic evolution is the explanation of the Modern Age, and that Age's characteristic symptom, Revolution, is the method whereby this evolution is expressed.16

¶775If there is no outer disturbance while the community disintegrates in order to integrate on a freer, more fruitful

¶77616 Perhaps the most characteristic mark of a low community is that every one keeps all the tabus. The sign of transition is that there is a division, questioning on the one side and the formation of a group within the group on the other, which group we today call Puritans (they often call themselves the revivers of primitive practice) and which wishes to enforce the questioned tabus without permitting discussion. In an advanced community there must be the complete disappearance of this overmastering wish to interfere with the lives of others and to make them conform with a group standard that is only valid at a sub-individual level. Thus, in states of the future, must philosophic anarchy be arrived at. There would be no rules save those of manifest convenience, and so would be established the law-abidingness of the primitive, not because of a conscious individual calculation that it does not pay to break the law, but because of a "sympathetic" sense that the community is the psyche's larger aspect. See Kant: "Voluntary recognition of the moral law is the only possible morality."

¶777[page 234] level, the individuals can pass on to the threshold of a state with which their pioneers are already faced, to a new community coterminous with the new consciousness, controlled and inspired, as is the individual’s body today, by a supreme and immediate sense of the whole.17 There is no other choice before us. Either civilization can follow its pioneers and with their experience carry out the metamorphosis of society through the evolution of consciousness, or arbitrary states, filled with arrested individuals, may still attempt to treat these as co-conscious masses, groups still amenable to mass suggestions and disciplines, and bring the whole of civilization down in ruin. In another war, for instance, what is to be dreaded more even than the actual violence is the complete disappearance of group loyalty, so cynically and stupidly exploited, and a savagery of social chaos unprecedented because there is nothing to contain the terrible energy of an unprecedented number of completely loosed individuals.

¶778Having diagnosed the informing force in the Modern Age as due to an acceleration in the psychic evolution of man, we must now trace in some detail how that force has expressed itself through the upward movement of the main mass. To do this, we must again, as in Chapter V, recapitulate the history of the Modern World, but this time with a view to showing the evolution of the lower individuals. Before doing so it is, however, necessary to repeat that the “starters”—the men who initiate the revolution, making it possible by what is here called their general psychic “effervescence”—are already by the first revolutionary phase, and certainly by the second, themselves belonging to upper individualism; for their own path of release has, by their fortunate accident of position, been made so clear, and therefore the pace of their evolution so much more swift,

¶77917 Such a culture would naturally be very unprecipitant, leaving little deposit because so dynamic. How immaterial must be left to later speculation and experience.

¶780[page 235] that they are already making *away* from individuality while those below them, whom they indirectly affect, are still making toward it.

¶781We have seen that the first symptom of the appearance of the modern world, the world of unattached individuals and revolutions, was the decay of organized religion. It may be said that whenever the number of self-conscious individuals (arrested from psychic development into something higher, and unprovided for by place or position) in any state becomes the majority, the centre of psychic gravity is passed and that state will overturn. So when what we may call the proto-individuals of lower individuality returned from the unsatisfying search for another world and saw that they had been sent on this fool's errand to get them out of the way—or, to put it less dramatically and more historically, when individuals became of too common occurrence for all of them to be bought up or shut up, then the modern world began, and that phase had to express itself in Revolution. A few might, missing out the intermediate stages, pass straight into Quietism. By far the greater number would react as did Luther.

¶782But though the Revolution in its constituents and successive phases—Religious, Political, Economic—may be envisaged and achieved by individuals, conscious and deliberate, it must not be lost sight of that of the larger process of which these phases are only symptoms, of the vast cycle of Revolution itself, of the crisis in the evolution of consciousness and of how they are forwarding that, while failing in their little limited objectives, the individuals, both upper and lower, have been as ignorant as though they were coral animalcules building their reef blindly up to the sea surface where they must die.18

¶78318 "The men who through their thoughts produce great effects in the world, do not, however wise they may be, produce the effects they intend or desire." Bertrand Russell, essay on Newton. See also Ch. I, pp. 24-25.

¶784[page 236] So with the dawn of the sixteenth century the pioneers begin to move, perhaps consciously aware, as upper individuals, that they are moving toward Humanism, as later they will turn to Humanitarianism, but unaware, like ant or bee, of the larger consequences of their act. The masses, too, are ready to crystallize out. The fundamental fact that links together all these phenomena—intellectual inquiry, humane interest, social unrest—is the acceleration of consciousness throughout society, a mysterious advance on which everything else depends, by which everything else is changed, but which we can say is certainly part of the one evolutionary sequence, springing from the same fount of creation as the inexhaustible varieties of which every species is capable the moment the stringent suppression of Natural Selection is raised.

¶785Historically we have studied only the symptoms, the successive aims, the attainment of which these newly isolated individuals thought, in turn, would relieve the discomfort and loneliness and general strangeness of their condition, a condition which, as it was new, they could not but imagine arose from a change in their environment—which another change might correct—instead of from an irrevocable change in themselves.19

¶786That there is an underlying continuous process in the modern age, a persistent though not fully conscious effort to adjust and understand, the curious similarity of the Revolutions' details and their general trend seem to establish. In the Revolutionary Epoch there have been so far four cycles, and each of these four cycles contains four phases, each of which phases corresponds to its appropriate phase in the other three cycles.

¶78719 Change in environment, i.e., easier conditions which relieve the pressure of Natural Selection, may occasionally be the opportunity whereby psychic evolution can take place, but once the spirit has emerged, only a re-establishment of the original conditions—beyond the power of any human repression—could eliminate the new and leave nothing but the old form of consciousness.

¶788[page 237] The first Revolution had of necessity to be Religious. The individuals who made it, being cloister-breakers, were incapable of making any other form. Yet such men, of whom Luther is the type, could not have had their opportunity had not the way been prepared for them. Desperately concerned as they were to solve a problem where they suspected that they had been tricked in no less a matter than eternal salvation, they would nevertheless easily have been crushed—the century-long records of the Inquisition, filled with unremembered names, are evidence—had not more advanced “upper individuals” given them aid, all the more efficacious because unintended.

¶789We have seen that when society attains any complexity it must, if it is to be strong and adequate, buy up the proto-individuals, for not only must it insure itself against their natural treason, but also it requires the services which advanced conscious intelligence alone can give. At the close of the Middle Ages the Church was retaining a vast number of such individuals, men whose powers were well exercised, whose prohibitions were perfunctory, whose privileges were immense.²⁰ The Dark Ages left the Church of the twelfth century with a vast legacy of superstition to be rationalized. That process culminated in Aquinas’ *Summa*. Like a great light on the religious darkness Aristotle had risen. Men saw what a strange accumulation orthodoxy had become.²¹ Each odd addition was no doubt due to some feeling in the dark, but now they saw that an attempt must be made to order the whole. The *Summa* is the final attempt of orthodoxy ²² to arrange the vast and random accumulations of popular use and ignorant custom so as to have an appear-

¶79020 Cardinal Wolsey, who could reasonably ambition the Papacy, acknowledged twenty-two children and made one of them, aged thirteen, a canon of St. Paul’s; while the actual wearers of the Tiara often exceeded by the difference that divides a Pope from a Cardinal his indulgences and crimes.

¶79121 See the Papal pruning ruling that only Saints who had been adored for so many generations should remain on the calendar.

¶79222 The Jesuits prefer Suarez, but the Pope maintains Aquinas.

¶793[page 238] ance of logical order and coherent system. The discovery of Aristotle and the genius of Aquinas brought about this codification; but codification can never be final. After a general pressure came detailed penetrations; after Aristotle, the textual critics. The incessant need for practical reform, the growing sense of decency which challenged actual laxity—symptoms of a clearer consciousness—in turn necessitated a clearer, an ever more detailed knowledge of originals. The individuals retained for such work could not suspect that the very attempt to focus with absolute clearness on the words of authority might show that, like the Martian canals, the lines which to the ordinary unquestioning glance looked so convincing melted away, under higher magnification, into ambiguous traces.

¶794The initial analysis, the preliminary disintegration, is carried on by those individuals high in the service of orthodoxy, men who by its discrediting stand to lose their all. Their wish, which is above suspicion, is to make impregnable the Church's position against the increasing danger of attack. It would have been better for the peace of mind of such if they could have realized that the one impregnable defence is to suggest that there is nothing to attack.

¶795Yet the mistake is inevitable, and indeed there could be no progress did men perceive what they were doing; for the first step must be yielded, it cannot be taken; it must be given for security's sake by those in power, it cannot be seized by those who are under. Cajetan and his textual revisers, Erasmus' Greek Testament more than his satires, are the original forces which percolate the vast dam of unquestioning consent. In time, with their work for the evolutionary process completed, work which never could have been initiated save by sincere champions of orthodoxy, they withdraw, already alarmed at the consequences. The first phase of the first, the Religious, Revolutionary cycle, is over. Through the fissure they have opened, however slight, be-

¶796[page 239] tween what is and what has been accepted, violent excavators follow up. Instead of inquiry to support authority, we have inquiry to challenge it. The first questions were asked in good faith that authority could and would answer them, would clear up small, doubtful points, and would strengthen its own position and that of all the contented; the second, in order to embarrass and with the assurance that they could not honestly be met. In the first phase of the cycle, the individuals who unconsciously make trouble are among the comfortable, among those who had to lose by change and who as far as they took long utilitarian views, as far as their sense of security did not make them carelessly inquisitive or sentimentally humanitarian, thought to strengthen defences on which their safety depended. In the second phase individuals are appearing among the unpossessing, the men who in any case have little to lose and perhaps much to gain if the vested interest they question and which has tried to put them aside proves no more than a vested interest; men who, in this particular religious cycle, on the threshold of the monasteries, look out on the world which they have been persuaded to flee and see their authority deep in enjoyment of that world. The first phase is of its nature a titillating effervescence on the surface, a general increase of cultured inquiry, approved because coming from those who from their position would naturally discover that Truth and the actual, what ought to be and what is, the Church’s teaching and her behaviour, needed only an exacter explanation to render them obviously agreeable. But *parva veritas et ergo praevalet*. It is the unperceived difference, the undisputed concession, that in the end splits the whole vast fabric asunder.

¶797The next stage is cruder and more direct. The general scholarly curiosity that plays upon the surface, this apparently sound interest in restating more exactly the orthodox position, in reviewing the received evidences, is followed by a direct challenge, an explosive force, the more disrup-

¶798tive because of the depth from which it escapes. With such an overturning uprush the crust, however percolated, can make no concession; one or the other must go. Repressed, the force is driven temporarily lower and rendered more violent.

¶799In this drama of personalities, in which our interests are still engaged on one side or the other, it is here important to remind ourselves that we have been concerned for the symptoms. The meaning underneath is the process whereby, through the forms of this struggle, the entire homogeneous mass is beginning to break up into individuals.

¶800We have then individualism, an intenser consciousness, appearing first at the top, as a general ferment showing itself through a new inquiry into presuppositions, and then, extending deeper, becoming from repression far more charged with emotion; in short, recognizably Revolutionary. The general intelligent awakening of inquiry is followed by the stronger feeling which must lead to false simplification—an all-embracing, instantly satisfying, illusory generalization. Erasmus and Cajetan are superseded by the far cruder, more personal, more arbitrary Luther. One stage lower penetrates individualism, and Luther in his turn is eliminated by complete nationalists. The first revolutionary cycle, the religious, thus terminates, having completed the curve until it reaches reaction. Nevertheless progress is there. The goal aimed at has not been attained, religion has not yielded its secret, the individual discovers he has as little proof whether he will survive death as had his deluded forefathers. How could it otherwise be? He could not recognize that his questions arise as a symptom of his evolution, a birth-cry of his individuality (which he thought had always existed), which could only be answered when he should come to realize that individuality lately born must soon grow into another state. The advance, then—though as yet no one can be aware of it—is the great increase of individuality—while a few at the

¶801[page 241] top will already be prepared to carry consciousness even beyond that. There are ever more individuals in the community, and as their numbers increase they are increasingly uncertain whether Religion can satisfy them. In consequence political secession becomes the movement of the day. It should not, however, be lost sight of that this secession from civilization, from the great unifying idea that the Holy Roman Empire expressed, is still an “upper-class” matter. All the religious, from cloister to curia, make really an upper class. For this, we must bear in mind, is the first cycle of the Age of Revolution, and so, under the upper belt of humanity which it affects, there still lie vast masses on which the three phases of Revolution, which are to follow this first, will draw, until only today do we begin to see an end of the process, with all human beings in civilized states almost completely individualized. In the sixteenth century, the date we are now considering, the unity of village with village and of town with town in the new nationhood is a synthetic force among the simpler, who till then had owed such national union as they had to autocratic compulsion and had treated any stranger, even from a township within sight, as a foreigner. This fact shows that while the upper part of society was undergoing analysis, and even at the very top volatilizing, the lower groups, on which it had been reared, were coalescing into larger units.

¶802It is inevitable therefore that the next cycle of the Revolutionary Movement should be political. The deposition of authority in religion had not given man the happiness to which, as a newly emerged individual, he never questioned he had ever had the right. Individualism was disillusioned as to a future life but still took immediate happiness for granted. In this second cycle of the Revolutionary Movement, Hobbes may be taken as the type corresponding to Cajetan and Erasmus in the previous. He is a pioneer to Revolution because he makes self-conscious that state-action,

¶803[page 242] which can only be carried on, we now see, if unconscious. So his outspokenness earned the abuse of the very practi­tioners whom he—less wise by thought than they instinc­tively—imagined he was supporting. Hobbes’ thinking marks a turning-point in sociology because he was the first philosopher of the modern world to see through the illusion of the Golden Age. But though his hostility to sentiment and his indifference to theodicy allowed him to perceive the hardness of early man’s environment, it left him blind to the change in psychic heredity. Like Machiavelli, he imagined the man he knew without any of the insulations of civilization and saw that primitive life must be “poor, nasty, brutish, short”—from the standpoint of a timid, carefully kept, elderly domestic philosopher of the seventeenth century. That a savage has different values, and that therefore fight­ing, which filled the philosopher of fear with panic, might seem not brutish but glorious; that the savage also has a different standard of life and therefore poverty and cleanli­ness are neither absolute (Hobbes’ own standards in these matters would certainly not satisfy an American artisan)— these facts the philosopher overlooked. He was not, there­fore, likely to perceive the profounder mistake he made in calling primitive man’s life short. He had not the anthro­pological information to warn him that savages do not al­ways cut short their days by violence, that in fact life may have been in many parts of the world more peaceful and safer at 6000 B.C. than in 1600 A.D. But he was psychologically stupid in applying his own intense and nervous time-sense to the child mind of the uncivilized. Who does not know that time is shorter the older we are? The further back we go, the slower it moves, until our first few years equal all the rest. At the threshold of self-consciousness we can see the timeless condition of the animal that cannot compare today with yesterday or imagine itself other than at the moment it is. The child is almost immortal because with the change

¶804[page 243] of time it, too, is fundamentally changed. The tragedy of age is that we lose the power of going on, and time therefore races away from us.23 But the profoundest misjudgment comes, in his famous definition, first. "Solitary" only an individual can be. Hobbes had thought himself back into the past. There was never a Golden Age, he maintained; the present is bad, but any other age was worse, because the environment has not changed; the earth is hostile to its creature, and he, shorn of the defences he has slowly reared against it, must perish miserably.

¶805We know that man is gregarious. We know that his social and psychic heredity can change and has changed far more swiftly than his physical. The completely vitiating mistake that Hobbes and the "Golden Age" theologians both made was that they saw the man each knew himself to be, a self-conscious individual, unchanging all down the ages. "Human Nature is always Human Nature." "It is only the environment that man changes, not himself." (It has long been remarked how early psychologists, working solely by the introspective method, produced an over-intellectualized picture of present-day man, because they were themselves intellectually so far in advance of the normal human being; the very act of introspection as it were precipitating the clouds of emotion, leaving consciousness clearly rational.) It is Hobbes' mistakes, however, that are instructive. The lucid force of his misinterpretation leaves no doubt as to his position and the limitation it imposes on a mind however free and vigorous. He, the champion of political authority—because his whole work is to bring into acute contrast the individual and the State—is the grandfather of the political Revolution.24

¶80623 See Ch. I.

¶80724 It may seem that to pass over the Hobbesian estimate of fear as the one force which holds society together is to be unjust to him as a political philosopher in his own right. But though fear is a factor in the behaviour of all animals, it is a complete rationalization if it is used to attempt sat-

¶808Follows Locke, no advocate, but an open inquirer, the friend and adviser of the constitutional revolutionaries of 1688, an individualist whose rejection of inherent ideas—“There is nothing in the understanding that was not first in the senses”—showed not only the degree of his psychological isolation, but was in itself very dangerous to authority. Voltaire and most intellectual Frenchmen accept him as their philosophic guide. The movement’s centre passes over to France, and the phase of general effervescence becomes unmistakable. The Encyclopaedists speculate freely on human institutions and, as unsuspectingly as the proto-individualists, take individuality for granted. Essentially intellectual, their preliminary part, of disintegration, performed, they give way to the condition in which emotion must dominate.25 It is interesting to note that the succession of Rousseau to Hobbes seems to reverse the natural process. Is not Rousseau with his *Social Contract*, his simple primitive happiness, prior to Hobbes’ realism? The respective positions are probably due to the facts (a) that Rousseau is really further away from the theologians, because the doctrine of original sin, of man’s being fallen, was of more practical importance to the theologians and brought their position and Hobbes’ closer together than Rousseau’s premise of primitive innocence still present and only hidden by an evil social order, and (b) that Hobbes is in sympathy with the cold individualism of the Renaissance. He fears and hates the people who he feels must be held down by force or dread of it, realizing, if unconsciously, that there are present in-

¶809isfactorily to account for the conduct of any of the gregarious, while in so far as it is made the complete explanation of the force which holds human society together it is patently false. It is a paralysis, not an inspiration, and a society whose individuals are kept together mainly through its coercion will divide into slaves who will not defend it and rebels who will successfully attack it.

¶81025 See Ch. V for a review of this process from the upper-individual standpoint.

¶811dividuals on whom collective suggestion, which in primitive communities dispenses with force, no longer adequately works. Rousseau is of the Humanitarian age. All his mistakes are mistakes of emotionalism. He has been called the essential modern, and his refurbishing of the golden age in spite of increasing knowledge of savage conditions (he maintained that perhaps “natural conditions” might be found in China!) shows how emotional development 26 may distort historical knowledge. Hobbes, with less knowledge but more prejudice in favour of the actual, describes objectively primitive conditions, though incapable of realizing the subjective psychological compensatory factors in the problem.

¶812Therefore, as in the preceding cycle Luther and the Bible had been the personality and the symbol, so now Rousseau is the man and the *Social Contract* the book, the one the emotional centre and the other the false comprehensive generalization around which the secondary stage of individuality crystallizes out. The political cycle, like the religious that precedes it, attempts universalism. Rousseau’s Gospel—“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains” —is curiously similar to Luther’s, the only difference being that the chains Luther saw were those of Pope and Devil— the Princes he afterward inspired to crush the peasants without mercy—while Rousseau, the Devil being disposed of and the Pope negligible, saw that men were still miserable, and so their secular oppressors must be broken.27

¶81326 Cf. the growing sensibility of the seventeenth century, which found the Thirty Years’ War worse than the Hundred.

¶81427 Coulton in *The English Village* and *Five Centuries of Religion*, Vol. I, points out that throughout the Middle Ages, even indeed from the Dark Ages on, there has been not only a steady and accelerating economic advance, but that this economic improvement made possible a psychological intensification, i.e., the emergence of individuality. The trouble, it is evident, is due to the emergence of individuality’s being itself the cause and not being caused by economic change. The rate of emergence of individuals must become greater than any provision for them, than any improvement in their environment, can keep pace with, far less catch up with. This environment is suitable enough for co-conscious groups, but is of course disregardful of, undesigned for, individuals. Even when the individual does gain attention,

¶815[page 246] As Luther’s universalism broke down into nationality and within each state rendered the new classes, in their attempt to stabilize the new order, in their reactionary dread of the new learning, and perhaps even in a disgust at a first glimmer of a new feeling for the masses, for a space more oppressive than the old—who had exploited largely through prescriptive right—so Rousseau’s universalism leads to a Committee of Public Safety at home and a campaign of overwhelming Imperialism abroad—the reply of the Realist to the Emotionalist.

¶816Each reaction, however, is less firmly established than the last. The Congress of Vienna has scarcely risen, Napoleon himself is not dead, when again effervescence, general inquiry and philanthropic expansion, is apparent. Salvation, the attainment of the consciously good life, had been attempted through Religion and through Politics. The new way and the old, Authority and Private Judgment, Autocracy and Democracy, are both in actual use in Europe at the same time. It is obvious, then, that these are not the essentials of a man’s life, of the individual’s happiness, for he is to be found living under either, and wise onlookers can be disagreed as to which condition is the better. Yet the struggle cannot be dismissed as nothing more than three hundred years of mistaken effort, as vain where it succeeded as where

¶817has a chance to shatter things to bits and remould them, he cannot know what he really wants, cannot be content with what he seizes on to satisfy himself; for as he is ignorant of his late emergence, so he can have no suspicion that he must continue to evolve and that the cure of his malaise cannot be found in any improvement of his environment but in the expansion of his own passionately private intensity. In the late cycles of the Revolutionary Age another factor enters which increases the general distress of disappointment. In Ch. V we have seen that the political Revolution, the central term of the four Revolutionary waves, is also a crisis in the development of Upper Individualism. Faced by the problem of a society which has obviously erupted, the layer of the Upper Individuals, for some time drawing apart, itself at this crisis definitely ruptures. The intellectuals draw away. The emotionalists have for a moment a free hand. We have seen (p. 237) in the first, the Religious phase, of Revolution, rudimentary Upper Individualism started the Revolution, the upsurging of masses toward individuality. But in the second, upper individualism not only is the “starter,” but owing to the continued development of itself and the conse-

¶818[page 247] it failed. Man was not only eliminating much that at first sight had seemed to be significant and later was shown to be irrelevant, he was not only by "proof of exhaustion" finding out where lay the essentials of his happiness; he was discovering himself all the while; he was learning to discriminate between what the community and what the individual wants; he was beginning, at first unconsciously, to recognize not only that these are different but that he himself is not constant, that he is changing, that progress is increasingly in himself.

