Invention: The Master-key to Progress. Fiske Bradley Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ of Five Hundred, whose members were chosen by lot each year from citizens over thirty years of age.

      The success of the Athenian democracy has had a powerful influence ever since on history; because it has supplied not only a precedent but an encouragement to every people to try to escape from the individual restrictions that monarchies and all "strong governments" tend to impose. But it had another though less powerful influence also, which continued for a long while, but now has ceased, in supplying a precedent for slavery. For while the citizens of Athens were free, only the sons of Athenian fathers and Athenian mothers could be citizens; many thousand workers and merchants of all kinds could take no part in the government, and there were besides an enormous number of slaves. It was to a great degree the fact of slavery that made possible the success of the so-called Athenian democracy; for it liberated the citizens in very great measure from the drudgery of life, and gave them leisure to devote themselves to the study of government and the arts.

      In addition, Athens acquired great wealth from the spoils of its wars and the tribute of its subject states. This wealth was expended largely in the beautifying of Athens, and in the consequent encouragement and opportunity to artists of all kinds. Naturally, the art most immediately encouraged was that of architecture; and that the encouragement met with ready and great success the most beautiful ruins in the world superbly testify. The directing genius in this work and in all the others was Pericles, who stimulated the Athenians with his conception and description of a city worthy to symbolize the power and glory of the empire. The twin arts of architecture and sculpture worked together and in harmony; and a city more beautiful than ever known before, or ever known since, testified to the soundness and brilliancy of the conception and to the constructive ability of the Athenians to embody it in material form.

      The poets and scholars kept pace with the statesmen and the architects and the sculptors; but the philosophers surpassed them all. For, while the successful democracy of Athens is a model still, and while the Parthenon and the statue of Apollo are models still, yet an integral part of the system of government (slavery) has been abjured by the civilized world, and the temples and the statues have been for the pleasure of but a few; while the teachings of the philosophers have been the basis on which has rested ever since much of the intellectual progress of mankind.

      It may be noted here that, as men have progressed up the steep road to civilization, the only guides they have had have been men who have not themselves passed over the road before, and whose only qualification as guides has lain in some attribute of the mind that enabled them to survey the road a little farther ahead than the others could, and to point out the paths to take, and the obstructions to avoid. Man's physical instincts guide him considerably as to the methods to preserve his physical existence; but they help him not at all to lift himself above his physical self, and in many ways they hinder him. It seems to be the office of the mind both to discern the upward paths and to stimulate the will to overcome the difficulties and dangers in the way.

      Of the great pointers of the way, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others, it might be deemed presumptuous of the present author to do more than speak; and of the great stimulators, Æschuylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and, above all, Demosthenes as well. But because it is pertinent to our subject it is instructive for us to note that the main distinctive feature of the work of each was originality. It is true that it is the completed work in the case of each that meets our gaze; it is true that the superficial impression would be the same, even if each work had been a copy of some work that had gone before; in the same way that, superficially, many a copy of an oil painting is as good as the original. But from the standpoint of influence on the future, it is the originator rather than the copyist who wields the influence; just as it is the basic inventor of a mechanical appliance rather than the man who improves upon it.

      The Athenians and Spartans became involved in the Peloponnesian War, that lasted from 431 to 404 B. C., and ended with the capture of Athens. The Spartans thereupon became dominant in Greece, but only to be mastered by the Thebans in 371 B. C. The little jealous states of Greece were never able to agree together long, and no one state was ever able to unite them. But the half-barbarian people of Macedonia, under Philip their king, after developing their army, according to a novel system invented by him, overcame and then united under their sway the highly cultured but now military weak states that had despised them.

      Possibly, it would somewhat strain the meaning of the word invention, to declare that Philip made a radically new invention, when he improved on the Theban phalanx, and devised his system of military training; for kings and other leaders had trained armies long before Philip lived, and Philip departed only in what some might call detail from the methods that had been used before. But, at the same time, it was an act, or a series of acts, betokening great initiative and originality, for a man ruling a weak collection of tribes such as dwelt in Macedon, to create out of such crude material as he began with, such an extraordinary army as he ultimately was able to lead to battle. To accomplish this it was necessary for him to conceive the idea of doing it, then to embody his conception in a formulated plan, and then bring forth the finished product. The thought of doing it must have come to him: – how else could he get it? An idea comes from outside through the mental eye to the mind; as a ray of light comes from outside through the physical eye to the retina.

      The picture made on Philip's mind must have impressed him profoundly, for he spent the rest of his life in giving it "a local habitation and a name." To accomplish it cost him years of continual effort of many kinds, but he did accomplish it. He did, as a result, produce a machine, as truly a machine as Stephenson ever produced, but made up of many more parts; each part independent of any other, and yet dependent on every other, and all working together, for a common purpose.

      Let us remind ourselves again that a machine composed of inanimate parts only is only one kind of machine; for a machine may be composed of animate parts, or inanimate parts, or of parts of which some are animate and some inanimate. Clearly, it makes no difference, so far as the act of invention goes, whether a man uses animate or inanimate parts; the essential of invention is the creation of a new thing. If a man merely puts two pieces of wood and a piece of string into a pile, or if he merely collects a number of men together, no invention is made and nothing is created. But if he so combines the two pieces of wood and the string as to make a bow and arrow; or if he combines a modified Theban phalanx with masses of cavalry and catapults in a novel and effective way as Philip did, invention is exercised and something is created.

      Before Philip's time a phalanx was used to bear the brunt of the battle, and to overwhelm the enemy by mere strength and force; as the Thebans did at Leuctra and Mantinea. But Philip conceived the idea of merely holding the enemy with his phalanx assisted by the catapults, and hurling his cavalry against their flanks. Philip's army, as Philip used it, was a machine and a very powerful one: – each part independent of every other, yet dependent on every other – all the parts working together for a common purpose. Philip conceived the idea of making this machine, and afterwards made it; just as Ericsson more than two thousand years later conceived the idea of making a "Monitor" and afterwards made it.

      By means of his machine Philip defeated the Greeks at Cheronea in the year 338 B. C., just as Ericsson by means of his machine defeated the Merrimac at Newport News in the year 1862 A. D., exactly twenty-two centuries later. The two machines differed, it is true. Yet they did not differ so much as one might unthinkingly suppose; for each machine was made up of parts, of which some were animate and some were not; and in each machine every part, animate or inanimate, cooperated with all the others; and all cooperated together, to carry out the inventor's purpose, the destruction of the enemy.

      The influence of Philip's invention began before Philip died, and it continues to this day. For after Philip's death, his son Alexander put it to work at once on the task of subduing thoroughly all of Greece, and then subduing Asia.

      The influence of the machine in subduing even Greece alone must not be regarded lightly; not so much because Greece was subdued, as because the various little states were by that means brought together; and because it illustrates the fact that without СКАЧАТЬ