schools of this wisdom four centuries before the Christian era and four centuries after that era. Compare the men whom those schools formed at those two periods. Compare Plato and Libanius. Compare Pericles and Julian. This philosophy confessed, nay boasted, that for every end but one it was useless. Had it attained that one end?

Suppose that Justinian, when he closed the schools of Athens, had called on the last few sages who still haunted the Portico, and lingered round the ancient plane-trees, to show their title to public veneration: suppose that he had said: "A thousand years have elapsed since, in this famous city, Socrates posed Protagoras and Hippias; during those thousand years a large proportion of the ablest men of every generation has been employed in constant efforts to bring to perfection the philosophy which you teach; that philosophy has been munificently patronized by the powerful; its professors have been held in the highest esteem by the public; it has drawn to itself almost all the sap and vigor of the human intellect: and what has it effected? What profitable truth has it taught us which we should not equally have known without it? What has it enabled us to do which we should not have been equally able to do without it?" Such questions, we suspect, would have puzzled Simplicius and Isidore. Ask a follower of Bacon what the new philosophy, as it was called in the time of Charles the Second, has effected for mankind, and his answer is ready: "It has lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has extinguished diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil; it has given new securities to the mariner; it has furnished new arms to the warrior;

it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendor of the day; it has extended the range of the human vision; it has multiplied the power of the human muscles; it has accelerated motion; it has annihilated distance; it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all dispatch of business; it has enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which run ten knots an hour against the wind. These are but a part of its fruits, and of its first fruits. For it is a philosophy which never rests, which has never attained, which is never perfect. Its law is progress. A point which yesterday was invisible is its goal to-day, and will be its starting-post to-morrow.'

Great and various as the powers of Bacon were, he owes his wide and durable fame chiefly to this, that all those powers received their direction from common sense. His love of the vulgar useful, his strong sympathy with the popular notions of good and evil, and the openness with which he avowed that sympathy, are the secret of his influence. There was in his system no cant, no illusion. He had no anointing for broken bones, no fine theories de finibus, no arguments to persuade men out of their senses. He knew that men, and philosophers as well as other men, do actually love life, health, comfort, honor, security, the society of friends, and do actually dislike death, sickness, pain, poverty, disgrace, danger, separation

from those to whom they are attached. He knew that religion, though it often regulates and moderates these feelings, seldom eradicates them; nor did he think it desirable for mankind that they should be eradicated. The plan of eradicating them by conceits like those of Seneca, or syllogisms like those of Chrysippus, was too preposterous to be for a moment entertained by a mind like his. He did not understand what wisdom there could be in changing names where it was impossible to change things; in denying that blindness, hunger, the gout, the rack, were evils, and calling them άжороŋ ɣμévа; in refusing to acknowledge that health, safety, plenty, were good things, and dubbing them by the name of ȧdiá popa. In his opinions on all these subjects, he was not a Stoic, nor an Epicurean, nor an Academic, but what would have been called by Stoics, Epicureans, and Academics, a mere idiwrns, a mere common man. And it was precisely because he was so that his name makes so great an era in the history of the world. It was because he dug deep that he was able to pile high. It was because, in order to lay his foundations, he went down into those parts of human nature which lie low, but which are not liable to change, that the fabric which he reared has risen to so stately an elevation, and stands with such immovable strength.

XXVII

A Drifting Civilization

By L. P. Jacks1

THE drifting of civilization is no new discovery, least of all is it a discovery of the present writer's. Now and for a long time past multitudes of thoughtful persons have been dimly conscious, amid all the talk and the clatter that were going on, that the course of events was in the sweep of invisible world currents: and there have been some, like Carlyle and Ruskin, who warned us in unmistakable language that industrial civilization was shooting the rapids. I catch an echo of the same thought in some remarks made by Lord Bryce not long ago in his presidential address to the British Academy, in which he throws out the suggestion, prompted by the present war, that modern States have grown so big as to be virtually unmanageable by existing means of human control.

But in this matter it is needless to quote authorities, for we can easily make our own observations. If we take the history of the last hundred years and mark

1 L. P. Jacks, the editor of the Hibbert Journal, has been, since 1915. Principal of Manchester College, Oxford. He is a prolific and stimulating writer on philosophical and religious subjects. His essay on A Drifting Civilization was first published in the Atlantic Monthly for March, 1916, and afterwards reprinted with many changes in a volume entitled From the Human End from which source it is here reprinted with the permission of the author. It may be taken as the inevitable question asked by the presentday of the cheerful, materialistic optimism of the 19th Century. That optimism, based not so much on science as on the triumphs of the applications of science to industry is best shown by our pre-war faith in progress. The post-war question is: Progress-whither?-EDITOR.

the important points of arrival reached in the march of progress, we shall find that at the end of each long interval civilization has always been somewhere where, at the beginning, it did not expect to be, and has in consequence waked up with a shock of surprise to find itself where it was. From moment to moment, from year to year, the shock was not felt; but a generation has usually been enough to make civilization rub its eyes and stare about in wonder and bewilderment at its new surroundings. The image that rises before the mind is that of a sleepy traveller suddenly roused by a jolt of the carriage, which has possibly thrown him into the middle of the road, and calling upon gods and men to tell him where he is. At the present day there is a vast literature to which theologians, philosophers, playwrights, novelists, and even sociologists make frequent contributions—a literature to which I am myself making a small contribution at the present moment, which can only be described as the literature of "Where are we?" Needless to say, the utmost divergence of opinion exists as to where we are. The only clear point that emerges from the welter of opinion is that we are somewhere where we never expected to be.

To this kind of speculation, which was always more or less popular, the present war has given an immense impetus. It has raised the question of "Where are we?" with a vengeance. It has caused many persons besides Lord Bryce to express a doubt as to the manageableness of modern States. May it not be, people are asking, that these great States, by reason of the enormous mass of their human contents, are liable to mass-movements, which are not properly controllable