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Updated: June 7, 2025
The ruins of those ancient civilisations are more magnificent than the actual constructions of Europe. But the Church gives Europe a special nimbus and a special excellency over those ancient worlds. Secular Europe does not know that, but the Church knows it and keeps silent. She cannot announce it because she has sinned. Her sins keep her tongue-tied.
The recovery in our time of the actual remains of Egypt and Babylon has corrected much of the libellous legend, which found its way into Greek and European literature, concerning those ancient civilisations. But, as culture advances, human development becomes so complex that we must refrain from attempting to pursue, even in summary, its many outgrowths.
A large zone, from Mexico to Peru, was overspread by this civilisation, and it was advancing steadily when European invaders destroyed it, and reduced the civilised Peruvians to the Quichas of to-day. There remain the civilisations of Asia, and here we have a new and interesting aspect of the question.
The older so-called 'classical' education of the British pedagogues, probably the most paralysing, ineffective, and foolish routine that ever wasted human life, had already been swept out of this great institution in favour of modern methods; and he learnt Greek and Latin as well as he had learnt German, Spanish, and French, so that he wrote and spoke them freely, and used them with an unconscious ease in his study of the foundation civilisations of the European system to which they were the key.
Ingram has remarked in his "Flora Symbolica," Every age and every clime has promulgated its own peculiar system of floral signs, and it has been said that the language of flowers is as old as the days of Adam; having, also, thousands of years ago, existed in the Indian, Egyptian, and Chaldean civilisations which have long since passed away.
Everywhere one sees traces of vanished races and submerged civilisations. Grotesque graves dot the hills or stand up against the sky-line: pyramidal graves, tumulus graves, rock graves everywhere, graves. And, occasionally, as the boat rounds a rocky point, one sees a deserted city up above houses, walls, battlements, with the sun shining through the empty window squares.
That is the rigid reality that still underlay the light mastery of the Arab rider; that is what a man sees, in the patchwork pavilion, when he grows used to the coloured canvas and looks at the walls of stone. This also was far too great a thing for facile praise or blame, a vast bureaucracy busy and yet intensely dignified, the most civilised thing ruling many other civilisations.
His eyes were as sombre as Alvarado's: doubtless both knew that their day would be short, their great gifts wasted in this far-away land, as remote from the great civilisations where lasting reputations are made as had it been on another planet. He shook Roldan warmly by the hand, but he did not smile.
The belief of Englishmen in their own moral superiority as a people is justified by the course of history, and is proven every day afresh by the attitudes of other races, especially by the behaviour in their choice of friends, when compelled to choose as between England and other European powers, of the peoples more or less unlike the Anglo-Saxon in their civilisations in the remoter corners of the world.
In another way, Comte's system may be criticised for failing to cover the ground, if it is regarded as a philosophy of history. In accordance with "the happy artifice of Condorcet," he assumes that the growth of European civilisation is the only history that matters, and discards entirely the civilisations, for instance, of India and China.
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