ing
back to an earlier impulse than that of the scholastic philosophy. The
mathematics of Pappus and the mechanics of Archimedes had to be carried
further before the new sciences of which Aristotle had given the first
sketch could be securely founded. The pioneers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries built therefore on the past, although accused of
impiety and revolution; and it must be so with any intellectual
construction which is to hold its own and form the future. So far from
there being any opposition in nature between history and science, the
two are but different aspects of one continuous enlargement of the human
spirit, which sees and lives more fully at each great moment of its
progress, and, so far as it is alive, is always informed by the real
achievements of the past. We illustrate this advance in the marvellous
record of our fifth chapter, and its spirit is summed up in the great
saying of Benedetto Croce that 'all history is contemporary history'.

But the reader may here begin not unnaturally to feel some impatience
with the argument, and to think that he is being carried into a region
of ideal imaginings quite out of touch with the realities of blood and
hatred and starvation with which we have been actually surrounded at the
end of our period. It is well to be thus sharply reminded of the
contrariety of facts, when we are sailing smoothly along on the current
of any theory, whether of education or politics, religion or art. To get
right with our objector, to set our sail so that the rocks in the stream
may not completely wreck us, we will go back to the point where we were
insisting on the obvious truth that the collective resources and
capacity of mankind have of late enormously increased.

The material fruits of science are among our most familiar wonders--the
motor-car, the aeroplane, wireless telegraphy. But it is not
sufficiently realized how all these things and the like are dependent
upon the co-operation of a multitude of minds, the collective rather
than the individual capacity of man. Men had dreamt for ages of flying,
but it was not until the invention of the internal combustion engine
that bird-like wings and the mechanical skill of man could be brought
together and made effective. It is Humanity that flies, and not the
individual man alone. The German Daimler, the French Levassor, are the
two names which stand out most prominently in this later development of
engineering as our own