EPHEMERAL NATURE OF ALL CIVILISATION.
We now enter the domain of civilisation; here I can and shall be exceedingly brief, for the relation of the Present to the Past is absolutely different from what it is in culture and knowledge. In discussing knowledge I had to break new ground, and lay foundations to enable us to understand the nineteenth century; for our knowledge of to-day is so closely bound up with the work of the preceding six centuries -- grows out of it under such definite conditions -- that we can estimate the Present only in connection with the Past; here, moreover, the genius of eternity rules; the material of knowledge is never "done with," discoveries can never be annulled, a Columbus stands nearer in spirit to us than to his own century, and even science, as we have seen, contains elements which vie in immortality with the most perfect products of art; there consequently the Past lives on as Present. We cannot assert the same of civilisation. Naturally in this domain also link is locked with link, but former ages support the present only in a mechanical way as in the coral the dead calcified generations serve as a basis to the living polyps. Here, too, of course, the relation of Past to Present is of the highest academic interest, and its investigation may prove instructive; but in practice public life always remains an exclusively "present" phenomenon; the doctrines of the Past are vague, contradictory, inapplicable; the future is likewise very little considered. A new machine supersedes former ones, a new law annuls the old; the necessities of the moment and the hurry of the short-lived individual are the ruling power. It is so, for example, in politics. In the discussion on "The Struggle in the State" we discovered certain great undercurrents which are still flowing as they flowed a thousand years ago; here universal racial relations are actively at work, physical fundamental facts, which in the hurtling waves of life break the light in manifold ways and consequently reveal themselves in many colours, but nevertheless are recognisable by careful observers in their permanent organic unity; but if we take real politics, we find a chaos of transecting and intersecting events, in which chance, the Unanticipated, the Unforeseen, the Inconsistent are decisive, in which the recoil from a geographical discovery, the invention of a loom, the discovery of a coal-mine, the exploit of a general of genius, the intervention of a great statesman, the birth of a weak or strong monarch, destroys all that centuries have achieved, or, it may be, wins back in a single day all that has been ceded to others. Because the Byzantines make a poor defence against the Turks, the great commercial republic of Venice falls; because the Pope excludes the Portuguese from the Western seas. they discover the Eastern route, and Lisbon springs into sudden prosperity; Austria is lost to the Germans and Bohemia loses its national importance for ever, because an intellectual and moral cipher, Ferdinand II., stands from childhood under the influence of a few foreign Jesuits; Charles XII. shoots like a comet through history, and dies at the age of thirty-five, yet his unexpected intervention changes the map of Europe and the history of Protestantism; the transformation of the world, the dream of that scourge of God, Napoleon Bonaparte, was effected in a much more thorough fashion by the simple honest James Watt, who patented his steam-engine in the year 1769, the very year in which that condottiere was born.... And meanwhile real politics consist of a ceaseless adaptation, a ceaseless ingenious compromising between the Necessary and the Chance, between what yesterday was a what to-morrow will be. As the venerable historian Johannes von Muller testifies: "All history humbles politics; for the greatest things are brought about by circumstances." Politics retard, as long as they can, they further, as soon as the stream has overcome its own resistance; they haggle with a neighbour for advantages, rob him when he becomes weak, grovel before him when he grows strong. Moved by politics the mighty prince invests the nobles with fiefs that they may elect him to be King or Emperor, and then promotes the interests of the citizens that they may aid him against those very lords who have raised him to the throne; the citizens are loyal, because they thereby escape the tyranny of the nobles, who think only of self- aggrandisement, but the monarch becomes a tyrant as soon as there are no longer powerful families to keep him in check, and the people awakens to find itself more dependent than ever; that is why it rebels, beheads its King and banishes his supporters; now, however, the ambition to rule asserts itself a thousandfold and with dogged intolerance the foolish "majority" raises its will to the dignity of law. Everywhere the despotism of the moment, that is to say, of the momentary necessity, the momentary interest, the momentary possibility, and consequently a rich sequence of various circumstances, which may indeed have a genetic connection and can be unrolled by the historian in their natural order before our eyes, but so that the one Present destroys the other, as the caterpillar the egg, the chrysalis the caterpillar, and the butterfly the chrysalis; the butterfly, again, dies when it lays eggs, so that history may begin all over again.
