University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXXIII
A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904)

A DYNAMIC theory, like most theories, begins by begging
the question: it defines Progress as the development
and economy of Forces. Further, it defines force
as anything that does, or helps to do work. Man is a force; so is
the sun; so is a mathematical point, though without dimensions
or known existence.

Man commonly begs the question again by taking for granted
that he captures the forces. A dynamic theory, assigning attractive
force to opposing bodies in proportion to the law of mass,
takes for granted that the forces of nature capture man. The
sum of force attracts; the feeble atom or molecule called man is
attracted; he suffers education or growth; he is the sum of the
forces that attract him; his body and his thought are alike their
product; the movement of the forces controls the progress of his
mind, since he can know nothing but the motions which impinge
on his senses, whose sum makes education.

For convenience as an image, the theory may liken man to a
spider in its web, watching for chance prey. Forces of nature
dance like flies before the net, and the spider pounces on them
when it can; but it makes many fatal mistakes, though its theory
of force is sound. The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory,
and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart
and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap.
Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching
that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had
acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire taught him secrets
that no other animal could learn; running water probably taught
him even more, especially in his first lessons of mechanics; the
animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into his hands

merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens or
supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of
study. With little or no effort on his part, all these forces formed
his thought, induced his action, and even shaped his figure.

Long before history began, his education was complete, for the
record could not have been started until he had been taught to
record. The universe that had formed him took shape in his mind
as a reflection of his own unity, containing all forces except himself.
Either separately, or in groups, or as a whole, these forces
never ceased to act on him, enlarging his mind as they enlarged
the surface foliage of a vegetable, and the mind needed only to
respond, as the forests did, to these attractions. Susceptibility to
the highest forces is the highest genius; selection between them is
the highest science; their mass is the highest educator. Man always
made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring
forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made
a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized
as unity and worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards
it has never changed, though science can no longer give to
force a name.

Man's function as a force of nature was to assimilate other
forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power. He
felt his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a bow
or a sling, to widen his range of power, as he sought a fetish or a
planet in the world beyond. He cared little to know its immediate
use, but he could afford to throw nothing away which he could
conceive to have possible value in this or any other existence. He
waited for the object to teach him its use, or want of use, and the
process was slow. He may have gone on for hundreds of thousands
of years, waiting for Nature to tell him her secrets; and, to his
rivals among the monkeys, Nature has taught no more than at
their start; but certain lines of force were capable of acting on
individual apes, and mechanically selecting types of race or sources
of variation. The individual that responded or reacted to lines of

new force then was possibly the same individual that reacts on it
now, and his conception of the unity seems never to have changed
in spite of the increasing diversity of forces; but the theory of variation
is an affair of other science than history, and matters nothing
to dynamics. The individual or the race would be educated on
the same lines of illusion, which, according to Arthur Balfour, had
not essentially varied down to the year 1900.

To the highest attractive energy, man gave the name of divine,
and for its control he invented the science called Religion, a word
which meant, and still means, cultivation of occult force whether
in detail or mass. Unable to define Force as a unity, man symbolized
it and pursued it, both in himself, and in the infinite, as
philosophy and theology; the mind is itself the subtlest of all
known forces, and its self-introspection necessarily created a science
which had the singular value of lifting his education, at the start,
to the finest, subtlest, and broadest training both in analysis and
synthesis, so that, if language is a test, he must have reached his
highest powers early in his history; while the mere motive remained
as simple an appetite for power as the tribal greed which
led him to trap an elephant. Hunger, whether for food or for the
infinite,, sets in motion multiplicity and infinity of thought, and
the sure hope of gaining a share of infinite power in eternal life
would lift most minds to effort.

