Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/371

 LIX The Development of Modern Political and Social Ideas THE institutions and customs and political ideas of the ancient civilizations grew up slowly, age by age, no man designing and no man foreseeing. It was only in that great century of human adolescence, the sixth century B.C., that men began to think clearly about their relations to one another, and first to question and first propose to alter and rearrange the established beliefs and laws and methods of human goverftment. We have told of the glorious intellectual dawn of Greece and Alex- andria, and how presently the collapse of the slave-holding civiliza- tions and the clouds of religious intolerance and absolutist govern- ment darkened the promise of that beginning. The light of fearless thinking did not break through the European obscurity again effect- ually until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We have tried to show something of the share of the great winds of Arab curiosity and Mongol conquest in this gradual clearing of the mental skies of Europe. And at first it was chiefly material knowledge that increased. The first-fruits of the recovered manhood of the race were material achievements and material power. The science of human relation- ship, of individual and social psychology, of education and of econ- omics, are not only more subtle and intricate in themselves but also bound up inextricably with much emotional matter. The advances made in them have been slower and made against greater opposition. Men will listen dispassionately to the most diverse suggestions about stars or molecules, but ideas about our ways of life touch and reflect upon everyone about us. And just as in Greece the bold speculations of Plato came before Aristotle's hard search for fact, so in Europe the first political en- quiries of the new phase were put in the form of " Utopian " stories, directly imitated from Plato's Republic and his Laws. Sir Thomas More's Utopia is a curious imitation of Plato that bore fruit in a new 351