European civilization

“ And the European, proud in his might, in his strength, in his civilization and his humanity, rules arrogantly, blindly, selfishly, egoistically, amidst all the intricate cog-wheels of [151] his authority, which he slips into gear with the certainty of clockwork, controlling its every movement, till to the foreigner, the outside observer, this overlordship of tangible things, this colonizing of territory alien in race and mind, appears a masterpiece, a very world created. ”

“ In coming to understand a mood which so fully reflects an unknown world, the European mind will discover principles which will make it rise superior to itself. May this broad comprehension of human thought lead Europe to estimate with greater justice a civilization numbering its years by thousands, and to refrain from thwarting the fulfillment of its destiny. ”

“ They were to produce an intense and active civilization of their own; a civilization which was undoubtedly the highest and the best our race has known, conformable to the instincts of the European, fulfilling his nature, giving him that happiness which is the end of men.
As we also know, Europe on this great experiment of the Middle Ages, after four hundred years of high vitality, was rising to still greater heights when it suffered shipwreck. ”

“ If we were to endeavour, by a similar test, to ascertain which European nation has contributed the most to the progress of European civilization, we should find Italy, Germany, England, and Spain, each claiming the first degree, but each also naming France as clearly next in merit. ”

“ At home and abroad they have exploited nature, men and other animals in their interest and for their profit. The trading cities of medieval Europe, the emerging nations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the colonizing empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the industrial European empires of the nineteenth century devoted their energies increasingly to expanding into new territory, occupying and exploiting it, and fighting the wars which pock-marked the ceaseless struggle for pelf and power. ”

“ The rise and growth of European civilization is too vast and complex a subject to be thrown into proper perspective and relation in a few paragraphs; but in all its details, as in its main features, it illustrates the truth that progress goes on just as society tends toward closer association and greater equality. Civilization is co-operation. Union and liberty are its factors. ”

“ The forces of regionalism, nationalism, and separatism still dominate European life. But the ideology and techniques of Europeanization are widely recognized, accepted and put into practice. The development of worldism seems to be following a parallel course. ”

“ Sundry sturdy European ideas, transplanted into this western soil, have triumphed over all competitors and thriven so mightily as to react upon all parts of the Old World, some more, some less, and thus to modify the whole course of civilization. ”

“ Despite the insistence of reason and experience that strength and stability are the result of unity,--tradition, custom and habit have held human society at the level of political, economic and ideological diversity. Nowhere in history is this generalization more emphatic than in the failure of the European standard-bearers of western civilization to replace a millennium of diversity, discord and conflict by a unified, coordinated, co-existing, cooperating European community. ”

“ Of the first the French are the guardians and have always been. Of the second the North Germans of the Baltic plain, and particularly the Prussians, have been the exponents; and one may survey Europe as a whole and say that the conflict spreads through the minds of all Europeans, dividing them between those who would prefer their posterity to live, consciously or unconsciously, under the ancient and continuous tradition of the civilization inherited from Rome or under some reversal of that tradition. ”

“ Whatever be the superstructure of social institutions, of arts and sciences, of religion and philosophy, that European men have built upon it, the régime which has made the Western World what it is, from before the dawn of metallurgy until now, has been generically a Bread culture ”

“ For it must be noted that new forces of expansion were making themselves felt, as the unity of the Church was being threatened from within. Explorers were extending, East and West, the sphere in which the European was to impose his influence for good and evil on other peoples, and the sixteenth century thus becomes one, perhaps the most critical, of all the turning-points in the history of the West. ”

“ But for the cultured ones among us, the idea of a hereditary feud has given way to a clear consciousness that there is a middle European Continental culture, supported by German, Austrian, and French genius in common, and that the preservation, development, and continuation thereof as against a hasty and superficial Anglization must be the task of the future. All, all now learn through experience that this matter with France is a woe of civilization (kulturjammer) , and that now at last it is going to change, that it could change, if—
In the same newspaper the Berlin National Economist, Prof. ”

“ Throughout its history, until the wars of 1914-45, western civilization had its headquarters in central and west Europe, with branch offices elsewhere on the planet. At no time after 1870 did any one European power occupy a position of easy superiority over its rivals. If Great Britain was top dog, France, the long established continental power was snapping at her heels. Germany was an expanding power of major consequence. To the North and East lay Russia, with its vast territories and its persistent pressures into East Europe and Far Asia. ”

“ There are of course many grades between these different types of influence, but the net outcome of what has occurred during the last four centuries is that civilization of the European type now exercises a more or less profound effect over practically the entire world. ”

“ One of the most spectacular aspects of European expansion during modern times has been the growth of production and trade; the rapid increase in "foreign" investment; and governmental efforts to tie together geographically and ethnically remote places and peoples into neat bundles tagged Spanish Empire, British Empire, French Empire, Russian Empire. ”

“ But the dissolution of early European society and culture under the stress of contact with regions outside Europe is no matter of prehistoric times. The task of this essay is over when it has presented that society and culture as Man's reasoned attempt to 'live well' in an exclusively European world. ”

“ UNESCO's History of Mankind devotes its final volume six to the twentieth century. The authors note that the chief European powers emerged from the general war of 1914-18 "weakened in every way: in men and wealth, in the balance of their economies and the stability of their political structure and above all in their relation to other powers rising or beginning to rise in other parts of the world". ”