Alas! Away! and leave them in their graves.
These strifes between the tyrant and the slaves!
They weary me; for scarcely are they o'er,
Than they commence from first to last once more.
What is here proved for politics is just as true of all industrial and economic life. One of the most industrious modern workers in this wide sphere, Dr. Cunningham, repeatedly points out how difficult it is for us -- in one passage he calls it hopeless [1] -- really to understand the economic conditions of past centuries and especially the views regarding them which floated before the minds of our fathers, and determined their actions and legal measures. Civilisation, the mere garment of man, is in fact so ephemeral a thing that it disappears and leaves no trace behind; though vases, earrings and suchlike adorn our museums, though all sorts of contracts, bills of exchange, and diplomas are preserved in dusty archives, the living element in them is dead beyond recall. Anyone who has not studied these conditions has no idea how quickly one state of affairs supersedes another. We hear talk of Middle Ages and believe that that was a great uniform epoch of a thousand years, kept in constant ferment by wars, but fairly stable, so far as ideas and social conditions are concerned; then came the Renaissance, out of which the Present gradually developed; in reality, from the moment when the Teuton entered into history, especially from the time when he became the decisive factor in Europe, there has never been a moment's peace in the economic world; every century has a physiognomy of its own, and sometimes -- as between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries -- one single century may experience greater economic upheavals than those which form a yawning gulf between the end of the eighteenth and the end of the nineteenth. I once had occasion to study thoroughly the life of that glorious fourteenth century; I approached it not from the standpoint of the pragmatic historian, but simply to get a really vivid idea of that energetic age in which the middle classes and freedom flourished so gloriously; one fact in particular struck me, that the great men of that impetuously advancing century, the century of "rashly daring progress" [2] -- a Jacob von Artevelde, a Cola Rienzi, a John Wyclif, an Etienne Marcel -- were wrecked because they were not understood by contemporaries reared on the traditional views of the thirteenth century; they had clothed their thoughts in a new fashion too quickly. I almost believe that the haste, which seems to us to be the special characteristic of our age, was always peculiar to us; we have never given ourselves time to live our lives; the distribution of property, the relations of class to class, in fact everything that makes up the public life of society is constantly swaying backwards and forwards. In comparison with economics even politics are enduring; for the great dynamic interests, and later the interests of races, form a heavy ballast, while trade, city life, the relative value of agriculture, the appearance and disappearance of the proletariat, the concentration and distribution of capital, &c., are subject almost solely to the influence of the "anonymous forces" mentioned in the General Introduction. From all these considerations it is manifest that past civilisation can scarcely in any respect be considered a still living "foundation" of the Present.
