Chapter 69. Farewell to Nemi.
WE are at the end of our enquiry, but as often happens in the search after
truth, if we have answered one question, we have raised many more; if we
have followed one track home, we have had to pass by others that opened
off it and led, or seemed to lead, to far other goals than the sacred grove
at Nemi. Some of these paths we have followed a little way; others, if
fortune should be kind, the writer and the reader may one day pursue
together. For the present we have journeyed far enough together, and it is
time to part. Yet before we do so, we may well ask ourselves whether there
is not some more general conclusion, some lesson, if possible, of hope
and encouragement, to be drawn from the melancholy record of human
error and folly which has engaged our attention in this book. 1
If then we consider, on the one hand, the essential similarity of man's
chief wants everywhere and at all times, and on the other hand, the wide
difference between the means he has adopted to satisfy them in different
ages, we shall perhaps be disposed to conclude that the movement of the
higher thought, so far as we can trace it, has on the whole been from
magic through religion to science. In magic man depends on his own
strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side.
He believes in a certain established order of nature on which he can
surely count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends. When he
discovers his mistake, when he recognises sadly that both the order of
nature which he had assumed and the control which he had believed
himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary, he ceases to rely on his
own intelligence and his own unaided efforts, and throws himself humbly
on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind the veil of nature, to
whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching powers which he once
arrogated to himself. Thus in the acuter minds magic is gradually
superseded by religion, which explains the succession of natural
phenomena as regulated by the will, the passion, or the caprice of spiritual
beings like man in kind, though vastly superior to him in power. 2
But as time goes on this explanation in its turn proves to be
unsatisfactory. For it assumes that the succession of natural events is not
determined by immutable laws, but is to some extent variable and irregular,
and this assumption is not borne out by closer observation. On the
contrary, the more we scrutinise that succession the more we are struck by
the rigid uniformity, the punctual precision with which, wherever we can
follow them, the operations of nature are carried on. Every great advance
in knowledge has extended the sphere of order and correspondingly
restricted the sphere of apparent disorder in the world, till now we are
ready to anticipate that even in regions where chance and confusion
appear still to reign, a fuller knowledge would everywhere reduce the
seeming chaos to cosmos. Thus the keener minds, still pressing forward to
a deeper solution of the mysteries of the universe, come to reject the
religious theory of nature as inadequate, and to revert in a measure to the
older standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly, what in magic had only
been implicitly assumed, to wit, an inflexible regularity in the order of
natural events, which, if carefully observed, enables us to foresee their
course with certainty and to act accordingly. In short, religion, regarded as
an explanation of nature, is displaced by science. 3
But while science has this much in common with magic that both rest on
a faith in order as the underlying principle of all things, readers of this work
will hardly need to be reminded that the order presupposed by magic
differs widely from that which forms the basis of science. The difference
flows naturally from the different modes in which the two orders have been
reached. For whereas the order on which magic reckons is merely an
extension, by false analogy, of the order in which ideas present
themselves to our minds, the order laid down by science is derived from
patient and exact observation of the phenomena themselves. The
abundance, the solidity, and the splendour of the results already achieved
by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the
soundness of its method. Here at last, after groping about in the dark for
countless ages, man has hit upon a clue to the labyrinth, a golden key that
opens many locks in the treasury of nature. It is probably not too much to
say that the hope of progress-moral and intellectual as well as material-in
the future is bound up with the fortunes of science, and that every obstacle
placed in the way of scientific discovery is a wrong to humanity. 4
Yet the history of thought should warn us against concluding that
because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet been
formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We must remember that at
bottom the generalisations of science or, in common parlance, the laws of
nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting
phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names
of the world and the universe. In the last analysis magic, religion, and
science are nothing but theories of thought; and as science has
supplanted its predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by
some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some totally different way of
looking at the phenomena-of registering the shadows on the screen-of
which we in this generation can form no idea. The advance of knowledge
is an infinite progression towards a goal that for ever recedes. We need
not murmur at the endless pursuit:
Fatti non foste a viver come bruti
Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza. 5
Great things will come of that pursuit, though we may not enjoy them.
Brighter stars will rise on some voyager of the future-some great Ulysses
of the realms of thought-than shine on us. The dreams of magic may one
day be the waking realities of science. But a dark shadow lies athwart the
far end of this fair prospect. For however vast the increase of knowledge
and of power which the future may have in store for man, he can scarcely
hope to stay the sweep of those great forces which seem to be making
silently but relentlessly for the destruction of all this starry universe in
which our earth swims as a speck or mote. In the ages to come man may
be able to predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses of the
winds and clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed
afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire of the sun.
Yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such distant catastrophes
may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions, like
the earth and the sun themselves, are only parts of that unsubstantial world
which thought has conjured up out of the void, and that the phantoms
which the subtle enchantress has evoked to-day she may ban to-morrow.
They too, like so much that to common eyes seems solid, may melt into air,
into thin air. 6
Without dipping so far into the future, we may illustrate the course which
thought has hitherto run by likening it to a web woven of three different
threads-the black thread of magic, the red thread of religion, and the white
thread of science, if under science we may include those simple truths,
drawn from observation of nature, of which men in all ages have
possessed a store. Could we then survey the web of thought from the
beginning, we should probably perceive it to be at first a chequer of black
and white, a patchwork of true and false notions, hardly tinged as yet by
the red thread of religion. But carry your eye farther along the fabric and
you will remark that, while the black and white chequer still runs through it,
there rests on the middle portion of the web, where religion has entered
most deeply into its texture, a dark crimson stain, which shades off
insensibly into a lighter tint as the white thread of science is woven more
and more into the tissue. To a web thus chequered and stained, thus shot
with threads of diverse hues, but gradually changing colour the farther it is
unrolled, the state of modern thought, with all its divergent aims and
conflicting tendencies, may be compared. Will the great movement which
for centuries has been slowly altering the complexion of thought be
continued in the near future? or will a reaction set in which may arrest
progress and even undo much that has been done? To keep up our
parable, what will be the colour of the web which the Fates are now
weaving on the humming loom of time? will it be white or red? We cannot
tell. A faint glimmering light illumines the backward portion of the web.
Clouds and thick darkness hide the other end. 7
Our long voyage of discovery is over and our bark has drooped her
weary sails in port at last. Once more we take the road to Nemi. It is
evening, and as we climb the long slope of the Appian Way up to the
Alban Hills, we look back and see the sky aflame with sunset, its golden
glory resting like the aureole of a dying saint over Rome and touching with
a crest of fire the dome of St. Peter's. The sight once seen can never be
forgotten, but we turn from it and pursue our way darkling along the
mountain side, till we come to Nemi and look down on the lake in its deep
hollow, now fast disappearing in the evening shadows. The place has
changed but little since Diana received the homage of her worshippers in
the sacred grove. The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished
and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden
Bough. But Nemi's woods are still green, and as the sunset fades above
them in the west, there comes to us, borne on the swell of the wind, the
sound of the church bells of Aricia ringing the Angelus. Ave Maria! Sweet
and solemn they chime out from the distant town and die lingeringly away
across the wide Campagnan marshes. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Ave
Maria! 8