He had reached this completeness five thousand years ago, and
added nothing to his stock of known forces for a very long time.
The mass of nature exercised on him so feeble an attraction that
one can scarcely account for his apparent motion. Only a historian
of very exceptional knowledge would venture to say at what
date between 3000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., the momentum of Europe was
greatest; but such progress as the world made consisted in economies
of energy rather than in its development; it was proved in
mathematics, measured by names like Archimedes, Aristarchus,
Ptolemy, and Euclid; or in Civil Law, measured by a number of
names which Adams had begun life by failing to learn; or in coinage,

which was most beautiful near its beginning, and most barbarous
at its close; or it was shown in roads, or the size ships, or
harbors; or by the use of metals, instruments, and writing; all of
them economies of force, sometimes more forceful than the forces
they helped; but the roads were still travelled by the horse, the
ass, the camel, or the slave; the ships were still propelled by sails
or oars; the lever, the spring, and the screw bounded the region
of applied mechanics. Even the metals were old.

Much the same thing could be said of religious or supernatural
forces. Down to the year 300 of the Christian era they were little
changed, and in spite of Plato and the sceptics were more apparently
chaotic than ever. The experience of three thousand
years had educated society to feel the vastness of Nature, and the
infinity of her resources of power, but even this increase of attraction
had not yet caused economies in its methods of pursuit.

There the Western world stood till the year A.D. 305, when the
Emperor Diocletian abdicated; and there it was that Adams broke
down on the steps of Ara Cœli, his path blocked by the scandalous
failure of civilization at the moment it had achieved complete success.
In the year 305 the empire had solved the problems of Europe
more completely than they have ever been solved since. The
Pax Romana, the Civil Law, and Free Trade should, in four hundred
years, have put Europe far in advance of the point reached
by modern society in the four hundred years since 1500, when conditions
were less simple.

The efforts to explain, or explain away, this scandal had been
incessant, but none suited Adams unless it were the economic
theory of adverse exchanges and exhaustion of minerals; but
nations are not ruined beyond a certain point by adverse exchanges,
and Rome had by no means exhausted her resources. On the contrary,
the empire developed resources and energies quite astounding.
No other four hundred years of history before A.D. 1800 knew
anything like it; and although some of these developments, like
the Civil Law, the roads, aqueducts, and harbors, were rather

economies than force, yet in northwestern Europe alone the empire
had developed three energies—France, England, and Germany—
competent to master the world. The trouble seemed rather to be
that the empire developed too much energy, and too fast.

A dynamic law requires that two masses—nature and man
—must go on, reacting upon each other, without stop, as the sun
and a comet react on each other, and that any appearance of
stoppage is illusive. The theory seems to exact excess, rather than
deficiency, of action and reaction to account for the dissolution of
the Roman Empire, which should, as a problem of mechanics,
have been torn to pieces by acceleration. If the student means to
try the experiment of framing a dynamic law, he must assign
values to the forces of attraction that caused the trouble; and in
this case he has them in plain evidence. With the relentless logic
that stamped Roman thought, the empire, which had established
unity on earth, could not help establishing unity in heaven. It
induced by its dynamic necessities to economize the gods.

The Church has never ceased to protest against the charge that
Christianity ruined the empire, and, with its usual force, has
pointed out that its reforms alone saved the State. Any dynamic
theory gladly admits it. All it asks is to find and follow the force
that attracts. The Church points out this force in the Cross, and
history needs only to follow it. The empire loudly asserted its motive.
Good taste forbids saying that Constantine the Great speculated
as audaciously as a modern stock-broker on values of which
he knew at the utmost only the volume; or that he merged all uncertain
forces into a single trust, which he enormously overcapitalized,
and forced on the market; but this is the substance of
what Constantine himself said in his Edict of Milan in the year
313, which admitted Christianity into the Trust of State Religions.
Regarded as an Act of Congress, it runs: "We have resolved to
grant to Christians as well as all others the liberty to practise the
religion they prefer, in order that whatever exists of divinity or
celestial power may help and favor us and all who are under our

government." The empire pursued power—not merely spiritual
but physical—in the sense in which Constantine issued his army
order the year before, at the battle of the Milvian Bridge: In hoc
signo vinces! using the Cross as a train of artillery, which, to his
mind, it was. Society accepted it in the same character. Eighty
years afterwards, Theodosius marched against his rival Eugene
with the Cross for physical champion; and Eugene raised the
image of Hercules to fight for the pagans; while society on both
sides looked on, as though it were a boxing-match, to decide a final
test of force between the divine powers. The Church was powerless
to raise the ideal. What is now known as religion affected the
mind of old society but little. The laity, the people, the million,
almost to a man, bet on the gods as they bet on a horse.