¶819This is shown by the fact that each phase of revolution brings man closer to the central problem, the heart of the whole difficulty, himself. The new effervescence ushers in the third, the Economic, Revolution. Representative of this stage of general inquiry among the prosperous, the upper individuals, is Robert Owen. His great success and influence remarkably illustrate both the evolution of upper individualism and also its place in and effect on the Revolutionary development of the masses toward full individuality. Though so close to the last (the political) Revolutionary eruption, his teaching is supported among the vested interests even by the Duke of York and by many prominent intellectuals. Then, as must all fundamental emotionalists, he begins to show that he is subject not to what pays, but to some urge

¶820quent dichotomy, it interferes with and aggravates the evolution of the lower individuals. This interference expresses itself in the compassion of those moving out of the intensity and insulation of individuality (and so touched by a new but still unenlightened sympathy) for the political, economic, and social conditions of those who are just moving into individuality. This leads to miserable misunderstandings. The philanthropist, imputing his own psychic condition to his patient, expects that if he relieve the patient of outer pressures, a nature similar to his own will appear. But environmental equalization, the offer of free conditions, which the philanthropist, owing to his psychic advance, is able to use for greater social unity, must only make more grasping a consciousness which is still to attain the pole of individuality. Whether psychic evolution can be accelerated or not, it will not be so by those advanced trying to bring on the backward by giving them economic resources which their condition precludes their being able to treat as means, not ends. This is the real tragedy of Rousseauism, of the author whom Acton adjudged to have "produced with his pen more effect than any other man who ever lived."

¶821[page 248] of feeling regardless of consequences. His denial of God, which was the signal for his abandonment by intellect and authority, was, as these allies consciously or unconsciously recognized, a confession that he was no longer bound to discover that society was fundamentally right, that small changes would make discontented thousands into God-fearing, throne-bearing citizens, and that he would follow his feeling for individual justice even to social destruction. This open declaration of Atheism has also another significance. God, as a property that King or Pope must preserve, is no longer worth having. Creative Power is incarnate in man. The Universe, stabilized with a marvellous smooth system of Natural Laws, runs (as it *must* run) on ball bearings, that man, on the steady platform, may be free to do as he pleases. As with Rousseau, but even more consciously, the only active factor to be taken into account is fellow man: "Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the Master of Things." Once set him free, said Rousseau, and all will be well. After the French experiment, Owen could not be quite so simple; besides, even by then, Economics had gone further toward becoming a science than politics is today. "Only teach him to live socially and co-operatively and all will be well," is the somewhat more elaborate formula.28 Too many kings and privileged had gone for a reformer not to be aware that part of the difficulty was not privilege but ignorance and even greed among the people themselves. Heredity is not yet suspected, still less different layers in the intensity of consciousness; men are assumed to be homogeneous and the mass is good; evil is but an accident of unnatural conditions. Happiness is native to man, and a little adjustment will put the matter right. Society, it is true, may have to be remodelled, but man need not change. So Owen intellectualizes the peremptory instinctive demand of his obsessing

¶82228 See also Fourier's belief in industrial co-operation as a social panacea. Bury's *The Idea of Progress*, p. 279.

¶823[page 249] sensibility.29 Thus the Religious, the Political, and the Economic cycles are bounded by a common belief, that the present discontent and distress spring from some temporary, adventitious trouble, that man will return to his original happiness quite easily by a brief and obvious change of his conditions. The three gospels of the three cycles vary only in their prescriptions, not in their diagnoses. The sensible Reactionaries, when in each due course their turn comes, cannot cure man of this optimism. They are right in pointing out that his efforts to wrench himself round into a perfect and delightful rectitude always fail, but they are wrong in maintaining that all would have been well if only he had stayed still. That he could not do, any more than a child may by taking thought prevent itself from growing up. Owing to their inevitable intellectualization, neither Reactionary nor Revolutionary could recognize the fact, which alone can explain this process, its repeated rise, its successive relapse, the fact that man the individual is something quite new and that they themselves, though they think of themselves as fatally opposed, are complementary to each other, are part, though they would reprobate it, of one process, the elucidation of consciousness. The gap between their diverging developments makes increasingly plain the area where a reconciling term is to be sought; their double influence on the masses is as inevitable and as necessary. Not till the end of the third, the Economic, cycle, did men even suspect themselves of being other than they found themselves thinking that they were; far less suspect the Natural Order. The individual was something given, with which reformers might work, sure that the supply would always be of standard quality; hence the generalizations

¶82429 "The first phase of socialism, its sentimental phase, was originated by St. Simon and Owen. Marx was to bring it down from the clouds. Both in its earlier and later forms the economic doctrines rest on a theory of society depending on the assumption that social institutions have been solely responsible for the vice and misery which exist and, changed, would abolish vice and misery." Bury's *The Idea of Progress*, p. 234.

¶825[page 250] about man and the certainty that the problem of making him happy was a simple one. Thereafter the first real step toward a scientific observation of progress, a scientific understanding of revolution, could be made, for men could realize that it was their own consciousness which was evolving, and much that they took to be objective change in the outer world was in reality the projected shadow of that growth. But not till the fourth Revolutionary cycle is closing, when the whole Revolutionary Epoch is completing, when the whole modern age in which we have lived and moved and had our being, with such completeness that we could only assume that this was life and there was no other, is passing away like a dissolving view, will men suspect that the Universe itself is not so blank, so steady, so neutral, as they have taken for granted.30

¶826Owen, then, and his fellow theorists are still mainly environmentalists. They wish to attack conditions instead of attempting to understand man. They take for granted that they know him and all that he can want. A new structure of society—still, because of the ignorance about the novelty of individuality, thought of as a return to primitive justice—must be achieved. But Owen is beginning to suspect that this is not all. He feels after a new spirit. History does not repeat itself; it recapitulates and resumes. Though they all act the part of preliminary ferments, Erasmus and Cajetan, Hobbes and Locke, Bentham 31 and Owen; all are men of their age, and each, though he serves his generation, is tinged with the spirit of the age that will fulfil and super-

¶82730 Their release may come when they realize, as Eddington has forecast, that Natural Law is itself only a phase, and a short one, of man's rapidly evolving thought; the link between an "aliveness" (which is considered arbitrary because it is as little understood by man as his own nature, which it mirrors) and a Universe which will be manifestly, eternally purposive because we understand ourselves.

¶82831 Bentham, though his life began in the Political cycle, lives into the Economic and belongs to the latter. His influence in spirit is economic; he shapes the Mill influence, and his own great power was mainly indirect, only becoming dominant in the Economic phase.

¶829[page 251] sede him. As Erasmus was not purely Religious but largely Humanist and by so much political; as the Physiocrats and the Encyclopaedists begin to realize that Politics is not enough, some science like Economics must supplement it; so Bentham and Owen are not unaware of something moving beyond the narrow rationality of Economics—of Psychology.

¶830So is illustrated in biographic language the course, traced in the previous chapter, of the upper individualism along its own advanced path of psychic evolution. The actual intellectual inquiries of these upper individuals are tangential to the main sweep of the cycle. In it their significance lies in their restarting of general speculation after the repeated failure of the previous generalization: their conclusions are of secondary importance. So in the Economic cycle, as in the two before, in a little time the doctrines of the pioneers: Socialism and voluntary discipline; Co-operation and love; Laissez-faire, Free Trade, and the calm contemplation of and pious submission to the majestic fulfilment of Economic Law: 32 the teaching of each of the speculative theorists in turn, after appealing to their equals, began to seem inhuman to their inferiors, to the increasing uprush of new, uneducated individuals. These, as ever, are resolved to be happy, and failing that, they are determined to find some one whom they can blame and attack for their failure. So it is that Luther and Rousseau find their successor in Karl Marx; the Bible and the *Social Contract*, in *Das Kapital*. “It,” Professor Hernshaw has said, “is a work of dogmatic mythology, the formula of a new religion of repulsion, the Koran of the Class War.” The Capitalist takes the place of Pope and King. The dominantly emotional phase of the cycle is present and crystallizes round the false generalization which can have, and is meant to have, a direct fighting

¶83132 “Bastiat, Whately, and Bentham all talk of Economic Laws as rigidly as of physical.” J. M. Keynes, *The End of Laissez-Faire*, p. 21.

¶832[page 252] appeal. Men know what they have to do: not to think and choose, adapt and compromise, search and adjust; but to strike hard at an accursed, unnatural thing, and when it falls, as it will at the first boldly delivered blow, to go up straight before them into a New Jerusalem.

¶833Each cycle of the Revolutionary Epoch, it is perhaps necessary to say here, is of course affected and disturbed by contingent issues. Even in the serene, frictionless heavens, no body keeps its perfect orbit, but shows perturbation and divagation as external influences radiate its system. But for the unique opportunity presented in Russia by the late preservation and, at the last, the complete collapse of a mediaeval autocracy, the Economic cycle might have lacked its fulfilment.

¶834Such a statement may need explanation. Some who would allow that the cause described as underlying these cycles is not imaginary might nevertheless hold that they must end with the Economic; that this cycle, because it is the one in which we have been born and bred, is the final, after which Society will either attain stability or "go back to barbarism." They believe, therefore, that though Russia has gone first, all other societies which are economic must follow. Such an assumption is due to the natural failure—which we have already seen causing the graver mistake as to individuality—to "calculate for displacement," to allow for the exaggerated proportions in which our own time must appear. Indeed if the last stage of the Economic cycle does not work itself out in the next ten years, if actual revolution, a lava flow of internal violence condensing into a cold, hard, narrow nationalism, does not break out before that decade is over, then, because of the fundamental acceleration whereby each cycle is gone through at a greater speed than the last, the initial phase, the period of effervescence, of the fourth cycle will be too far advanced for the third in its decay to be able to hold it back, for we have seen there was no pause even

¶835between the final stage of the second and the first stage of the third. Indeed Russia itself would have been more at home in a Revolution belonging to the second, the Political, Cycle.33 But civilization as a whole, to which, in spite of Pobedonostsev, Russia, largely because of Peter, could not help belonging, had reached the Economic cycle and thither the nation had to be hurried forward, passing all intermediate phases when in a couple of years the Muscovite passed through emotional imagination to clumsy, almost blind, action. Inevitably, and at corresponding speed, we reach the turn of reaction, and nationalism is now probably a stronger force in Russia than ever was Tsarism or ever can be Marxism.34

¶83633 Not the first, however, for though much of her was mediaeval, Peter, who was essentially a "hero" breaking with all priest-kingliness, by subordinating the Church, without divine assumptions on his own part, made the nation essentially a political, not a religious, unit.

¶83734 Not Leninism, for that is precisely the ladder whereby the doctrinaire Communist can climb down from the lurid clouds among which he has not found firm ground to the material patriotism which for some time must be the inspiration of the large number of peasants newly come to individuality and feeling for the first time that they own a unit called Russia which they must defend and advance against the envy of less happy lands. (Already *novi homines*, sprung from those peasants, who are making themselves rich quickly, are asserting the heavy authority which we have seen in Western Europe this type has to exert when it first gets into the saddle, while the clique which actually governs the Union of Soviet Republics from Moscow is more autocratic than Napoleon and as pitiless as the German princelings who, hounded on by Luther, massacred their peasantry. Perhaps it should be added that the "unit" Russia for which patriotism may be felt is of course an abstraction only possible in this age through the suggestive power of the press modifying the otherwise definite limitation—the range of the senses is the limit of the emotions. Nevertheless if places are not found for the new individuals they will, as formerly, destroy the State. As it is, the Russian peasants' patriotism is of course a very crude thing: it works for his village against the town—*vide* the holding up of the corn—and the stronger it is, the more—as it is a form of jealousy—will it make him dispute political control with any others who share his political feeling. As in ancient Greece, patriotism will, therefore, be a self-determinationist dissolvent, not a unifier of society. It is also well known that the dictators of Russia, neither through their own sympathies—none of the central oligarchs are peasants—nor through doctrinaire Marxism, can have any place for the peasant.) Marxism is *Das Kapital*, an international book far more rigid and comprehensive than the Bible. But Leninism is no code. In his thought, notoriously opportunist, as the N.E.P. witnessed, he can always be claimed as Russian, the peculiar possession, the palladium, of a new nationalism.

¶838But here again history does not slavishly follow the past. Indeed knowledge of the past assures that it will not be repeated.35 The leaders of the Revolution, although they may accept Nationalism, are taking the greatest pains that if possible the Napoleonic transition shall be omitted.36 Throughout every vicissitude, behind every objective, even

¶83935 Individuality is, however, the supreme danger to the Soviets, and if unattacked, their Empire may disintegrate from that inner crystallization. Already (since the end of 1927) the unity of the Party is gone and the powerful and numerous minority has been scattered over Siberia and other Muscovite hinterlands.

¶84036 It cannot go unnoticed that both Bolshevism and Fascism are making most significant and unparalleled efforts to re-merge the individual. No doubt the leaders feel not only the supreme danger to their idea that the individual must be and also that their idea of this new intensity of corporateness must mean somehow the sublimation of individuality, but they themselves are men of action reinforced by intellectual upper individuals in revolt, as we know Lenin and Mussolini were, against the sentimental upper individuals who (just before) had done so much to make clear the way for their, the newest, form of tyranny. Naturally (the fact of the violent coercion shows) the directors are passionate individuals themselves and are therefore the supreme obstacle and treason to their own idea. Their behaviour, whether in Russia or Italy, confines their action to a national area, the man-of-action willed state. There is one more illuminating aspect in this comparison. The return to nationality anywhere today can only be a reaction. We know that Russia will go on revolving toward universalism—though Marxism and all economic gospelling is dead. But Italy's case is of greater interest. For Mussolini started with hysteric nationalism and cannot get beyond that. He maintains that his movement was a reply to international forces and he is now divided as to whether his solution is only for Italy (if so he would be denied his passion for preaching to other societies) or is really a social system for the whole world, as he suggests with the Holy Roman Imperial analogies; if this is so, his own egocentric position is challenged. See Herr Réné Fülöp-Miller's *The Mind and Face of Bolshevism*: “The Bolshevists find in the complete absorption of all individuals in a million-headed impersonal mass, the ideal development.” And *The Universal Aspects of Fascism*, by J. S. Barnes, with preface by Mussolini. The author declares that thought took a wrong turn at the Renaissance. The Reformation, Democracy (the Political Revolution), and Industrialism (the Economic Revolution) are all consequences of this error. The State cannot be in any way at variance with itself; therefore it exists to maintain the moral law, and it has to see that the interests of the individual never clash with those of the State—so there can be no individuality if the State is really operative. Individual liberty is to be abolished and the “After-work” Association is to organize leisure as thoroughly as work. It does not need much political penetration to see that these Latin and Slav movements are different only in accident; in substance they are the same, while their love of mechanization (which is as far as their ignorance allows them to recapture the idea of group consciousness) for “efficiency” and vast quantitative economic output makes them turn to America. They needs must love the biggest wherever they see it.

¶841[page 255] those the attraction of which we ourselves feel, under the turning of each cycle we have to discern their cause and driving force, the uprush of consciousness into individuality—and on. These individuals must always be seeking expression and satisfaction by trial and error, following their own psychic evolution, working out their own salvation, though blindly. However the topical system may seem to contain and exploit them, the force of which they are the transitional crystallization will, when its hour comes, disrupt the temporary devices to which it has been put. Individuality has been used and has lent itself to achieve a new Religion, a new Polity, a new Economics, but always its real objective has been self-satisfaction: "Their Gods are as the Fates assign: Their prayer and all the world's is 'Mine.' " Where, in Russia, a great untouched reservoir existed, for the third time in the history of the Modern World a sudden condensive precipitation of individuality has taken place. Roused by the growing sense of unhappiness, of being unprovided for, the individual comes fully awake, to realize that all the revolutionary changes of the modern world have left him in himself no better off, with none of the ultimate demands answered, any more than the tossing of an uneasy sleeper leaves him at rest. As far as the individual is concerned, the Movements have been no more than involuntary reactions to unpleasant sensations. The original demands of groups and societies are undeniably economic, but in the effort of making them, the individual develops, and his demands must be, with increasing insistence, psychological. He is still, as we have seen, attempting to satisfy them indirectly through external channels, but as he comes to realize clearly that they are not fundamentally economic, a break must come. It is this realization among the educated today, their search for a more fundamental basis of experience and satisfaction, for a truer and more objective knowledge of the psyche, that seems to

¶842[page 256] be part at least of the effervescence which is the initial stage of the Fourth Revolutionary Cycle. Certainly now Psychology is the mode, as once was Religion, then Politics, and till the end of the nineteenth century Economics. Thinking people feel that it matters supremely in a way that they cannot imagine its three predecessors' ever again being significant. It has its furious controversies, which, it has been remarked, are religious in their bitterness and the sundering of their schisms. Myriads already look to it as a gospel—a power which may really set them free and keep them happy, a reality behind the shams of Church and State and Counting-House.

¶843Is this Cycle, then, also, to follow the same development? Is some self-assured, crookedly simplifying fanatic to succeed to the effervescence which is overflowing from Vienna and Zurich and with a false compendium sweep credulous multitudes as Mrs. Eddy once did, as Mrs. Besant almost does? Is free inquiry to give way to dogma, and dogma to lead on to crusade and persecution? Only if history repeats without exception—but it is the exception which is always present and which makes for progress. It seems almost inevitable, but it is that "almost" which has always preserved life from repetition. The four Cycles complete the whole Revolutionary Epoch of which they are the parts. In them man has been carried round the whole ambit of experience. In the first he, a new individual, still in the monastic swaddling-bands, looks for an individual, though other-worldly, salvation. Discovering that this is an illusion and disheartened, he turns to seek salvation here, in Politics, in Economics. After that there is nothing left but himself. He can no longer fail to discover the real seat of his distress, his own psychic growth. The Psychological Cycle of Revolution ends the cycles because the whole Revolutionary Epoch is at base a psychic process, which takes these preceding forms while it is making for consciousness, but which ap-

¶844[page 257] pears in its true nature and is solved when that self-consciousness is attained. The Revolutionary Age has this profound purpose. It is not an aimless turning over. It ends because self-consciousness is sufficiently attained to end it. As the Mediaeval world came to an end when individuality became too rife to be contained any longer, when it began to set the mode of life, so the Modern world comes to an end, passes into another condition of consciousness, when there are sufficient self-conscious “upper” individuals to know that individuality is not enough, that the world is not worth going on with unless there is something bigger than individuality, that the whole thing is futile if it is not to lead to a larger unity, a single purposive consciousness, that without that, individuality’s intense force cannot but drive civilization to suicide.

¶845To many sociologists who have not arrived at their conclusions from psychological premises, it is already evident that the great danger now is that society, having guarded itself against all outward dangers, having the power to put far from it all threat of violence, will itself fail at the centre from a lack of nerve, a stroke of paralysis. Mankind, having at last raised itself above the floods of circumstance, will break down through a Babel of irreducible individuals. The psychological condition has already nearly reached saturation point. The numbers of self-conscious individuals are nearly sufficient. The centre of gravity in the community has hardly ever before been so high. The intensity as well as the extent of self-consciousness has its only precedents in the two last city-state phases, and yet today men live in individual-swamping empires and work in vaster economic systems, and the empires and systems compete as intensely as once did city states.

¶846One thing is certain; the present state of affairs cannot be continued, not for a generation, not for a decade. The choice is before the individual: What will he do? Is recessionalism—

¶847[page 258] recessionalism which is the *vera causa* of that curious post-war nationalistic excuse, self-determination—the *liberum veto* of civilization—the right to secede from the empires that exploited them—is this force to win and individuals to retreat from empire, from nation, from city-state—always seeking in vain for the social environment in which they may find the place and value they need but can never get, till they end, club in hand, each at bay in the mouth of his lair? Or can individuality itself evolve and make, with a new direct sense of social communion, a society which can really be worthy of all service and so embrace humanity and the world?

¶848On the evidence of the cycles that compose it, it does not seem possible that the Revolutionary Age can itself any longer continue. It is itself due to change, and as the economic cycle was itself cut short, so the psychological should be cut even shorter. For not only does each cycle move through its three phases at an accelerated rate over that which precedes it, but this, the last, is itself the culmination of the whole, the solution of Revolution. As each cycle becomes increasingly influenced by the cycle that is to succeed it, so this last must be affected by the entirely new order into which it leads.

¶849We have seen also that, while the mass of humanity has, with Revolutionary outbursts, been breaking up into individuals, those at the top, who have already attained full individuality, are, first intellectually and then emotionally, making for a super-individual condition. We may assume, then, that the mass will in its turn become intellectually and emotionally capable of super-individual experience. This is, however, but a deduction, and we have seen, when considering the upper individuals, that is not enough; it only points to a possibility. Either humanity must find, completing and uniting its intellectual requirement and its emotional need, factual experience, or it will collapse.

