THE HERESY OF THE NEW MAN

The writing of History is commonly advertised as a twofold labour: it is necessary not only to ascertain the facts but to interpret their meaning. The vocation of Karl Marx was scarcely less arduous; for, having established the principle of social evolution, there remained the labour of investing it with a positive content. This precisely was done by postulating an economic interpretation of History. Sociologists and biologists to whom the whole of nature was the result of development from the simple to the complex (and all reality derived from the homogeneous distribution of matter) could scarcely pass the ball from one to another with more ease than that with which the cloak of Victorian morphology fell to the Sociologist. Analysing those economic forces whose inter-play was according to him the cause of social behaviour, Karl Marx claimed to have found the key of history. Robert Owen and the Utopians, awaiting a swift transformation of Society without violence, fell by the way even as Utopians have fallen since. Owen’s New Moral World would not dawn. How could it? Evolution, said Marx, was a strictly Gontinouous process and since the operating forces were no longer occult there could be no surprise in store for society. This is all the best part of a century ago; but at no time, surely, has historico-political thought re-acted so obediently to the mood of evolutionists as to-day. There are still those of us old enough to treasure recollection of history classes in which our media axiomata of all time (and for all time) was the triumph of Christianity over the paganism of the ancient world. Today in an ever increasing number of instances the cosmos-changing mission of Jesus Christ is presented to young students as merely an emphatic point in the cycle, classical, subclassical and Christian.