e
Jewish nation has its type of progress in the prophets, side by side
with its type of permanence in the law and Levites, more distinct than
any other ancient people. Nowhere in common history do we see the two
forces--both so necessary and both so dangerous--so apart and so
intense: Judaea changed in inward thought, just as Borne changed in
exterior power. Each change was continuous, gradual and good. In early
times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage;
such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage
never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies,
it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued
endless consequences. But I cannot deal with such matters here, nor are
they to my purpose. As respects this essay, Judaea is an example of
combined variability and legality not investing itself in warlike
power, and so perishing at last, but bequeathing nevertheless a legacy
of the combination in imperishable mental effects.
It may be objected that this principle is like saying that men walk
when they do walk, and sit when they do sit. The problem, is, why do
men progress? And the answer suggested seems to be, that they progress
when they have a certain sufficient amount of variability in their
nature. This seems to be the old style of explanation by occult
qualities. It seems like saying that opium sends men to sleep because
it has a soporific virtue, and bread feeds because it has an alimentary
quality. But the explanation is not so absurd. It says: 'The beginning
of civilisation is marked by an intense legality; that legality is the
very condition of its existence, the bond which ties it together; but
that legality--that tendency to impose a settled customary yoke upon
all men and all actions if it goes on, kills out the variability
implanted by nature, and makes different men and different ages
facsimiles of other men and other ages, as we see them so often.
Progress is only possible in those happy cases where the force of
legality has gone far enough to bind the nation together, but not far
enough to kill out all varieties and destroy nature's perpetual
tendency to change.' The point of the solution is not the invention of
an imaginary agency, but an assignment of comparative magnitude to two
known agencies.
III.
This advantage is One of the greatest in early civilisation--one of the
facts which give a decisive turn to t
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