468 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



TEE SPONTANEOUS DEGRADATION OF CULTURE (Prof. 

 Tenney L. Davis, B.S., M.A., Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of 

 Technology, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.). 



" Don't read the Times," said Thoreau, " read the Eternities," and gave 

 words to a scheme for the judgment of excellence, of value, of progress, and 

 of civilisation. To his scheme the common people of France gave tacit 

 endorsement w^hen, in answer to a call by one of the Paris dailies for a popular 

 vote, they named Louis Pasteur as the greatest Frenchman of history. 



Whoever would discuss the history of civilisation or would think about 

 its rise, its progress, or the contributory value for civilisation of various 

 historical circumstances, finds his task complicated at the outset by the 

 meaning of the word in its derivation. Taking the path of least resistance, 

 it is easy for him to think of progress of civilisation as progress in the forma- 

 tion of communities, or, even more, in the communisation or federation of 

 communities, and to regard as of greatest importance in furthering the progress 

 of civilisation those factors of history which have tended most to further 

 the formation of communities. Yet communities pass away : civilisation 

 remains and finds growth in their decadence. King David in the body is 

 gone long since, but the " vicarious existence " that he leads through his 

 Psalms has more importance for twentieth-century civilisation than the 

 splendour of his organised kingdom. We are more concerned with the burning 

 at the stake of Etienne Dolet than with the massacre of eleven thousand 

 virgins, and more with Don Quixote than with his contemporary chivalry 

 of Spain. " Great men form an epoch ; the many reflect their age " — and 

 epochs are determined by the particular idea-system which may happen to 

 be current. The history of civilisation is the history of idea-systems. And 

 evolution or modification of idea-system is progress of civilisation. 



Anthropologists tell us that the customs of a tribe of primitive people 

 undergo a gradual change as the decades or centuries pass. They undergo 

 certain changes anyway even if the tribe is left wholly to itself entirely isolated 

 from external influences. The ceremonial customs suffer small and gradual 

 modification, the spoken word assumes new and slightly different meanings 

 and intonations ; perhaps new modes of weaving grass for baskets are devised, 

 or new shapes for moulding clay into pottery. Similar changes take place 

 among highly civilised people. The transition from the language of Chaucer 

 to the English of the present is change, but it is not progress in civilisation. 

 Such changes are markers which indicate the elapse of time, like the wrinkles 

 on a man's face or an increased facility in doing habitual things — and they 

 have the same kind of interest for the broad-minded student of history that 

 the phenomena of putrefaction have for the student of comparative mor- 

 phology. They are not structural changes of idea-system. 



Darwin is a more important figure in the history of European culture 

 than any of his contemporary monarchs. Napoleon ravaged the face of 

 Europe, and hardly more than a century later his effect upon its thinking 

 is scarcely discernible. We remember that Archimedes was working on 

 geometrical problems when the siege of Syracuse broke through, that he was 

 too absorbed in figures written in the sand to give heed to soldiers who 

 accosted him, and that he was killed — for his indifference to the things of 

 war. Archimedes is a factor in our present civilisation, while the war that 

 killed him is romance or dry dusty history according to how we view it, but 

 nothing more. The reading throughout Europe of the imagined adventures 

 of Pantagruel probably had quite as much to do with bringing about the 

 Protestant Reformation as did the actual posting of the theses of Luther. 

 Indeed, the criterion for judging the value for civilisation of the many factors 

 which influence it is to be found in an examination of the effect which these 

 factors have produced, not merely in an examination of their effect upon 

 their own times, but in one of their depth and permanence, in a measurement 



