Bury them over there, some way
off in the field.'
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE NEW PHASE
Section 1
The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we may view
it now from the clarifying standpoint of things accomplished, was in
its broad issues a simple one. Essentially it was to place social
organisation upon the new footing that the swift, accelerated advance
of human knowledge had rendered necessary. The council was gathered
together with the haste of a salvage expedition, and it was confronted
with wreckage; but the wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the only
possibilities of the case were either the relapse of mankind to the
agricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the
acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order. The
old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy, particularism, and
belligerency, were incompatible with the monstrous destructive power
of the new appliances the inhuman logic of science had produced. The
equilibrium could be restored only by civilisation destroying itself
down to a level at which modern apparatus could no longer be produced,
or by human nature adapting itself in its institutions to the new
conditions. It was for the latter alternative that the assembly existed.
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