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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    exercising a blind impulse for self-preservation and for race- preservation, the natural need for food and for love. Love brings several persons into close relationship with one another, and thereby primitive man learns the benefit of communion, and from the immediate family he extends fellowship to those whose progenitors were similarly bound together and who now live in the same neighbourhood and join in the chase,— to the clan or gens, then to the tribe, and still later to the larger com- binations of city and nation. Between these bodies, especially between the large cities and states, competition was so keen that each was exposed to great danger, and lived on perpetual guard, like animals. Hence there was extreme need, which most men are intelligent enough to perceive, for all the individ- uals in them to herd together in the closest union, and every one demanded from every other more attention to the whole than to himself. So necessary and universal was this col- lectivism, that it was taken for granted. Later, when the need for it begins to break down, and it has to be cultivated, it is called patriotism, though by now it covers rather the occu- pants of a territory than the descendants of a common father. When, further, one successful state has absorbed all the others within its reach, or adjoining states with natural boundaries have learnt the wisdom of peacefulness, then the teaching of patriotism sinks before that of cosmopolitanism, or of humani- tarianism in general. Every one is now allowed to pay more attention to his own interests, and allows every one else to do the same. There comes on an age of individualism, with the motto of “every one for himself and the devil take the hind- most.” To outsiders conduct always was harsh,— brutal at first, but tending to become gentler through mutual regulation when the advantages derivable from keeping engagements were recognised. But the principal means of advance in this line has come through the taking in of more and more outsiders into the circle of neighbourliness, until at last this becomes al- most all-comprehensive. The establishment of contractual re- lations introduces a change in morality, which begins in the culminating period, but becomes most prominent in the de- clining. In the early period, the principal injunction was of loyalty in the performance of service to the community, and toward outsiders was permitted the use of force. Now the