WITHERS.

ANALYSIS

CHAPTER I. THE GROUNDS OF UNITY

The appeal to history. Previous great schisms in Europe which have been surmounted give hope for the present. The Reformation. The Napoleonic Wars.

The two points of view, (1) Man's nature itself tending to unity through conflict. (2) The stages in the process developed in history.

In pre-history conflict and diversity are predominant, though the necessities of life prescribe certain uniformities. Consolidation comes in favoured physical conditions, especially great river-basins like the Nile and the Euphrates.

The possibility of a world-unity first consciously envisaged in the Greco-Roman world. Greece gives unity in thought, Rome in practice. Order with a solid intellectual foundation established with the Roman Empire. In the mediaeval world a unity mainly spiritual is reached in the same framework. The position of Germany in this development. The break-up of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. The enlargement of the known world and the growth of wealth and knowledge. This crisis still continues and has been recently accentuated by the birth-throes of nationalities. The supreme problem for international unity is now the reconciliation of national units with the interests of the whole. Underneath the superficial turmoil the great unifying forces of science and of common sentiments continue to grow and will ultimately prevail.

CHAPTER II. UNITY IN PREHISTORIC TIMES

Retrospect of the search for unity in man's affairs, in its political and scientific bearings.

The Unity of Man as an Animal Species. Ancient beliefs, doubts suggested by the practice of slavery, their solution, and the modern conception of a 'Human Family'.

The unity of man as a rational animal struggling against nature for subsistence. Archaeological evidence as to the reasonableness of primitive culture on its material side; doubts raised by man's irrational 'barbarities' on the social plane. Lévy Bruhl's hypothesis of a 'savage logic' and the Greek analysis of wrongdoing as rooted in ignorance.

Man's struggle with Nature in the N.W. Quadrant of the Old World. Unity here not to be found in the Food Quest. Prehistoric Europe shows variety of regimens, hoe-agriculture, pastoral nomadism. The wheel and the plough and the composite bread and cheese culture.

Race, Language, and Culture as Factors of Unity. The spread of the European Bread Culture is earlier than that of Indo-European Speech and probably than that of the 'Alpine' type of man. Race in Europe has led not to unity but to discord, and linguistic affinity does not ensure mutual intelligibility.

CHAPTER III. THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME

Contemporary history is the only genuine and important history, the present is the only object of historical knowledge; what the present is and how, properly conceived, it gives history its unity and justifies the study of what is past (ancient history); all history is our history, and otherwise without meaning or value to us. The history of classical antiquity is the history of the youth of the modern world, of the formation of the now latent but still potent hopes, fears, designs and thoughts which constitute the substratum of the European mind; how this still unites a divided Europe and affords a ground of hope for a restored and deepened union. Our debt to the Greeks: (a) the very notion of civilization, (b) the idea of its realization through knowledge, (c) the ideal of freedom as the inner spirit of true civilization. How the Greeks failed to work all this out in both theory and practice, and how nevertheless they taught their lesson to the world; the services of Greece to the world in the creation of Art, the Sciences, and Philosophy; the Greek ideal of a life beyond 'civilized' life, but rendered possible by it, and thus giving to civilized life a new and higher value; defects and merits of this ideal.

The Romans are inheritors of all this; how, while making it more prosaic, they rendered it more practical and more effectually realized it. All this most visible in the Imperial period. The Roman ideal: (a) world-wide peace, (b) secured and maintained by a centralized system of laws issuing from and enforced by a single power. Influence of this ideal on later and modern thought and practice. Causes of its decline and fall: (a) ignorance of the economic substructure of civilized life, (b) neglect of opportunities to extend and defend it, (c) the rise of the idea of nationality. The Revolution as the last great attempt to reinstate the full Roman ideal in its outworn form.

Lessons still to be learned by us from the study of both the success and the failure of Greco-Roman civilization; how the consideration of these may at once sober our expectations and inspire us with hope in the present. The forces which created it still maintain it and show no signs of exhaustion. But that