¶850[page 259] There are such indications, but, as we have seen in the last chapter, the condition to which they point is itself not at present wholly agreeable to the intellectual or even to the emotional. Indeed to many it would be easier and even pleasanter to imagine collapse, if collapse could be gradual, a gentle senescence of society—but that cannot be. At least there can be no doubt that an advance out of individuality is our only chance; otherwise we crash. It has already been noticed that the growing economic complexity of civilization, alone, demands, if the whole machine is not to collapse in wreckage, a constantly extended time-sense on the part of the individuals who compose it. Individuals who have no sense of the future cannot be controlled by threats or spurred by rewards. But there is a very definite limit beyond which the realization of the future begins to exert an opposite effect. The individual who lives with a constant and clear sense of his own impending and inevitable extinction will hardly devote himself to the community as may one who feels himself part of it. The more perfect becomes our actuarial foresight, the further we live in the future, the more definite must become the certainty of physical death. The larger the society, the more complex its machinery, the more consciously calculating must become its individuals. It is obvious that there is a very definite term to such extensions. If in psychological evolution there is nothing beyond the individual, the more conscious he becomes, the more must he be either paralyzed by a sense of vanity or stung to attempt the indifference which can follow surfeit. From this aspect individuality itself shows that it cannot be stable. It must press on to its limit and there either come to disaster or be transformed. The Revolutionary Age is itself revolving and passing into another. External, indirect, working through Religion, Politics, Economics, Psychology, it is about to be eliminated, because as we have seen these are but symptoms of changes in the spirit of man, they are con-

¶851centric stages of Progress, which now has penetrated so close to us that it can change us directly. It has long been a commonplace to say that the psychological progress of the twentieth century will go far beyond the physical progress of the nineteenth. That is as certain as that there will be any future, but it may be doubted whether there is the faintest realization of what that change must mean. Such an advance cannot be anything but qualitative. Up to the present we have increased our means, not our ends, our instruments rather than our faculties, far less our qualities. What is upon us is a revolution no longer in our conditions but in ourselves, in the very terms of our consciousness.

¶852But apart from human necessity, apart from this negative proof that it cannot last, is there any evidence that individuality is passing into another category of consciousness? Is there empiric proof that individuality is preparing for a revolution in itself? In general terms we can say that all evolution is from the complex to the expressed, from the diffuse to the intense and back again to the resolved. Life is a constant process of focus and expansion. This is the systole and diastole of Time itself, the alternating current that drives the Universe. From co-consciousness has been evolved self-conscious individuality, and from individuality ought there not be developed, in the course of evolution, a superconsciousness, a common self-consciousness? To some of the evidence for this development we are blind, because, as we found difficulty in recognizing the survival of a more primitive form of consciousness among backward communities, so in ourselves we must find it even more difficult to recognize not only the vestiges of that old generality but rudiments of a larger field. We are undoubtedly faced with a very determined, though unformulated, unwillingness to recognize symptoms which would indicate the oncoming of a condition as far above individuality as co-consciousness is below it.

¶853[page 261] The evidence which points to individuality's expansion must, therefore, because of the prejudice which causes us to disregard it no less than because of the importance of the issue, be reviewed in another chapter.

¶854To conclude this, a brief summary of the argument, so far as it has been developed, may be given. We have seen that the emergence of individual self-consciousness is the cause of history. Happy is the people that has no annals, for they have no loneliness, no failure, no death. As a symptom of this condensation of consciousness, civilization rises and subsides when this informing spirit volatilizes. At each emergence of individuality, however, the psychological evolution of man attains somewhat higher before it relapses, so that with the Modern or Revolutionary Age we can see clearly—a condition of which we have only the faintest traces earlier—that individuality is not the end of that evolution—something further is to be and must be attempted. Hence the Revolutionary character of the Modern Age, caused (a) by an unparalleled release of individuals from the monasteries as well as from the masses, and (b) by an unprecedented advance of the highest individuals towards a new understanding and a new sympathy. Contemporaneously with the Revolutionary cycles another movement has been proceeding. As during the Middle Ages, while the centre of social gravity was at co-conscious level, individuality was present and gave amazing displays, so during the second part of the Modern Age a new phase of consciousness has been increasingly evident, and the nineteenth century, though it was supposed to be essentially the age of individualism, was not really so. Indeed periods often call themselves by their father's names, as it is especially difficult for a condition of consciousness to realize that it has changed.

¶855The essence of that change we must now describe.

¶856[page 262] CHAPTER VII

¶857THE ENLARGEMENT OF INDIVIDUALITY: (A) PSYCHO-PHYSICAL

¶858SUMMARY

¶859THE evidence for super-normal faculties evolving: Contrary to prejudice, our senses are already sharper than the savages', even though at present our senses are distracted. Sight itself is keener than we can even at present use. New categories permit the awareness of new experience. The intelligence is actually building up the senses in a material, non-racially significant order. Sight, which finally dominates all the others, itself becomes a reflective "non-reactive" sense. The growth of the colour sense illustrates that man's senses are growing now that natural selection has ceased to limit them to racial use. For this reason we should look for new capacities. Vision grows continually more speculative. We see already so far that much action is stultified. We see so deeply that we see that permanence is only appearance. Our vision shows, first, that we can't permanently alter the flux of things, and next that it would be absurd to wish to do so; so understanding becomes our aim. That this is a new kind of understanding can be seen from the manner in which it reacts on our other aims. Man's aims were first fantastically ambitious, though childishly greedy. Attempting to satisfy them, he learned first the Nature of the Universe and how it works. That cycle of experience ends with Bacon. Then from that vision, made clear for purposes of exploitation, suddenly flashes on man the uselessness of attempting to exploit such a thing, and with that comes to man knowledge of himself. From attempting to affect the stars, he tries to alter the seasons and the earth, and so

¶860[page 263] finally comes to himself. And every failure has taught him something about himself. Meanwhile his work, ever less static, grows ever more dynamic. So he comes the full cycle to understanding as the intensest energy. This is not subjectivity. It is already an objective fact that matter is no more than motion. Indeed in astronomy we attain an objectivity, a freedom from subjective standards, that the Prag- matists defined as impossible. Astronomy opens up the new vision. Biologically the stars are without meaning, and increasingly we apprehend them first by an extension of sight, and then with a vision which is not sensuous any longer. Thus in astronomy we can trace the evolution of consciousness. Man is here able through an effort of impersonal intelligence to grasp an impersonal universe. In the effort men are building up a super-personal consciousness. So, too, through the whole scale of our activity; we attempt to move things less as our minds move more. This principle is affecting the body. Man is physically volatilizing and diminishing; so, too, in this manner minds may be intergrouped more closely. Meanwhile in the category of the senses sight has (a) atrophied the others, (b) has reached its own limit. At that limit we can perceive a mental interchange which reveals that intellectually, man is emerging on to a common mind. He is altered by what he sees and taken up into its generality.

¶861CHAPTER VII

¶862What are the evidences for the growth of super-normal faculties, for super-individual powers?

¶863In the first place, the understanding undoubtedly sharpens its own instruments. Contrary to prejudice (a prejudice very serious in this matter and inherited from the disheartened individualism which could only see itself a decadent driven into a blind alley; the savage, beautiful and free),

¶864[page 264] the very senses of civilized man are getting keener. Balked disposition, which has given rise successively to the sense of sin, of unnaturalness, and of decadence, has for a little while given our generations an inferiority complex about the past. This sense discounted, it is obvious that we ought to expect to have keener senses than the savage for the following reasons. In the first place he is nearer the chill penury of natural selection, a force which is now seen to be a numbing and limiting influence. Into this matter we must go more fully later. Here it can only be said that only those senses which have survival value will, among those exposed to the full rigour of natural selection, be kept keen; the others must atrophy even when possessed. In the second place the savage always has to see (blurring, distorting, vignetting actual percepts) what tradition has seen, i.e., the tribe's concept. We have attributed keenness of sense to the savage partly through assumption. As we took him as being free from convention and simple in speech, so we fancied him a vital contrast to our inhibited selves. That was a mistake, we have seen, due really in the main to our ignorance of ourselves. But there was an objective reason also for the blunder. The savage was generally discovered in a stable condition, one in which, as there had been little change in his surroundings for a long time, tradition and perception agreed. This allows for an almost instinctive speed of reaction, but in reality the reaction is almost as blind as instinct. Take the savage out of his environment, where the tribal concept is no longer congruent with the individual percept, and he is lost. Even in his own field he is competent only because of the limitation of his interests and long practice. The Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits reported that Europeans could, when shown, soon surpass the savage in every accomplishment, even in such as seemed native to him: tracking and naturalistic observation.

¶865On our own side, in the making of a fair judgment of

¶866ourselves in this comparison, we must bear in mind that our sense data, our percepts, are at present undoubtedly in a state of uncommon confusion owing to the rapid changes in our own environment (i.e., those categories of experience to which we attend and which we hold to be important), so that through this sense of confusion we are apt to discount our real advance and even to think that we must have become duller-sensed. Our percepts, unselected by a canon, a classic code, of what is of interest, what to be retained, what rejected, what worthy of attention, what insignificant, are apt to become over-rich. This is a real danger, only of late recognized. It is a very modern discovery that has shown us how much perception, to become conscious, depends on the conception that can contain it: what literal truth lies in the hackneyed mysticism, “The eye can only see that to which it brings a power of seeing.”

¶867This question of the state of our senses is critically important for two reasons. In the first place assumptions about human faculty have been all too frequent in the mouths of mystics. In the second place if there is an intensification of human faculty in spite of conceptual derangement, it would suggest a movement throughout man’s whole nature toward the building up of new concepts, a new non-racially conceived universe. It is fortunate, therefore, that definite experiments in hyperaesthetic conditions have revealed that the eye—to mention but one sense, as it is the most important—must continually be recording facts of which we can make no use and so of which we neglect to become conscious.¹

¶868¹ One striking example of this power may be given as illustrative of a class of such phenomena. It had often been noted by hypnotists that their subjects were able invariably to pick out a marked card though the backs appeared to the closest scrutiny to be indistinguishable. To Dr. Wingfield it occurred to ask a subject, while still in trance, how this was done. The reply, “They are all different,” gave him a hint, and taking a numbered but not titled slide from his microscope, he handed it to the subject, telling him to hold it to the light and describe what he saw. The subject with the naked eye described a specimen visible to the normal eye only through high magnification.

¶869But not only does intelligence sharpen the senses it uses, by giving wider categories and so allowing an exacter observation to be released, as the trained eye of the expert will detect differences so small that he cannot consciously tell on what minutiae he builds up a conviction that this work is genuine, that a fake, but the intelligence also co-ordinates the senses in an intensifying hierarchy. Of this psycho-physical process there is anatomic evidence. There can be little doubt that smell is a primitive sense—as far as the primate stock is concerned—while sight today has become so dominant that we trust none of the other senses without its confirmation. As Professor Elliot Smith has pointed out, the extrusion of the neo-pallium in the frontal cortices of the brain has been over the olfactory centre. It therefore seems probable that as brain has developed, the smell centre has contracted, the snout dwindled, and binocular vision become possible. So, in an interchange of mental development and physical modification, has psychic evolution gone on.² Vision becomes the dominant channel of apprehension. The shift from smell to sight is certainly a great step in setting free the psyche. Smell is essentially a racial matter: through it passion must dominate. It overwhelms the animal in a short-range, short-circuiting reaction. As J. B. S. Haldane has pointed out,³ even dogs can have only a limited understanding, owing to racial meanings to which smell confines them. Dizzy scent is lifting like a cloud from off the spirit: that gale of perfume which sweeps us drugged into the swift stream of racial life is falling. To this hypnotic summons not to see and think but to yield and feel, through the evolution of sight we are becoming immune. The outer world, whose grey irrelevance for the animal only glares intermittently

¶8702 "The development in the retina brought about the further changes in the brain." Prof. G. Elliot Smith, Bowman Lecture, Ophthalmological Society, 1928.

¶8713 *Possible Worlds*.

¶872with lurid warning or intoxicating challenge, becomes for us an ever enlarging field of tranquillizing interest.

¶873Therefore at its simplest, sight must always have been longer-ranged and so longer-reactioned. It always permits and sometimes compels consideration, and so must lead in the end to a critical estimation. This is, however, but an initial step. Of its nature sight must extend, and soon it outranges any possible physical reaction. But before we come to the consequences of this, there is an important fact to be noticed, a fact which a new knowledge of the evolution of this particular sense has brought to light. "The grey irrelevance" of the animal's outlook, mentioned above, is not poetical commiseration, but a fact. Myers in his *Experimental Psychology* has shown that the colour sense is still evolving among human races and that while most mammals do not clearly distinguish any colour save red,4 there are races of mankind today in this limited condition which the Greeks seemed to share.5 Others are beginning to be aware of orange tints—the Nepal tribes have been taught to detect blue (which they call BluBlu)—as are colour-blind peoples, through a difference of tone rather than tint. This fact suggests that Lothian Green's great work on colour-blindness throws light on this problem of evolution when he suggests that the incomplete condition of the colour-blind's eye is an atavism, a suggestion which gains force when we realize that only parts of the eye of normal advanced humans are today sensitive to colour.

¶8744 The dog completely lacks colour vision. See *Conditioned Reflexes: an Investigation into the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex*, by I. P. Pavlov, Oxford University Press, 1927.

¶8755 The hyacinthine hair seems really to have been blue, the wine-dark sea and "red Sirius" confirm the suspicion that Homer's possession of several words for red and only a doubtful term or two for green and blue was owing to the fact that even before he lost his sight he was nearly colour-blind and so were all his audiences Cf. Ch. I, p. 44 (note), the Bantu's primitive colour-sense. The Assyrians, too, speak of Sirius "as red as rust," the star's dominant flashes of blue-white escaping their vision. The Welsh word "glas" stands for the white of the sky, the wold, the seascape, the colourless background of things.

¶876[page 268] This fact of the emergence of the colour sense illustrates the reversal of our ideas of natural selection. We see that when the pressure of racial use and necessity is lifted the organism does not sink back unstimulated into uncreative lethargy, but, free to experiment, produces new capacities. Such a discovery is of great significance when, as in this inquiry, we are seeking to find out whether evolution is not still working in us. This supreme sense, we cannot but now recognize, is becoming, as it grows more powerful and wider-ranged, less utilitarian, less racial. Even through the unaided human eye, the still animal and far from perfect organ, we can see that the glory of the world is but awaking. The clouds that gather round the setting sun are taking a more splendid colouring from the eye that sees, each generation, more of the splendour that exists around it and glimpses man’s immortality.

¶877We must then continue to explore the consequences of the rise of “non-reactive” vision. They extend far beyond the delight in the appreciation of a new faculty, however splendid. Sight is taking us not only beyond the animal’s uncoloured, utilitarian outlook but beyond the ordinary individual man’s uncomprehending acceptance of beauty. Along the line of sight, we are being taken past even the most civilized ideas of beauty and use, though we should not overlook the value to a non-racial concept of evolution of a non-racial aesthetic. No doubt during civilization, and ever more rapidly, our powers have grown incomparably; but faster than our reach, however magnified, ranges our vision. In comparison with the primitive, we are, in this dual relation of what we see and what we can do, becoming far weaker; for the small compass of his focus he could master and affect far more thoroughly than we the worlds now shown to us by, for example, our telescopes. On his plane, we have become more helpless than the man of action. Inevitably the children of darkness, because they are stabilized and native, must be

¶878[page 269] wiser in their generation than the transitional, double-visioned children of light. Already we are getting out of touch, our impress is fainter, we are leaving less mark. The maximum of man's impressiveness was the nineteenth century. From the dolmens to the Eiffel Tower, from Grimes Caves to the Tube System, Alpine railway tunnels, and mines running miles under the sea, from the first chalk rampart to the Gatun Dam, that is a single rhythm, a cycle of evolution of some ten thousand years.⁶ Now that our vision makes us question our aim it seems probable that no tower will ever out-top Eiffel's and that a Channel tunnel may never be bored. No doubt we could still do so, and more easily than at any former time; but shall we wish it? Does it seem of any use? Those patient excavators and builders of the past desired, in so far as they were not mere mechanic slaves, in so far as they saw their goal, permanence, a thing which not only our extended time-sense but our dynamic knowledge shows to be impossible; for the larger the work, the more it challenges Nature's self. The Palaeolithic haunt is often covered over, escaping destruction because it attempted so little to alter things. But the vast ambition of Panama is daily shaken, competing with physics on the full scale where the solid earth is a yeasty mass and the hot heart disturbs with every pulse this absurd alien rigidity of man's. As below a certain scale we see the Brownian movement, an incessant molecular restlessness, so too on the larger. Already the United States thinks of abandoning Panama for Nicaragua. The steady platform, so necessary for understanding, so essential for objective observation, exists only between two vortices. Man is the balance of the Universe, the point of rest in its constant reciprocation. Outside his "individualized" scale everything rises and falls, moves and fluxes. At both ends he has already penetrated and found not a dead

¶879⁶ In all that time, though a spray of individuals may have shot out beyond, the main head of man's energy burst against matter, driving and heaping it ever more vastly.

¶880[page 270] matter, a plastic if stubborn mass, which he may fashion and mould, but, at the very first showing, an incessant movement which can be shaped less easily than water, perhaps a tide which bears him and all else to a fullness of freedom which now is inconceivable.7 It is therefore becoming patent that we cannot, when we have passed a certain stage of development, when we are able to see things with more than an animal's vision, either hope or desire to shape and set things. Our true action is to watch and try to understand the drift, the flood, of the Universe. No doubt our power has, actually, increased. But what is power if desire to exercise it fails, achievement becomes ridiculous, and aim vanishes? Relatively with our vision's expansion our power has shrunk to insignificance. Who will now think of shaking the heavens or even to stir the hypnotic rhythm of the engyred earth? To all who reflect, the problem has already focused to one of manoeuvre, and from that it develops inevitably to one of becoming *en rapport*.

¶881Along this line we have then arrived at evidence that we are attaining objective apprehension, for our cognition, as it advances, is followed increasingly by immaterial, intense original conation. Of this we have proof in the increasing dynamism and immateriality of our works. Music, we have seen, takes the place of architecture, and it is possible that mathematics will in the same way supersede music. Einstein 8 is said to have remarked of certain mathematic demonstrations that their beauty gave him, himself a musician, an harmonious pleasure that transcends music. That this is the true direction of the process, and not a temporary aberration, a glance at man's psychic evolution makes clear. Understanding reveals itself not as the means but as the end of life. In the beginning physical needs and their demands

¶8827 Professor Eddington has said, "Whatever view we may take of free will on philosophic grounds," because of the new quantum mechanics "we cannot appeal to physics against it."

¶8838 See Ch. VI, p. 228.

¶884[page 271] exercise the rudimentary faculty. Man must make the attempt to control everything he sees in order that his interest shall be kept focused outside himself. The very attempt to grasp the scheme for the sake of the body's demands leads to deliverance. Man, with his hands on reality, to drag it down to his animal needs, finds that it lifts him instead so far that seeing so much more, he is so much the less desirous to change things. In the Magic phase he thinks he must and can control the stars. They are intimate pointers of his private destiny, and by mastering the clock of the heavens he will give his order to everything, he will make his passions eternal, his pains pass in the twinkling of an eye. The Modern Age, the Age of Revolution, started from this point. Lilly the astrologer was consulted by Elizabeth, and Wallenstein would never act without consulting the stars. But the process develops, and the discovery of understanding, in the effort to master, is continued, through the more modest ambitions which discovery imposed, though still the conscious aim is animal and unintelligent: that understanding is the real aim is not yet understood. Men do not see as yet how the piecemeal modification of their method is leading them round to where a new outlook will suddenly break upon them. This new phase begins with Bacon, in whom intellect attained its greatest power without vision, its vastest range without deliverance. He might extend for man unprecedentedly the Realm of Means and never enter the Realm of Ends. He concentrated man's assault under the strategic summary, "Obey Nature to conquer her." That phase has ended with Dean Inge's antiphonal "Conquer Nature in order to obey her." That cycle is finished. Understanding has led not to the overthrow of the outer order, not by a jot or tittle to its reduction or our extension. It is not leading to man's dominance but to his sublimation. The industrial age tried to tackle the earth, but the study of the stars, relieved of all childish terms of reference, went on all the time, and even in

¶885[page 272] the practical, the focus continued to narrow until man saw not only what he was looking at—instead of only that aspect which had drawn the animal—but how he was looking—how his interest was changing, he himself being altered by what he saw. As his focus is forced on to reality, as he grasps the true balance of himself and the Universe, he begins to attain something more than Emerson's "binocular vision"; he begins to see not only things "in the round," but himself looking at them.⁹ He is but an ultra-magnifiable minuteness on the scale of Space. A pole, though all circle round it, has no dimension. He is a pole of Reality. The Mind that comprehends the Universe need have no extension. The long, painful travel of man is due to the fact that he came to himself as an individual out among the stars. So far had the group consciousness taken him from the animal's indifference to the stellar universe, and there the common tie broke. Thence, abandoned as an Ishmael, in a desert whose every grain of sand is a sun, has the individual struggled with a blind homing-instinct back. The age of metal finds him landed on earth and attempting its coercion as once he had attempted the stars'. Indeed the individual's spirit was now in need of evidence that he could alter things; his realization of his failure really to alter anything before (for all the tribal meanings and interpretations now can only seem make-believe) might otherwise have paralyzed him and made him utterly to come to naught. Hence the Megalithic culture, which still scars the soft members of the Downs, and the monstrous accumulations of the Pyramids—"Stations" that mark each stage of the spirit's *Via Dolorosa*. So through all the age of metals did he attempt to set his mark enduringly on the face of the earth. It should own him master. So Bronze raises Gizeh and Stonehenge, Iron the aqueducts that strode over valleys and the walls that encompassed empires, and

¶886⁹ As Santayana has said, when a man can see his individual insignificance he is obviously at that moment something more than that insignificance.

