A short survey of facts concerning
civilization will help to point the way.

Humanity, in its cradle, did not have science; it had only the faculties
of observation and speculation. In the early days there was much
speculative thinking, but it was without any sufficient basis of facts.
Theology and philosophy flourished; their speculations were often very
clever, but all their primitive notions about facts--such as the structure
of the heavens, the form of the earth, mechanical principles,
meteorological or physiological phenomena--were almost all of them wrong.

What is history? What is its significance for humanity? Dr. J. H. Robinson
gives us a precise answer: "Man's abject dependence on the past gives rise
to the continuity of history. Our convictions, opinions, prejudices,
intellectual tastes; our knowledge, our methods of learning and of
applying for information we owe, with slight exceptions, to the past--often
to the remote past. History is an expansion of memory, and like memory it
alone can explain the present and in this lies its most unmistakable
value."(2)

The savage regards every striking phenomenon or group of phenomena as
caused by some personal agent, and from remotest antiquity the mode of
thinking has changed only as fast as the relations among phenomena have
been established.(3)

Human nature was always asking "why"? and not being able to answer why,
they found their answer through another factor "who." The unknown was
called, Gods or God. But with the progress of science the "why" became
more and more evident, and the question came to be "how." From the early
days of humanity, dogmatic theology, law, ethics, and science in its
infancy, were the monopolies of one class and the source of their
power.(4)

The first to break this power were the exact sciences. They progressed too
rapidly to be bound and limited by obscure old writings and prejudices;
life and realities were their domain. Science brushed aside all sophistry
and became a reality. Ethics is too fundamentally important a factor in
civilization to depend upon a theological or a legal excuse; ethics must
conform to the _natural_ laws of human _nature_.

Laws, legal ideas, date from the beginning of civilization. Legal
speculation was wonderfully developed in parallel lines with theology and
philosophy before the natural and exact sciences came into existence. Law
was always made by the few and in general for the purpose of preserving