Arthur James Balfour

“ If our outlook upon the Universe has suffered modifications in detail so great and so numerous that they amount collectively to a revolution, it is to men of science we owe it, not to theologians or philosophers. ”

“ Is it seriously to be ranked with religion and patriotism as an important force for raising men’s lives above what is small, personal, and self-centred? Does it not rather pervert pure knowledge into a new contrivance for making money, and give a fresh triumph to the ‘growing materialism of the age’? ”

“ Our observer however might, very rightly, feel that a far-spreading Empire like that of Rome, including regions profoundly differing in race, history and religion, would be liable to other dangers than those which arise from mere external aggression. One of the first questions, therefore, which he would be disposed to ask, is whether so heterogeneous a state was not in perpetual danger of dissolution through the disintegrating influence of national sentiments. ”

“ But should we be better fitted to form a correct conception of the life-history of complex organisms if we refused to recognise any cause of death but accident or disease? I admit, of course, that [Pg 33] the term ‘decadence’ is less precise than ‘old age’: as sociology deals with organisms far less definite than biology. I admit also that it explains nothing. If its use is to be justified at all, the justification must depend not on the fact that it supplies an explanation, but on the fact that it rules out explanations which are obvious but inadequate. ”

“ Few governments have been more anxious to foster an alien and higher culture, than was the Roman Government to foster Greek civilisation. In so far as Rome inherited what Alexander conquered, it carried out the ideal which Alexander had conceived. In few periods have the rich been readier to spend of their private fortunes on public objects. There never was a community in which associations for every purpose of mutual aid or enjoyment sprang more readily into existence. There never was a military monarchy less given to wars of aggression. ”

“ Philosophy has never touched the mass of men except through religion. And, though the parallel is not complete, it is safe to say that science will never touch them unaided by its practical applications. ”

“ The material world, howsoever it may have gained in sublimity, has, under the touch of science, lost (so to speak) in domestic charm. Except where it affects the immediate needs of organic life, it may seem so remote from the concerns of men that in the majority it will rouse no curiosity, while of those who are fascinated by its marvels, not a few will be chilled by its impersonal and indifferent immensity. ”

“ For this latter mood only religion or religious philosophy can supply a cure. But for the former, the appropriate remedy is the perpetual stimulus which the influence of [Pg 55] science on the business of mankind offers to their sluggish curiosity. And even now I believe this influence to be underrated. If in the last hundred years the whole material setting of civilised life has altered, we owe it neither to politicians nor to political institutions. We owe it to the combined efforts of those who have advanced science and those who have applied it. ”

“ Berkeley, in a well-known stanza, tells how the drama of civilisation has slowly travelled westwards [Pg 8] to find its loftiest development, but also its final catastrophe, in the New World. While every man who is weary, hopeless, or disillusioned talks as if he had caught these various diseases from the decadent epoch in which he was born.
But why should civilisations thus wear out and great communities decay? and what evidence is there that in fact they do? These questions, though I cannot give to them any conclusive answers, are of much more than a merely theoretic interest. ”

“ It may seem fanciful to find in a single recent aspect of this revolution an influence which resembles religion or patriotism in its appeals to the higher side of ordinary characters—especially since we are accustomed to regard the appropriation by industry of scientific discoveries merely as a means of multiplying the material conveniences of life. But if it be remembered that this process brings vast sections of every industrial community into admiring relation with the highest intellectual achievement, and the most disinterested search for truth ”

“ Even in the organic world, decay and death, familiar though they be, are phenomena that call for scientific explanation. And Weismann has definitely asked how it comes about that the higher organisms grow old and die, seeing that old age and death are not inseparable characteristics of living protoplasm, and that the simplest organisms suffer no natural decay, perishing, when they do perish, by accident, starvation, or specific disease. ”

“ They have to harmonise and to coordinate, to prevent the new from being one-sided, to preserve the valuable essence of what is old. But science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge; [Pg 56] and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilisation. ”

