feat of the imagination, outdoing Thor's deep draught of the
sea! And once he had done it, all do it and no one falters at the deed.
You are not yet seven as I write and already you are serenely aware that
you live upon a sphere. And in much the same manner it is that we, who
are sociologists and economists, publicists and philosophers and what
not, are attempting now to roll up the vast world of facts which concern
human intercourse, the whole indeed of history and archaeology, into some
similar imaginable and manageable shape, that presently everyone will be
able to grasp.

I suppose there was a time when nobody bothered at all about the shape
of the earth, when nobody had even had the idea that the earth could be
conceived as having a shape, and similarly it is true that it is only in
recent centuries that people have been able to suppose that there was a
shape to human history. It is indeed not much more than a century since
there was any real emergence from theological assumptions and pure
romanticism and accidentalism in these matters. Old Adam Smith it was,
probing away at the roots of economics, who set going the construction
of ampler propositions. From him spring all those new interpretations
which have changed the writing of history from a record of dramatic
reigns and wars and crises to an analysis of economic forces. How
impossible it would be for anyone now to write that great chapter of
Gibbon's in which he sweeps together into one contempt the history of
sixty Emperors and six hundred years of time. His note of weariness and
futility vanishes directly one's vision penetrates the immediate
surface. Those Heraclians and Isaurians and Comneni were not history, a
schoolboy nowadays knows that their record is not history, knows them
for the mere scum upon the stream.

And still to-day we have our great interpretations to make. Ours is a
time of guesses, theories and provisional generalizations. Our phase
corresponds to the cosmography that was still a little divided between
discs and domes and spheres and cosmic eggs; that was still a thousand
years from measuring and weighing a planet. For a long time my mind
hovered about the stimulating theories of Socialism and particularly
about those more systematic forms of Socialist teaching that centre
about Karl Marx. He rose quite naturally out of those early economists
who saw all the world in terms of production and saving. He was a
necessary step for me at lea