PREFACE

In offering to the public a second edition of TheLaw of Civilization and Decay I take the opportunityto say emphatically that such value as the essaymay have lies in its freedom from any preconceivedbias. All theories contained in the book, whetherreligious or economic, are the effect, and not thecause, of the way in which the facts unfolded themselves.I have been passive.

The value of history lies not in the multitude offacts collected, but in their relation to each other,and in this respect an author can have no largerresponsibility than any other scientific observer. Ifthe sequence of events seems to indicate the existenceof a law governing social development, such alaw may be suggested, but to approve or disapproveof it would be as futile as to discuss the moral bearingsof gravitation.

viSome years ago, when writing a sketch of the historyof the colony of Massachusetts Bay, I becamedeeply interested in certain religious aspects of theReformation, which seemed hardly reconcilable withthe theories usually advanced to explain them. Afterthe book had been published, I continued readingtheology, and, step by step, was led back, through theschoolmen and the crusades, to the revival of thepilgrimage to Palestine, which followed upon the conversionof the Huns. As ferocious pagans, the Hunshad long closed the road to Constantinople; but thechange which swept over Europe after the year 1000,when Saint Stephen was crowned, was unmistakable;the West received an impulsion from the East. Ithus became convinced that religious enthusiasm,which, by stimulating the pilgrimage, restored communicationbetween the Bosphorus and the Rhine,was the power which produced the accelerated movementculminating in modern centralization.

Meanwhile I thought I had discovered not onlythat faith, during the eleventh, twelfth, and earlythirteenth centuries, spoke by preference througharchitecture, but also that in France and Syria, atleast, a precise relation existed between the ecclesiasticaland military systems of building, and that theone could not be understood without the other. Inthe commercial cities of the same epoch, on the contrary,the religious idea assumed no definite form ofartistic expression, for the Gothic never flourished inVenice, Genoa, Pisa, or Florence, nor did any pureschool of architecture thrive in the mercantile atmosphere.Furthermore, commerce from the outsetseemed antagonistic to the imagination, for a universaldecay of architecture set in throughout Europeafter the great commercial expansion of the thirteenthcentury; and the inference I drew from thesefacts was, that the economic instinct must havecho

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