Antonius, Marcus, 83 B.C.?-30 B.C. -- Drama; Caesar, Julius -- Drama; Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, -30 B.C. -- Drama
Now if we count the generations of Progressive elderly gentlemen
since, say, Plato, and add together the successive enormous
improvements to which each of them has testified, it will strike us at
once as an unaccountable fact that the world, instead of having been
improved in 67 generations out all recognition, presents, on the
whole, a rather less dignified appearance in Ibsen's Enemy of the
People than in Plato's Republic. And in truth, the period of time
covered by history is far too short to allow of any perceptible
progress in the popular sense of Evolution of the Human Species. The
notion that there has been any such Progress since Caesar's time (less
than 20 centuries) is too absurd for discussion. All the savagery,
barbarism, dark ages and the rest of it of which we have any record as
existing in the past, exists at the present moment. A British
carpenter or stonemason may point out that he gets twice as much money
for his labor as his father did in the same trade, and that his
suburban house, with its bath, its cottage piano, its drawingroom
suite, and its album of photographs, would have shamed the plainness
of his grandmother's. But the descendants of feudal barons, living in
squalid lodgings on a salary of fifteen shillings a week instead of in
castles on princely revenues, do not congratulate the world on the
change. Such changes, in fact, are not to the point. It has been
known, as far back as our records go, that man running wild in the
woods is different to man kennelled in a city slum; that a dog seems
to understand a shepherd better than a hewer of wood and drawer of
water can understand an astronomer; and that breeding, gentle nurture
and luxurious food and shelter will produce a kind of man with whom
the common laborer is socially incompatible. The same thing is true of
horses and dogs. Now there is clearly room for great changes in the
world by increasing the percentage of individuals who are carefully
bred and gently nurtured, even to finally making the most of every man
and woman born. But that possibility existed in the days of the
Hittites as much as it does to-day. It does not give the slightest
real support to the common assumption that the civilized
contemporaries of the Hittites were unlike their civilized descendants
to-day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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