More or less precise chronology does not begin until
after 1000 B.C., and at that time "Sargon I of the Akkadian-Sumerian
Empire was a remote memory,... more remote than is Constantine the
Great from the world of the present day.... Hammurabi had been dead a
thousand years... Stonehedge in England was already a thousand years
old."
Mr. Wells was writing with a purpose. "In the brief period of ten
thousand years these units (into which men have combined) have grown
from the small family tribe of the early neolithic culture to the vast
united realms--vast yet still too small and partial--of the present
time." Mr. Wells hoped by changing the time perspective on our present
problems to change the moral perspective. Yet the astronomical measure
of time, the geological, the biological, any telescopic measure which
minimizes the present is not "more true" than a microscopic. Mr.
Simeon Strunsky is right when he insists that "if Mr. Wells is
thinking of his subtitle, The Probable Future of Mankind, he is
entitled to ask for any number of centuries to work out his solution.
If he is thinking of the salvaging of this western civilization,
reeling under the effects of the Great War, he must think in decades
and scores of years." [Footnote: In a review of _The Salvaging of
Civilization, The Literary Review of the N. Y. Evening Post_, June
18, 1921, p. 5.] It all depends upon the practical purpose for which
you adopt the measure.
Pages:
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155