Page:The Source and Aim of Human Progress.djvu/45

Rh Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine, Arabian, Chinese empires, and in modern times the sudden collapse of the French, Russian, German, and Austrian empires warn us, by example, of what happens to nations, in spite of all their external splendor and apparent manifestations of greatness, when the private individual becomes restricted in thought and act by narrow, mean specialization, mean formalism, monotony of lines of action due to a legalized mesh of fibrinous tissue in a hypertrophied, cartilagenous, ossified structure of organized, and classified, governmental officialdom. History is strewn with the ruins of empires and with the remains of once living social organisms, because in the eagerness to build massive, rigid, and stable structures, the individual units became so bound and cemented by official tissue that paralysis of personal activities ensued. The whole social structure became decayed, and was finally destroyed by less organized, but more youthful societies in which the individual units were still vital, still having free scope for the manifestation of their energies. Brilliant as were those empires, magnificent as those social structures were to the external observer, they were rotten with corruption and decay, and were doomed to perish at the hands of the less advanced, more backward, but more vigorous tribes who were still alive with the living, nuclear energies of the individual.

In his description of the degenerate Byzantine Greeks Ribot tells us that their geniuses were mediocrities and their great men commonplace personalities. It was the cultivation of indpendentindependent [sic] thought and the freedom of individuality that awakened the Greek mind to its achievements in art, science, and philosophy; it was the deadening Byzantine bureaucracy with its cut and dried theological discipline that dried up the sources of Greek genius. Society is on its downward course when it is building up a Byzantine empire with large institutions, immense organizations, and big corporations, but with small minds and dwarfed individualities. It is a sure symptom of social degeneration when administration is valued above individuality and official ceremonialism above originality. When the free soul of the individual is gone, the social organism gives up the ghost, and at best remains as an embalmed corpse, a warning to men in their craving for imperialism and their efforts at empire-building at the expense of the living, thinking individual. Imperial pomp is bought with the life-blood of man. Vain is imperial glory; for it is the symptom of disease and death of the social organism, grown fat with the lives of men. Society never appears so brilliant as when the end is nigh. It is like the dead lull