The revolutionary shift of interest from Religion to Technology among the leading spirits of the Western World in the later decades of the seventeenth century had two effects that changed the rest of the World’s attitude towards the West. The Late Modern West’s concentration of attention and energy on Technology brought to the West an increase in wealth and power that, for scale and speed, was perhaps unprecedented in the previous history of any civilization; and at the same time the Late Modern West’s alienation from its own traditional religion brought with it an abatement of the West’s traditional religious intolerance.

Intrinsically the West’s technological achievements during the last quarter of a millennium are not such great prodigies of human ability as the primary technological discoveries, made by Primitive Man, on which all subsequent technological advances have been based: how to make fire and keep it alight; how to chip a stone into an edged tool; how to navigate a hollowed-out tree-trunk—not to speak of such relatively late and sophisticated inventions as agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the wheel. What has been unprecedented in the last 250 years of Western technological history has been the pace—and in A.D. 1956 this pace had not yet begun perceptibly to slacken. This pace has been the result of an unprecedentedly large investment of human ability and non-human capital in deliberately experimenting in improvements over the whole field of Mankind’s apparatus, including domesticated plants and animals.

The change in the West’s temper which opened the way for this technological ‘drive’ showed itself in the West’s dealings with people of alien religions. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the temper then prevailing in the West had made it virtually impossible to study in a Western country without having accepted the locally established form of Western Christianity—Catholic or Protestant. The University of Padua, which was under the aegis of the Republic of Venice, had been unique in opening its doors to non-Catholics. The Protestant Englishman Hervey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, and the Eastern Orthodox Christian Chiot Alexander Mavrogordato, who wrote a treatise on Hervey’s discovery before entering the Ottoman public service, were, both of them, students there. But the University of Padua’s liberality had been an exceptional régime which was partly due to Venice’s possessing a colonial empire with a mainly Eastern Orthodox Christian population. Other Western universities were slow in waiving their religious tests. The University of Oxford, for instance, continued down to A.D. 1871—a date by which Britain had already lost one empire and acquired a second—to exact a declaration of assent to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Episcopalian Church of England from every candidate for a degree. Before the end of the seventeenth century, however, the West was beginning to create for itself a non-university organization for study and for the exchange of information and ideas in the shape of a ‘Republic of Letters’ composed of local academies patronized by enlightened monarchs, and here the traditional religious tests were not applied. As the Late Modern Age of Western history ran on, the Paduan rift in the Western veil of compulsory religious uniformity began to widen.

This dawn of religious toleration in the West in the Late Modern Age of Western history made it possible for non-Westerners now to go to school in the West without any longer being compelled to accept the local Western religion as a condition sine qua non for being allowed to receive a training in Western technology. Concurrently, the West’s technological progress in this age made it imperative for leading spirits in non-Western societies to take advantage of their new access to the fountainhead of Western technique in order to master the new Western technology in the interests of self-defence.

In the Early Modern Age the West had not yet forged so far ahead of other living societies in its military technique as to make it impossible for these societies to master the use of Western military inventions without revolutionizing their own way of life. In the sixteenth century the Ottoman Turks, the Russians, and the Japanese readily mastered the use and manufacture of the Western fire-arms of the day. In the Great Northern War of A.D. 1558–83, Muscovy was able to take the offensive in a first attempt to conquer the Baltic Provinces from the Western World, and was checked with great difficulty by a coalition of Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania, which stepped into a breach opened by the collapse of the resistance of the Teutonic Order. Japan, which enjoyed the advantage of remoteness, besides that of political unity, was able, as late as A.D. 1637, still to dictate terms to all Western comers. On the other hand, the bout of anarchy in Muscovy during the years A.D. 1603–13 (‘The Time of Troubles’) showed that even such relatively backward border Western countries as Poland-Lithuania and Sweden had now become decisively stronger than Muscovy in military technique. The Poles were able to occupy Moscow itself during the years A.D. 1610–12; the Swedes were able to conquer Muscovy’s only Baltic seaboard, at the head of the Gulf of Finland, in A.D. 1611, and Muscovy had to accept this loss in the peace treaty of A.D. 1617. As between the Ottoman Empire and the West, the turn of the tide was marked by the failure, in A.D. 1683, of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna.

Such experiences as these made it urgent for the West’s non-Western neighbours to master Western military technique and to keep abreast of its accelerating progress. This response to the challenge of the West’s military ascendancy was made in Russia, after ‘the Time of Troubles’, by Peter the Great, who came into power de facto in A.D. 1689. In Turkey it was made, after the shock of the disastrous Russo-Turkish war of A.D. 1768–74, by Selīm III (accessit A.D. 1789). In Japan it was made, after the shock of Commodore Perry’s irresistible intrusion in A.D. 1853, by the authors of the Japanese revolution of A.D. 1868. It was fortunate for these non-Western countries that the seventeenth-century Western revolution that had made the West unprecedentedly powerful had also made it unprecedentedly tolerant. This concomitant change in the West’s temper made it possible for leading spirits in Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan to learn in a Western school those Western arts that they must now master if they were to have any prospect of holding their own against the preponderance of their Western neighbours.

