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period of the warring states, while men's minds were chiefly
preoccupied by politics and mutual aggression, their progress in
the acquirement of external Power was slow-rapid in comparison
with the progress of the old stone age, but slow in comparison
with this new age of systematic discovery in which we live. They
did not very greatly alter the weapons and tactics of warfare,
the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their knowledge of the
habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of domestic life
between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when
Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were
inventions and changes, but there were also retrogressions;
things were found out and then forgotten again; it was, on the
whole, a progress, but it contained no steps; the peasant life
was the same, there were already priests and lawyers and town
craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers doctors, wise women,
soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and
south-eastern Europe at the begi
were doing much the same things and living much the same life as
they were in Europe in A.D. 1500. The English excavators of the
year A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt
and disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family
correspondence that they could read with the completest sympathy.
There were great religious and moral changes throughout the
period, empires and republics replaced one another, Italy tried a
vast experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again
and again and failed and failed and was still to be tested again
and rejected again in the New World; Christianity and
Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialised cults, but
essentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind to
material conditions that must have seemed fixed for ever. The
idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life
would have been entirely strange to human thought through all
that time.
Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for
his opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and
goings, the wars and processions, the castle building and
cathedral building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacies and
incurable feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of the middle
ages. He no longer speculated with the untrammelled freedom of
the stone-age savage; authoritative explanations of everything
barred his path; but he speculated with a better brain, sat idle
and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused upon the coin
and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain leisure for
thought throughout these times, then men were to be found
dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with
the assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread
symbols in the world about them, questioning the finality of
scholastic wisdom. Through all the ages of history there were
men to whom this whisper had come of hidden things about them.
They could no longer lead ordinary lives nor content themselves
with the common things of this world once they had heard this
voice. And mostly they believed not only that all this world was
as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at, but that
these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come to men by
chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among
rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some
odd utilisable thing, sometimes deceivingthemselves with fancied
discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day
laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them a
ill-treated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and
sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and
entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part heeded them
not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first
dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his
blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly,
was the snare that will some day catch the sun.
Section 3
Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court
of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His
common-place books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious
anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. Durer was his
parallel and Roger Bacon-whom the Franciscans silenced-of his
kindred. Such a man again in an earlier city was Hero of
Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred years
before it was first brought into use. And earlier still was
Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Daedalus
of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history whenever there
was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared.
And half the alchemists were of their tribe.
When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might
have supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive
engine. But they could see nothing of the sort. They were not
yet begi
too poor to make such engines even had they thought of them. For
a time they could not make instruments sound enough to stand this
new force even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile. Their
first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited
for more than five hundred years before the explosive engine
came.
Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey
before the world could use their findings for any but the
roughest, most obvious purposes. If man in general was not still
as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies about him as his
paleolithic precursor, he was at best purblind.