FUNDAMENTAL FORCES IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION 219 



that urges him to obey a command, even at the price 

 of certain death. Even in our modern, free countries 

 the citizen is controlled more by impulse than reason. 

 He thinks he votes intelligently ; but no one can fail 

 to recognize that the vast majority of people vote 

 for a certain party simply because their parents 

 voted for it, or because some leader, who has won 

 their admiration, tells them to do so. Most of us 

 follow blindly the custom of those around us. We 

 shut our eyes to logic and act from instincts and 

 emotion. 



Rome conquered her enemies because her soldiers 

 acted together. Her enemies lost because they were 

 unable to hold together; but this inability did not 

 come from any lack of intelligence. Highly intelli- 

 gent Greece perfectly understood the necessity for 

 unity of action. As nations have disintegrated one 

 after the other, it has not been from any lack of 

 appreciation of the results of disintegration, but 

 because of the inability to hold together. After the 

 complete disintegration of the European peoples 

 which followed the inroads of the barbarians into 

 Italy, there was, for a short time, no centralizing 

 force. But soon the tendency to centralization ap- 

 peared again, as the Roman Church, little by little, 

 gained control over the barbarians of the north. 

 This power stretched its influence over tribe after 

 tribe until it had underneath its sway all the races 

 of Europe. But the church thus gained its influence 

 through its appeal, not to their intelligence, but to 

 their emotions. It was the religious instincts of men, 

 their feeling of the mysterious, their purely emo- 

 tional nature, that enabled the papacy to gain con- 

 trol over Europe so completely that at its bidding 



