DISCOVERY 



183 



and that we are re-entering the Dark Ages. But 

 those whose historical memory is capable of the effort 

 are puzzled by the absence of the usual barbarian 

 hordes waiting outside the gate to overwhelm us. 

 Hitherto they have never failed to appear when the 

 time was ripe for them — the Northerners in Crete, 

 the Goths in Italy, and the Saxons and Danes in 

 Western Europe. But now it seems that it is the 

 stranger unthin our gates who is to set back the hands 

 on the dial of progress. With unerring intuition our 

 middle classes have divined the foe in what is con- 

 veniently summed up by the term Bolshevism. Nearly 

 all the old familiar associations are present — the lower 

 culture and the desire of loot, the destruction of idols 

 and conversion by the sword. Only one is absent — 

 the migration of large bands of people and the conquest 

 and settlement of alien territory by people of the 

 lower culture. But since nowadays the contending 

 parties occupy the same geographical area in each 

 instance, this migration is unnecessary, and the looting 

 is also easier. 



I have taken Bolshevism as a convenient example 

 to show how the present can be interpreted in the 

 light of the past. It is not possible to develop this 

 theme .here ; but before passing on, I must refer to 

 another, more general aspect of the same phenomenon. 

 What has been the chief characteristic of these set- 

 backs ? Surely it was the making of a fresh start 

 after each. After a blank period the writing begins 

 to appear again upon the wall. To vary the metaphor, 

 it is as if civilisation were unable to keep going con- 

 tinuously, but needed, like a living organism, long 

 periods of sleep. It is as if men awoke after such 

 sleep refreshed and full of vigour, remembering but 

 dimly the days of long ago, and ordering their conduct 

 without reference thereto. Conduct thus freed from 

 the iron chains of precedent was easier and life at 

 the dawn of history far simpler than nowadays, when 

 we are crippled by the burden of a vividh' remembered 

 past. " Happy is the people without a history " ; but 

 to have had a past and to have forgotten it is, for a 

 community, a still more blessed state. The accumu- 

 lation of files and records complicates social life, and if 

 continued long enough, maj' crush it by its dead 

 weight. It is to society what memory is to the in- 

 dividual, or notes to the man of science, i Every 

 research student knows that the chief difficulty in 

 producing constructive work is to keep one's notes 

 subordinated to one's purpose, to defeat them and fuse 

 them into a li\Ting structure, to prevent them at all 

 costs from terrorising and o\Trwhelming one. WTien 

 records, notes, or precedents outgrow the power of 

 the individual and of society to deal with them thus 



' Samuel Butler called his note-books his "externalised" 

 or " e.xtra-corporeal " memory. 



summarily, the latter become sterile and rapidly 

 degenerate into a mechanical rigidity. Reactions 

 become automatic instead of intelligent ; plasticity 

 is lost and adaptation to environment ceases. When 

 such a state of intellectual paralysis is achieved, no 

 more is possible in that incarnation. 



Let it not be supposed, however, because a 

 period of " sleeping and forgetting " has hitherto been 

 necessary, that it must always be necessary. It has 

 been necessary in the past because things have been 

 allowed to drift, because those at the helm have lost 

 their bearings and surrendered to the blind forces 

 of nature. Let me take from English history an 

 example of what I mean by saj'ing that it is sometimes 

 a good thing for a society to forget its past. One 

 of the most complicated transactions at the present 

 day is the transfer of land from one owner to another. 

 Why is this so ? Because the method of transfer 

 has persisted almost unchanged since the seventh cen- 

 tury of this era, and this in spite of the fact that the 

 community has caused to be prepared, for the express 

 purpose of simplifying this procedure, an unrivalled 

 set of large-scale plans of the whole country. But a 

 small section of the community, with vested interests, 

 has frustrated the intentions of the whole community, 

 and persists in smothering under an unintelligible 

 ritual of expensive jargon what should now be a 

 perfectly straightforward business. It is difficult to 

 see how these legal gentlemen are to be cured of their 

 Anglo-Saxon habits without having an operation 

 performed upon them by the rest of the community. 



The history of our own country during the last 

 millennium provides more than one example of the 

 recurrent necessity for a "clean sweep." When the 

 customary services of feudal times became intolerable, 

 they were commuted for in money payment, which 

 still survives as rent (only that nowadays one need 

 not have Norman blood to be a landlord). But the 

 extraordinarily involved allotment system of the 

 common fields long outlived its original purpose, 

 and was not finally swept out of existence until the 

 Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth 

 centuries. (It still survives, I believe, in a few out- 

 of-the-way places.) The Enclosure Acts may have 

 borne hardly upon a few individuals, and upon the 

 community as a whole in the loss of common lands ; 

 but the trend of modern expert opinion is to regard 

 the injustice and loss as grossly exaggerated, and the 

 national gain in efficient agricultural control as well 

 worth the sacrifice. 



The examples I have given show the value of an 

 historical and archaological perspective in regarding 

 questions of modern policy. Let me now deal with 

 the objective value of this department of knowledge. 



Every student of comparative anatomy knows that 



