Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/252

 HABIT AND PEOGEESS. 251 prove a serious barrier to further progress. For if, as French peasants say, le mieux est Vennemi du Men, it may also be said that le Men est Vennemi du mieux. It may be asked why " the continued production of new ideas" should not go on as before, or even with accelerated speed. The answer is, I conceive, that intellectual activity is derived from the energy accumulated in the course of a prolonged struggle with the difficulties of material existence, and suddenly set free by the abatement of those difficulties for employment in a higher sphere. Again, with a greatly augmented store of knowledge, a vast multiplication of useful arts, and an increased complexity of social arrangements necessitating increased intelligence and ac- tivity on the part of the governing classes, together with in- creased docility and co-operation on the part of the governed the work of preserving and transmitting what was already won might leave no surplus of energy available for adding to the store. The constant complaints of overstrain and the death or permanent disablement of so many young men who have sought to combine tuition with original investigation seem to show that this is no imaginary danger. Finally, there is a possibility, though certainly at present only a remote one, that a single language, a single race and a single type of civilisation may drive out or absorb all others over the entire surface of the habitable globe. For if there is one lesson more than another taught by history, it is that intellectual pro- gress is not continuous in any single community, but has to be taken up in turn by different members of the human family, and is conditioned by their mutual reaction. The records of literature, art and science show that no great efflorescence of national genius lasts very long, and that each is distinctly traceable to an impulse received from without. The immense productivity of ancient Hellas and mediaeval Italy was doubtless due in great part to their division into a swarm of rival commonwealths pos- sessing rapid means of intercommunication, while widely con- trasted in their physical surroundings and spiritual traditions. It is obvious that with such an effacement of national character- istics as is here anticipated this source of stimulation would be lost. The mental condition of mankind would then resemble the dynamical condition of matter known, I believe, to physicists as entropia, that is, the uniform distribution of heat over space, an arrangement which, so far as can be foreseen, would put an end for ever to cosmic evolution. It seems likely that the realisation on a small scale of such a condition may have much to do with the stagnation of Oriental races, separated as they are by physical and linguistic barriers of the most impassable descrip- tion. It would, however, be folly to concern ourselves seriously about an eventuality whose approach can be neither verified nor delayed, and which may after all be compatible with an assured well-being more than equivalent to the labour spent by all previous generations as a condition of its attainment.