Had there been no swarming and aggressive barbarians, standing to later Rome as Rome had done to Carthage--collectively exigent of moral equality as Romans had once been, and therefore conjunctly mighty as against the morally etiolated Italians--the Western Roman Empire would have gone on just as the Eastern[89] so long did, just as China has so long done--would have subsisted with little or no progress, most factors of progress being eliminated from its sphere. It ought now to be unnecessary to point out that Christianity was no such factor, but rather the reverse, as the history of Byzantium so thoroughly proves. No Christian writer of antiquity, save perhaps Augustine[90] in a moment of moral aspiration, shows any perception of the political causation of the decay and fall of the Empire.[91] The forces of intellectual progress that did arise and collapse in the decline and the Dark Ages were extra-Christian heretical forces--Sabellian, Arian, Pelagian, anti-ritualistic, anti-monastic, Iconoclastic. These once deleted, Christianity was no more a progressive force among the new peoples than it was among the old; and the later European progress demonstrably came from wholly different causes--new empire, forcing partial peace; Saracen contact, bringing physics, chemistry, and mathematics; new discovery, making new commerce; recovery of pagan lore, making new speculation; printing, making books abundant; gunpowder, making arms a specialty; and the fresh competition and disruption of States, setting up fruitful differences, albeit also preparing new wars. To try to trace these causes in detail would be to attempt a complete sociological sketch of European history, a task far beyond the scope of the present work; though we shall later make certain special surveys that may suffice to illustrate the general law. In the meantime, the foregoing and other bird's-eye views of some ancient developments may illustrate those of modern times. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 12: Cp. A. Schwegler, _Römische Geschichte_, 1853, i, 610-615; Pelham, _Outlines of Roman History_, 1893, p. 25. When Professor Ferrero (_Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans. 1907, i, 5) pronounces that "The Romans were a primitive people without the defects peculiar to a primitive people," he sets up a needless mystification. They had the defects of their own culture stage, which was far beyond that of "primitives" in the general sense of the term. They were "semi-civilised barbarians," with a long past of institutional life.] [Footnote 13: It might be an interesting inquiry whether a grouping by threes could have arisen from a primary union of two exogamous clans.]