¶887[page 273] Steel drives galleries beneath heaped miles of mountain and has twice cleft continents.

¶888And all this attempt to make the fleeting breath of his life indelible on the mirroring surface of the world has served a purpose. It is part of his psychic evolution. For first it assured him that he was more real than the tribe, he was the next stage of progressive evolution. The tribe, with all its tribe-satisfying incantation, was only pretending. He could really affect something, could at least fashion hard shapeless stone to an enduring monument, could leave a lasting record of his action, so that against the inchoateness of nature the triumph of purpose, intention, aim, shone out.10 Secondly, in attempting to set his mark, as each seal crumbled, he was compelled to consider ever more deeply the nature of the stuff on which he would make an eternal impress.

¶889We can then say that we have discovered the following correlation: The steadily lessening impress of our work is a concomitant of our increasing energy. We are, therefore, dematerializing. With every advance in the understanding of ourselves—an understanding first attained indirectly by outer knowledge, and then immediately—with this purer effort of the mind, we desire less to alter things. All outer activity becomes aimless activity, because unnecessary to a mind which, without action, understands mind. We have not reached even the upper part of this process, but already activity has become so much less material—as it has become conscious—that its satisfaction is immaterial. As understanding thus grows it must come to satisfying desire directly—at its source.

¶890This—surely it is evident—is no retreat into subjectivity; rather it is to reach out further than the animal can see, the savage imagine, the individual conceive. This new realism

¶89110 This deep desire for meaning, be it no more than comprehensible pattern, is shown by the fact that fetish-worshipping peoples notice and collect such natural objects because of their unfamiliar shape—a shape that seems purposive and so must contain “mana.”

¶892[page 274] makes things more, not less, real. Viewed in its sharper focus the works of the man of action appear no more purposive than the abacus fumblings of a child, comparable with the limited handling of the lemur, which is said to be incapable of passing an object from one hand to the other but must put it down and pick it up again. Meanwhile this seeing things apart from their racial significance, apart from the wish to alter them, has brought to light an element in reality which till then had escaped man. It, we now see, is not a plastic stuff to be moulded. Even materially, physicists (without any suspicion that they are psychically evolving) are finding themselves “the other side of matter” under the surface, in a non-sensuous world. Its firm, inert surface has been broken through, and down into what depths do they now not gaze, into that great vortex that runs beneath us from the spiring nebula to the spinning system of the atom.

¶893Already astronomy disproves the pragmatic definition of truth, the law which would keep us ever tied to animal uses. For in what way does the Copernican rather than the Ptolemaic hypothesis give us greater “power over our environment,” unless the mind is its own place and the order which the economy and balance of the younger system can give to the intellect is a power which is not less real, an organized extension not less fruitful, than that given by steel and explosives? 11 Man found himself trying to wrest the stars to his appetites; he has retreated to easier conquests, his earth, his body, and finally his spirit; at every stage winning more actual influence, but never enough. His clearer knowledge ever throws up the impossibility of his ambitions—and yet gives him the power to be able to continue pressing on though these limited objectives are dissolved. No science illustrates this more than astronomy. To the average sensual man this

¶89411 “There is a deeply founded solidarity between the Laws of human thought and the Laws of external nature.” R. D. Carmichael, “Einstein and Relativity,” in *Scientia*, September, 1928.

¶895science is not merely useless—it is paralyzing. Where in such solitary stupendous advances shall he find the quick reaction, the return, the flush, the fever pulse, from greed to glut? But the astronomic mind is hardly anthropocentric. Content with its transparent shield and lens, such sensual notions as the weariness of travelled distance, shrivelling cold, and obliterating heat are mere romance. Such states are neither actual 12 nor theoretical, but arise from a confusion of two states of being, the feelings of a creature of appetite on looking through the eyes of a philosopher. The sidereal spectacle contemplated does not depress the mind but exalts it to serenity. In a reposeful and interested patience the astronomer looks on, beginning to be aware that merely by onlooking he is on the way to understand, and by his understanding he is co-operating. Certainly he is raised above the animal which can never escape the limitation of the feeling, “To what use can I put this new object that challenges my attention?”—if sense is engaged, “How may I possess myself of it?”—if dangerous, “How may I escape it?” The greedy cycle of use is escaped. The astronomer is certainly, psychologically considered, evidence of a new species. He is ready for—he is already employing—new faculties, for faculties used for unnatural purposes develop unnaturally. Biologically the stars have no meaning, they do not exist. Though dogs bay the moon, no animal has ever raised its eyes even to Venus. But we can drive this realism deeper. The stars are no Platonic beings, but foci of the entire continuum, to all the remaining interstellar field of which our shrouded embryonic senses give no answer. Of all life, to us only are they known, and to us only by such a delicate web of mirror and

¶89612 Professor Eddington in his *Stars and Atoms* has pointed out that space might be called either very hot or very cold. If a solid thermometer could be placed there, no doubt it would record zero, but it seems extremely unlikely that a thermometer, any more than a man, could exist in that condition of ultimate tenuity, and if it became appropriately tenuous, it would record a temperature so high that life would be impossible.

¶897[page 276] theory, estimate and enlargement, calculation and refraction, that we may well say 13 that such things exist not merely in their own right but to some degree by our own creative effort. Our most ingenious attempt to view them binocularly is so slight and so significant. We step from one side of the sun to the other, of all man's pilgrimages and purposive journeyings the greatest, the grandest taking-up of position, albeit he, a conscious powder, is whirled about on his uncontrollable planet, and his greatness lies wholly in realizing his position. At the telescope's mouth reality is so far beyond our grasp, so entirely within our eye, that Antares or Arcturus has no meaning unless mirrored in the warped and clouded pool of a human retina.

¶898So at siderial range we attain, at the unit of matter, the focus of the New Realism, a new faculty, a new consciousness. The focus of power is withdrawn to vision's seat at the back of the brain. Thus are undone and laid aside the implications and involvings of racial reaction, of sensation's invariable answer in blind action. So through this new invisible reaction, the spirit of man has its kenosis of its animal inheritance. The focus extends in exact proportion as the power of interference is confined. A human sublimation has begun, for already among the most advanced are some who are now able to pass through the transition when strength is withdrawn from action, not only that it may cease to interfere with vision but also because the flame of understanding requires the whole being as its fuel.

¶89913 Eddington says that no disk has ever been visible of any star; yet their masses are known, their weight, their volume, their age, and their path. In this supreme effort of creative observation, too, it is well to note that the centre of the material lens is no longer the focus of attention. It is by an amazing use of refraction, by the fringes of the field of illumination, that we have suddenly had the range of our observation extended to such an extent that Sir J. H. Jeans thinks it possible that man might actually look to the real bound of the Super-Universe which contains not only all the island universes but outside which time itself does not run. The Interferometre is probably the last instrument we shall need to raise the mind to full eternal equality with its other aspect, the entire physical universe. But see later.

¶900[page 277] This process, which is here expressed under dual terms, is of course a single process. It is, put into other terms, only a late phase of that evolution of consciousness which this essay has attempted to trace. It is the building up of the new social consciousness, the new group personality, which will not only be conscious of itself—and so sublimate its individuals—but also grow in awareness of the other, varied, but parallel conscious conditions or fields that our advanced group consciousness, we have seen above, begins to diagnose as invariable concomitants of all organizations of matter. Again it must be repeated, this is no decay, collapse, or failure, but the only possible achievement. Man is still seeking power. All his efforts have so far proved fanciful, futile, fatal. He must have more, not less, power, but of a rarer quality. He knows that he and the Universe, his consciousness and its mass, must reciprocate. It absorbs him, it cannot but be affected; he of necessity must be impregnating it. He retreats—but to take it wholly in. The fulcrum to move the Universe was hard to find, for it lies behind the eye that sought it. At last, however, man sees things apart from uses and, almost rid of implications, his vision is freed. For fear and pride he compassed the world. So to enchain it he dug like a Titan, and earth, quivering so slightly that the vast mirrors of her seas hardly blur the images of the stars, smoothed his diggings as ripples die on calm water. For more satisfying lust, for the body's immediate appetites, he still moved mountains and ransacked ranges. But to satisfy his spirit—once it has learned, by being held from action, what it, and not the body nor the race, may desire—he has only to move his eye.

¶901In leaving this line, which has been pushed perhaps further than without parallel support could be acceptable, for safety's sake let us return to earth. Even there we shall find that we are leaving the ground, we are getting out of touch,

¶902[page 278] our tracks grow fainter. Flint lasts for ever, copper for civilizations, iron for generations, steel for a lifetime. Who will be able to map the route of the London-Peking air express when the age of movement is over or today to say what is the path through the “aether” of the messages which are radiated and received? But the frontiers of the petty vanished kingdom of the Iceni still sweep defensively across the southern frontier of East Anglia, from drained marsh to obliterated forest.

¶903There can be no doubt that we move things less because our minds move more. Further, we cannot avoid the conclusion that as we move things less, one of the things which will be moved less is the body from which the nimble mind has already won such freedom and independence. Of all the species which have become dominant man is the only one which has not increased vastly in size on attaining to unrestricted supplies. Undoubtedly his energy has been greater—great enough to volatilize in thought. The body is beginning to diminish and must diminish at an increasing rate.13a For in the first place, man no longer needs his present bulk. Evolution 14 has built up elaborately to the attainment of self-conscious understanding, and now having attained it, the circumventing steps, which outer conditions and inner uncertainties necessitated, can be cut out. As the late Dr. Gamble said,15 not only has our intellectual superiority allowed us to carry many survivals which less powerfully endowed species would have had to drop or themselves drop out, but the sheer length of our “lines of communications,” the elaborate hierarchy of ganglia—to look only at the highest part of the range—each of which is “an automatic mechanism” of the greatest delicacy, has become too extensive. Not only does failure at any one link cause a breakdown at the

¶90413a See p. 294, “On the Diminishment of Human Physique.”

¶90514 See Ch. I.

¶90615 Presidential Address, British Association, Zoological Section, 1925.

¶907[page 279] front, but that front is so far advanced that it may be completely ignorant of the essential needs of those which sustain it and so send back orders in the attempt to meet which the whole may become deranged and the front collapse. Further advance demands a shortening of our communications.

¶908These are the negative reasons why we should not retain our present physiological elaboration. There are positive ones also. Our size, once moderate enough, now stands in our way. It is an obstacle not only to our physical efficiency but to our further apprehension of the outer world. Imperatively, we require to be smaller if we are to master things. As a first step the hand must grow ever neater for plying its minute instruments so as to direct them to touch the invisibly little, at which low level lie all the powers that now concern us, powers which at the "animal-man" scale are as obstinate as adamant or have the invisibility of death, but which at their own "scale" not merely are ductile but may be seen to have a path which if detected may point to an intenser plane of life.16

¶909But this line must not be pursued further here. It has been advanced to show that physique—the animal base on which the individual mind, however advanced, must depend—that unit of individual bodily force which was the *sine qua non* of the older self-consciousness—is no longer necessary to the evolution of mind, that on the contrary it now actually interferes with it, that the diminishment of physical bulk means that mind can now and must now be carried on as a group affair wherein the units can rely wholly for their survival on a common, co-ordinated, immediate interest of the whole.

¶910To return to a more detailed study of the extension of the

¶91116 Even physiologically all our problems lie at cell-level. "There was a door to which I found no key" is not true, but it is of microscopic smallness. No doubt the secret of cancer lies there, and at our present clumsy size we may be fatally too unwieldy to ward that dart. Indeed cancer may be a challenge to diminish, drastically to reduce our no longer needed accumulation, or to die.

¶912senses, we can say of sight that the exercise of this sense has led us to an extreme position on the very limit of the senses. In the first place it dominated and atrophied the others. This step is very important in any attempt to understand the present process of evolution. As Dr. Bergson has suggested,17 the senses seem, when considered as apparatus of consciousness, to be the channels wrought by a common energy, and so one sense can draw off the sum of sensibility to supply its own intensifying requirements, and thus atrophy the others, as in the body the demands of one centre can draw off the blood until, should that concentration continue, the parts furthest away would experience starvation. So seen, physical feeling is at the foot of the scale of apprehension. As each sense—evolved because of the constant need of finer awareness—develops, it must tend to answer (as indeed pathology shows that it does, many diseases of the eye making their presence felt by flashes of light; of the ear, by morbid sounds) in terms of its function and not in terms of general pain. As soon as the consciousness can understand these more advanced signals the intolerably crude interruption of pain ceases, as we no longer goad a creature to which we can speak.18

¶913The fact that our pain-sense evolves into a finer awareness of mistake explains another otherwise anomalous observation that the Torres Straits Anthropological Expedition recorded. By the tests they employed they discovered that contrary to the usual Rousseau notions about the savage, the native showed himself more sensitive to pain than the European. If we allow that the upper range of his senses are not as advanced as ours, then we can see that the residue of general physical feeling is greater and so he is capable of greater pain.

¶91417 Presidential Address to the Society for Psychical Research.

¶91518 The necessity of pain at a certain and still highly developed level is shown by the fact that rats in which the pain nerves of the foot have been severed will begin to eat the insensitive member.

¶916[page 281] In the second place, sight has itself ceased to have a material reaction, and, in the third, it itself is evolving. Released from the utilitarian racial narrowness of natural selection, we are seeing colours invisible before, of no physical significance, and yet, in the ultimate arrest of beauty, of a meaning to which all use is nothing. We are seeing objects to which there can be no reaction, which have no meaning in the world of action, but which if we try to make use of them may easily, by the release of atomic energy, either explode the earth from beneath us or rot all life down into one sweeping plague of cancer.

¶917So we reach the limit of even the highest, intensest, less material sense. With the microscope we have come to the point where the light-wave breaks, and in its trough can lie hid the object we seek.19 We are dividing the fine tissue of the day and have penetrated into a space behind, unlit, unknown, perhaps incomprehensible to individual consciousness. With the telescope, as we have seen, we are close to the corresponding limit. As today on a radio set may be heard, one-seventh of a second after the sound of sending out, the sound of the sent signal returned from round the earth, so Sir J. H. Jeans has said that light may yet be picked up which has travelled round the entire sweep of the super-universe and so returns still recording the scenes that it went out bearing—not one-seventh of a second before but perhaps one thousand million years ago.20 The Mount Wilson instrument in the hands of Dr. Hubble has pointed the path to the outer “Super-Universe’s” limit where “space re-enters upon itself,” outside which there is no distance as we understand distance, and so outside which time itself does not run.

¶918We have then got outside our last and least animal sense

¶91919 Mr. Barnard’s “ultra-microscope” uses ultra-violet rays, as daylight is too “coarse.” Mr. Gye’s organism—the so-called cancer germ—can be concealed between two light waves.

¶92020 Lecture before the Royal Society of Arts, March, 1928.

¶921even when evolved to its finest, least reactive extreme. In that ultimate world (to which the mind of man has attained not by one leap of faith or despair, but patiently step by step, not asking the end; even, with some greatness, not caring), even categories derived from visual experience degrade and limit the reality. We are instructed by the explorers of the infinitely little no longer to think in terms of matter at all, however subdivided and minute. No increase in magnification will ever show this reality.21 From the intangible, man has penetrated into that which cannot any longer be rendered in terms of form, and yet this supersensuous plane is, we know, more real than the sensuous, for thereon are to be found the powers which control life on the sensuous. We must go to it, not it come down to us, and already the explorers are advancing thither. The proton and electron are not matter as we animals have known it, though with a change of its eternal dance this positive and negative electricity gives pleasure and pain, colour and weight, life and death, adamant and vacuum. The mysteries of the quantum are not to be conceived by any who still think in terms of material images. And so close is this relation, so open the channel that runs under our feet from star to atom, that what the physicist says today the astronomer caps tomorrow. As the ground under our feet, to the eye of science, is dissolved, so too the vault of heaven is opened, and yet the whole achievement—so real that chemical problems of the laboratory can be checked by siderial observation, that the path of suns can be calculated aeons beyond the death of the calculator, that the age of the earth can be read from the minute radio-active mechanism in the rocks,22 that men can

¶92221 "Any picture we form of the atom errs, as it were, by excess of solidity. The mathematical symbols refer to entities more indefinite than our pictorial imagination, limited as it is by experience of "gross matter," can construct. . . . In the development of Modern Science the pictorial faculty is proving more and more of a hindrance." *The Bases of Modern Science*, by J. W. N. Sullivan.

¶92322 See Dr. Joly, *The Age of the Earth*.

¶924be stricken dead with cancer by directing on them rays they neither feel nor see—indeed takes place in the mind, is caused by a revolution of imaginative effort; for the elder physicists have confessed that the difficulty of accepting the new Universe which has come to be associated with the name of Einstein is not in any of the steps of reasoning, once the mind has determined to face them, but in abandoning the last underlying anthropomorphic materialism, a change as drastic as any physical metamorphosis.23

¶925Such a unifying concept, built up in our own time, gives the evidence which in this chapter was to be sought, of a central term between sensibility and sense in the evolution of consciousness. Derived from sense data, developed by an evolutionary intensification of the highest developed sense, it passes under our eyes today beyond physical vision.24 Soon a blind man will see the universe as clearly, perhaps more clearly, because with less animal prejudice, than the seeing. We can conceive a mind untroubled by senses, beholding reality as we, our *speculum animae* so distorted by a past of action, so shaken by a present of consequences, so troubled by a future of apprehensions, cannot, until raised to the serene level of its liberty.

¶926But is not this a lonely attainment? An eagle flight of contemplation, no doubt; the world well lost, perhaps; but what of the larger consciousness which was to evolve? Does not this outlook lead to an eremitic withdrawal beside which the “holy selfishness” of the monk was a social thing? We

¶92723 See *Aspects of Science*, Second Series, Sullivan; also Dr. Larmor, *Problems of Relativity*.

¶92824 Dr. Millikan has shown that from outer space a supersensuous radiation with the terrific charge of 60,000,000 volts is pouring in on us, a radiation to which, though (see note, p. 227) it may be fatal to us, none of our senses, not even sight, is able to respond. Indeed Dr. Millikan’s latest opinion (Messel Memorial Lecture, New York, September, 1928) is that the nuclear combination which produces this cosmic radiation does not take place in stars at all. In other words, we must look for the sources of energy and indeed for creation's fundamental term where our senses can find nothing, in what used to be thought absolute space.

¶929have actual evidence that this is not so. Dr. Whitehead, himself among the foremost who have opened the way into that upper world, has written in the introduction to his *Principles of Natural Knowledge*,25 that thought today depends on a general field—the immediate mathematic field of England lying between London, Oxford, and Cambridge—wherein between the constituents an exchange goes on which is a condition of intellectual creative commonalty. This is clear evidence that thought at this level, to be valid, must be anonymous; it must be of the general mind, not individual. Artists may possess themselves of a particular expression valued in a society so disintegrated that it dreads the common. Appliers of science may patent their processes, living in a world of individuality and private profit. But for those who enter into the divine uselessness of the Realm of Ends there can be no more mine or thine. Everything is theirs, as far as they can understand it; and as they understand and grasp it, by that act they give.

¶930So we see that as man has entered into a new Universe, a Universe tremendously, impersonally alive, he, to discover it, has attained again an unindividualized understanding. We can now see that as man's thought has grown it has passed through the pre-animistic and the animistic, relics of the upper and lower stages of a group consciousness; the anthropomorphic, symptom of his attainment of individuality; the monotheistic, the phase of incipient super-individualism when for the first time he apprehends law and order but still confuses this under the decategorizing, falsely simplifying pattern of mechanism. It may be that the Copernican extension of thought is not the purely intellectual effort that it has seemed, but that, as we perceive in the Einstein revolution in our own day, it may be symptomatic of the reaction of the intellect to a sudden evolutionary advance in

¶93125 P. vii.

¶932[page 285] the whole psyche of man. Certainly the monotheistic outlook is being followed in the thought-feeling of civilization by the immanent pantheism to which, whenever civilization can last long enough, develop sufficiently far in its final term, all its individuals show a tendency to turn.26

¶933This, then, is the true continuation of evolution. As we attain unindividualized vision we ourselves alter. Our minds become, though still retaining their keen consciousness, integrated parts of a larger consciousness; the escape from individuality is to a condition from which individuality can be seen to be only limitation. And this advance, though it begins from the side of intelligence, as a mental advance, spreads until it embraces the whole psyche, linking up with the parallel advance in sensibility. So sense and sensibility are both, through the evolution of sensuousness, allowed to continue a convergent advance, and “the irreducible kernel of consciousness” is seen to be a focus point that is expanding until, each limiting ring of darkness overspread, consciousness becomes one field.

¶934In the introduction I have guarded against any misconception that might arise owing to current sociological theories and especially owing to the views of some anthropologists, whose conclusions regarding *primitive* man have in this essay been adopted when discussing that phase of our psyche’s evolution. I have pointed out that, contrary to the modern anti-intellectualist notions of a present *Volkgeist*, such a spirit, if it existed as it seems it must have existed in the pre-individual past, cannot exist in the individualized present and will, or it seems it will, exist in the future only through a revolutionary expansion or sublimation of the individual. In this chapter the evidence for that expansion has been reviewed. Against that evidence two objections may be brought and here had best be met.

¶93526 Cf. the immanent pantheism of late Graeco-Roman philosophy.

