tory? Does it conform to this scheme?
Is there a demonstrable development, by inherent forces, of human
society, from lower to higher ranges of culture? Civilization [tr note:
sic] have risen, civilizations have perished: is there in this traceable
the working of natural law?

Dr. Emil Reich, in the _"Contemporary Review,"_ 1889. p. 45 ff. pointed
out the failure of the development theory as applied to human culture.
Hebrew religion as well as the Hebrew state were not derived from
Babylonian, Egyptian, Arabic or Hittite culture; Greek art is not a
derivative product of Egyptian, Assyrian, or Phoenician art; Greek
religion and mythology are not derived from other pagan systems; Roman
law has not been developed out of Greek, Aryan, or Egyptian law; the
English constitutional form of government has no antecedents in German
or Norman-French history; German music is not a result of development
out of Dutch, French, or Italian music. Dr. Reich sums up the matter:
"Institutions do not 'evolve,' nor are they 'derived,' they step into
existence by fulguration"--sudden flashes--, "by a process that is
technically identical with the theological idea of creation. The whole
concept of evolution does not at all apply to history."

In this argument there is considerable force. For, indeed, what natural
law can account for the rise of human institutions, so infinitely
diversified in their structure? Every age is divided into epochs, and at
the center of each epoch there is some personage of force and genius.
But how did Cromwell, Lincoln, Bismarck arise? What force produced them?
Whence did they evolve? Yet without these three names, three great
periods in the world's history would be meaningless.

By what combination of forces shall we say that the various geniuses
have developed which, in a manner almost spectacular, rise before us as
we study the literatures of the past? The youthful years of Shakespeare
were spent under circumstances which might have produced in him one dull
and unaspiring British country lout, like, as one egg to another, to a
hundred thousand others who lived in his age. What made this one country
boy the most astonishing genius in all the history of literature? Study
the youth of Robert Burns, of Heinrich Heine, or Coleridge, and then
tell me why the first two should become the greatest lyric poets of
their time, and the third, one of England's deepest thinkers? Why did
they not develop, one into a satisfied