THE WOXDERS OP LIFE 



their offshoots, such as the United States of North 

 America." For the second stage — ^middle cultured races 

 — he gives a programme that may be carried out in three 

 or four hundred years' time, with this definition: "All 

 men are well fed and housed; war is universally con- 

 demned, but breaks out now and again. Small armies 

 and fleets of all the nations co-operate as a sort of inter- 

 national police; commercial and industrial life are di- 

 rected according to the moral precepts of sympathy; 

 culture is general; crime and punishment rare." Of 

 the third and highest stage Sutherland merely says, 

 "Too bold a subject for prophecy, that may not come 

 for one thousand to two thousand years yet." This di- 

 vision seems to me too vague and unsatisfactory, in the 

 sense that it does not properly emphasize the civiliza- 

 tion of the nineteenth century in contrast with all pre- 

 ceding stages. It would be better to distinguish pro- 

 visionally the following stages in modern civilization: 

 first, sixteenth to eighteenth century; second, nine- 

 teenth century; and third, twentieth century and the 

 future. 



A. Lower cultured races (Europe, sixteenth to eigh- 

 teenth century). At the commencement of this period, 

 the first half of the sixteenth century, we notice the 

 preparatory movements to the full growth of mental 

 life which was to achieve such great results in the fol- 

 lowing periods: i. The cosmic system of Copernicus 

 (1543) maintained by Galileo (1592). 2. The discovery 

 of America by Columbus (1492) and of the East Indies 

 by Vasco da Gama (1498), the first circumnavigation 

 of the earth by Magellan (1520) and the evidence it af- 

 forded of the rotundity of the earth. 3. The liberation 

 of the mind of Europe from the papal yoke by Martin 

 Luther (1517) and the repulse of the prevailing super- 

 stition by the spread of the Reformation. 4. The 

 new impulse to scientific investigation independently of 



398 