¶936[page 286] It may be said that what has been shown to be growing from a sublimation of the senses is not a new collective sense of humanity, but a new impersonal thought which is built up by the very men to whom the idea of emotional mergence is repugnant. It may also be urged that on such evidence as Dr. Whitehead's, what these minds are building up is a state not only merely mental, but, even at that, a field that does not embrace of necessity the whole of the intellect of humanity. Quite apart from the fact that during the war the intellectuals themselves showed that their narrower emotional ties and loyalties were stronger than their intellectual, there is no guarantee that the intellectual force itself will create a single all-mind-embracing field and not a series of fields. Nor is there assurance that these fields would grade themselves in a hierarchy, a feudalism, of the intellect, wherein each specialized order would owe and pay fealty to a co-ordinating overlord. Nationalism, a field of intense emotional force in which the individual has found not a little deliverance from the self (in a manner of psychic atavism),27 has undoubtedly endangered civilization, and for more ideal, more deliberate, intelligent, and moral groupings, such as religious orders, individuals have perpetrated crimes which no bribe of self-satisfaction would have made them commit.

¶937In answer to this it may be said that to represent the actual advance, whose path can be traced in the psychophysique of modern man, as purely intellectual, is gravely to misplace it. That advance has been *in the term between intelligence and sensibility*. As far as it has up to the present shown its main consequences in an increase in mental solidarity (that the intellectual *understand* their mental interdependence more than they feel it, and more than they understand, far more than they feel, their emotional humanitarian interdependence), that is because it was the intellectual side

¶93827 Nations are throwbacks, religious orders are arrests, from this standpoint.

¶939of man (as far as sense of solidarity is concerned) 28 that was lagging behind the emotional. Indeed the intellectuals in their reaction from the emotionalists were showing even in their own unity signs of a serious break-up. Advance on this side was of supreme importance if a fissure between feeling and thought (whose joint progress was essential) were not to open. There was no necessity to overcome any unwillingness on the part of the emotions to advance. For the time being, because of the backwardness of the intellectual, progress had to be apparent on that side, in order that it might be discovered that the emotional sense of a new unity ahead was a true monition of conditions which are now coming to light to the intelligence. It is this fact, the fact that the apprehension of sensibility has been confirmed by the intellect, following up the evolution of the senses, that gives us assurance against the second danger: that the new grouping and unification may prove to be only a limited allegiance, larger, it is true, than personality, but far more difficult to surmount, because it, too, depends ultimately for its emotional force on its exclusiveness, its repulsive power against all other organisms. The new sensibility, with which the new intelligence can now be combined, is not based on any repulsion but on a desire (unreasoning as it has seemed to those who only find reasons in acts which can be shown to have biologically selective significance) to embrace the whole of life by understanding. Having realized that private salvation is not in escape nor in domination, the self-assertiveness which orthodoxy, either from pride or fear, unconsciously engenders vanishes. The human spirit, now seeing its deliverance to lie in a larger unity, can understand that the fundamental tragedy of life is “the struggle of right with right.” It does not wish to champion one cause against another but only to make them understand that they are parts

¶94028 See Ch. V.

¶941[page 288] of a whole, in the realization of which alone they can find completion. The only possible unity is the one which is dynamic enough to be able to exist without the adventitious aid of outside pressure. The only unity which can combine and satisfy both the intelligence and the sensibility is of the whole of consciousness complementing and replying to the whole of outer experience.

¶942This is undoubtedly the final revolution. Suddenly we have realized that this strange process of change—a universe becoming while we watch ever more completely dynamic, a vaster complex of immaterial tendency—this revolution in our comprehension of the objective is in reality a change in ourselves, as children realize suddenly that it is their train, not the platform, which is moving, as Copernicus by suddenly wrenching himself free from the assumption that the earth was fixed, at a stroke, by bringing man's place down into the arena, suddenly simplified and resolved the overwhelming tangle of the Ptolemaic epicycles.

¶943The realization is a shock; so in concluding this chapter it is worth while reviewing the steps whereby we are led to the conclusion that we ourselves are at the crisis of that revolution which changes man from a physique dominating a psyche to a psyche dominating a physique.

¶944In the first place, the general concept of evolution seemed to forbid such a notion; then the development of the general evolutionary idea itself showed that evolution must be conceived as a force which not only becomes more intense, but which in becoming intenser evolves on to a swifter cycle, the quantitative change coming qualitative. In the second place, the evolution of mind seemed inevitably restricted to the evolution of brain, and so the brain's limitations, not merely the cranial restriction but the insulation of each brain from each, seemed to set forever a limitation to the evolution of mind; but here too, as in the general concept

¶945[page 289] of evolution, the conception of mental evolution has been widened even by biologists.29

¶946We can now see mental evolution as something concomitant with, perhaps dependent for its expression but not dependent for its existence on, the evolution of brain. In the third place, there appeared a deep division between each two psyches. Not only was each brain insulated, but this division was a fundamental fact of consciousness. We now see that the insulation, far from being an eternal separateness, is in the history of consciousness but a slight and passing phase: individuality is an exception, not a rule. In proof of this we have already found that we are attaining a point when we cannot think our own thoughts, if they are to be worthy of the name of thought; and when, too, we no longer have, as the individualist assumed, “always strength to endure the misfortunes of others.”

¶947All these difficulties had to be overcome and have been overcome by being resolved from a more advanced position. One, however, remains: the conception of values. The last opposition to realizing the future that is on us comes from the conservative idealism which for so many aeons has been the most serious obstacle to psychic advance. At every stage the conception of movement has been opposed because the mind, setting hard on the surface of consciousness (whether as the tribe or the individual unit), resents movement, and as each step in that dynamic discovery has been made, it has been accepted by the mass only when they have been able to say, “Anyhow it makes no difference after all: all that makes life worthy is untouched; values remain.” At each advance,

¶94829 “The Principle of Continuity makes us postulate that this new category of phenomenon [mind] has not sprung up during the course of evolution absolutely *de novo* but that in some sense it is universally present in all phenomena. It is merely that we have not yet found a direct method for the detection of mental processes, as we have, say, for electric, but something of the same general nature, the same category as mind, must be present in lower organisms and in the lifeless matter from which they originally sprang.” *Essays of a Biologist*, Prof. J. S. Huxley, pp. 71-72.

¶949however, evolution has invested more closely the central terms of being. New views on cosmogony, new views on genesis, were both resented, not merely because man had by psychic association allowed his morality to adhere arbitrarily to his cosmology, but because ethics and cosmology, values and facts, have a causal relation. In turn the new views were accepted because man in his individualistic extreme had been able to condense and focus himself from his matrix. In consequence we have today reached the unprecedented condition when the rule, "The Ethic which is not dependent on a cosmology is untrue," has been modified to "the Ethic which is not dependent on a psychology." Its complement remains, however: The cosmology which does not result in an ethic is meaningless; and so, as we have seen, our behaviour is being altered by our idea of the Universe. In consequence we find ourselves with a double standard. A new morality, a new conduct, based on a new knowledge, is already growing up outside the quick little good doings of the smaller elder morality. "This do and thou shalt live" is the preamble of them both, but the living "thou" in the latter is no longer an individual in search of long life here and eternal individuality hereafter. Because practical men of action, unquestioning individuals, felt that the old morality must be retained, they only saw the new cosmology 30 as hostile or at best indifferent. We have seen that it is individualism that prevents men from realizing that as the new cosmology is larger than the old, so it results in a larger morality.31 There is a reaction, there is a consequent conduct, but on a scale proportionately large and so escaping the hasty glance of the individual. The life of action, the morality of doing, not being, is the inevita-

¶95030 Cf. T. H. Huxley, *Romanes Lecture*.

¶95131 As an example of this development, compare the transitional morality of the Eugenics campaign which advocates attempting to make men feel more disgraced by an act which may have racial ill consequences, but which individualized tradition does not condemn, than by one which tradition disapproves but which has no racial consequences.

¶952[page 291] ble consequence of individuality, and from that level, it is true, once question whether the individual is eternal, and moral coherence becomes impossible. Yet from its own standpoint—even if there were no larger morality growing up outside and only waiting to become fully conscious with the abandonment of individuality—the elder individualistic morality contains already a fatal contradiction. To preserve its ethic it has abandoned cosmology (as sanction) for psychology, but psychology can tell it nothing about the general nature of things, only of human behaviour; psychology cannot tell the individual if he is eternal; indeed its terms of reference seem to rule out such an assumption. Its substitution for cosmology shows that the individual can find no external guarantee that his standards, values, and demands have any objectivity. We see, then, from the elder individualist morality, that while the individual has demanded an eternal life as the only possible sanction for his conduct, he has in practice been compelled to fall back on a psychology which can promise him nothing of the sort. “This do and thou shalt live” can by the sanction of psychology only run, “This do and you may be a little happier while you live.”

¶953So, if there were no larger morality growing up from the larger cosmology, the old values would in any case be hopelessly undermined. But this is not all. It is of the utmost importance to note that in this matter, actually from the ethical side this advance is being noticed and recorded; that, from the enlarging concept of conduct, individuality no longer remains an eternal value; that it is ceasing to be the *sine qua non* of worth and meaning and so indeed it must be becoming an obstacle to the evolution of these, the supreme concepts of consciousness. Dr. William Browne 32 has said: “It is very doubtful whether we shall be able to preserve individuality as an ultimate value in the scheme of

¶95432 See collection of essays by various authors called *Religion and Reality*, pp. 325-326.

¶955things. It looks as if we shall have to dismiss individuality as appearance, not reality. It is a stepping-stone. Even personality must go, because the Universal has no room for merely separate persons." This is the considered opinion of an authority who is inclined to give to religion a place of utmost importance and to consider most carefully the demands of the conservatives who so largely control its present expression. But he is also a trained and long-practised psychologist. Such an opinion should show that from this side, the side of values, individuality is already an obstacle.

¶956At this point the inquiry might close were it not that the final question—as to whether values can really be guaranteed in the larger world, into which with pain and haste we are being born—gives rise to another, and this seems to throw light from an unexpected quarter on our future.

¶957We saw that individuality, if it is not to evolve, must be made eternal. We saw that psychology can never really provide adequate sanction and cover for the ethics that even our present state of psychic evolution (what has here been called upper individualism) has attained. There grows up, therefore, from this anomalous mixture of a morality which really has its sanctions in a past (and future) common consciousness, and present individuality so intense that it cannot conceive that sanctioning condition, a new revelation, a creative wish translating itself into a cosmology of the future, as once the Hebraic genius,33 faced with a similar experience, projected the apocalyptic visions of that "good time coming" when the order of nature would be friendly and comprehensible and yet individuality would continue and be preserved. Spiritualism is the apocalyptics of our day.

¶958If, however, it were but a wish, even though a creative one, it need not be considered here. But it is more than this. There is perhaps no clearer proof of man's evolution than

¶95933 See Ch. III.

¶960this fact, that though he starts out on every discovery to find what he wishes, his wish can never quite conceal the larger meaning of his discovery. For generations he will distort his findings, misread his evidence in terms of his preconception, but gradually the projected shadow of his wish clears off the field of observation, and finally, as the passion to see clearly above all drives away any desire to impose himself, he is contracted until he no longer interferes with the beam that passes from pure percept to undistorted object.

¶961In this way alchemy became chemistry; astrology, astronomy. In both cases the wish to get power without first understanding was fruitless. In the first case, and perhaps in the second, with sidereal chemistry and the application of Millikan's intercosmic short-wave radiation,34 understanding has given the power once sought, but now, by the understanding mind, valued only for its use in leading to deeper knowledge.

¶962In this way psychical research, undoubtedly owing its impetus to a most powerful wish, should nevertheless lead to an interest which, never otherwise to have been awaked, will gradually free itself of the distortion caused by that initial, falsely restrictive wish and lead to a knowledge of the psyche through which we may have final proof of the evolutionary trend of consciousness.

¶963It is therefore necessary in a final chapter to review in the broadest outline the subject of psychical research, for though the evidence it has brought to light was sought under the impetus springing from the belief that the eternity of the individual could alone guarantee values, nevertheless that evidence is in reality discovering the reverse: that not only is the preservation of values not bound up with individuality,

¶96434 Sir J. H. Jeans said of this radiation in the Trueman Wood Lecture already quoted (Royal Society of Arts, March 7, 1928): "We are not dealing with a minute phenomenon of mere academic interest. In a sense this radiation is the most fundamental physical phenomenon of the whole Universe. . . . Our bodies are traversed by it night and day . . . and it is so intense that it breaks up several million atoms in our bodies every second. It may be essential to our life or it may be killing us."

¶965but that actually there lies yonder a state of being in which individuality is in rapid disintegration and the psyche experiencing enlargement into a general state of consciousness.35

¶966ON THE DIMINISHMENT OF HUMAN PHYSIQUE

¶967This notion is evidently so unfamiliar that it may be advisable to support it by the judgment of an anatomist. Wilfred Trotter has said, in *Functions of the Human Skull*:

¶968"When we see an evolutionary tendency so strong as that seems to be which has stripped and lightened the cranium until it has reached the degree of fragility and simplification seen in the modern European, we are inclined to ask whether even yet its force is exhausted. There are perhaps signs that even now the cranium is, so to say, intolerant even of the light burden of accessory function it still has to bear. It is scarcely possible to be familiar with the lower jaw of the modern English without wondering whether the unexhausted tendency we have been considering is not at work to free the cranium even of the temporal muscle. It is clear that the molar region of the mandible is shrinking, and experience already suggests that eight fully erupted molar teeth are nearer the actual normal than twelve. Since the temporal muscle is especially concerned with the use of the molars, it is perhaps permissible to wonder whether it, rather than the jaw, is the real object of evolutionary attack."

¶96935 Mrs. Ladd-Franklin's collection of essays entitled *Colour and Colour Theories* was issued too lately for her conclusions to be discussed in this chapter. It must therefore suffice to say that though she holds to another theory of colour evolution she maintains not only that the present colour sense can only be accounted for as an evolved and evolving faculty but that there is every reason to suppose that this evolution may be expected to continue.

¶970CHAPTER VIII

¶971THE ENLARGEMENT OF INDIVIDUALITY : (B) PSYCHIC

¶972SUMMARY

¶973THE field of Psychical Research has been confused by prejudice. So both sides think that if Psychical Research is at all true, it must decide for or against individual survival, because there is no alternative. This is not so. In the first place Psychical Research gives negative proof, because the mediumistic accounts of life after death contradict the individual-survival hypothesis; and in the second, Psychical Research shows that in spite of immense prejudice of the wish, something which is not individual comes through. For in Psychical Research as in other exploration man arrives at truth, though he starts determined to find what he wishes. We alter ourselves in asking and so become capable of understanding the real answer. But this process of discovery reaches a crisis in Psychical Research, for we begin to see that not only does true knowledge of the outer known mean proportionate knowledge of the inner knower, but that here inner and outer come together. Because of the nature of this crisis we can understand Psychical Research's real significance for, and evidence toward, this inquiry, only if we trace its evolution. The medium is a proto-individual and is spiritually descended from the witch. The witch was a proto-individual appearing in a backward fertility-religion when it began to turn salvationist, i.e., individualized. Hence her persecution and her hatred-reaction. Hence suggestion and projection of diabolism. This modifies as persecution dies down, but till today Psychical Research has been generally thought morbid. This is unavoidable because, of the whole

¶974[page 296] of the abnormal, only the morbid can be noticed by the normal. From this point then are to be traced separately the two divisions of this abnormality: medium phenomena (subjective) and phenomena of hauntings (objective). In the first we can continue to follow the evolution of the medium from proto-individualism and see that, as she develops, her anthropomorphism modifies (case of Mrs. Piper). This abandonment of anthropomorphism and the establishment of telepathy reveal that there exists a field of consciousness which is impersonal. Further, Psychometry suggests that that field is not necessarily attached to living persons, and Cryptaesthesia, that the field may extend very widely in space and time. So we pass outside the strict limits of the medium side of Psychical Research. Between this "subjective" side and the "objective" side, of hauntings, this middle term of Cryptaesthesia lies. The *Gate of Remembrance* is an example of this. So we pass to hauntings. They, if at all true, would seem to support personal survival. But they in fact are liable to more serious anthropomorphic distortion by the onlooker than even mediums' phenomena. What was a mood is taken for a person, not merely by the misconception of the experient but by his power of creative unconscious suggestion. The Doris case is an illustration of this; here a "mood" was transformed into a "person." The trace or echo theory of hauntings is right, if not considered final. The trace or echo is a path, a final and distorted vibration, from a field which we can only be aware of in distortion. Ceasing to be anthropomorphic we should be able to be aware of the field in its normal areas, i.e., of super-personality. This the nature of all present known hauntings confirms, for all are expressions of the self-regarding passions. We have, then, from the abnormal, knowledge of a lower condition of unindividualized passions. We may assume an upper layer for the other-regarding passions where, *a fortiori*, individuality would be transcended. So from Psychical Research and de-

¶975ductions from it we find confirmation that individuality is but a boundary belt through which man is passing and that ahead lies a new consciousness combining the peace of the co-conscious with the intensity of personality.

¶976CHAPTER VIII

¶977Some of the acutest intellects of our time have regarded this [Psychical Research] problem as pointing to the possibility of a great extension of our knowledge of man's nature and a revision of the view of his place in the Universe implied by the current formulations of Science.

¶978DR. MCDOUGALL, *Abnormal Psychology*.

¶979ANY study of Psychical Research, however cursory, presents peculiar difficulties. Though patient and thorough attempts have been made to render the subject a science, research is faced with one unprecedented obstacle. Instead of observers' finding a field which the unobservant, uncritical man had never noticed, the ground is not only already occupied, but so disturbed, so tampered with, so worked up, that most scientists have turned away from it in disgust. For its studies the scientific attention has been accustomed to find uncontaminated areas. The physical sciences have made their investigators used to obtaining a clear yes or no to their inquiry. In these upper reaches of psychology it is all different. Always there is a glib reply, and never can it be taken without the most careful reinterpretation. It is this ignorance of the nature of the phenomena with which they were faced, this unawareness that here were experiences which came so close to their own nature that they could not in reality focus clearly upon them, that led to the uncritical rejection of all the evidence by the majority, and a hardly less critical and perhaps more damaging acceptance by a few, of the scientific world. Hardly without exception, to all who have taken any interest in the subject, it has appeared that

¶980[page 298] here they were faced with only two possible alternatives: either the evidence was at its face value true and tradition confirmed; or it was false and psychophysics was the final term of human knowledge and experience. Individuality might have arisen from a more rudimentary state of consciousness, personality might have been in the past dimmer than today, but now it is set and final. It arises in every human being, reaches a climax as the body reaches its full complexity, and as the body sinks into decay, it too is dissolved. It is obviously the goal of psychophysical evolution: there is and can be nothing beyond it, whether it is temporary or eternal. On this, mechanist and vitalist, physicist and spiritualist, agree. That “you have either to die or to survive,” the true extremes concur, are the only alternatives, and as the survival evidence of the spirits seems self-contradictory and absurd, most of those who depend on outer evidence for their conclusions decide that there is no survival. But the way out of a dilemma is usually found to lie between the horns. The problem appears to be insoluble because that particular term in which the solution lies has been overlooked. Here, as has been suggested, it lies in the word “you”—the term of separate individuality. And if without prejudice we sift the evidence of Psychical Research, we shall find that to this conclusion it can give important confirmation.

¶981On the face of the evidence offered, this is of course not so. The findings of this study also seem to lie between the horns of the dilemma: either the mechanist is right, these stories are simply projections of the wish to live (and certainly “Summerland” suggests little else), or they prove finally the ultimate nature of individuality. But we have seen that such psychic evidence must of its nature come to us distorted and must require re-expression before it can be rendered a valid description, and here, too, the dilemma divides under analysis.

¶982In the first place, undoubtedly, under the urge of desire, Psychical Research presents evidence which reveals inherent

¶983[page 299] disproof of, results inconsistent with, its driving assumption and its presumed discovery, the survival of individuality. "Summerland," which is the most concrete and often repeated idea of the post-mortal condition of human consciousness, undoubtedly shows that an eternal individual is a contradiction not only in values but in terms. It is patent how inadequate these separate human lives are. Human personality on an unearthly plane (i.e., one on which there have no longer to be many material co-ordinated means to compass an end, so that the "struggle" as well as the "prize" is of interest and value: one in which man no longer has to discover the immateriality of his value through the attempt to satisfy his nature with animal ends, and so, through the devising of new means to compass old ends, to discover new ends) is an instrument without its material, still attempting action, once, but now no longer, necessary for the development of consciousness 1 when it has already attained action's goal, understanding. "What do you do in Summerland?" "Raymond" 2 continues his old earth-life, though its vital nexus, procreation, is eliminated. The other numerous communicators which the war produced used Iliad-wise to go down on hot days to help the sides they had just left—the other side presumably having also its spiritual helpers. So once again, after the Luciferan purge, there would be war in heaven. These communications are full of the contradictions which, as much by the way they are overlooked by the "wish-fulfiller" as by their inherent incompatibility with the hypothesis of personal survival, show that they are certainly not what they are claimed to be, are certainly wish-projections. On this evidence alone, individual survival shows itself to be more unlikely than not. We see, then, by the showing of its advocates, that individuality is not enough, is obviously a thing of time and transition. So much Psy-

¶9841 See Ch. VII.

¶9852 See Oliver Lodge's *Raymond, or Life and Death*.

¶986chical Research has proved in the most convincing way, i.e., by the actual evidence which it has produced and which the survivalist school of researchers has brought forward as proof of their contention. The wish can keep most of the actual producers from being able to read aright their findings. To an impartial onlooker they can yield at once one conclusion—that individuality is not eternal.

