CHAPTER VIII
DEFINITION OF THE WORD "CIVILIZATION"; SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT HAS A TWOFOLD ORIGIN
Here I must enter on a digression vital to my argument. At every turn I am using a word involving a circle of ideas which it is very necessary to define. I am continually speaking of "civilization," and cannot help doing so; for it is only by the existence in some measure, or the complete absence, of this attribute that I can gauge the relative merits of the different races. I refer both to European civilization and to others which may be distinguished from it. I must not leave the slightest vagueness on this point, especially as I differ from the celebrated writer who alone in France has made it his special business to fix the meaning and province of this particular word. Guizot, if I may be allowed to dispute his great authority, begins his book on "Civilization in Europe" by a confusion of terms which leads him into serious error. He calls civilization an event.
The word event must be used by Guizot in a less positive and accurate way than it usually is—in a wide, uncertain, elastic sense that it never bears; otherwise, it does not properly define the meaning of the word civilization at all. Civilization is not an event, it is a series, a chain of events linked more or less logically together and brought about by the inter-action of ideas which are often themselves very complex. There is a continual bringing to birth of further ideas and events. The result is sometimes incessant movement, sometimes stagnation. In either case, civilization is not an event, but an assemblage of events and ideas, a state in which a human society subsists, an environment with which it has managed to surround itself, which is created by it, emanates from it, and in turn reacts on it.
77
