§ 2
That dream was but a moment in a man's life, whose proper business it
seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget after the manner
of all that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts. About him, hidden
from him by the thinnest of veils, were the untouched sources of Power,
whose magnitude we scarcely do more than suspect even to-day, Power that
could make his every conceivable dream come real. But the feet of the
race were in the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.
At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food
is abundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his
earlier jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less urgently,
more social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a larger community.
There began a division of labour, certain of the older men specialised
in knowledge and direction, a strong man took the fatherly leadership in
war, and priest and king began to develop their rôles in the
opening drama of man's history. The priest's solicitude was seed-time
and harvest and fertility, and the king
ruled peace and war. In a hundred river valleys about the warm,
temperate zone of the earth there were already towns and temples, a
score of thousand years ago. They flourished unrecorded, ignoring the
past and unsuspicious of the future, for as yet writing had still to
begin.
Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable
wealth of Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He tamed
certain animals, he developed his primordially haphazard agriculture
into a ritual, he added first one metal to his resources and then
another, until he had copper and tin and iron and lead and gold and
silver to supplement his stone, he hewed and carved wood, made pottery,
paddled down his river until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel
and made the first roads. But his chief activity for a hundred centuries
and more, was the subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger
societies. The history of man is not simply the conquest of external
power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,
that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands
from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents association.
From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of the
Peace of the World, man's dealings were chiefly with himself and his
fellow man, trading, bargaining, law-making, propitiating, enslaving,
conquering, exterminating, and every little increment in Power, he
turned at once and always turns to the purposes of this confused
elaborate struggle to socialise. To incorporate and comprehend his
fellow men into a community of purpose became the last and greatest of
his instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone age
was over he had become a political animal. He made astonishingly
far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting and then of
writing and making records, and with that his town communities began to
stretch out to dominion; in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and
the great Chinese rivers, the first empires and the first written laws
had their beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers
and knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which had
been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of pirate
polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome. The history of
Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up of the Roman
Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last, aped
Cæsar and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or
Kasir-i-Hind. Measured by the duration of human life it is a vast space
of time between that first dynasty in Egypt and the coming of the
aeroplane, but by the scale that looks back to the makers of the
eoliths, it is all of it a story of yesterday.
Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this
period of the warring states, while men's minds were chiefly preoccupied
by politics and mutual aggression, their progress in the acquirement of
external Power was slow—rapid in
comparison with the progress of the old stone age, but slow in
comparison with this new age of systematic discovery in which we live.
They did not very greatly alter the weapons and tactics of warfare, the
methods of agriculture, seamanship, their knowledge of the habitable
globe, or the devices and utensils of domestic life between the days of
the early Egyptians and the days when Christopher Columbus was a child.
Of course, there were inventions and changes, but there were also
retrogressions; things were found out and then forgotten again; it was,
on the whole, a progress, but it contained no steps; the peasant life
was the same, there were already priests and lawyers and town craftsmen
and territorial lords and rulers doctors, wise women, soldiers and
sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and south-eastern Europe at the
beginning of that period, and they were doing much the same things and
living much the same life as they were in Europe in A.D. 1500. The
English excavators of the year A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of
Babylon and Egypt and disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and
family correspondence that they could read with the completest sympathy.
There were great religious and moral changes throughout the period,
empires and republics replaced one another, Italy tried a vast
experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again and again and
failed and failed and was still to be tested again and rejected again in
the New World; Christianity and Mohammedanism
swept away a thousand more specialised cults, but essentially these were
progressive adaptations of mankind to material conditions that must have
seemed fixed for ever. The idea of revolutionary changes in the material
conditions of life would have been entirely strange to human thought
through all that time.
Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for
his opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings,
the wars and processions, the castle building and cathedral building,
the arts and loves, the small diplomacies and incurable feuds, the
crusades and trading journeys of the middle ages. He no longer
speculated with the untrammelled freedom of the stone-age savage;
authoritative explanations of everything barred his path; but he
speculated with a better brain, sat idle and gazed at circling stars in
the sky and mused upon the coin and crystal in his hand. Whenever there
was a certain leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were
to be found dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied
with the assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread
symbols in the world about them, questioning the finality of scholastic
wisdom. Through all the ages of history there were men to whom this
whisper had come of hidden things about them. They could no longer lead
ordinary lives nor content themselves with the common things of this
world once they had heard this voice. And mostly they believed not
only that all this world was as it were a painted curtain before things
unguessed at, but that these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come
to men by chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking
among rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some
odd utilisable thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied
discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day laughed
at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and ill-treated them,
or was seized with fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of
them, or with covetousness and entertained them hopefully; but for the
greater part heeded them not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him
who had first dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of
his blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly, was
the snare that will some day catch the sun.