No doubt the Church did all it could to purify the process, but
society was almost wholly pagan in its point of view, and was
drawn to the Cross because, in its system of physics, the Cross had
absorbed all the old occult or fetish-power. The symbol represented
the sum of nature—the Energy of modern science—and society
believed it to be as real as X-rays; perhaps it was! The emperors
used it like gunpowder in politics; the physicians used it like rays
in medicine; the dying clung to it as the quintessence of force, to
protect them from the forces of evil on their road to the next
life.

Throughout these four centuries the empire knew that religion
disturbed economy, for even the cost of heathen incense affected
the exchanges; but no one could afford to buy or construct a costly
and complicated machine when he could hire an occult force at
trifling expense. Fetish-power was cheap and satisfactory, down
to a certain point. Turgot and Auguste Comte long ago fixed
this stage of economy as a necessary phase of social education, and
historians seem now to accept it as the only gain yet made towards
scientific history. Great numbers of educated people—
perhaps a majority—cling to the method still, and practise it
more or less strictly; but, until quite recently, no other was known.

The only occult power at man's disposal was fetish. Against it,
no mechanical force could compete except within narrow limits.

Outside of occult or fetish-power, the Roman world was incredibly
poor. It knew but one productive energy resembling a modern
machine—the slave. No artificial force of serious value was applied
to production or transportation, and when society developed
itself so rapidly in political and social lines, it had no other means
of keeping its economy on the same level than to extend its slave-system
and its fetish-system to the utmost.

The result might have been stated in a mathematical formula as
early as the time of Archimedes, six hundred years before Rome
fell. The economic needs of a violently centralizing society forced
the empire to enlarge its slave-system until the slave-system consumed
itself and the empire too, leaving society no resource but
further enlargement of its religious system in order to compensate
for the losses and horrors of the failure. For a vicious circle, its
mathematical completeness approached perfection. The dynamic
law of attraction and reaction needed only a Newton to fix it in
algebraic form.

At last, in 410, Alaric sacked Rome, and the slave-ridden, agricultural,
uncommercial Western Empire—the poorer and less
Christianized half—went to pieces. Society, though terribly
shocked by the horrors of Alaric's storm, felt still more deeply the
disappointment in its new power, the Cross, which had failed to
protect its Church. The outcry against the Cross became so loud
among Christians that its literary champion, Bishop Augustine
of Hippo—a town between Algiers and Tunis—was led to
write a famous treatise in defence of the Cross, familiar still to
every scholar, in which he defended feebly the mechanical value of
the symbol—arguing only that pagan symbols equally failed
—but insisted on its spiritual value in the Civitas Dei which had
taken the place of the Civitas Romae in human interest. "Granted
that we have lost all we had! Have we lost faith? Have we lost
piety? Have we lost the wealth of the inner man who is rich

before God? These are the wealth of Christians!" The Civitas
Dei, in its turn, became the sum of attraction for the Western
world, though it also showed the same weakness in mechanics that
had wrecked the Civitas Romae. St. Augustine and his people perished
at Hippo towards 430, leaving society in appearance dull to
new attraction.