AUTONOMY OF MODERN INDUSTRY
As far as industry in particular is concerned, obviously not only the conditions of its existence depend on the caprices of Protean economics and fickle politics, but it derives even its possibility and particular nature first and foremost from the state of our knowledge. There the equation -- as the mathematician would say -- receives two variable factors, the one of which (economics) is in every way inconstant, while the other (knowledge) only grows in a fixed direction, but with varying rapidity. Clearly industry is very variable; it is often -- as to-day -- an all-consuming, but yet uncertain and inconstant entity. It may powerfully affect life and politics -- think only of steam and electricity -- yet it is not really an independent but a derivative phenomenon, springing on the one hand out of the needs of society, on the other from the capabilities of science. For this reason its various stages have only a slight or no organic connection, for a new industry seldom grows out of an old one -- it is called into life by new wants and new discoveries. In the nineteenth century a perfectly new industry was dominant: being one of the great, new forces (vol. i. p. lxxxii), it left its distinct, individual impression upon the civilisation of this century and revolutionised -- as perhaps, no previous industry -- wide spheres of life. It was devised in the last quarter of the eighteenth and realised in the nineteenth century: what formerly stood, disappears as before a magic wAnd, and possesses for us -- I repeat -- merely academic interest. The student will, of course, find the idea of the steam-engine in earlier times: here he will have to consider not only, as is usually done, Papin, who lived one hundred years before Watt,and Hero of Alexandria, who flourished, exactly two thousand years before Papin, but above all that wonderful magician Leonardo da Vinci who, in this sphere as in others, had with giant strides sped far in front of his age. dominated as it was by Church Councils and Inquisition Courts. Leonardo has left us an accurate sketch of a great steam-driven cannon. and in addition he studied especially two problems, how to use steam to propel ships and to pump water -- the very purposes for which three hundred years later steam was first successfully employed. But neither his age with its needs and political circumstances. nor science and its apparatus were sufficiently developed to allow these brilliant ideas to be turned to practical account. When the favourable moment came, Leonardo's ideas and experiments had long fallen into oblivion, and have only lately been brought to light again. The use of steam, as we know it, is something altogether new and must be discussed in connection with the nineteenth century, since we do not wish, any more than in preceding parts of this book. to allow artificial divisions of time to influence our thought and judgment. But what we have said is true not only of the revolution effected by steam, and naturally to a still higher degree by electricity, which had not even begun a hundred years ago to be applied to industry. but also of those great, all-important industries which pertain to the clothing of man, and consequently have in this sphere somewhat the same place as the cultivation of corn has in agriculture. The methods of spinning, weaving and sewing have been completely changed, and the first steps were likewise taken at the end of the eighteenth century. Hargreaves patented his spinning frame in I770, Arkwright his almost at the same time, the great idealist Samuel Crompton gave the world the perfect machine (the so-called Mule) about ten years later; Jacquard's loom was perfected in 1801; the first practical sewing machine, that of Thimonnier, was not completed -- in spite of attempts at the end of the eighteenth century -- till thirty years later. [3] Here too, of course, there had been previous attempts and ideas, and first of all we must again think of the great Leonardo, who invented a spinning machine which embodied the most brilliant ideas of later times and "is quite equal to the best machines of to-day": in addition he experimented with the construction of looms, machines for cutting cloth and the like. [4] But all this had no influence upon our age, and is consequently out of place here. Another fact should be noticed, that in by far the greater part of the world men still spin and weave as they did centuries ago; in these very matters man is extremely conservative; [5] but if he does make the change, it is made, like the invention itself -- at one bound.
PAPER
Within the scope of this first book, then, there remains little to be said about industry. But this little is not without significance. Just as our science can be called a "mathematical" one, so our civilisation from the beginning possesses a definite character, or, we might say, a definite physiognomy; and, moreover, it is an industry which at that decisive turning- point, the twelfth to the thirteenth century, laid upon our civilisation that special impress which has been growing ever more pronounced; our civilisation is of paper.
