The Human Adventure (1) The Conquest of Civilisation

Abstract

IT always arouses one's suspicions if a timehonoured institution which we have known all our days, and know to be the outcome of an immemorial growth, suddenly announces that it has become quite new. Or. if a certain number of its workers set up the claim to a new and inspired method of working, we are apt, and often rightly, to regard them as charlatans or ‘ bolsheviks,’ or whatever may happen to be the fashionable word for a dangerous revolutionary at the time. So it was, and in that case rightly, with those who promised us a new heaven and a new earth as a result of the War, and so in the minds of many is it likely to be with those who are now talking of a new history. The phrase is chiefly current on the western side of the Atlantic, and if we are not mistaken it has been most, if not first, used by one of the two authors of the beautiful work entitled “The Human Adventure,” which has just appeared in two volumes, by Prof. J. H. Breasted, the eminent Egyptologist, and Prof. J. H. Robinson. Prof. Robinson, who writes the second volume, on medieval and modern times, is principally identified with this new gospel of history, but Prof. Breasted, who supports him with a massive knowledge of archaeology and the ancient world, is at one in thinking that history in our time has entered into another and far more important phase of its development.

The Human Adventure. (1) The Conquest of Civilisation.

By James Henry Breasted. Pp. xxv + 717 + 50 plates + 17 maps. (2) The Ordeal of Civilisation: a Sketch of the Development and World-Wide Diffusion of our Present-Day Institutions and Ideas. By James Harvey Robinson. Pp. xii + 769 + 59 plates (12 maps). (New York and London: Harper and Bros., 1926.) 16s. net each vol.; 32s. net the set.