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ANCIENT SOCIETY
IT is, or has been, a commonplace with 19 many that the system of to-day has been made by the growth of ages, and that our wills in the present are impotent to change it: but those who put this forward from their position of “standing on the ancient ways,” fail to see that this very fact condemns that position. The business of progressive minds is to recognise the coming change, to clear away obstacles to it, to accept it, and organise it in detail. Reactionists, however, although they deny it and profess to accept moderate, i.e. non-essential change, are trying consciously to stay that very evolution at the point which it has 20 reached to-day: they are attempting to turn the transient into the eternal: therefore by persistently reading the spirit of the present into the records of the past, they really annihilate history, which is not a mere series of actual events through which society, crystallised at once and for ever as to its essentials in the form that it assumes now, has cut its way, but is really one with the present society of which we are ourselves a part; is in fact society as regarded from its dynamic aspect, as the agent and patient of change. The 18th century view of history was entirely based on the abovementioned narrowness of conception,11 which forced men to look on "Homer" as a literary man, like, say Dryden and Pope, and on Lycurgus as an early Dr. Johnson.
The hopes for the social life of the future are involved in its struggles in the past; which indeed, since they have 21 built up the present system, and created us out of its conflict towards fresh change, have really forced