he weapons
and tactics of warfare, the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their
knowledge of the habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of
domestic life between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when
Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were inventions and
changes, but there were also retrogressions; things were found out and
then forgotten again; it was, on the whole, a progress, but it contained
no steps; the peasant life was the same, there were already priests and
lawyers and town craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers doctors,
wise women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and
south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they were
doing much the same things and living much the same life as they were in
Europe in A.D. 1500. The English excavators of the year A.D. 1900
could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt and disinter legal
documents, domestic accounts, and family correspondence that they could
read with the completest sympathy. There were great religious and
moral changes throughout the period, empires and republics replaced one
another, Italy tried a vast experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery
was tried again and again and failed and failed and was still to be
tested again and rejected again in the New World; Christianity and
Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialised cults, but
essentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind to
material conditions that must have seemed fixed for ever. The idea of
revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life would have been
entirely strange to human thought through all that time.

Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for his
opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the
wars and processions, the castle building and cathedral building, the
arts and loves, the small diplomacies and incurable feuds, the crusades
and trading journeys of the middle ages. He no longer speculated
with the untrammelled freedom of the stone-age savage; authoritative
explanations of everything barred his path; but he speculated with a
better brain, sat idle and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused
upon the coin and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain
leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be found
dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the
assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with