Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/463

Rh platitude and dogma, or has denied to him the opportunity of spending his energies in the cultivation of a land of promise.

The kindling enthusiasm of the man of science must not, however, be confused with the philistine's boast that history is a wreck from which only he and his time have been saved. Opportunity which inspires the scholar inflates the time-server and intoxicates the anarchist. The difference between these persons rests at last upon temporal perspective, or the want of it; for it is the apprehension of new opportunities and new needs in the light of old accomplishments that leads to profitable reconstruction of human knowledge. In mechanical invention, the new model may cause the old to be cast upon the rubbish-heap; but in man's interpretation of the world, old theories and old points of view which have served their generation are never discarded; they still mark the stages of human acquisition and take their place in the development of science. Without a knowledge of them, and of their relation to present problems, no man, however ingenious or fertile, should hope to do more than a journeyman's work in the free advancement of learning.

But even when we know the general history of thought and the special histories of our own small divisions of human knowledge, we are apt to overlook the fact that, in a large sense, civilization itself is a matter of the moment, which may be viewed in the light of a broader perspective. Civilization we measure by hundreds and thousands of years. For example, we trace the Mediterranean cultures eight or ten or twelve thousand years, and then we lose the thread; but the whole history of man we reckon in geological epochs. We find his footprints stamped everywhere upon the Quaternary earth, and we find what appear to be vestiges of him in the deeper deposits of the Tertiary. Throughout the brief day of his written history we study him in a long series of related disciplines which we call "the humanities"; while we hand over the unmeasured period of his whole antecedent career to the single science of anthropology. We glance with admiration at his morning work in iron and bronze and brass, his noontime of Athenian culture, his late hours of reflection and invention, and we seek however feebly to illumine the night of his future; but we tend to overlook the antiquity of man, the record of other days and years, and to avoid the question whether civilization is not, after all, still in the experimental stage—whether we ourselves are not next-door neighbors to the barbarian.

When we regard the rapid accumulations of a few thousand years of culture, we realize that civilization lays upon the human mind a staggering load of traditional knowledge and traditional duty. In "Darwinism and Politics" the late Professor Ritchie has defined civilization as "the sum of human contrivances which enable human beings