228 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



The fourfold movement of thought pretty clearly reflected 

 in science, ethics and religion is seen also in the direction of 

 artistic creation. It is reflected in the control of physical 

 nature, where the advance is from the empirical handling 

 of surface effects to the apprehension and control of deeper 

 and larger forces. And we now see that in social organisa- 

 tion on its many sides, though the way is crooked, the final 

 tendency is to realise that free co-operation of humanity 

 which is the condition of a harmonious development. This 

 correspondence is no mere parallelism. It is rather the 

 effect of an interaction, and is at every turn part cause and 

 part effect of the then stage of the development of mind. 

 Were society, as some have suggested, really of { spiritual ' 

 character through and through there would be no such 

 interaction. There would be steady growth alone. The 

 parallelism on all sides would be complete. But in tracing 

 the history of mind we are dealing with one cause only a 

 cause that acts in a milieu of complex forces, but, acting 

 steadily, if our account is correct, gets the upper hand 

 among them little by little. 



Lastly, when we seek to conceive social development as 

 a process going forward in time, we must revert to what 

 was said at the outset of the manifold centres from which 

 the movement proceeds. 1 There are and have been a great 

 number of societies, and their development is in large 

 measure independent and of very unequal rapidity. It is 

 only by a gradual process that civilisation becomes a single 

 stream. We see the process of unification going on 

 rapidly in our own time. In earlier periods interconnec- 

 tion was less constant and less vital, and so, instead of one 

 evolution of culture, there were many evolutions, and cer- 

 tain societies reached a high pitch in one direction or 

 another, even like the Greeks in almost all known direc- 

 tions, which pitch they were unable to maintain. This 



1 One sometimes sees that alleged fact that * we have not progressed 

 since the days of Euripides ' brought forward as evidence that social pro- 

 gress is illusory. As if * we ' and the ancient Athenians were the same 

 people. Certainly there is a moral and intellectual thread of connection. 

 But c we ' are not the Greeks, but Teutons and Celts, and our ' progress ' 

 or want of progress since the fifth century B.C. must be measured by what 

 the Celts and Teutons then were, not the Greeks. 