Yet the attraction remained constant. The delight of experimenting
on occult force of every kind is such as to absorb all the
free thought of the human race. The gods did their work; history
has no quarrel with them; they led, educated, enlarged the mind;
taught knowledge; betrayed ignorance; stimulated effort. So little
is known about the mind—whether social, racial, sexual or
heritable; whether material or spiritual; whether animal, vegetable
or mineral—that history is inclined to avoid it altogether; but
nothing forbids one to admit, for convenience, that it may assimilate
food like the body, storing new force and growing, like a forest,
with the storage. The brain has not yet revealed its mysterious
mechanism of gray matter. Never has Nature offered it so
violent a stimulant as when she opened to it the possibility of
sharing infinite power in eternal life, and it might well need a
thousand years of prolonged and intense experiment to prove the
value of the motive. During these so-called Middle Ages, the Western
mind reacted in many forms, on many sides, expressing its
motives in modes, such as Romanesque and Gothic architecture,
glass windows and mosaic walls, sculpture and poetry, war and
love, which still affect some people as the noblest work of man, so
that, even to-day, great masses of idle and ignorant tourists travel
from far countries to look at Ravenna and San Marco, Palermo
and Pisa, Assisi, Cordova, Chartres, with vague notions about the
force that created them, but with a certain surprise that a social
mind of such singular energy and unity should still lurk in their
shadows.

The tourist more rarely visits Constantinople or studies the
architecture of Sancta Sofia, but when he does, he is distinctly conscious

of forces not quite the same, Justinian has not the simplicity
of Charlemagne. The Eastern Empire showed an activity and
variety of forces that classical Europe had never possessed. The
navy of Nicephoras Phocas in the tenth century would have annihilated
in half an hour any navy that Carthage or Athens or Rome
ever set afloat. The dynamic scheme began by asserting rather
recklessly that between the Pyramids (B.C. 3000), and the Cross
(A.D. 300), no new force affected Western progress, and antiquarians
may easily dispute the fact; but in any case the motive influence,
old or new, which raised both Pyramids and Cross was the
same attraction of power in a future life that raised the dome of
Sancta Sofia and the Cathedral at Amiens, however much it was
altered, enlarged, or removed to distance in space. Therefore, no
single event has more puzzled historians than the sudden, unexplained
appearance of at least two new natural forces of the highest
educational value in mechanics, for the first time within record of
history. Literally, these two forces seemed to drop from the sky
at the precise moment when the Cross on one side and the Crescent
on the other, proclaimed the complete triumph of the Civitas Dei.
Had the Manichean doctrine of Good and Evil as rival deities been
orthodox, it would alone have accounted for this simultaneous victory
of hostile powers.

Of the compass, as a step towards demonstration of the dynamic
law, one may confidently say that it proved, better than
any other force, the widening scope of the mind, since it widened
immensely the range of contact between nature and thought.
The compass educated. This must prove itself as needing no
proof.

Of Greek fire and gunpowder, the same thing cannot certainly
be said, for they have the air of accidents due to the attraction
of religious motives. They belong to the spiritual world; or to the
doubtful ground of Magic which lay between Good and Evil.
They were chemical forces, mostly explosives, which acted and
still act as the most violent educators ever known to man, but

they were justly feared as diabolic, and whatever insolence man
may have risked towards the milder teachers of his infancy, he
was an abject pupil towards explosives. The Sieur de Joinville left
a record of the energy with which the relatively harmless Greek
fire educated and enlarged the French mind in a single night in the
year 1249, when the crusaders were trying to advance on Cairo.
The good king St. Louis and all his staff dropped on their knees
at every fiery flame that flew by, praying—"God have pity on
us!" and never had man more reason to call on his gods than
they, for the battle of religion between Christian and Saracen was
trifling compared with that of education between gunpowder had
the Cross.

The fiction that society educated itself, or aimed at a conscious
purpose, was upset by the compass and gunpowder which dragged
and drove Europe at will through frightful bogs of learning. At
first, the apparent lag for want of volume in the new energies lasted
one or two centuries, which closed the great epochs of emotion by
the Gothic cathedrals and scholastic theology. The moment had
Greek beauty and more than Greek unity, but it was brief; and
for another century or two, Western society seemed to float in
space without apparent motion. Yet the attractive mass of nature's
energy continued to attract, and education became more rapid
than ever before. Society began to resist, but the individual
showed greater and greater insistence, without realizing what he
was doing. When the Crescent drove the Cross in ignominy from
Constantinople in 1453, Gutenberg and Fust were printing their
first Bible at Mainz under the impression that they were helping
the Cross. When Columbus discovered the West Indies in 1492,
the Church looked on it as a victory of the Cross. When Luther
and Calvin upset Europe half a century later, they were trying,
like St. Augustine, to substitute the Civitas Dei for the Civitas
Romae. When the Puritans set out for New England in 1620, they
too were looking to found a Civitas Dei in State Street; and when
Bunyan made his Pilgrimage in 1678, he repeated St. Jerome. Even