When we follow the usual practice of representing the invention of printing as the beginning of a new age, we are in error and are therefore falsifying history. In disproof of such an assertion we have, to begin with, only to recall to mind the fact that the living source of a new age lies not in this or that invention, but in the hearts of definite men; as soon as the Teuton began to found independent States and to shake off the yoke of the Roman-theocratic Imperium, a new age was born; I have proved this in detail and do not need to return to the point. He who shares Janssen's opinion that it was printing which "gave wings to the intellect," might explain to us why the Chinese have. not yet grown wings. And whoever champions with Janssen the thesis that this invention, which "gave wings to the intellect," and in addition the whole "activity of intellectual life" from the fourteenth century onwards are to be ascribed solely to the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification by works, might be good enough to explain why the Hellenes, who knew neither printing nor justification by works, were yet able to soar so high on the wings of song and creative philosophy that it was only after great difficulty and long striving, and after having shaken off the fetters of Rome, that we succeeded in reaching a height which rivalled theirs. [6] We may well give no heed to these foolish phrases. But even in the province of the concrete and sincere study of history, the one-sided emphasising of the invention of printing obscures our insight into the historical course of our civilisation. The idea of printing is very ancient; every stamp, every coin is a manifestation of it; the oldest copy of the Gothic translation of the Bible, the so-called Codex argenteus, is "printed" on parchment by means of hot metal types; the decisive -- because distinctive -- thing is the manner in which the Teutons came to invent cast movable type and so practical printing, and this again is bound up with their recognition of the value of paper. For in its origin, printing is an application of paper. As soon as paper -- i.e., a suitable, cheap material for reproduction -- was found, the industrious, ingenious Teutons began in a hundred places (the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France) to seek a practical solution of the old problem, how to print books mechanically. It will repay us to study the process carefully, especially as compendia and encylopaedias are still very badly informed concerning the earliest history of our paper. In fact the matter has only been fully cleared up by the works of Josef Karabacek and Julius Wiesner, and the results form one of the most interesting contributions to the knowledge of Teutonic individuality. [7]
It seems that those industrious utilitarians, the Chinese, first hit upon the idea of making a cheap, convenient and universally suitable medium for writing (in place of expensive parchment, still more expensive silk, comparatively rare papyrus, Assyrian bricks for writing on, &c.); but the assertion that they invented paper only partly represents the facts. The Chinese, who themselves used a papyrus perfectly similar to our own, [8] and knew its disadvantages, discovered how to make by artificial process from suitable plant fibres a writing material analogous to paper: that is their contribution to the invention of paper. Chinese prisoners of war then brought this industry (roughly speaking, in the seventh century) to Samarkand, a city which was subject to the Arabian Khalif, and mostly ruled by almost independent Turkish princes, the inhabitants of which, however, consisted at that time of Persian Iranians. The Iranians -- our Indo-European cousins -- grasped the clumsy Chinese experiments with the higher intelligence of incomparably richer and more imaginative instincts and changed them completely, in that they "almost immediately" invented the making of paper from rags -- so striking a change (especially When we think that the Chinese have not advanced any further to the present day!) that Professor Karabacek is certainly justified in exclaiming: "A victory of foreign genius over the inventive gifts of the Chinese!" That is the first stage: an Indo-European people, stimulated by the practical but very limited skill of the Chinese, invents paper" almost immediately"; Samarkand becomes for a long time the metropolis of the manufacture. Now follows the second and equally instructive stage. In the year 795 Harun-al-Raschid (a contemporary of Charlemagne) sent for workmen from Samarkand and erected a factory in Bagdad. The preparation was kept a State secret; but wherever Arabs went, paper accompanied them, particularly to Moorish Spain, that land where the Jews were for long predominant and where paper can be proved to have been in use from the beginning of the tenth century. Hardly any, on the other hand, came to Teutonic Europe, and, if it did, it was only as a mysterious material of unknown origin. This went on till the thirteenth century. For nearly 500 years, therefore, the Semites and half-Semites held the monopoly of paper, time enough, if they had possessed a spark of invention, if they had experienced the slightest longing for intellectual work, to have developed this glorious weapon of the intellect into a power. And what did they do with it during all this period -- a span of time greater than from Gutenberg to the present day? Nothing, absolutely nothing. All they could do was to make promissory notes of it, and in addition a few hundred dreary, wearisome, soul- destroying books: the invention of the Iranian serving to bowdlerise the thoughts of the Hellene in the form of spurious learning! Now followed the third stage. In the course of the Crusades the secret of the manufacture, guarded