The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh.

  • Correa Moylan Walsh
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of altruistic feeling’ with which our western societies were “equipped” by the Christian religion during fourteen cen- _ turies, and which was “ liberated ”’ at the time of the Reforma- tion.* The metaphor is limp, as feelings are hardly a kind of things that can be piled up and stored ina fund. Strange, too, is it that when the Christian religion held sway, the humanita- rian movement did not exist, and this movement has increased as that sway has declined. Moreover, the phenomenon is not new: no “new era” (p. 245) are we entering, though we may hope that the era ahead of us will be better and more last- ing than the corresponding era in antiquity. Mr. Kidd rightly ascribes the progress of the lower classes to the concessions made by the upper classes, who, though at the time the stronger, are by their deepened and softened character ‘‘ rendered in- capable of making any effective resistance to the movement which is undermining their position.” > But before Mr. Kidd published his paradoxes, Fustel de Coulanges in his fine work La Cité Antique had noticed the same phenomenon in antiqui- ty, and had generalised it, writing: ‘“ When to the subjects authority ceases to appear just, time is needed for it to cease to appear so to the masters; but this comes at length, and then the master who no longer believes his authority to be legitimate, de- fends it badly or ends by renouncing it.”® Indeed, the hu- manitarian movement can hardly fail to come, in some form, to any civilisation when it has reached the period of ease. Mat- thew Arnold himself defined civilisation to be “ the humanisa- tion of man in society;’’* and it is probable that he obtained this from his classical studies, because Pliny, in describing the functions which had been assigned by the gods to Italy (civil- ising functions, evidently, though this term was not used by the Latins), placed among them that of “ giving humanity to mankind.” § 7 4Pp. 165, 166, 177-8, 182, 194, 200, 216, 256, 261, 320. 5 Pp. 188-90, 192-3, 219, 322, cf. 234, 259. 6 P. 310; again 355: “ When an aristocracy comes to doubt the legitimacy ae empire, either it has not the courage to defend it or it defends it T ns on “ Equality,” in Mixed Essays, 63, also p. vi. 8“*Numine deum electa, quae... et humanitatem homini daret,” Nat. Hist., Ill. 5 (or 6).— Mr. Kidd’s thesis is that our individual and social in- terests are divergent, and that, while instinct prompts to the latter, rea- son inclines to the former, and while instinct is stronger at first, reason