when, after centuries of license, the Church reformed its discipline,
and, to prove it, burned Giordano Bruno in 1600, besides condemning
Galileo in 1630—as science goes on repeating to us every day
—it condemned anarchists, not atheists. None of the astronomers
were irreligious men; all of them made a point of magnifying God
through his works; a form of science which did their religion no
credit. Neither Galileo nor Kepler, neither Spinoza nor Descartes,
neither Leibnitz nor Newton, any more than Constantine the
Great—'if so much—doubted Unity. The utmost range of their
heresies reached only its personality.

This persistence of thought-inertia is the leading idea of modern
history. Except as reflected in himself, man has no reason for
assuming unity in the universe, or an ultimate substance, or a
prime-motor. The a priori insistence on this unity ended by fatiguing
the more active—or reactive—minds; and Lord Bacon tried
to stop it. He urged society to lay aside the idea of evolving the
universe from a thought, and to try evolving thought from the
universe. The mind should observe and register forces—take
them apart and put them together—without assuming unity at
all. "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." "The imagination
must be given not wings but weights." As Galileo reversed
the action of earth and sun, Bacon reversed the relation of thought
to force. The mind was thenceforth to follow the movement of
matter, and unity must be left to shift for itself.

The revolution in attitude seemed voluntary, but in fact was as
mechanical as the fall of a feather. Man created nothing. After
1500, the speed of progress so rapidly surpassed man's gait as to
alarm every one, as though it were the acceleration of a falling
body which the dynamic theory takes it to be. Lord Bacon was as
much astonished by it as the Church was, and with reason. Suddenly
society felt itself dragged into situations altogether new and
anarchic—situations which it could not affect, but which painfully
affected it. Instinct taught it that the universe in its thought
must be in danger when its reflection lost itself in space. The

danger was all the greater because men of science covered it with
"larger synthesis," and poets called the undevout astronomer mad.
Society knew better. Yet the telescope held it rigidly standing on
its head; the microscope revealed a universe that defied the senses;
gunpowder killed whole races that lagged behind; the compass
coerced the most imbruted mariner to act on the impossible idea
that the earth was round; the press drenched Europe with anarchism.
Europe saw itself, violently resisting, wrenched into false
positions, drawn along new lines as a fish that is caught on a hook;
but unable to understand by what force it was controlled. The
resistance was often bloody, sometimes humorous, always constant.
Its contortions in the eighteenth century are best studied
in the wit of Voltaire, but all history and all philosophy from Montaigne
and Pascal to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche deal with nothing
else; and still, throughout it all, the Baconian law held good;
thought did not evolve nature, but nature evolved thought. Not
one considerable man of science dared face the stream of thought;
and the whole number of those who acted, like Franklin, as electric
conductors of the new forces from nature to man, down to the year
1800, did not exceed a few score, confined to a few towns in western
Europe. Asia refused to be touched by the stream, and America,
except for Franklin, stood outside.

Very slowly the accretion of these new forces, chemical and
mechanical, grew in volume until they acquired sufficient mass to
take the place of the old religious science, substituting their attraction
for the attractions of the Civitas Dei, but the process remained
the same. Nature, not mind, did the work that the sun does on
the planets. Man depended more and more absolutely on forces
other than his own, and on instruments which superseded his senses.
Bacon foretold it: "Neither the naked hand nor the understanding,
left to itself, can effect much. It is by instruments and helps that
the work is done." Once done, the mind resumed its illusion, and
society forgot its impotence; but no one better than Bacon knew
its tricks, and for his true followers science always meant self-restraint,

obedience, sensitiveness to impulse from without.
"Non fingendum aut excogitandum sed inveniendum quid Natura
faciat aut ferat."

