The Age of the Gods

Introduction

xxiii Introduction after a century and more of historical specialism and archæological research, of the minute criticism of documents and sources, the time has come when it is becoming possible to reap the fruits of this intensive labour, and to undertake some general synthesis of the new knowledge of man’s past that we have acquired. It is a truism that we cannot understand the present without a knowledge of the past or the past without the whole, but previous to our own age it has been difficult to realise this. Men were forced to rest content with the history of a few favoured peoples and exceptional periods—like classical greece and Rome or our own immediate past—that were islands of light in a sea of darkness. But now, thanks not only to the sensational discoveries of the great civilisations of the ancient east, but even more to the patient investigation of the dry bones of archæology—literal bones and fragments of pottery and rude implements—a general vision of the whole past of our civilisation has become possible. There is still no lack of gaps in our knowledge, there is an infinity of problems that still await solution, but at least the broad outlines are there, and no educated person need any longer be ignorant of the primary foundations on which our civilisation has been built up. The practical importance of this knowledge is obvious. If we have not a general framework into which to fit our knowledge of history, we are forced to fall back on some lesser unity in relation to which we order our ideas, and this lesser unity will of course be the national state. during the last two centuries the history of europe has been given an almost exclusively national interpretation. and since the unit is a political one, the method of interpretation has tended to be political also, so that history has often sunk to the level of political propaganda and even some of the greatest of nineteenth-century historians—such xxiv The Age of the Gods as Macaulay, froude, Treitschke, even Mommsen himself—have been unashamed political partisans. This state of things was one of the great predisposing causes of the late War, and it is certain that the peoples of europe will never be able to co-operate in peace, so long as they have no knowledge of their common cultural tradition and no revelation of the unity of european civilisation. Now the alternative to the nationalist conception of history is the cultural or sociological one which goes behind the political unit and studies that fundamental social unity which we term a culture. I. The Nature of Culture.—What is a culture? a culture is a common way of life—a particular adjustment of man to his natural surroundings and his economic needs. In its use and modification it resembles the development of a biological species, which, as dr. Regan pointed out in his address to the British association in 1925, is primarily due, not to change in structure, but to the formation of a community, either with new habits, or in a new and restricted environment. and just as every natural region tends to possess its characteristic forms of animal and vegetable life, so too will it possess its own type of human society. Not that man is merely plastic under the influence of his material environment . he moulds it, as well as being moulded by it. The lower the culture the more passive it is. But the higher culture will express itself through its material circumstance, as masterfully and triumphantly as the artist through the medium of his material. It is true that three of the main influences which form and modify human culture are the same as in the case of the formation of an animal species. They are (1) race, i.e. the genetic factor; (2) environment, i.e. the geographical factor; (3) function or occupation, i.e. the economic factor. But in addition to these there is a fourth element—thought or the psychological factor—which is peculiar to the human species and the existence of which frees man from the blind dependence on material environment which characterises the lower forms of life. It is this factor which renders possible the acquisition of a growing capital of social tradition, so that the gains of one generation can be transmitted to the next, and the discoveries or new ideas of an individual can become...