THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY 7 



positivism of Auguste Comte. It was perhaps a result of 

 Comte's work that the idea of progress became so completely 

 accepted by the people of the nineteenth century, and it is, 

 of course, the basis of Herbert Spencer's philosophy, em- 

 bodied in his First Principles^ published in 1862. Belief in 

 progress was greatly reinforced by the rapid development of 

 science and technology and by the manifest improvement in 

 the conditions of life. 



Nevertheless, the cyclic theory of history, held by the 

 Greeks, has not been abandoned in modern times. The 

 theories of Plato and Polybius, that the history of states 

 must repeat itself, were worked out in detail by Vico in the 

 eighteenth century and used as a fundamental theory of his- 

 tory by Brooks Adams in his Law of Civilization and Decay. 

 Adams bases his interpretation on psychology, seeing in fear 

 and greed the two great motives for human action. These 

 two motives, he thought, alternate through the course of his- 

 tory, so that we have first a stage in which fear predominates 

 and civilization is organized on a military and imaginative 

 basis. In this stage, there is an accumulation of wealth, and 

 society is centralized. This centralized society then transfers 

 its central motive from fear and the military state to greed 

 and the economic state. The productive power of this state 

 collapses as a result of the greed of the individuals in a capi- 

 talistic society, and the military phase of expansion recurs. 



Brooks Adams takes a deeply pessimistic view of human 

 history and, indeed, of human nature. According to him, 

 men have been almost invariably scoundrels inspired by fear 

 or by greed. Such a view of the motives that have moved 

 men in the past and of the characters of those who could be 

 moved almost entirely by such motives is sufficient to refute 

 the entire argument. In the absence of any specific informa- 

 tion to the contrary, the best assumption as to the nature of 

 men in the past is that it was the same as that of men in the 

 present. Nevertheless, it is true that nations pass through 

 successive stages of integration and disintegration. States 

 have been built up by conquest and assimilation, and then, 



