To incorporate and comprehend his
fellow men into a community of purpose became the last and greatest of
his instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone
age was over he had become a political animal. He made astonishingly
far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting and then of
writing and making records, and with that his town communities began to
stretch out to dominion; in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and
the great Chinese rivers, the first empires and the first written laws
had their beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers
and knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which had
been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of pirate
polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome. The history
of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up of the Roman
Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last, aped Caesar
and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind. Measured
by the duration of human life it is a vast space of time between that
first dynasty in Egypt and the coming of the aeroplane, but by the scale
that looks back to the makers of the eoliths, it is all of it a story of
yesterday.
Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this period
of the warring states, while men's minds were chiefly preoccupied by
politics and mutual aggression, their progress in the acquirement of
external Power was slow--rapid in comparison with the progress of the
old stone age, but slow in comparison with this new age of systematic
discovery in which we live.
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