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Untitled Article
into stimulating contact ; and , if ultimate advantage to all parties be the result of this , the question at issue seems to us to be decided , and we may look upon the whole course of Providence as a progressive plan , all the parts of which are essential to each
other ; as a mysterious process , of which all that we know is , that evil is converted by it into a means of eventual good . Thus , at the very time that we pass the heaviest judgment on the genius of the Romans and the spirit of their policy , as insidious , tyrannical , and unjust , we may , with perfect consistency , taking into view the whole concatenation of events , acknowledge the benefits that have accrued to the progressive civilization of mankind , from the connexion which their conquests opened between the most distant regions—from the universal establishment of their law— - from the prevalence of two languages , that formed , respectively , in the east and the west , a common medium of intercourse for all classes—and from the circulation that was procured by these means , for the accumulated knowledge and intelligence of the capital . The conquests of Alexander served to diffuse the civilization of the Greeks through Asia and Egypt , but the effects of them were necessarily bounded . by the same limits as the
prevalence of the Grecian tonerue : in the seaueh a western people lence of the Grecian tongue ; in the sequel , a western people stepped into the arena of war , overthrew the Greeks , dragged their arts and their literature in triumphal procession to Rome , and through a Latin medium spread them to the shores of the Atlantic . Upon this broad basis the civilization of modern Europe has been slowly and irregularly reared ; and whatever value we attach to that civilization , whatever the blessings of which it is yet destined to be the parent to mankind , we must consider ourselves as indebted for it to the mixed and various train of causes which
gradually introduced it . Herder ' s reasonings , if analysed , are reducible to this , that the present world is not a state of perfect opti * mism . Hume selects the age of Trajan and the Antonines as the most flourishing period of the Roman empire—a period in which he imagines this part of the world might possibly contain more inhabitants than at present * ; and whoever impartially weighs the extracts which he has given in a note from Pliny , Tertullian , and Aristides , as testifying the general prosperity and populousness , in their time , subsisting throughout the dominions of Rome , will surely hesitate , before he pronounces the humane and civilized multitudes , who dwelt in peace under the protection of laws , in the splendid cities which covered the provinces , as in a less desirable condition than the ferocious barbarians who traversed the forests of Gaul and Germany , or wandered over the wilds of Illyricum and Thrace . Though we have thus ventured to express a dissent from some of the doctrines advanced by Herder , we should not be doing
? Espays ; vol . 1 . On the Populousness of Ancient Kations , p , 466 , note Q . Q .
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£ 22 The Philosophy of the History of Mankind .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1832, page 222, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1810/page/6/
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