¶987But, and this is the second point, though the evidence tells against individuality, that is not to say that it reveals nothing but subjectivity and epiphenomenalism. It is true that spiritualists have not found what they were looking for, what, under the prejudice of the wish, they claim to have found; but only prejudice as violent as theirs and of narrower sympathy could maintain that they have found nothing, and so refuse to sift their evidence. The individualistic misinterpretation in this matter should no more surprise and trouble the really unprejudiced mind than does the similar natural blunder on the part of the early anthropologists. In both cases the error was inevitable to researchers at that stage of individualism and interpretable in more exact terms by such as have reached the condition of "upper individualism." Though the evidence brought forward to prove individual survival seems more and more to be accountable by wish-distortion, less and less to be the valid interpretation of the facts, that is not to say that there are no facts at all, that is not to say that all these records contain no evidence of any psychic activity save that of the survival-craving individuals who carry on the experiments. For Psychical Research is no exception to all the other lines of man's advance. As we have seen, man can begin, and, generally, at the start of any knowledge has begun, to discover truth by an attempt to prove the reality of some desire. The prompting wish does not, cannot, indefinitely prevent him from arriving at truth, for the very fact that he attempts to establish his assumption shows that some part of

¶988[page 301] his psyche recognizes the possibility that he may be wrong—that anyhow it stands in need of confirmation. It is as unhistorical and contrary to present facts to say that man has never discovered an unsuspected reality in pursuing an anthropomorphic hypothesis or even an animal end as to say that every prompting wish, from whatever stage of his development it may spring, actually and in detail is answered by a corresponding reality. To every question that man has asked persistently (i.e., every question which, in spite of the continuous change in himself, continues to present itself to his consciousness) answers have always been forthcoming—enough explanation to keep him continually discovering. These answers have never closed the question. Each stage of the answer has shown that man has questioned in a way to which there could be no final answer, only an interrogatory one, only a partial, temporary solution, only a more extensive problem, an opening into a larger issue. A comprehensive answer—one that completely covers the question—is only possible when we have learned to frame a question as exact and as comprehensive, i.e., when we ourselves have grown until all local, distorting, and limiting personal desire has been withdrawn from our inquiry, when we no longer want an answer that may confirm our prejudice or help to strengthen our private interest, but are really prepared for truth, no longer afraid or greedy, but able to understand a reply so vast that to the animal it must seem meaningless. As Eucken has said, many questions that seem searching, vital, and ultimate fall to pieces when we can analyze what we really purpose by them; that therefore it is by the questions we ask rather than by the answers we obtain that the spirit's dimensions may be adjudged. To the average sensual man this must be nonsense, but he cannot understand the interests even of science; how much less is he able to understand that it is the change in oneself, wrought by learning to ask a question rightly, that matters more

¶989than the answer; that that is indeed the answer; for in the effort of framing and reframing the question, in growing up to understanding the problem, the answer has come, by man's reaching the point where he no longer wants an answer for himself, and so has become a part of that which before, while he was outside of it, he questioned.

¶990Thus we come across the working of that principle, emerging through this inquiry, that *pari passu* with our extended penetration into the outer is the extension of ourselves through our growth in knowledge of those selves; that not only is self-knowledge self-creation, but the clearer, deeper, more impersonal our knowledge of and insight into the outer world, the greater do we ourselves become. By the act of self-abandonment, by the detachment of interest from any private interpretation, any personal application, by the apprehension of the whole as a unity unsubservient to any immediate animal reactions or human achievement, the percipient finds himself not disregarded and eliminated, but, as he views reality *sub specie aeternitatis*, himself become a fully integrated part of the eternal act of contemplation.

¶991In the second place this particular evidence with which this chapter deals is subject to two peculiarities, which are really the same problem presenting two aspects, as we view it (a) from our outer apprehension of new scientific evidence or (b) from our introspective knowledge. Viewed from the first aspect, as the last of our discoveries of the outer world—we may be said to have come to the end of that longest of pilgrimages, that brings us at last to the point where we see ourselves in the picture, ourselves looking at reality, and so, as this is the last of the outer discoveries, it passes into and becomes the first of the inner. As we have seen, discovery, even while still “outer,” becomes, as it grows, increasingly immaterial,³ increasingly difficult not to dis-

¶992³ See Ch. I, pp. 26, 30-31.

¶993[page 303] tort. If we are slow to change ourselves we shall be slow to discover; if we are slow to discover we shall be stubborn in self-change. This is the reason why we have carried into these upper reaches of knowledge a great deal of the distorting and dwarfing misconception for which we commiserate the savage.

¶994From the other aspect, we may say that we have come to a new inner, immaterial world, which because it is new we must, as the savage once did, misconstructionally condense into anthropomorphic form. This, we can now see, is something more than simply "the child mind personalizing everything." That is too simple a definition and leaves out the effect of the seer on what he sees. At this stage Mind, still in the dichotomic condition of subject and object, is still projective, still anthropomorphic, and therefore the object, because of this interdependent relation, *is* anthropomorphic too. As physical phenomena were once conceived as animated, next as personal, and now as manifestations of a general energy-process, so psychic phenomena have passed through these stages, and we are now witnessing the extension from anthropomorphism to the higher animism. Till now the evidence was not only solely comprehensible under anthropomorphic terms; not even were only those parts which are anthropomorphic perceptible; but the whole state, though objective, is even yet, in its own right and present phase, so rudimentary and yet, viewed from the whole history and advance of man, so advanced, that up to this moment, through the mediums and those who attend on them, it is actually distorted and condensed into personalities.

¶995We can, then, only hope to understand this subject and the great contribution that it can make to our knowledge of the evolution of consciousness if we approach the study of it, too, as a phase of the entire evolutionary process and trace historically the development of mediumship.

¶996The rise of Spiritualism, with its chief process, medium-

¶997[page 304] ship, in the modern world, is commonly not traced beyond the outburst in America associated with the Fox Sisters in the middle of last century.⁴ Not to penetrate more deeply is, however, to show that there is no diagnosis or even recognition of the true nature of the psychic state with some of the outward features of which mediumship has made the world familiar. It is essential to perceive that psychic producers and researchers are mainly drawn from the level of proto-individualism, i.e., those who (a), such as the mediums, are still at the anthropomorphic-projective stage and (b) the vast majority of the devotees who are little removed from it.⁵ As such they are driven by an overmastering desire for survival which can only express itself in individual terms. Such is the force of this desire that not only does it misinterpret its experience in anthropomorphic terms, but it condenses it into anthropomorphic images and phantasms. Experients at this stage of consciousness cannot conceive the evidence they produce as being something beyond mechanism, i.e., symptoms of a superconsciousness, and so they must make out of it something below mechanism, i.e., anthropomorphism.

¶998But as these workers are proto-individuals (however late they may be appearing) we should be able to trace back their emergence as a recognizable outcrop at least to the beginning of the modern age. This undoubtedly we can do, and with the aid of this recognition we can make a discovery which is of great significance, but which may be a little startling, so respectable have spiritualistic practices now become. The movement has its origin in the witch cults that

¶999⁴ 1847 at Arcadia, New York.

¶1000⁵ The passion for personal survival which has marked so many of these (R. Hodgson exclaiming, “I can hardly wait to know”; F. W. H. Myers echoing significantly Bunyan’s salvation-lusting cry, “Life, Life, Eternal Life!”) shows that we are dealing with one of the acutest phases of individualism, so acute, indeed, that however scholarly are some of the researchers, we can hardly class them as “upper individuals,” because they still seem making for a lonelier intensity of individuality, a keener and more insulative condensation of consciousness.

¶1001[page 305] reached their crisis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The centuries of Reformation in the common day religion (Reformation which was caused, as we have seen, by the general resumption among high and then low of psychic advance) are also the centuries wherein a religion, so obscured that we can now only outline it, and yet so extensive that it might, as has been suggested, best claim to be Catholic,6 experienced the *first* stage of the inevitable psychic evolutionary revolution.7 Once that is recognized much becomes clear not only about the witch but also about mediumship and its results.

¶1002In the first place we see why it is, and remains, principally a feminine activity. The "witch cults," it would appear, are called (like the Church of Rome) by a title that describes where they ended rather than where they began. Modern study 8 has shown that the covens are vestiges of a suppressed fertility-religion which has reached the stage when it is dominated by women. The men have gone out of it, save those strange few who acted as devils and carried on vicariously the procreative rites of the denigrated Nature God. Why, it may be asked, should this female dominance be the mark of a religion in decadence? Strabo says that Religion begins with women, and undoubtedly the stage he knew did so begin.9 But we can now go behind that and see man crossing the threshold which woman will not cross for millennia after. The Arunta 10 and other tribes at that level keep

¶10036 See Frazer on magic—the only religion which can claim *quod omnibus, quod semper, quod ubique.*

¶10047 "Pope Innocent IV. by his Bull of 1484 against witchcraft gave a fearful impetus to the persecution and he commissioned Spenger, whose book was long recognized as the witch-finder's manual." Lecky, *History of Rationalism,* p. 6.—"The witch-finding manias of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mark a *conscious reaction.*" Dr. G. C. Coulton on the rise of individuality in religion, Vol. I, p. 433, *Five Centuries of Religion.*

¶10058 Cf. Miss Murray, *The Witch Cult in Western Europe.*

¶10069 See the development of the matriarchate.

¶100710 See Spencer and Gillen, *The Arunta.* See also note, Ch. I, p. 52, on the problem of woman's position: how it is her conservatism that leads to her being left out, for she has been left behind.

¶1008[page 306] women out of religion altogether. According to this essay's thesis, there is in this veto no hardship nor real excommunication, for the woman, by nature always the conservative, is kept by that nature inexpugnably communicate, for she is, as yet, not individual enough to feel separateness, to strive for at-one-ment, to need religion. Because man is of his nature, as the variant, the pioneer—spiritually as well as physically the departure from the norm—he must invent religion, a way whereby his strayed and banished soul may return again. But woman, too, must sooner or later become individual, and what we witness, through distortion of horrible misrepresentation and mishandling (and the horrible reaction which such treatment produces in its victims), at the rise of the Modern Age, in the terrible witch-findings, is the destruction of a backward and senile religion—though not of all its followers—arrested when passing from a fertility to a salvationist rite.11 Lit by the fires of ecclesiastical fury, we see these poor creatures surprised in their dark and tortuous spiritual evolution. The witch is the proto-individual, the priest-king in the Modern World. Born out of time, a poor laggard of civilization, she repeats the tragedy of his history without his purple glory: even as a squalid May Day mendicancy is the last whimper of that great appeal through vicarious sacrifice which once brought man back to nature in reconciliation, and which still, thin and high, like the last echo of an Alpine horn lost on the snows, speaks to many who listen with strained hearing of an atonement between the poor sinner and high heaven.

¶1009And as the priest-king, faced with public hostility, became malicious, so we may account for the witch's poor spite. So first she wills to wound, and then, true to her terrible doom, she must long to return, yes, and even to make, as her fate

¶101011 Cf. the important part the Maenad, Bassarid, and Bacchante played in the traditional Greek religions when they were passing through a similar stage.

¶1011[page 307] urges, some manner of atonement, some reconciling sacrifice. One of the strangest evidences in all the strange evidence of witchcraft, but one which becomes immediately comprehensible once we realize that these poor women are proto-individuals,12 is the constantly attested fact that the witch frequently denounced herself. As with all proto-individuals, the sense of excommunicate loneliness was too great, the need to serve, in the end, so strong that she sought by self-revelation and immolation to return to the community, from which she felt such terrible alienation that even its welcome of torture and fire were better. If then we are undoubtedly dealing with proto-individuals, we are concerned with beings living across a threshold of consciousness and so having true psychic experiences but compelled to render them in terms of individuality, and, when the experience is treated as evil, naturally compelled to construe them as diabolic.

¶1012It is this evil complexion suggested by the group to the lonely proto-individual that, still not quite faded, has made additionally obscure to the modern world the problem of Psychical Research, already confused by the anthropomorphic misrepresentation. To the ordinary informed man, though he may no longer react into persecuting fury, the whole subject is assuredly morbid. That is, however, an honest and even a useful reaction, though to allow that is not of course to concede that the subject is evil, or even morbid, when wholly known. The question is whether, if the manifestations were not abnormal, they could at all gain the attention of the ordinary man. The regular cannot be noticed and can only be assimilated if it has value for the condition in which man, or any other organism, is at the time. Normal happenings on any other plane, the more normal he himself is to his own, the less he can notice. This blindness is due to something else as well. The first reason for it, we have seen, springs from his own nature, but there is a

¶101312 See Ch. I.

¶1014[page 308] second which springs from the peculiar nature of these peculiar phenomena. On his part modern man inherits the savage's indifference to the regular and his assumption of the beneficial. On their part only psychic states which, from the standpoint not merely of man, but of another psychic plane, are abnormal, confused, and transitional, are in any way liable to force themselves on his attention. Dr. Hart in his *Psychology of Insanity* has pointed out how much normal psychology owes to the study of the mental states of the insane. Therein were made visible, through dissociation, separate traits exaggerated to such disproportionate size that they became, as it might be said, visible to the naked eye, traits which in the normal make-up, at their proper scale and proportion, were not only too small and ordinary but were too blended in the homogeneous psyche to be discernible. So in Psychical Research we should expect to force themselves upon our rudimentary attention only those elements which were both disrupted and through that disruption driven down to, distorted by, and to some extent transformed into a parody of, our own psychophysical condition.

¶1015We have, then, reason for connecting the witch and the medium and can see how witchcraft and mediumship, because of the personality of the witch-medium, is apt to have a hostile and morbid tone. We can also recognize that as such abnormal powers and experiences have their opportunity of outwelling as the proto-individual passes from group consciousness to full individualism, those powers and experiences cannot help being interpreted and even condensed by the medium into anthropomorphic form. Thus at the first, the witch, stage of this evolution, we should expect to find the experience felt and communicated as diabolic—to the witch the coven suggested that the Presence was the degraded deity, and the upper world maintained that it was the Principle of Evil. And at the second stage, the mediumistic, that

¶1016element of morbid suggestion will still not be wholly eliminated.

¶1017Though we have reached a stage in this sketch of psychophysical evolution when, owing to the convergence and intensified mutual reaction of the outer and the inner, the distinction of objective and subjective is of rapidly diminishing value, we may perhaps still use it as a formal division. If that is so, we may take the witch-medium phenomenon and its evolution as the subjective side, and for the objective all such happenings as may be grouped under the wide term of hauntings. As we draw to the end of the inquiry we shall see that the facts of mediumship are quite as “objective” as the facts of hauntings, while the facts of hauntings are as dependent on “subjective” elements as are those produced by mediums. This is only to state as a single proposition the obvious fact that the observer cannot but affect and be affected by his observation and that facts do force themselves upon our attention. So we may view along this approach also the convergence of seer and seen.

¶1018To finish therefore with mediumship and then to turn to hauntings: We can now trace with some clearness that line of the evolution of consciousness; first, the witch who condensively projects a devil; then the mediums, as intolerance abates, projecting “controls” and “guides” which are increasingly amiable, though Puckish-outbreak throwbacks are not infrequent still. Ought we not then postulate a third stage? Can we not *a priori* expect to get evidence of an impersonal condition of consciousness? One of the difficulties has been that for many years a highly educated medium seemed not unnaturally a contradiction in terms; it was not possible to make the best of two such different worlds. Yet it could only be from mediums who had begun to pass out of the anthropomorphic stage that it might be hoped to obtain super-personal evidence. We have seen that women are

¶1019[page 310] the most frequent and the best mediums because of their general position in psychic evolution, as extant examples of proto-individualism. Of the “upper individuals,” the critical faculty of Humanists would naturally make ecstatic states difficult to experience, but why should not Humanitarians have such? The explanation probably lies in the fact that both types of “upper individuals” are drawing away from the pole of individuality and therefore that any relaxation of consciousness—such as trance or hypnosis—would mean for them a return not to wider but to narrower consciousness. Certainly the higher type, if it does relax, falls back to an individualism from which more rudimentary types are safe in relaxation (though not in activity).

¶1020Nevertheless the psychic evolution of the witch-medium type is proceeding. The best studied and perhaps the most gifted medium of our age, Mrs. Piper, is a woman who could objectively consider the results of her faculty, and she was not persuaded of the individuality of the personations to which she gave expression. The late Mrs. Verrall was a gifted medium who contributed not only to the elucidation but to the production of much automatic script of psychological value and was also a classical lecturer at Cambridge and so a member of one of the most critical societies in the world. These two, Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Verrall, gave rise to that new branch of psychic phenomena, cross-correspondences, a type of evidence which is of great importance in this inquiry. The cross-correspondence 13 consists of scripts which are received separately, sometimes simultaneously, and sometimes with instructions that they are to be sent to a particular person. This person has also received script, and these several scripts fit into one another, containing cross-references which show a common co-ordination. The phraseology of each medium affects the script she receives (Mrs. Verrall

¶102113 For a lucid summary see Professor Oesterreich's *Occultism and Modern Science*, Ch. III.

¶1022[page 311] often writes a "master word" in Greek or Latin), and the general control seems, even to those who have no theory of a common consciousness, to be accounted for better by the idea of a common telepathic field 14 than by the operation of a single discarnate personality.

¶1023To return to the rising standard of the mentality of mediums (as leading to a less anthropomorphic distortion of their experience), finally there may be mentioned the case of Professor Gilbert Murray. He has been able, as might have been hoped, to analyze the remarkable telepathic gift he possesses, to such a degree that he can almost control its exercise at his conscious will.15 He notes the curious conditions of hyperaesthesia, malaise, and drowsiness that attend the opening of the subjective mind.16 His conclusions and his experiments 17 have tended distinctly to favour the telepathic hypothesis and so against proof of individualistic survival.18 But (it may be asked) is there this antithesis?

¶102414 It should be noted here that Dr. Broad, in his *The Mind and Its Place in Nature*, prefers to this conclusion an original one of his own, i.e., that the medium gets into touch with a "psychic factor," not a surviving disincarnate individual (that, he thinks, is shown to be too improbable by what "it" reports of its present after-death life, sayings which are simply echoes of the medium-plus-circle wish), and this psychic factor is the disintegrated individual's memory reintegrated by the medium. It seems simpler to conclude that what the medium does is to distort into individual form a general field of memory, selecting therefrom those details which are relevant, more or less, to the sitting (cf. the "dramatization" of the hypnotized).

¶102515 See his Presidential Address, S.P.R.

¶102616 The important point that this reveals is that the slightest interference or even interest of the individual mind utterly interrupts the communication.

¶102717 See *Proceedings*, S.P.R.

¶102818 It may be asked: Is there no other alternative, and will not mediums, when they cease to be wholly proto-individuals and become as normal and as critical as the ordinary contemporary individual, lose the powers of transliminal insight which are peculiar to their transitional condition? Such things have seemed to happen, such powers have been more likely to manifest themselves in childhood, when heaven, and hell, too, lie about us. Even Archbishop Whately was a magic calculator when a boy. But to assume that is to assume that the main mass of us is not moving, that the world is still the world of the Utilitarians. It is not. If humanity were staying individual then there would be no alternative, and as the boy magic calculator became a laissez-faire archbishop, so too every abnormality must shrink into a completely condensed individual—incidentally, as we have

¶1029Undoubtedly. If living minds are continuously and unconsciously in touch with each other, no proof can be given by a personification (as proof, to be proof, must then require) which it is possible to demonstrate never to have been known to some one living and unconsciously communicated to the medium’s mind.19 But though telepathy does tell against survival, the two sides, the Mechanists and the Survivalists, seem so anxious to have occasion to quarrel that they appear to have overlooked the far more significant fact which telepathy’s undoubted proof reveals. As Bergson pointed out in the Presidential Address above cited, it is apparently always going on, and every one, though not consciously aware, may be receiving. Mediums, and all those who cultivate the release and observation of the subjective mind, alone clearly raise the impression to the level where it can express itself, and even they cannot tell at what moment the actual message entered their recipient centre: as tidal waters may rise in the well of a castle, fill a deep reservoir, and sink again, leaving the water to be drawn up to ground-level long after. Freud also has given it as his opinion that the dreams of occupants of the same house may be confused, one’s with another’s. It must not be thought, however, that there is any known physical limitation to telepathic influence. What appear to be instantaneous intimations have been received in England from Australia.20 Our present knowledge of telepathy would seem to show that it is a constant mental communication, perhaps circulation, but one

¶1030seen, not less dangerous and hostile to the community, though not so strange, as any witch or priest-king. But we are all moving, and those who leave the anthropomorphic visions of the proto-individual, the power of which comes, though not the form, from his still not severed contact with the lower group life (from which most of us are sundered), may now exchange them for a direct apprehension of the higher group life, into which all upper individuals are moving and which need not be misrepresented by anthropomorphic imagery.

¶103119 The one possibility, of some hidden object, say buried before the birth of any living person, indicated in trance and then brought to light by excavation, will be dealt with later under Cryptaesthesia.

¶103220 See Gurney's *Phantasms of the Living.*

¶1033[page 313] which can only emerge onto our insulated individual consciousnesses when their limited and exclusive focus is relaxed. Attention soon causes failure; keen interest immediately distorts and almost as soon terminates the inflow. As Dr. Osty has shown,²¹ information breaks through: it is, to those immediately around, very probably meaningless: the sense that it appears senseless almost at once influences medium and circle to affect it in the direction of a meaning which they can recognize and this wish almost as soon checks the communication, the rest being merely unconscious pretence.

