George McDermott

“ The Iliad reflects how men thought and felt more than ten centuries before our era; and this way of looking at things, judging about them, are most material facts if it be contended that social evolution was the moulding hammering instrument which made the poor, wretched, wandering savage the being whom Hamlet describes so finely.
When Hesiod laments that he was born in the fifth age it is the fierce anguish of a spirit like that of Lucretius nearly ten centuries later, who railed at gods powerless to remedy the evils under which the world was dying. ”

“ We pass through the luminous darkness of that time into the Bronze Age, a period of fierce, strong men who remind one of the "mighty hunter" who first established military despotism. But before this dark Age of Bronze, when chiefs and rulers fought and robbed like mediaeval barons twenty-five centuries later, there was the Age of Silver when men lived happily and enjoyed length of days, but this age, toward its close, was setting in the spirit of impiety and war in which the Bronze Age opened. ”

“ I am only suggesting the possibility that certain facts have not been duly considered by writers on society who take their inspiration from certain eminent physiologists. I maintain, however, that facts in the history of life, though found in the moral plane, are at least of equal value with inductions made from any order of physical phenomena, human or extra-human. The great activity in pursuing phenomena of society and facts of individual human nature relating to them is unquestionably due to difficulties which compelled men to direct their attention to social problems. ”

“ As surely as every writer of a work of imagination holds the mirror for his own age to glass herself in, as surely as Dante crystallized his enemies in immortal scorn, or that the vast gallery of Shakespeare was taken from every phase of life that met in London ”

“ I take the poets of antiquity as witnesses for facts of society whether in relations of courtesy, or of duty, of friendship or emnity, whether in the picturing of private life or public solemnity, or in the expression of orderly life in customs, laws, police, and I find that I can construct out of these materials states or societies in which men and women could live who possessed every quality that our century would accord to the most perfect representatives of the sexes. ”

“ Writers on society, when they speak of social evolution mean something more than what Mr. Hobson, in his review of Kidd's Social Evolution in the November number of this Journal called the verbal proposition that the aim of social evolution is the development of social efficiency. They really mean that society has made man what he is, that it has not merely somewhat shaped him, but that it has conferred his entire intellectual and moral nature and given to his physical the grace and beauty, combined with strength, we find in the best types of the Aryan race. ”

“ This, I think, would bear a little analysis even though I should be compelled to pass over some other matters in reference to the notion I am trying to present, that society has been the preserver of man in the enjoyment of his higher nature, and not the creator of the higher nature. In other words, that when he first exists he is not a degraded savage or transmuted ape, and unquestionably we do not find him to be ape or savage in any remains in writing or building that show his presence in the dawn of history. ”

“ What Hesiod's notion was concerning the virtues of the primal man—the virtues of the Golden Age—we gather in some degree from his saying that men lived like the gods, but we gain it more distinctly by reading into his wail for the lost time Homer's conception of the virtues which made men illustrious and woman the ornament and crown of man's life. ”

“ The philosophers and statesmen of Greece afford evidence of power in the exercise of the speculative and practical intellect which can compete with the best exertions of modern philosophical and political thought. The drama of that people is only rivalled by the one towering genius of the Elizabethan era. Thirty centuries have produced nothing like the Iliad.
Possibly much of the reasoning relied upon to prove the evolution of society in the sense of human advancement is based on assuming that a high state of civilization means a highly complex society. ”

“ The evil time he lived in was one of economic difficulty; the other age was the tradition of a period free from social problems. The fact of a tradition is evidence for all it carries or for a greater or less amount of it according to the value of the subject and the care taken in the delivery of it from generation to generation. Going up to the Golden Age from that of Iron we enter the penumbral Heroic Age which, as has been suggested, was a partial revival of the virtues of the golden one. ”

“ There can hardly be a doubt of this if the theory is correctly represented by stating that evolutionists maintain that biological laws brought an irrational animal to a stage at which he became a social one, then an ethical one, next a pious one, so reverencing his dead ancestors as first to worship them and finally to graft upon that worship the "fungoid growth" of a belief in a God eternal and omnipotent, the creator and conservor of all things. ”

“ Such evidence for the cast and character of any period is as much to be relied upon as the testimony of a living witness about the men, the movements, the looks, the bustle of Wall street or the Stock Exchange. ”

“ The testim.ony which history receives is that of the men who made it, and the life of the human race is within the province of history and that alone. If it can be proved that a Bushman or a Polynesian, moulded and rounded by social action and reaction, developed into a Shakespeare or a Cæsar, I shall without faces drink the chalice of absurdity which Comte presents in his deified personification of humanity.
The earliest monuments give types of man equal to the best specimens of our day. ”

“ The worship of ten thousand gods does not contradict the great central fact implied in the belief of a superior God—that there was a first cause, not in the sense of the great agnostic Lucretius who, despite his unbelief, had a fear that there might be a power to rule the varied course of the white stars, [1] and which would be too strong for men—but in the sense of the God who said let there be light, and whose angel spoke in the thunders of Sinai. ”

“ That they are not to be found in greater number and virulence in mediaeval history is, I submit, due to the prevailing sentiment of European society from the seventh century, resting on the principle, doctrine or dogma, I care not what it is called, of common brotherhood with the Lord Christ—that well being was the right of every child of Adam. ”

“ What is there in this day which gives assurance that problems of society never before existed, never before were dealt with? It is the superlative egotism of the nineteenth century patronizmg all antecedent ages that assumes no other time could possibly be vexed by social troubles. There have been difficulties always more or less menacing ; the only difference between them and the problems of today is that these are articulated by a greater variety of organs. To a large extent the history of the Roman commonwealth, to the genuine student, is one of such problems. ”

“ I should like to analyze the man of many wiles and to reproduce the maidens and matrons whom the blind old bard has drawn, to prove that family life was a holy thing while some influence, though an impaired one from the unseen world, yet rested upon this ”

“ The fact is that all these difficulties are really economic. I do not mean that bread and the circus would satisfy all the restless spirits of Europe and America, but if they were within the reach of all, there would be no problems to be solved. ”

“ If the influences which, acting through a long period, raised the brute-like creature who fought for existence with other brutes to so high a level, they contend that indefinite development is possible by the continuous operation of such influences. ”

“ It amounts to this unless we agree to efface the evidence of all antiquity that religion was a great social and political power and that it was such a power because it supplied the last sanction to decrees of conscience. ”