“ It is curious how deeply imbedded in ordinary discourse are traces of the conviction that childhood, maturity, and old age, are stages in the corporate, as they are in the individual, life. “A young and vigorous nation,” “a decrepit and moribund civilisation”—phrases like these, and scores of others containing the same implication, come as trippingly from the tongue as if they suggested no difficulty and called for no explanation. ”

“ He would learn probably, with a strong feeling of surprise, that with the single exception of the Jews, the constituent nations, once conquered, were not merely content to belong to the Empire, but could scarcely imagine themselves doing anything else: that the Imperial system appealed, not merely to the material needs of the component populations, but also to their imagination and their loyalty; that Gaul, Spain, and Britain, though but recently forced within the pale of civilisation, were as faithful to the Imperial ideal as the Greek of Athens or the Hellenised Orientals of Syria ”

“ But though the advance of each community is thus limited by its inherited aptitudes, I do not suppose that those limits have ever been reached by its unaided efforts. In the cases where a forward movement has died away, the pause must in part be due to arrested development in the variable, not to a fixed resistance in the unchanging factor of national character. Either external conditions are unfavourable; or the sentiments, customs and beliefs which make society possible have hardened into shapes which make its further self-development impossible ”

“ Associations connected with industry or commerce, which began by freely exchanging public service for public privilege, found their members subjected to ever increasing obligations, for the due performance of which they and their children were liable in person and in property. Thus while Christianity, and the other forces that made for mercy, were diminishing the slavery of the slave, the needs of the Bureaucracy compelled it to trench ever more and more upon the freedom of the free. ”

“ Consider for instance the long agony and final destruction of Roman Imperialism in the West, the most momentous catastrophe of which we have historic record. It has deeply stirred the imagination of mankind, it has been the theme of great historians, it has been much explained by political philosophers, yet who feels that either historians or philosophers have laid bare the inner workings of the drama? ”

“ Civil dissensions, military disasters, pestilences, famines, tyrants, tax-gatherers, growing burdens, and waning wealth—the gloomy catalogue is unrolled before our eyes, yet somehow it does not in all cases wholly satisfy us: we feel that some of these diseases are of a kind which a vigorous body politic should easily be able to survive, that others are secondary symptoms of some obscurer malady, and that in neither case do they supply us with the full explanations of which we are in search. ”

“ To some it will commend itself as a eulogy on an industrial as distinguished from a military civilisation: as a suggestion that in the peaceful pursuit of wealth there is that which of itself may constitute a valuable social tonic. This may be true, but it is not my contention. In talking of the alliance between industry and science my emphasis is at least as much on the word science as on the word industry. ”

“ Granting for the sake of argument that it demoralised the mob of Rome, it must be remembered that Rome was not the Empire, nor did the mob of Rome govern the Empire, as once it had governed the Republic.
Slavery is a far more important matter. The magnitude of its effects on ancient societies, difficult as these are to disentangle, can hardly be exaggerated. But with what plausibility can we find in it the cause of [Pg 27] Rome’s decline, seeing that it was the concomitant also of its rise? ”

“ Is it not true that there, while wars and revolutions, dynastic and religious, have shattered ancient states and brought new ones into being, every community, as soon as it has risen above the tribal and nomad condition, adopts with the rarest exceptions a form of government which, from its very generality in Eastern lands, we habitually call an ‘oriental despotism’? ”

“ Now I am quite unable to offer any such general analysis of the causes by which these hindrances to progress are produced or removed as would furnish a reply to my question. But it may be worth noting that a social force has come into being, new in magnitude if not in kind, which must favourably modify such hindrances as come under all but the last of the divisions in which I have roughly arranged them. This force is the modern alliance between pure science and industry. ”

“ The only explanation, if we reject the idea of a mere coincidence, seems to be, that quite apart from opportunity, the exceptional stir and fervour of national life evokes or may evoke qualities which in ordinary times lie dormant, unknown even to their possessors. ”