with such intellectual poverty, was revealed. What the poor Iranian, wedged in between Semites, Tartars and Chinese, had invented, was now taken over by the free Teuton. In the last years of the twelfth century exact information concerning the making of paper reached Europe; the new industry spread like wild-fire through every country; in a few years the simple instruments of the East were no longer sufficient; one improvement followed another; in the year 1290 the first regular paper-mill was erected in Ravensburg; it was scarcely one hundred years before block-printing (of whole books even) had become common, and in fifty years more printing with movable letters was in full swing. And are we really to believe that this printing first " gave wings to our intellect"? What a contempt of the facts of history! What a poor appreciation of the value of Teutonic individuality! We surely see that it was, on the contrary, the winged intellect that actually forced on the invention of printing. While the Chinese never advanced further than printing with awkward flat pieces of wood (and that only after painful groping for about one thousand years), while the Semitic peoples had found next to no use for paper -- in the whole of Teutonic Europe and especially in its centre, Germany, "the wholesale production of cheap paper manuscripts" had at once become an industry. [9] Even Janssen tells us that in Germany, long before printing with cast type had begun, the most important products of Middle High German poetry, books of folk-lore, sagas, popular medical treatises, &c., were offered for sale. [10] And Janssen conceals the fact that from the thirteenth century onwards the Bible, especially the New Testament, translated into the languages of the various nations, had been spread by paper through many parts of Europe, so that the emissaries of the Inquisition, who themselves knew only a few pruned passages from the Holy Scripture, were astonished to meet peasants who repeated the four Gospels by heart from beginning to end. [11] Paper at the same time spread the liberating influence of works like those of Scotus Erigena among the many thousands who were educated enough to read Latin (see p. 274). As soon as paper was available, in all European countries there followed the more or less distinct revolt against Rome, and immediately, as a reaction against this, the prohibition to read the Bible and the introduction of the Inquisition (p. 132). But the longing for intellectual freedom, the instinct of the race born to rule, the mighty ferment of that intellect which we recognise to-day by its subsequent achievements, would not be tyranised and dammed up. The demand for reading and knowledge grew day by day; there were as yet no books (in our sense), but there were already booksellers who travelled from fair to fair and sold enormous quantities of clean, cheap copies printed on paper; the invention of printing was rendered inevitable. Hence, too, the peculiar history of this invention. New ideas like the steam-engine, the sewing machine, &c., have generally to fight hard for recognition; but printing was everywhere expected with such impatience that it is scarcely possible at the present day to follow the course of its development. At the same time as Gutenberg is experimenting with the casting of letters in Mayence, others are doing the same in Bamberg, Harlem, Avignon and Venice. And when the great German had finally solved the riddle, his invention was at once understood and imitated, it was improved and developed, because it met a universal and pressing need. In 1450 Gutenberg's printing press was set in motion, and twenty-five years from that time there were presses in almost all the cities of Europe. Indeed in some of the cities of Germany -- Augsberg, Nurnberg, Mayence -- there were twenty or more presses at work. How hungrily does the Teuton, pining under the heavy yoke of Rome, grasp at everything that gives freedom to manhood! It is almost like the madness of despair. The number of separate works printed between 1470 and 1500 is estimated at ten thousand; all the then known Latin authors were printed before the end of the century; in the next twenty years all the available Greek poets and thinkers followed. [12] But men were not content with the past alone; the Teuton at once devoted himself to the investigation of nature, and that too in the right way, starting from mathematics; Johannes Muller of Konigsberg in Franconia, called Regiomontanus, founded between 1470 and 1475 a special press in Nurnberg to print mathematical works; [13] numerous German, French, and Italian mathematicians were thereby stimulated to work in mechanics and astronomy; in 1525 the great Albrecht Durer of Nurnberg published the first Geometry in the German language, and soon after there also appeared in Nurnberg the De Revolutionibus of Copernicus. In other branches of discovery man had not been idle, and the first newspaper, which appeared in 1505, "actually contains news from Brazil." [13]
Nothing could surely bring more clearly home to us the great importance of an industry for all branches of life than the history of paper; we see, too, how all-important it is into whose hands an invention falls. The Teuton did not invent paper; but what had remained a useless rag to Semites and Jews became, thanks to his incomparable and individual racial gifts, the banner of a new world. How just is Goethe's remark: "The first and last thing for man is activity, and we cannot do anything without the necessary talent or the impelling instinct.... Carefully considered, even the meanest talent is innate, and there is no indefinite capacity." [14] Anyone who knows the history of paper and still persists in believing in the equality of the human races is beyond all help.
