Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/609

Rh specimens of our day. In physical development, whether we regard strength or beauty, the Greeks more than twenty centuries ago have not been surpassed. The philosophers and statesmen of Greece afford evidence of power in the exercise of the speculative and practical intellect which can compete with the best exertions of modern philosophical and political thought. The drama of that people is only rivalled by the one towering genius of the Elizabethan era. Thirty centuries have produced nothing like the Iliad.

Possibly much of the reasoning relied upon to prove the evolution of society in the sense of human advancement is based on assuming that a high state of civilization means a highly complex society. Nothing could be more complex than the Oriental caliphate into which the Eastern Empire degenerated in the centuries before its fall. Yet what has it left behind in policy, in art, in literature, comparable to the achievements of the best days of Greece and of the Augustan age of Rome? Yet the Byzantine Empire was in the most special and immediate sense the heir of both. Again, society, whether in a "primitive " or "complicated" form—the opposition is always so expressed—is treated as the power which conferred on man his intellectual and moral nature. There can hardly be a doubt of this if the theory is correctly represented by stating that evolutionists maintain that biological laws brought an irrational animal to a stage at which he became a social one, then an ethical one, next a pious one, so reverencing his dead ancestors as first to worship them and finally to graft upon that worship the "fungoid growth" of a belief in a God eternal and omnipotent, the creator and conservor of all things. It amounts to this unless we agree to efface the evidence of all antiquity that religion was a great social and political power and that it was such a power because it supplied the last sanction to decrees of conscience. The worship of ten thousand gods does not contradict the great central fact implied in the belief of a superior God—that there was a first cause, not in the sense of the great agnostic Lucretius who, despite his unbelief, had a fear that there might be a power to rule the