“ We are concerned with the Empire. We are not concerned with a passing phase or fashion, but with a process which seems to have gone on with increasing rapidity, through good times as well as bad, till the final cataclysm. A local disease might have a local explanation, a transient one might be due to a chance coincidence. But what can we say of a disease which was apparently co-extensive with Imperial civilisation in area, and which exceeded it in duration? ”

“ A community may breed a minority thus exceptionally gifted, as it breeds a minority of men over six feet six. There may be an average decennial output of congenital geniuses as there is an average decennial output of congenital idiots—though the number is likely to be smaller.
[Pg 61]
But if this be the sole cause of the phenomenon, why does the same race apparently produce many men of genius in one generation and few in another? Why are years of abundance so often followed by long periods of sterility? ”

“ Evidently we must not consider a diminution of national power, whether relative or absolute, as constituting by itself a proof of national decadence. Holland is not decadent because her place in the hierarchy of European Powers is less exalted than it was two hundred and fifty years ago. Spain was not necessarily decadent at the end of the seventeenth century because she had exhausted herself in a contest far beyond her resources either in money or in men. ”

“ We have not an idea of what ‘life’ consists in, but if on that account we were to abstain from using the term, we should not be better but worse equipped for dealing with the problems of physiology; while on the other hand if we could translate life into terms of matter and motion to-morrow, we should still be obliged to use the word in order to distinguish the material movements which constitute life or exhibit it, from those which do not. ”

“ If under the excitement of religion or conquest, or else through causes more complicated and more obscure, this limit has sometimes been left behind, reaction has always followed, and decadence set in. Many people indeed, as I have already observed, take this as a matter of course. It seems to them the most natural thing in the world that the glories of the Eastern Khalifate should decay, and that the Moors in Morocco should lose even the memory of the learning and the arts possessed but three centuries ago by the Moors in Spain. ”

“ It may be replied that the history of Rome, on which I dwelt a moment ago, shews that arrested progress, and even decadence, may be but the prelude to a new period of vigorous growth. So that even those races or nations which seem frozen into eternal immobility may base upon experience their hopes of an awakening spring. ”

“ If, for example, the more successful members of the community had smaller families than the less successful; or if medical administration succeeded in extinguishing maladies to which persons of a particular constitution were specially liable; or if one strain in a mixed race had a larger birth rate than another—in these cases and in others like them, there would doubtless be a change in the physiological factor of national character. ”

“ The facile generalisations with which we so often season the study of dry historic fact; the habits of political discussion which induce us to catalogue for purposes of debate the outward signs that distinguish (as we are prone to think) the standing from the falling state, hide the obscurer, but more potent, forces which silently prepare the fate of empires. National character is subtle and elusive ”

“ Its wonders may be catalogued for purposes of education, they may be illustrated by arresting experiments, by numbers and magnitudes which startle or fatigue the imagination; but they will form no familiar portion of the intellectual furniture of ordinary men unless they be connected, however remotely, with the conduct of ordinary life. Critics have made merry over the naive [Pg 54] self-importance which represented man as the centre and final cause of the universe, and conceived the stupendous mechanism of nature as primarily designed to satisfy his wants and minister to his entertainment. ”

“ Movement may be controlled or checked by the many; it is initiated and made effective by the few. If (for the sake of illustration) we suppose mental capacity in all its many forms to be mensurable and commensurable, and then imagine two societies possessing the same average capacity—but an average made up in one case of equal units, in the other of a majority slightly below the average and a minority much above it, few could doubt that the second, not the first, would show the greatest aptitude for movement. ”

“ I at least find it quite impossible to believe that any attempt to provide widely different races with an identical environment, political, religious, educational, what you will, can ever make them alike. ”

“ But they are not the questions with which I am at present concerned. The decadence respecting which I wish to put questions is not literary or artistic, it is political and national. It is the decadence which attacks, or is alleged to attack, great communities and historic civilisations: which [Pg 7] is to societies of men what senility is to man, and is often, like senility, the precursor and the cause of final dissolution. ”