EPILOGUE !! (6)

Essentially there are two fundamental and pivotal events in human history, the agricultural revolution, in which men passed from hunting to tillage and settled down to build homes, schools, and civilization, and the industrial revolution, which threw millions and millions of men, first in England, then in America and Germany, then in Italy and France, then in far away Japan and the ex soviet union now in China, India and Brazil,out of their homes and their farms into cities and factories. It transformed society and government by empowering the owners of machinery and the controllers of commerce beyond the owners of titles and land.

It transformed religion by generating science and its persuasive miracles and including many men to think in terms of cause and effect and machine. It transformed the mind by substituting novel and varied stimuli. It transformed woman by taking her work from the home and forcing her into the factories and the work force. It transformed morals by complicating economic life, postponing marriage, multiplying contacts and opportunities, liberating woman, reducing the family, and weakening religious and parental control and authority. And it transformed art by subordinating beauty to use, and subjecting the artist, not to a favored few with inherited standards of judgement and trained tastes,but to a multitude who judged all things in terms of power and cost and size.

ALL this and more,incredible as it may seem, Capitalism, Socialism, the Imperialism that must come when industrialised nations need foreign markets and foreign food, the wars that must come for these markets, and the revolutions that must come from these wars.

I know how partial and provincial all these lists must be. We are all born within frontiers of space and time,and, struggle as we will, we never escape from our boxes. To us, civilisation means Europe and America, and the orient, which considers us barbaric, seems barbarous.

I will let the reader, then, make his own lists, helping himself to what he likes in mine. Let him try to build for himself another perspective that shall clarify human development and progress for him.



Thanks again to MR. Durant, Little, et al.
thanks to all my readers for their patience in following my line of thoughts.
And finally salamat to all.