¶1034Perhaps, however, the most valuable example of the influence that the individual mind has in checking the emergence of the wider field of consciousness is given by Dr. Schiller,²² who shows that the endowed and extensive experiments in controlled telepathy that took place at Leland Stanford University in the United States, and which appeared unfruitful, revealed under careful checking that the numbers to be indicated by telepathy (playing-cards were used) were actually passed over considerably more often than by the law of chance they should have been. In other words, there was present a consciousness aware that these numbers were the numbers on which the test depended, and the experimenter was made to miss them more often than by pure chance he would. We may say, anthropomorphically, that so alien and repulsive is the influence of the individual attention that the "other mind" feels itself driven to conceal itself against discovery.²³

¶1035We have then from the medium's, the "subjective," side not only evidence to support the conclusion that their con-

¶1036²¹ *Revue Métapsychique.*

¶1037²² See the article "Psychical Research," in the 1920 *Supplement to Encyclopaedia Britannica,* edition of 1911.

¶1038²³ Dr. Coover at Leland Stanford University, California, in 1917 carried out a series of controlled experiments in telepathy with one hundred students, the test being the correct transmission of the denominations of playing-cards. See also Mrs. Sidgwick, "Obstacles to Telepathy," *Journal of S.P.R.*

¶1039trols and surrounding spirits are personifications and apostrophes, but we also have proof that there does exist a field of consciousness of indefinite extent, with which every individual is profoundly connected but which is so alien to and incompatible with individuality that it can come through and present itself to that insulated point of consciousness only when the personality is relaxed almost to disarticulation. That impersonal field of consciousness, possessed of powers of which our psychophysical limitations make it difficult for us to conceive (for it seems to have a wider percept of time than we in our individualism can imagine 24), mediums have, of necessity, up till now condensed and distorted, but we can see how this distortion is growing less. From devils we reach angels and demigods. From small, brackish, sour pools we reach fresh inlets and lagoons. A few fathoms further, and we shall be past the shallows and the miseries and see before us the eternal Pacific, the calm, all-embracing, all-resolving sea.25

¶1040There remains to trace this emergence from that other side whereon there are upwellings without human mediums' being consciously employed for the purpose, and so, in this chapter, distinguished as "objective." There remains to consider, for similar evidence of the growth of a larger consciousness, that vast mass of ill-sorted phenomena which is classed under its most generalized and oldest title, as Hauntings.

¶1041But before we pass to that side, there is a middle term

¶104224 See J. W. Dunne, *An Experiment with Time*.

¶104325 It is apposite to quote here Dr. Hans Driesch's judgment on Telepathy (*The Crisis in Psychology*, p. 236): "In telepathy and mind-reading we have a direct, dynamic relation between mind and mind with no material intervention. This seems to prove that all mind is one at bottom. This is also a conclusion which is reached along very different ways of reasoning in critical metaphysics. All moral feeling, for instance, is only understandable on this assumption." See also the clinical opinion quoted by Professor Driesch that the deepest layers of consciousness accessible through hypnosis reveal a consciousness apparently inerrant and impersonal. Kohnstamm, *Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie*. Vol. XIII, April, 1918.

¶1044[page 315] between the “subjectivity” of the medium and the “objectivity” of the haunting, and which incidentally illustrates how arbitrary is, at this level, the common-sense distinction between inward and outward. What that middle term is can best be shown by a question: Can the medium work without a client? Is it possible to detect memories not only floating around other minds but around the places or objects with which they were “first associated”? This is the problem which was mentioned above, and the faculty for such detection has been called, for objects Psychometry; for places and for more general knowledge, Cryptaesthesia.26 The medium, holding some object in her hand or visiting some place, can describe its associations. It may be noted that the first well-known case of Mrs. Piper’s powers was that of her giving information about the writer of an Italian letter by holding it to her forehead.27 Such evidence, Dr. Oesterreich thinks, does not require a new category to describe it. He believes that it is in reality due to telepathy—some mind knowing all the circumstances which the medium appears to elicit from the object or place. There are, however, cases given in Dr. Richet’s book in which it is hard to see who of the living can have been possessed of the evidence, and it is also a little difficult to believe that the object merely serves as a reminder to the medium that she is to concentrate (or rather, excentrate), when the cases of Mrs. Piper and many similar ones are considered. But whether this power is merely an extension of telepathy or a new aspect of the general consciousness, it illustrates the extension of that awareness not only in space but in time. Indeed there is one protracted case in which the conditions required to establish the evidence for a field of consciousness embracing more than the subconscious union of all living individuals seem provided. We have seen that to satisfy such conditions there would have

¶104526 See Dr. Charles Richet's *Thirty Years of Psychical Research*. 27 Oesterreich, *op. cit.*, p. 38.

¶1046[page 316] to be, first, information through the subjective mind, of detailed facts lost to all living, and secondly, that after this information had been duly witnessed, discoveries would have to be initiated which would prove the correctness of the message. Such appears to have been the course of events recorded in Mr. Bligh Bond's book, *The Gate of Remembrance*. First he obtained a long and detailed script giving details—measurements, plans, etc.—about Glastonbury Abbey, which were not known to any living, nor, as far as could be discovered, were anywhere on record, and which had been proved to be improbable by recent and competent archaeological excavation. The scripts were laid up with reliable witnesses, excavation was started, and ample proof was forthcoming. Again the same process was employed, new information given; it, too, was similarly laid up, and in turn confirmed by excavation. Mr. Bligh Bond himself, although there was much vivid personalizing in the scripts, inclined to the hypothesis that he and his fellow medium were in touch with an impersonal memory—the "idea" of the long-vanished buildings, the constructional vision that they once had been in Mind, now no longer focused in individuality.

¶1047So we are led to true hauntings. These are called "objective" because where they attain a maximum of intensity the same disturbance (a figure seen, a sound heard of human cries, of wheels, galloping, or blows) is experienced and similarly described by several persons who witness it separately and without previous information. If such things are accepted at all, they would seem at first sight to sustain the belief in individual survival, but analysis shows that here again is being made that same mistake as was made about telepathy, that here in this less advanced side of Psychical Research we are passing through the same anthropomorphic stage which we have seen we have already nearly passed out of in the more advanced. The receiving mind must begin—

¶1048because of the stage of its development when it first becomes capable of reception of any sort—by translating every experience, however vague, however refractory, into its own anthropomorphic language. The “censor” that guards the threshold of individual consciousness objects far more to the indecency of an undress which cannot even clothe itself in a personification than to any psychophysical exposure. There is, however, in these “objective” phenomena another and far more confusing element, an unconscious but potent influence of all researchers up to the present, and one which, until we can manage to withdraw it, will make it probably impossible for any one to discover with what in these cases we are actually faced. And this element, we shall see, is all the more difficult to discount because the very “objectivity” of the experience makes it extraordinarily difficult for the observer to realize that while it may owe its form—and that a comparatively permanent one—to the repeated presence and prejudice of observers, its force may be drawn from something completely outside of them.

¶1049This distinction is essential, but it is difficult to realize, and an approach to the position from which it may become clear can perhaps best be made from the side that the alienist has opened up. Even in trance communication we are often faced with characterizations so complete that only a long experience of normal and abnormal psychology has revealed to scientific researchers 28 that in the study of these they are confronted with the protean creativeness and suggestibility of a field of mind, when access is obtained to it by the starved personality, but to which individuality is but the temporary focus through which it becomes evident. And so difficult is the subject that even this step forward seemed to have led to a blind alley. The explanation, though it avoided one mistake, fell into another, for it was too simple

¶105028 See the classic case of “Helene Smith” and its brilliant and painstaking analysis by Professor Flournoy of Geneva. Oesterreich, *op. cit.*, Ch. I.

¶1051and complete. The researcher said, when confronted with these multiple personalities: “There is nothing here but a single human psyche ‘splintered’ into fragments which are now developing on their own.” 29 So the “nothing but” school, which had been such an arbitrary and serious obstacle to advance in anthropology, repeated its mistake in Psychical Research. Naturally in the “subjective” branch, in the study of trance mediums and their “controls,” the mistake did not at once become apparent, because it was possible to carry on investigations very far and to clear up many difficulties before “the error introduced by the observer” became a serious distortion. In spite of the fact of telepathy pointing to a common underlying awareness connecting individuals, those researchers who were most concerned with trance personalities could continue to regard them as drawn solely from such fund of psychic energy as a completely isolated psyche (which we have seen is an impossibility) might provide. Greater weight to this restrictive limitation (because those who imposed it were more influential than the usual psychical researcher) has been given through the study of those cases which are, more exactly than the impersonations of mediums, called splintered personalities, because in them the patient may involuntarily and at any moment undergo a complete change of individuality. It is true that though a critical study of these splintered states has made it increasingly doubtful whether we are ever dealing with any extension of the psychic field beyond that which informed the temporarily or permanently suppressed original ego—there is no evidence of “spirit possession” in these cases—it is nevertheless of vital importance to note that

¶105229 This, however, was in itself a step of great importance, if not for the study of the actual phenomena under observation, at least for the freeing of the mind of the observer from prejudice. For as Dr. McDougall has said (*Abnormal Psychology*, p. 522) when considering this problem: “The simple dualistic view of personality goes because it means the conjunction of one body with one indivisible soul. *This, multiple personalities have disproved.*”

¶1053[page 319] the original personality can, as in the Sally Beauchamp case, disappear for ever, and the general energy which made the original Miss Beauchamp now finding better expression in Sally, the original personality is recomposed in this later and more satisfactory manifestation. This, surely, is evidence of a field of spirit which expresses itself first through one co-ordination of faculties and then, better, through a second arrangement of the same. This obvious deduction, however, was not made by the original researchers. They were blinded to the simplest explanation because of their prior "spiritist" assumptions. In the famous "Doris" Case, Dr. Prince, who studied and recorded it throughout, thought that one of the "splinters" which called itself Margaret was not a splinter but a true intrusion. So it described itself to be, but—and this is of great importance—only after Dr. Prince had suggested to it that it was so. Still, before he gave the suggestion it had occurred to him, owing to the unusual behavior of Margaret. From the beginning she claimed to be protecting Doris when Doris was helpless, and when Dr. Prince began to eliminate the other splintered personalities by making them grow back into infantilism and so disappear, through suggestion, into the main psyche, so permitting the full re-emergence and constant re-establishment of the original Doris (the usual remedial technique in these cases), Margaret declared her willingness to go but said she would not "grow back," but that on a certain date she would suddenly withdraw and never be found again. This she did. If to this fact we add this other, that Dr. Prince is a Christian clergyman to whom the idea of discarnate spirits is fundamental, but that of a general consciousness alien, we can see how evidence which would suggest the simpler hypothesis of general psychic energy existing round an individual focus or vortex, so that the vortex could draw in creative capacity beyond its original endowment, would be overlooked in favour of a more traditional,

¶1054[page 320] but in reality more elaborate and less substantiated, theory.30

¶1055We have seen in this example how a new element—miscalled intrusion—is coming to be recognized on the “subjective” side of Psychical Research, but how the prejudice of the discoverer may lead to the discovery’s being rendered almost useless. For on the one side we have the biologically founded psychologist to whom nothing can come out of the psyche save that which was put into it by the physique. The physique sets an absolute term to the resources of the psyche. Such a point of view is yet powerful, though how it maintains itself in the face of the fact of telepathy is hard to understand. On the other hand, we have the religious, and therefore in the West the anthropomorphic, individual-salvationist psychologist, to whom any evidence of psychic energy other than that for which the original psyche can account must be referred to another individualized spirit or spirits. In short, in these cases we are presented with individualities, in part, no doubt, manufactured by the patient, but—and this is important—partly manufactured by the observer and out of something which can be so isolated but which of its free nature is not so.

¶1056Now in hauntings this outer, obtrusive factor is even more in evidence and even more liable to anthropomorphic condensation, not only by the present observer, but—a peculiar difficulty—owing to past observers. In consequence the erroneous prejudice of these observers becomes so serious and potent a factor that the whole of their evidence requires reinterpretation in the light of this knowledge. We have seen that Dr. Prince suggested to Margaret that she, a helpful spirit, came from without. Afterward any one who questioned this aspect and channel of consciousness, it is clear to see, would get the same answer even though the question

¶105730 See “The Doris Case,” by Dr. Prince and “A Study of the Doris Case,” by Dr. C. F. S. Schiller, *Proceedings of the S.P.R.* Dr. Schiller inclined to the view that Margaret was “from without,” i.e., not within the innate capacity and variform complex of the original Doris.

¶1058[page 321] were framed so as not to suggest it. With "ghosts" there is proceeding from the living a constant "condensive" suggestion. They have, like the aborigine, to conform to the character that is expected of them. The most cautious theory of hauntings is that of the echo or trace. Some deed (of the peculiar class to which nearly all such deeds seem to belong there will be something to say later), has been committed. For a little while there is no reaction. It is as though the impetus were still penetrating the environment and were yet to be returned. Then, in the vast majority of recorded cases, it begins to repeat on so regular a sequence and with so automatic a rendering that it is obviously a rhythm, the reflex, from some receptive surface, of an energy which has disturbed it. It is the deed that is re-echoing, not the doer that is re-enacting. Into such a disturbed area comes a human being.31 As with the early anthropologist, so with the causal psychical experient, something is experienced which is alien but arresting and in this case peculiarly disconcerting. He can neither dismiss it nor observe it dispassionately. Hence he becomes gravely affected by it and it by him. There is a completely confusing interaction going on between object and subject, and so not only will he imagine that what he experiences approximates to the categories with which he is familiar, that faced with "it"—a presence or a disturbance—he is faced with an isolated self-conscious individual, in consciousness like himself, but in his dismay, and unchecked by critical detachment, he will unconsciously but all the more powerfully release a force of suggestion which may bring the repetitive deed a step

¶105931 The type of place which takes a psychic impression should have been studied. Some correlation between the places that receive as well as between the deeds that record might have been discovered. The place must be an important factor, else how account for the fact that some spots which have been subjected to constant discharges of all the most violent human passions seem to retain no trace, e.g., the lowest vault of the White Tower (of London), in which for generations torture was practised, has never been reported to be haunted.

¶1060[page 322] nearer to becoming a less circumscribed action—indeed toward becoming a doer. If in anthropology the suggestion of the explorer can actually transform the savage in the direction of individualism, how much more when the psychic state is even more vague, and unsustained by any group suggestion. Even as the anthropomorphic anthropologist attributes to the savage many souls, with a mistaken but potent individualism breaking up a unity he cannot conceive, so the individual who experiences a rudimentary haunting must of necessity conceive of it as personal and by that conception focus and fix it in that shape.

¶1061It is thus we reach the second stage in the development of hauntings. So we see that this branch, too, of Psychical Research follows the evolution of the elder branch, as *it* followed that of the general evolution of consciousness. First there is a diffused condition, an undefined field, next an anthropomorphic condensation, and then the spiral returns and we have re-expansion. The condensed mood, fortified not only by the assumption, the unconscious contribution, of the observer, will then become capable of elaborate variation of action and what may even appear as purposive behaviour. It will react to changed conditions and to new presences. There is, however, even when faced with evidence such as this, no reason, indeed quite the reverse, to suppose we have present real individuals. The simpler hypothesis for these immediate facts, as well as the only theory which will bring them into line with any general conception of consciousness, is that we are dealing with vortices, eddies of elemental passions, “secondaries” from a cyclone perhaps itself already dissipated, while they continue held together and reinforced by the adventitious contributions of experients and even casual observers. The meteorological metaphor may help to illustrate the fact that though these phenomena arrest the attention they are not fundamental, and if they are to be understood the scientist must realize that their real signifi-

¶1062cance is that they indicate a power of the air, which, though omnipresent and so to the ordinary attention unnoticeable, is the source and inexhaustible reservoir of all these disconcerting manifestations. We may then say that the ghost is “the dream”—the violent wish—“of the dead” doer—not generally the “done in”—reinforced by being experienced by a series of individuals who come into its path generally when most easily “tapped,” i.e., asleep or frightened.

¶1063Finally, as was promised above, a word must be said about these manifestations’ character, for they have a common and most significant nature. Every haunting observed seems without exception to be the expression only of the “self-regarding” passions; they are compounded of the scoriae of individualism. They are expressions of the master forces of the lower life, of the inhibitions of the free spirit, of the insulations that make the psyche realize its desperate loneliness and yet despair of any escape, even deny (so complete do they seem) that any reality can be outside and beyond. These are Greed, Hatred, and Fear. They remain on, poisoning like infective centres the lives and consciousness of others who, to some degree already tainted with them, cannot resist their envelopment. Yet they throw light on the problem of individuality and its evolution from the smaller field of general consciousness into the larger. They even show that the individual is a very temporary phase. They are fragments flung off as the vortex passes, drawn downward; a momentarily animated dust that spins into the shape of a petty purpose, a small trouble, and then is dissipated. They show how unstable, how disruptive, even in this its acute crisis, individuality of its nature must be. When the psyche is prevented from expanding, it fragments; when it fails to attain a higher unity, it is dragged asunder in a lower dissolution. Below, we find the fundamental psychic reality to be this trinity of repulsive condensation: Greed that spoils, Hatred that destroys, Fear that

¶1064[page 324] shrinks from all outside the narrow focus of personal desire. Above we can detect the greater trinity of force which breaks the individual out of his cerement, the trinity of the "other-regarding" passions: Creativeness, which makes Greed and even possession senseless: Love that renders hatred absurd: Understanding, which leaves Fear meaningless. These will not tolerate isolation, and they deliver the individualized psyche by making it realize that the last and worst enemy is individuality.

¶1065Neither below nor above is there, then, place for individuality. It is not even as permanent as those self-regarding passions in expressing which it believes it is conserving itself. Touched by the other-regarding power, the psyche must see that it will possess everything when it has the power to give everything; that discarding itself, it will find open to it the power and the consciousness of all.

¶1066Whether we delay to take that step or whether even now the ground gives under us and we fall on to another condition, we can no longer refuse to see that individuality has been, and at most can only be, a shifting boundary belt between the endlessly repeated phases of the passions and the eternal, impersonal constancy of ideas.

¶1067To sum up this chapter: the finer appreciation of mental states leaves us aware of conditions existing, ever more apparently, between the term of mechanistic epiphenomenalism—no mind without matter—and anthropomorphic spiritism—no matter without its genius, its isolated soul. Obviously there is ahead of us a condition (into which we are already moving) wherein we shall discover, by the change of evolution and as that evolution changes and accelerates in us, that the sharp focus of the night-lamp of individuality, which has lit us through the darkness of our separation, vanishes as the comprehensive light of dawn breaks over us and we see ourselves united in the sunrise. As psychoanthropology has looked into the past it has discovered at

¶1068[page 325] last what was Eden. We have climbed out of the mists, and across the valley, in which lie shrouded all the cities, the kingdoms, and the empires, we look on to the sunlit slopes on which the child-mind plays. Turning back to the position we have won to gain that insight, we see that we, too, are on the threshold of a station, itself as clear and free and open. If that was Eden, a step ahead of us is Paradise.

¶1069So closes a rudimentary attempt at a philosophy of history, an effort in barest outline to show how, in the light of modern sciences, history might be viewed as the Odyssey of the spirit of man. Springing from the prehistoric, he emerges as a thing of such short time that he makes history, attempting first to satisfy, then to discover, and finally to transcend, himself. So only, perhaps, can we interpret our effort and elucidate our aim. So viewing the future we may perceive a condition which can justify the past, make comprehensible and worthy the present, and be both an objective toward which we can move with all desire and a goal at which we can find dynamic peace.

