TRADITION AND HEREDITY 461 



to make the best and not the worst of Hfe upon earth. They were 

 ambitious to cultivate as the highest good the idea of beauty.' ^ 



Let us look at the other side of the picture when energy is 

 lacking. There was a widely held opinion that the world would 

 end in the year a. d. 1000. All classes shared this opinion and 

 prepared for the end, and it can easily be understood how under 

 these circumstances, whatever the innate capacities may have 

 been, little capacity for labour or eagerness for work would be 

 manifested. Again, in the later days of the Roman Empire there 

 was abroad a spirit of lethargy and apathy. The great Empire 

 was like a clock that had run down ; the machinery was all 

 intact, but there was no force to set it in movement. It is said 

 that there was abroad in the minds of men prescience of some 

 coming catastrophe, a feeHng that the inevitable end was approach- 

 ing. If such a mental horizon is contrasted with that set before 

 an EngHshman of the sixteenth century or a Greek in the age of 

 Pericles, we can understand how eagerness for work as outwardly 

 manifested is profoundly influenced by tradition. 



When our knowledge of the circumstances is sufficiently precise, 

 we can always detect the influence of a powerful stimulus in 

 periods of progress. It often takes the form of a national purpose. 

 ' A national purpose ', it has been said, ' is the most unconquerable 

 and victorious of all things upon earth. It can raise up Babylon 

 from the sands of the desert, and make imperial civilizations 

 spring from a score of huts, and after it has wrought its will can 

 leave monuments that seem as everlasting a portion of nature 

 as the rocks.' ~ At times the stimulus may arise from an invention 

 of great import, such as the discovery of the use of metals. More 

 often, however, the stimulus takes the form not directly of 

 invention but of friction between different ideas— the coming into 

 the mental horizon not merely of new skiUed methods but of 

 strange and foreign ideas of all kinds. Thus contact of cultures is 

 followed by more than the transfer of the elements of one culture 

 to another ; it is in itself a stimulus so powerful as to be of the 

 greatest import in history. 



In the past when there was little or no contact at a distance, 

 stimuli were most often due to the physical contact of races whose 

 tradition was not too dissimilar. ' Just as in the mental develop- 



' Lee, Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century, p. 28. ' A. E., hna-ji na- 



tion and Reveries, p. 107. 



