WAR AS A FACTOR IN CIVILIZATION. 827 



civilized nations, seems to tend strongly toward this condition of 

 isolation ; and such isolation in its conservative influence is a 

 fatal bar to any wide or continuous progress. The long persist- 

 ence of one form of government, of one condition of social cus- 

 toms, of one line of thought, tends to produce that uniformity of 

 character which is so fatally opposed to any width of develop- 

 ment or breadth of mental grasp. From uniformity arises stag- 

 nation. Its final result is a dead pause in mental advancement. 

 Variety of influences and conditions alone can yield a healthy 

 and vigorous growth of thought. The movement of the national 

 mind in any one line must soon cease. Its limit is quickly reached, 

 unless it be aided by development in other directions. China 

 affords us one example of this. There the religion is the worship 

 of ancestors, or the Buddhistic atheism ; the learning is the ethics 

 of Confucius ; the government is a patriarchal despotism. Re- 

 ligion, learning, and political institutions are thus innately pro- 

 saic ; there is nothing to arouse the imagination ; the mind of the 

 whole people has become hereditarily stagnant through its ages of 

 continuance in this state. In India, on the contrary, the imagina- 

 tion has been fostered at the expense of the reasoning faculties ; 

 literature, religion, and political relations are full of an unpruned 

 growth of fancy; and the historical works, which form the basis 

 of the literature of practical China, are unknown in imaginative 

 India. 



Such are some of the results of an isolated national develop- 

 ment. Progress, in such nations, can not proceed far; for the 

 mind, to attain its best results, must unfold all its faculties 

 together. These strike'fire from each other, and produce a genial 

 flame where otherwise would be but smoldering embers. Every 

 separate nation is subject to special conditions. It gains laws, 

 customs, and possessions in accordance therewith. A number of 

 isolated nations is equivalent to a number of separate individuals, 

 each content with his own range of experiences and stock of ideas, 

 and refusing, through prejudice or bigotry, to accept those of 

 others. But when once individuals intimately mingle, and begin 

 to compare thoughts and interchange ideas, a rapid mental growth 

 takes place in each. A similar mental contact is not easy between 

 nations. Isolation and national prejudice form barriers over 

 which thought can but slowly make its way. Yet, evidently 

 enough, were nations, after attaining the limit of progress in their 

 special lines, to be thoroughly mingled, each falling heir to the 

 mental growth of all the others, a sudden and rapid intellectual 

 progress might well be achieved, hosts of new ideas arising from 

 this grand influx of new experiences. In barbarian and semicivil- 

 ized communities such an intermingling proceeds but slowly in 

 times of peace. A certain degree of intercommerce and of emi- 