“ During several centuries, ending in 1900, western civilization passed through an era of consolidation and integration that brought its sovereign segments into increasing stable relationships. The most advanced of these relationships took political shape in the half-dozen European empires which controlled the planet in 1900. ”

“ Until the Reformation and the Renaissance, European ruling oligarchies in territories along the Mediterranean and throughout western Europe were able to perpetuate their privileges and preserve the life styles of an agricultural-feudal society. ”

“ But, aside from the fact that in Europe this political and social evolution had taken centuries, there was also the working of the law of the survival of the fittest. In European nations it had been the element, always composite, which deserved to live, that formed the nucleus of a nationality. ”

“ What the Europeans shared with each other, which in their own eyes distinguished them from everyone else and made them capable of ‘discovering’ and ‘civilising’ the rest of the world, was a distinctive kind of consciousness or conscience. ”

“ We see Europe's greatest sin precisely where we found Africa's and Asia's,—in human hatred, the despising of men; with this difference, however: Europe has the awful lesson of the past before her, has the splendid results of widened areas of tolerance, sympathy, and love among men, and she faces a greater, an infinitely greater, world of men than any preceding civilization ever faced. ”

“ Disraeli in his detached way said, 'The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization'. ”

“ Wherever we have gone, we have carried Europe with us; wherever we have gone, we have never got beyond the power of the two influences which, mingling into one, have made Europe all that it has been. The whole of European history is embodied in the formula which couples together the ‘rule of Christ and Cæsar;’ and that joint rule still goes on, in the shape of moral influence, wherever the tongues and the culture of Europe win new realms for themselves in the continents of the western or in the islands of the southern Ocean. ”

“ One of the most amazing spectacles in history is the expansion of Europe since the sixteenth century. Not resting content with discovering the rest of the world, the European nations with sublime confidence pressed on to divide the new continents among them, to conquer, Christianize, and civilize the natives, and to send out millions of new emigrants to establish beyond the seas a New England, a New France, a New Spain, and a New Netherland. ”

“ In contrast with these giant empires, the nation-states of Europe felt themselves out of scale, just as the Italian cities in the sixteenth century must have felt themselves out of scale in comparison with the new nation-states of Spain and France. To achieve the standard of the world-state, to make their own nations the controlling factors in wide dominions which should include territories and populations of varied types, became the ambition of the most powerful European states. A new political ideal had captivated the mind of Europe. ”

“ THE close of the sixteenth century saw western Europe undergoing a curious and comfortable change. Civilization, with her handmaid, luxury, and her schoolmaster, the printing-press, had seduced the souls of men. ”

“ What has made the European family of nations an improving, instead of a stationary portion of mankind? Not any superior excellence in them, which, when it exists, exists as the effect, not as the cause; but their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another: they have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable ”

“ The environment of a modern European will add to the physical surroundings an enormously enlarged mass of social traditions and customs, an extensive literature, contact with numerous other societies in various stages of culture, and relations, more or less obscure, to a vast literary and social past. The environment thus includes not merely the living, but also the dead. Roman law, Greek philosophy, Eastern religious ideas, etc., all affect the twentieth century European. ”

“ Aristocracy.—This is pre-eminently a democratic age, and Western Europe with one voice approves of the increasing claims of the people as against the dominant sections of the European society. The lords have lost much of their ancient powers and privileges, but the spirit of the time shews that they have some more yet to lose. ”

“ Europe sends her millions hither, and they in turn send back by every ship to those they left behind, the wonderful record of what they see here; and these inspiring testimonies are read at the firesides of ten thousand hamlets by kindred men whose awakening intelligence and energies are stirring the foundations of European society and shaking all thrones to inevitable ruin, unless they speedily plant themselves on more solid ground than the divine right of kings. ”

“ England blocked the way to the growth of Germany from a European into a World-power; Germany, to preserve intact for German culture the surplus of the growing population, must be a World-power or perish. ”

“ If, then, European triumphs in culture have been greater, so, too, may her failures have been greater. How great a failure and a failure in what does the World War betoken? Was it national jealousy of the sort of the seventeenth century? But Europe has done more to break down national barriers than any preceding culture. ”

“ These diverse elements, for all their conflict, cannot any one of them extinguish any other; each has to dwell with the rest, make a compromise with the rest. The outcome, then, of this diversity and struggle is liberty; and here is the grand and true superiority of the European over the other civilisations. European civilisation, if I may say so, has entered into eternal truth; it advances in the ways of God. ”

“ In this way the writer has gained the space necessary to give a clear and interesting account of the all-important movements, customs, institutions, and achievements of western Europe since the German barbarians conquered the Roman Empire. Such matters of first-rate importance as feudalism, the mediæval Church, the French Revolution, and the development of the modern European states have received much fuller treatment than has been customary in histories of this compass. ”

“ Up to past the middle of the eighteenth century the social and economic history of western Europe was in fact retreading the path along which the Roman State had gone in the three last centuries B.C. America was in many ways a new Spain, and India and China a new Egypt. But the political disunions of Europe, the political convulsions against monarchy, the recalcitrance of the common folk and perhaps also the greater accessibility of the western European intelligence to mechanical ideas and inventions, turned the process into quite novel directions. ”