¶1070INDEX

¶1071Acton, Lord, 168, 247 Adams, Henry, 225-26, 229 Aesthetics, 268, 281 Age of Revolution. *See* Modern Age Akhnaton, 93-94, 97, 111, 191 Algolagnia, 161, 176 Amenophis IV. *See* Akhnaton Ammianus, Marcellinus, 90 Anarchy, philosophical, 233 Animal mentality, 27-28, 57-59, 243-44 Anthropology, 24-35, 47-48, 54, 64-66, 285, 322 Anthropomorphism, 34, 224, 283, 303-04, 308, 309, 312, 313, 320, 322, 324 *Apathia*, 144 Apocalypticism, 8, 130-32, 134, 163-64, 224, 292 Aquinas, Thomas, 237-38 Architecture, 148, 226-29, 270 Aristotle, 4, 122, 137, 140, 142, 143, 150, 237-38 Art, 45-46, 54-55, 92, 110, 114, 148, 188, 226-28 Arunta, 52, 60, 305-06 Asceticism, 123, 144, 161, 165, 181. *See also* Monasticism; Stoicism Assyria, 113, 267 Astronomy, 274-76 *Ataraxia*, 140, 143, 144, 269 Aulard, A., 85 Aurignacian man, 45, 54 Australians, 36, 52-53, 195

¶1072Babbitt, Irving, 198, 207 Babylon, 114 Bacon, Francis, 191-92, 271 Baganda, 70 Bagehot, 60 Bantu, 39, 43, 47, 75 Barbarism, return to. *See* Recessionalism Barnes, J. S., 254 Bastiat, F., 251 Beauchamp case, 14, 319 Beebe, W., 47 Bentham, 205, 250, 251. *See also* Utilitarianism Berbers, 39 Bergson, H. L., 280, 312 Berr, Henri, 59-60 Black Death, the, 175-79, 223, 226 Blake, William, 189 Body, the human, diminishing, 278-79 Bolshevism, 4, 231, 252-55 Bond, Bligh, 316 Borroro, 47 Broad, C. D., 311 Browne, William, 291 Buddha, 122-23, 143, 149, 173-74 Burckhardt, J. C., 187 Burkett, A. N., 35 Burkitt, M. C., 42, 55, 132, 163 Bury, J. B., 4-5, 140, 171, 192, 197, 219, 232, 248, 249 Bushman, 40, 45-47, 54

¶1073Caesar, Julius, 195 Cajetan, 238, 240, 241, 250 Calvert, Roy, 201 Cannibalism, 70, 135 Capitalism, 251 Carmichael, R. D., 274 Carpenter, Edward, 109 Carr-Saunders, A. M., 7, 83, 112, 164, 199, 222 Catholicism, 85, 143, 162-81, 183-84, 237-41 Chadwick, H. M., 82, 83, 87, 90, 168 Chaka, 40 Charlemagne, 78, 85, 170 Charles, R. H., 127, 163 Chasidim, 129, 131, 164, 207 Child mind, 58-59, 63-64, 242-43 Chinese, 111, 113, 123, 148, 161, 174. *See also* Confucius Christianity, 85, 119, 146, 163, 186. *See also* Catholicism Church, the. *See* Catholicism Church and state, 83, 93, 94, 96, 164, 256 City states, 105, 136-43, 148, 158-59, 164, 172, 184-87, 257-58 Civilization, 87, 199; danger to, 10, 142-43, 206, 257, 286; definition of, 109; impending change in, 13, 95, 231; rise and decline of, 69, 87, 94, 95, 98, 109-11, 155-68, 177, 220-25, 230-31, 234, 257, 261 Climate, influence of, 39, 54, 222-23

¶1074Co-consciousness, 6, 11, 12, 14, 15, 43, 52, 61, 71, 73, 75-76, 94, 95, 127, 141, 142, 147, 167, 171, 189, 195, 206, 218, 225, 230, 232, 234, 245, 260, 261

¶1075Collingwood, R. G., 110, 162, 226

¶1076Colour-sense, 44, 267-68, 281, 294

¶1077Communes, Italian, 184-86

¶1078Communism, 123, 253

¶1079Confucius, 63, 111, 112

¶1080Consciousness, 5, 8, 11, 62-65, 208, 248, 249; evolution of, 6-8, 10, 12-14, 17, 24-26, 33-38, 51, 64, 66, 72, 77, 102-03, 124-26, 141, 145, 152-53, 155, 159-60, 161, 166, 175, 180, 193, 198, 202-03, 207, 212, 217, 223, 229-31, 233-36, 247, 255, 260-61, 270-71, 273, 276-77, 285, 299, 304, 309, 322-24; group, 14, 15-16, 31-33, 38, 47-66, 69, 76-77, 91, 111, 125, 167, 168, 254, 272, 277; impersonal field of, 314; the new, 261, 276-77. *See also* Co-consciousness; Self-consciousness; Subconsciousness; Superconsciousness

¶1081Contemplation, 84, 91, 195, 302

¶1082Cornford, F. M., 140

¶1083Cosmology, 132, 290-91

¶1084Coulton, G. C., 164, 171, 173, 245, 305

¶1085Creativeness, 324

¶1086Cross correspondences, 310-11

¶1087Cryptaesthesia, 312, 315, 316

¶1088Cushing, F. H., 30

¶1089Dark Ages, 82, 110, 165-68, 171-73, 184-85, 237, 245

¶1090Darwin, Charles, 33, 48

¶1091Davy, G., 36, 43, 59, 70, 81, 106, 110

¶1092Death, 12, 74, 89, 122, 176-77

¶1093Democracy, 4, 136-39, 156, 246, 254

¶1094Dickinson, G. Lowes, xi

¶1095Diffusion, human, 37-39, 46

¶1096Doris case, 14, 319-21

¶1097Driesch, H., 14, 314

¶1098Drunkenness, 117

¶1099Dunne, J. W., 314

¶1100Durkheim, E., 15, 36, 78

¶1101Economic, advance, 245; interpretation, 3, 5-9, 84-85, 190, 251; revolution, 247-55, 271-72

¶1102Economics, 86; the new, 255

¶1103Ecstasy, 72, 73, 178

¶1104Eddington, A. S., 250, 270, 275, 276

¶1105Egypt, 85, 88-104, 157, 220, 223

¶1106Egyptian religion, 70, 74, 88-104, 118-19, 145, 166

¶1107Einstein, 228, 270, 283, 284

¶1108Emotionalism, 11, 88, 93, 190-213, 244-47, 286-88

¶1109Empire. *See* Imperialism

¶1110Encyclopaedists, 244, 251

¶1111England, 194-97

¶1112Environmentalism, 236, 250

¶1113Epictetus, 145

¶1114Epicurus, 143-44

¶1115Epiphenomenalism, 16, 300, 324

¶1116Erasmus, 238, 240, 241, 250, 251

¶1117Eschatology, 12, 103, 116-19, 127, 160, 162; the new, 162. *See also* Apocalypticism; Death; Immortality; Salvationism

¶1118Eskimos, 39

¶1119Ethics, 131-32, 290-92. *See also* Morality

¶1120Eucken, R. C., 301

¶1121Evolution, 32; as a spiral, 7, 22-25, 37, 83, 212, 322; new perspective of, 4, 22, 285, 288-92; social, 35, 37, 70, 83-85, 102-03, 152, 153, 217, 229. *See also* Consciousness, evolution of

¶1122Farnell, L. R., 117

¶1123Fascism, 4, 36, 254

¶1124Fear, 89, 243-44, 323-24

¶1125Feeling. *See* Emotionalism

¶1126Fertility-rites, 57, 73, 83, 85, 115, 118, 121-22, 305, 306. *See also* Sex in religion

¶1127Feudalism, 88, 185

¶1128Fleure, H. J., 21, 106

¶1129Flower, J. C., 223

¶1130Fourier, J. B. J., 248

¶1131Frazer, Sir J. G., 69-70, 71, 75, 91, 118, 163, 305

¶1132Frederick II, 150, 188

¶1133Freedom, political, 4; and social, 36

¶1134Freud, 33, 70, 122, 312

¶1135Fuegan, 46

¶1136Fülöp-Miller, R., 254

¶1137Gamble, F. W., 278

¶1138Garrod, D. A. E., 55

¶1139Gasquet, F. A., 175

¶1140Gillen, F. J., 52-53, 195, 305

¶1141Ginsberg, Morris, 15-17

¶1142Greece, 82, 83, 132-53, 160, 172, 182

¶1143Greed, 323-24

¶1144Greek philosophy, 143-53, 285; religion, 117-20, 162, 166, 306

¶1145Green, Lothian, 267

¶1146Gregariousness, 50, 58-59, 243-44

¶1147Group consciousness. *See* Consciousness, group

¶1148Gurney, E., 312

¶1149Gwatkin, H. M., 22

¶1150Haddon, A. C., 81, 264, 280

¶1151Haldane, J. B. S., 266

¶1152Hall, G. S., 64, 115-16

¶1153Harmony, pre-established, 38, 193

¶1154Harris, Frank, 195

¶1155Harrison, Jane, 82

¶1156Hart, Bernard, 308

¶1157Hatred, 323-24

¶1158Hauntings, 309, 314-17, 321-23

¶1159Heard, A. St. J., 153

¶1160Heath, Sir T., 140

¶1161Hedonistic paradox, 152, 191

¶1162Heitland, W. E., 157

¶1163Heroic phase, 42, 44, 45, 70, 77, 78, 80-106, 135, 170, 171, 218, 253

¶1164Historian, development of, 7

¶1165History, economic interpretation of, 84-85

¶1166History, philosophy of, 9-10, 69, 84, 217-31, 325

¶1167Hobbes, 8, 31, 40, 241-45, 250

¶1168Hobhouse, L. T., 17

¶1169Hodgson, R., 304

¶1170Homer, colour in, 267

¶1171Hooton, E. A., 37

¶1172Hottentot, 45

¶1173Hrdlicka, A., 35

¶1174Humanism, 182-213, 235, 251, 310

¶1175Humanitarianism, 5-6, 93, 147-50, 179, 182-213, 221, 224-25, 235, 245, 247, 286-88, 310

¶1176Hume, 196, 201-02

¶1177Huntingdon, Ellsworth, 222-23

¶1178Huxley, J. S., 289

¶1179Huxley, T. H., 290

¶1180Immortality, 12, 52, 57, 77, 91, 115, 131, 145-46, 162, 170, 177, 180, 193, 240, 291. *See also* Psychical research

¶1181Imperialism, 87-98, 101, 105, 114-15, 126, 156, 165, 231, 258

¶1182India, religion in, 89, 144-45. *See also* Buddha

¶1183Individualism, 34, 52, 60, 61, 78, 94, 110, 138, 140, 142, 147, 240, 322

¶1184Individuality, 16, 30, 34-36, 42, 217, 218, 244, 272, 289, 293; arrest of, 154-81; as final, 6; as not final, 8-9, 11, 33, 65-66, 114, 128, 230, 232, 291-92, 299-300, 324; beginning and development of, 12-13, 21, 41, 43, 60-64, 71-86, 88, 94, 96, 115, 120, 126, 133, 136, 144, 156, 166, 177, 240, 245-47, 255, 258, 298; complete, 158, 187, 198, 241, 258; a danger, 254-55; disintegrated, 293-94, 311; dominant, 96; enlargement of, 262-325; lower, 165, 179, 214-61; new sense of, 5, 11, 324; pioneer, 106-53; problem of, 78, 323; upper, 165, 179, 182-213, 229, 237, 246-47, 251, 257, 258, 300, 304, 310, 312. *See also* Pre-individuality; Proto-individuality; Super-individuality

¶1185Industrialism. *See* Revolution, the economic

¶1186Inge, W. R., 163, 207, 209, 271

¶1187Instinct, 36, 57-59, 199-202, 205, 210

¶1188Intellectualism, 11, 93, 193, 197-213, 235, 244, 248-49, 285-88

¶1189Intelligence. *See* Intellectualism

¶1190Ireland, 179-81

¶1191Israelites. *See* Judaism

¶1192Italian polity, 184-88. *See also* Fascism

¶1193Jainism, 123

¶1194Jeans, Sir J. H., 276, 281, 293

¶1195Jerome, 161

¶1196Joly, John, 282

¶1197Jones, D. W. C., 142

¶1198Judaism, 56, 80, 120-24, 138, 139, 143, 160, 162, 163, 166, 177, 292. *See also* Chasidim

¶1199Juliana, Lady, of Norwich, 178

¶1200Kaffirs, 147

¶1201Kant, 233

¶1202Keitgen, F., 185

¶1203Keith, Sir A., 27

¶1204Kennett, R. H., 120-21

¶1205Keynes, J. M., 251

¶1206Kingship, 43, 44, 70, 71, 77-78, 90, 102, 135, 136, 139. *See also* Priest-Kingship

¶1207Kohnstamm, O., 314

¶1208Ladd-Franklin, C., 294

¶1209Languages, an evidence of evolution, 37, 55-57, 65

¶1210Lao-Tze, 111

¶1211Larmor, Sir J., 283

¶1212Lawrence, T. E., 195

¶1213Lazarus, J., 15

¶1214Lecky, W. E. H., 34, 305

¶1215Leninism, 253, 254 Leuba, J. H., 72 Lévy-Bruhl, L., 32, 47, 56, 74 Leys, Norman, 44 Liberalism, 4 *Liberum veto*, 137, 258 Locke, John, 244, 250 Lodge, Sir Oliver, 299 Love, 324 Luther, Martin, 235, 237, 240, 245-46, 251, 253 Lyell, Sir Charles, 27

¶1216McDougall, W., 15-16, 297, 318 Machiavelli, 187-91 Mackinder, H. J., 86 Magdalenian man, 31, 45, 54 Magic, 41, 52, 75, 69-71, 80, 83, 91, 101, 102, 118, 172, 271, 305 Marshall, Sir John, 42, 123 Marx, Karl, 117, 249, 251, 253, 254. *See also* Socialism Mathematics, 228, 270, 282 Matriarchy, 81, 123, 305 Medes, 114, 116 Medicine-man, 69, 75, 78 Mediumship. *See* Spiritualism Melanesians, 48, 50, 76, 142 Middle Ages, 22, 163, 168, 171-93, 216, 237, 245, 257, 261 Migration, 7, 222-23 Mill, J. S., 208, 250. *See also* Utilitarianism Millikan, R. A., 227, 283, 293 Modern Age, 179, 210, 213, 214-61, 271, 306 Monasticism, 79, 118, 122, 132, 145, 149-50, 154-81, 183-84 Mongols. *See* Chinese Morality, 142, 233; Jewish, 120, 127-28; the new, 290-92, 314. *See also* Ethics Moret, A., 36, 43, 59, 70, 81, 91, 96-97, 106, 110 Muir, Ramsay, 4 Müller, Max, 42 Murder, ritual. *See* Sacrifices Murray, Gilbert, as medium, 140, 311 Murray, M. A., 134, 305 Music, 227-29, 270 Mussolini. *See* Fascism Myers, C. S., 267 Myers, F. W. H., 304 Mystery-religions, 117-19, 135, 144, 146, 161, 162-63 Mysticism, 12, 15, 72, 86, 92-93, 95, 118, 139, 175, 178-79, 265

¶1217Napoleon, 78, 85 Nationalism, 15, 124, 126, 186, 240, 246, 252-54, 258, 286 Neanderthal man, 23, 26, 27, 85 Negroes, 35, 39-40 Neo-Platonism, 145 Newman, J. H., 147

¶1218Oesterreich, T. K., 310, 315, 317 Osiris, 118-19 Osty, E., 313 Owen, Robert, 247-51

¶1219Paget, Sir R. A. S., 55 Pain sense, 280 Painting, 228 Papuans, 31 Patriotism. *See* Nationalism Pavlov, I. P., 267 Peake, H. J. E., 106 Perry, W. J., 73-74 Persia, 97, 114, 116 Personalities, dissociated, 14, 16, 65, 318-22 Personality, 57, 292, 298-99 Peter the Venerable, 174-75 Petrie, Sir W. M. Flinders, 70, 145, 166, 220-22, 225 Petronius, 160 Phelps, E., 122 Philanthropy. *See* Humanitarianism Philosophy, Greek, 143-53, 285; of history. *See* History, philosophy of Phoenicians, 124, 130 Piper, Mrs., medium, 310, 315 Pitt-Rivers, A. E. Lane Fox, 49 Platonism, 145 Political revolution, the 241-47, 254 Polity. *See* State Polo, Marco, 195 Polynesians, 36, 48-52, 76 Pre-individuality, 14, 15-16, 18-66, 285. *See also* Primitive man Priestess, the, 52-53, 305-06 Priesthood, 52, 72, 79-85, 90-91, 102-04, 114, 116-17, 121-22, 135, 157, 165-66, 170 Priest-Kingship, 44, 69-81, 88-106, 137, 170, 171, 253, 306, 312 Primitive man, 110, 230, 233, 242, 264, 268-69, 285, 322. *See also* Pre-individuality *Prince, the*, 187-91 Prince, Morton, 14, 319-20 Progress, 3-13, 60, 197, 203, 247, 250, 260; definition of, 6

¶1220INDEX

¶1221Property, conception of, 42

¶1222Proto-individuality, 43, 61, 67-106, 133, 170, 172, 174, 218, 235, 237, 244, 304, 306-08, 311-12

¶1223Psychical research, 293, 297-325

¶1224Psychological, interpretation, 7-9, 63, 204, 231; revolution, 256-61

¶1225Psychology, 5-9, 12, 31, 33, 290-92

¶1226Psychometry, 315

¶1227Pythagoras, 117-18

¶1228Pythagoreans, 120

¶1229Quietism, 97, 131, 178-79, 235

¶1230Realism, the new, 273-76

¶1231Reason, 36, 58, 145, 202

¶1232Recessionalism, 22, 50, 84, 158, 167-68, 221-25, 229, 252, 257-58

¶1233Reformation, 181, 254, 305. *See also* Luther, Martin

¶1234Religion, 7, 89, 91, 157; decay of, 235; evolution of, 71-83, 114-15; the new, 255; primitive, 47, 56-57, 112, 305. *See also* Egyptian religion; Greek religion; India; Mystery-religions

¶1235Religious revolution, the, 114-15, 237-41, 246

¶1236Renaissance, 147, 187, 191-92, 195, 205, 206, 225, 226-27, 244, 254

¶1237Resurrectionism. *See* Immortality

¶1238Revolution, 201, 217, 229, 233; the approaching, 33-34, 199; the economic, 247-55, 271-72; the French, 202-03; the political, 241-47, 254; the psychological, 256-61; the religious, 114-15, 237-41, 246

¶1239Revolutionary Age. *See* Modern Age

¶1240Revolutionist, 8, 201

¶1241Richet, C., 315

¶1242Rites. *See* Religion

¶1243Rivers, W. H. R., 49, 50, 51, 81, 264, 280

¶1244Rolle, Richard, 178

¶1245Romantic movement, 202

¶1246Rome, 144, 156-62, 231

¶1247Rostovtsev, M. I., 156-57, 160, 162, 231

¶1248Round, J. H., 184

¶1249Rousseau, 31, 244-48, 251, 280

¶1250Russell, Bertrand, 33, 199, 235

¶1251Russia, 123, 211, 225. *See also* Bolshevism; Leninism

¶1252Sacraments, 72, 117, 121-22, 178-79

¶1253Sacrifice, religious, 70-75, 81-82, 103, 105, 120, 121-22, 135, 178, 306-07

¶1254St. Simon, C. H., comte de, 249

¶1255Salimbene, 173

¶1256Salvationism, 47, 56-57, 74, 77, 79, 90, 115-16, 118-21, 123, 127-28, 132, 135, 140, 144, 146, 149-52, 157-66, 170, 178-79, 184, 186, 237, 250, 287, 304-06, 320

¶1257Santayana, G., 150, 272

¶1258Satyriasis, 123, 161, 165

¶1259Savage, the. *See* Primitive man

¶1260Schiller, C. F. S., 313, 320

¶1261Schliemann, H., 27

¶1262Science, 136, 138, 139, 140, 149-52, 188, 192-93, 209-11, 224, 282-83

¶1263Self-consciousness, 5, 8, 11, 14, 33, 35, 36, 38, 41, 63, 64, 65, 68, 71, 75, 78, 82, 85-98, 105, 110, 116, 122, 124-25, 128-29, 135-36, 141, 152, 170, 171, 187-90, 212, 217, 221, 233, 235, 242, 257, 260-61, 321

¶1264Semites, 111, 113, 144. *See also* Judaism

¶1265Senses, development of, 208, 264-70, 279-83, 287

¶1266Sensibility, 8, 148, 150, 161, 197, 202, 204, 206, 211, 221, 285-87. *See also* Humanitarianism

¶1267Sex in Religion, 57, 115-16, 122, 161, 181. *See also* Fertility-rites

¶1268Shakespeare, 194-97

¶1269Sidgwick, E. M. B., 313

¶1270Sidgwick, H., 22

¶1271Sight, sense of, 265-69, 281-83

¶1272Smell, sense of, 266

¶1273Smith, Elliott, 42, 266

¶1274Socialism, 206, 249, 251. *See also* Marx, Karl

¶1275Socrates, 149, 150

¶1276Sollas, W. J., 39

¶1277Spencer, B., 52-53, 195, 305

¶1278Spengler, O., 141, 223-24, 226-29

¶1279Spiritualism, 12, 292-93. *See also* Psychical research

¶1280State, development of the, 60, 95-98, 189-91; endurance of the, 61-62, 87

¶1281State, theory of the, 5-6, 125, 254; the new, 255

¶1282Steinen, von den, K., 47

¶1283Stoicism, 144-46, 159

¶1284Strabo, 172, 305

¶1285Strandloopers, 45

¶1286Subconsciousness, 15, 50, 77

¶1287Sublimation of man, 271, 276-77, 285-94

¶1288Suicide, 146, 173-74, 196

¶1289Sullivan, J. W. N., 282-83

¶1290[page 332] Sumeria, 113; religion of, 105-06 Superconsciousness, 6, 141, 152, 166, 178, 189, 260, 304 Super-individuality, 14, 142, 197, 207, 209, 212, 258, 260-61, 263-85 Super-sensuous plane, 282 Survival belief. *See* Immortality

¶1291Tabus, 40, 70, 74, 85, 103, 195, 233 *Taedium vitae*, 50, 122, 142 Tasmanian, 46, 53-54 Telepathy, 15, 38, 51, 65, 311-15, 318, 320 Thought, 32, 33, 199, 208, 274 Tibetans, 123 Time-sense, 23, 29, 41, 62, 141, 142, 231, 233, 242, 259, 269 Tímour, 224-25, 229, 232 Tolerance, 34, 165 Torres Straits expedition. *See* Haddon, A. C. Totemism, 47, 81, 88, 102, 104, 178 Tradition, 41, 58, 76, 77, 82, 88, 91, 264 Trial and error, 36, 58, 255 Tylor, Sir E. B., 32 Tyranny, 83, 151, 184, 254

¶1292Ulpian, 147, 168, 200 Understanding, 8, 210, 271-73, 286, 324

¶1293Ure, P. N., 83, 184 Utilitarianism, 196, 201-02, 205, 311. *See also* Bentham; Mill, J. S.

¶1294Values, 10, 208, 289-94 Verneau, R., 35 Verrall, Mrs., medium, 310 Vico, 83, 156, 218-19 Victim. *See* Sacrifice, religious Voltaire, 180, 244

¶1295Wallas, Graham, 199 War, 40-45, 52, 80, 81, 89, 90, 92, 242 Wegelin, 68 Whately, R., 251, 311-12 Whitehead, A. N., 153, 284-85 Witch, witch-doctor, 71, 75, 80, 134, 304-10, 312 Wolf-children, 59 Woman and religion, 52-53, 305-06 Woolf, Leonard, 195 Woolley, C. L., 74 Wundt, W. M., 15

¶1296Yeats, W. B., 153

¶1297Zarathustra, 116 Zeno, 143-44 Zimmern, H., 172 Zulus, 40 Zuñis, 30