The success of this method staggers belief, and even to-day can
be treated by history only as a miracle of growth, like the sports
of nature. Evidently a new variety of mind had appeared. Certain
men merely held out their hands—like Newton, watched an
apple; like Franklin, flew a kite; like Watt, played with a tea-kettle
—and great forces of nature stuck to them as though she were
playing ball. Governments did almost nothing but resist. Even
gunpowder and ordnance, the great weapon of government, showed
little development between 140 and 1800. Society was hostile or
indifferent, as Priestley and Jenner, and even Fulton, with reason
complained in the most advanced societies in the world, while its
resistance became acute wherever the Church held control; until
all mankind seemed to draw itself out in a long series of groups,
dragged on by an attractive power in advance, which even the
leaders obeyed without understanding, as the planets obeyed
gravity, or the trees obeyed heat and light.

The influx of new force was nearly spontaneous. The reaction
of mind on the mass of nature seemed not greater than that of a
comet on the sun; and had the spontaneous influx of force stopped
in Europe, society must have stood still, or gone backward, as in
Asia or Africa. Then only economies of process would have counted
as new force, and society would have been better pleased; for the
idea that new force must be in itself a good is only an animal or
vegetable instinct. As Nature developed her hidden energies, they
tended to become destructive. Thought itself became tortured,
suffering reluctantly, impatiently, painfully, the coercion of new
method. Easy thought had always been movement of inertia, and
mostly mere sentiment; but even the processes of mathematics
measured feebly the needs of force.

The stupendous acceleration after 1800 ended in 1900 with the
appearance of the new class of supersensual forces, before which the

man of science stood at first as bewildered and helpless as, in the
fourth century, a priest of Isis before the Cross of Christ.

This, then, or something like this, would be a dynamic formula
of history. Any schoolboy knows enough to object at once that it
is the oldest and most universal of all theories. Church and State,
theology and philosophy, have always preached it, differing only
in the allotment of energy between nature and man. Whether the
attractive energy has been called God or Nature, the mechanism
has been always the same, and history is not obliged to decide
whether the Ultimate tends to a purpose or not, or whether ultimate
energy is one or many. Every one admits that the will is a
free force, habitually decided by motives. No one denies that
motives exist adequate to decide the will; even though it may not
always be conscious of them. Science has proved that forces, sensible
and occult, physical and metaphysical, simple and complex,
surround, traverse, vibrate, rotate, repel, attract, without stop;
that man's senses are conscious of few, and only in a partial degree;
but that, from the beginning of organic existence, his consciousness
has been induced, expanded, trained in the lines of his sensitiveness;
and that the rise of his faculties from a lower power to a
higher, or from a narrower to a wider field, may be due to the
function of assimilating and storing outside force or forces. There
is nothing unscientific in the idea that, beyond the lines of force
felt by the senses, the universe may be—as it has always been—
either a supersensuous chaos or a divine unity, which irresistibly
attracts, and is either life or death to penetrate. Thus far, religion,
philosophy, and science seem to go hand in hand. The schools
begin their vital battle only there. In the earlier stages of progress,
the forces to be assimilated were simple and easy to absorb, but,
as the mind of man enlarged its range, it enlarged the field of complexity,
and must continue to do so, even into chaos, until the
reservoirs of sensuous or supersensuous energies are exhausted, or
cease to affect him, or until he succumbs to their excess.

For past history, this way of grouping its sequences may answer
for a chart of relations, although any serious student would need to
invent another, to compare or correct its errors; but past history
is only a value of relation to the future, and this value is wholly
one of convenience, which can be tested only by experiment. Any
law of movement must include, to make it a convenience, some
mechanical formula of acceleration.