Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/162

 148 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

vanced civilization and it is quite gratuitous to assume that they represent the first occasions on which man rose to such a stage of culture. Even if they do, the wonderful tale of how the con- ditions of which we find hints in Babylonia, Egypt, and Crete came about is lost.

"Let us suppose that there has been something worth saying about the deeds and progress of mankind during the past three hundred thousand years at least; let us suppose that we were fortunate enough to have the merest outline of such changes as have overtaken our race during that period, and that a single page were devoted to each thousand years. Of the three hun- dred pages of our little manual the closing six or seven only would be allotted to the whole period for which records, in the ordinary sense of the word, exist, even in the scantiest and most fragmentary form. Or, to take another illustration, let us imagine history under the semblance of a vast lake into whose rather turbid depths we eagerly peer. We have reason to think it at least twenty-five feet deep, perhaps fifty or a hundred; we detect the very scantiest remains of life, rara et disjecta, four or five feet beneath the surface, six or seven inches down these are abundant, but at that depth we detect, so to speak, no move- ments of animate things, which are scarcely perceptible below three or four inches. If we are frank with ourselves we shall realize that we can have no clear and adequate notion of any- thing happening more than an inch, — indeed, scarce more than half an inch below the surface.

"From this point of view the historian's gaze, instead of sweeping back into remote ages when the earth was young, seems now to be confined to his own epoch, Rameses the Great, Tiglath-Pileser, and Solomon appear practically coeval with Caesar, Constantine, Charlemagne, St. Louis, Charles V, and Victoria; Bacon, Newton, and Darwin are but the younger con- temporaries of Thales, Plato, and Aristotle. Let those pause who attempt to determine the laws of human progress or decay. It is like trying to determine, by observing the conduct of a man of forty for a month, whether he be developing or not. Any- thing approaching a record of events does not reach back for