The introduction of paper is unquestionably the most pregnant event in the whole of our industrial history. All else is comparatively of very little importance. The advance in textile industries, mentioned at the beginning of this section, and to a higher degree the invention of the steam-engine, the steamboat and the locomotive, were the first things that exercised as deep an influence upon life; but even they were not nearly so important as paper, because the invention of the locomotive, which has made the earth accessible to all (as paper has the realm of thought), contributes not directly, but indirectly, to the increase of our intellectual possessions. But I am convinced that the careful observer will notice everywhere the activity of these same capacities, which have revealed themselves with such brilliancy in the history of paper. I may therefore regard my object as fulfilled, when I have by this one example pointed out not only the most important achievement, but at the same time the decisive individual characteristics of our modern industry.
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Notes:
1. The Growth of English Industry and Commerce during the Early and Middle Ages, 3rd ed. p. 97.
2. Lamprecht: Deutsches Stadteleben am Schluss des Mittelalter, 1884, p. 36.
3. I have not been able to find in any language a really practical, comprehensive history of industry; the dates have with great trouble to be sought in fifty different specialised treatises, and we may be glad to find anything at all, for the men of industry live wholly in the present and care very little about history. For the last subject, however, see Hermann Grothe: Bilder und Studien zur Geschichte vom Spinnen, Weben, Nahen (1875).
4. Grothe, loc. cit. p. 21. More details in Grothe's Leonardo da Vinci als Ingenieur, 1824, p. 80 f. Leonardo had infinite talent in the invention of mechanism, as we can see by reading the above work.
5. Grothe: Bilder und Studien, p. 27.
6. Janssen: Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, 16th ed. l. 3 and 8. If his industrious and consequently useful compilation has really won extravagant praise, it is fundamentally a party pamphlet in six volumes, unworthy either for its fidelity or its depth of becoming a household book. The German Catholic has as little reason to fear the truth as any other German; but Janssen's method is systematic distortion of truth, and deliberate sullying of the best impulses of the German spirit.
7. Karabacek: Das arabische Papier, eine historisch-antiquarische Untersuchung, Wien, 1887; and Wiesner: Die mikroskopische Untersuchung des Papiers mit besonderefr Berucksichtigung der altesten orientalischen und europaischen Papiere, Wien, 1887. The two scholars, each in his own special department, have investigated the matter simultaneously, so that their works, though appearing separately, supplement each other and together form a whole. One result is of decisive importance, that paper made of cotton nowhere occurs, and that the oldest pieces of Arab manufacture are made of rags (of linen or hemp), so that (in contrast to the former assumption) the Teuton does not deserve credit even for the modest idea of using linen instead of cotton. The details of tile following are taken to a large extent from these two books.
8. The papyrus of the Chinese is the thinly cut medullary tissue of an Aralia, as that of the ancients was the thinly cut medullary tissue of the Cyperus papyrus. The use of this is still prevalent in China for painting with water-colours, &c. For details, see Wiesner: Die Rohstoffe des Pflanzenreiches, 1873, p. 458 f. (new enlarged edition, 1902, ii. 429-463)
9. Vogt und Koch: Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur, 1897, p. 218. More details in any of the larger histories.
10. Loc. cit. i. 17.
11. Cf. p. 132. note I.
12. Green: History of the English People iii. p. 195.
13. Gerhardt: Geschichte der Mathematik in Deutschland, 1877, p. 15.
14. Lamprecht: Deutsche Geschichte v. 122.
15. Lehrjahr, Book VIII. c. iii.