The most dramatic demonstration of this new possibility was Peter the Great’s self-educational tour in the West in A.D. 1697–8. It was an extraordinary piece of good fortune for Russia that, in an age in which she was in dire peril of falling into Western hands, an anima naturaliter Occidentalis should have been ‘born in the purple’ at Moscow. Peter was not merely a born technician of the Late Modern Western type; he was born 100 years before people with his aptitude and outlook began to make their mark in the West itself. He was the coming homo mechanicus of whom the fathers of the Royal Society had dreamed, but whom they were never to see in the flesh except in the person of this exotic seventeenth-century Russian forerunner of the eighteenth-century English artificers of the Industrial Revolution. Yet Peter’s native bent towards Technology, precocious though it thus was, might not have sufficed, in itself, to enable him to do his life-work in Russia if it had not been open to him in his generation to serve the apprenticeship in Holland and England that he turned to such good account.

More significant, though less sensational, than the welcome given in the maritime Western countries to Peter the Great was the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy’s acceptance—in three successive instruments promulgated in A.D. 1690, 1691, and 1695—of a proposition from insurgent Serb Eastern Orthodox Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. These Serbs had offered to transfer their political allegiance to the Hapsburg Monarchy on two conditions. They must be given permanent asylum behind the Hapsburg military lines, and at the same time they must be allowed to retain, as subjects of the Holy Roman Caesarea Maiestas, not only their own religion, but the communal autonomy, under the presidency of their own patriarch, which they had enjoyed under the Ottoman régime. Both conditions were accepted; and this volte face in the Hapsburg Dynasty’s ecclesiastical policy, only forty-two years after the end of the Thirty Years War, was something portentous.

The shock of defeat in the War of A.D. 1682–99 did not move the ‘Osmanlis to go to school in the West in person, as Peter had done; but it did move them to take two steps. They now gave responsible positions in the public service to Greek Eastern Orthodox Ottoman subjects who had not been educated in the Sultan’s Slave-Household and had not been converted to Islam, but had acquired a Western education on their own private initiative.1 They also hired Western technicians to come to Turkey in order to train ‘Osmanlis in some of the most highly technical branches of the Western art of war, especially in military engineering and in gunnery. These Ottoman essays in the acquisition of Western military technique between A.D. 1699 and A.D. 1768 were, however, fragmentary, spasmodic, and half-hearted.2 A second shock, administered by a more humiliating defeat in A.D. 1768–74, was needed in order to move Sultan Selīm III to make the first attempt at a thorough-going Westernization of the Ottoman armed forces. This time the ‘Osmanlis had been defeated by Russian co-religionists of their despised Eastern Orthodox Christian subjects, in virtue of the process of Westernization through which Russia had been putting herself during the previous eighty years. This triumph of the Western military technique, even in Russian hands, convinced the ‘Osmanlis at last of the necessity of acquiring for themselves the same Western talisman.3

The Japanese did not begin to substitute nineteenth-century for seventeenth-century Western armaments till after Commodore Perry’s descent on Japan in A.D. 1853. By that date the obstacle to the reception of a Western education by a Japanese student in the West was not any Western xenophobia; it was the unfamiliarity of the West to the Japanese after a period of self-seclusion that, by then, had lasted for more than 200 years.

The policy of these pioneer military Westernizers was a negative one. They wanted to take nothing, even of the secular residue of a deconsecrated Western Civilization, except the bare minimum of Western military technique that would be sufficient to secure their countries’ survival in warfare with Western or Westernizing Powers. None of the pioneer Westernizers were moved by any positive attraction towards the Western Civilization. Their motive for mastering elements of the Western Civilization was in all cases a wish to acquire the power that this mastery would bring with it. The self-Western-educated Ottoman Greeks and Bengali Hindus who were taken, respectively, into the Ottoman and the British administrative service, saw in their Western education an instrument for getting even with a Muslim ‘ascendancy’ which was slower than they were to recognize that the key to power was now a mastery of Western technique of one kind or another. Those non-Westerners who, unlike eighteenth-century Greeks and Hindus, were still politically independent now recognized that they would forfeit their independence to Western conquerors if they did not acquire sufficient Western military technique to enable them once again to hold their own against the West in war. But the pioneer Westernizers in these still independent non-Western societies all started with the aim of preserving as much as possible of their traditional non-Western civilization at the price of adopting as little as possible of Western military technique. They wanted to insure against the worst risks only at the cost of a minimum premium. The sequel demonstrated, however, that a selective reception of elements of an alien civilization was impossible in the long run.

This was impossible because every civilization or way of life is a pattern of conduct in which the parts are interdependent. This interdependence is so multiple and so intimate that elements which, at first sight, look as if they could not have any connexion with one another turn out to be indissoluble when a practical experiment is made in replacing some single native element by some single foreign element. The single native element proves impossible to eliminate without also eliminating, or at least modifying, a whole set of other native elements; the single foreign element proves impossible to introduce without also introducing a whole set of other foreign elements.

The introduction of a Late Modern Western military technique in place of a traditional native one proved to be a case in point. The importation of Western weapons was not enough in itself; they were often still inferior to non-Western weapons. The French cavalryman was not so well equipped as the Egyptian mamlūk whom he defeated in A.D. 1798; a British musket did not carry so far as the Afghan jezayl that proved more than a match for it in A.D. 1838. Western military superiority sprang from the use of Western weapons by disciplined troops; and military discipline is the apex of a pyramid of social achievement. It is the fruit of law and order in civil life; for it cannot be established without effective hygiene and without regular pay. Effective hygiene in the armed forces requires a corresponding standard of public health in civil life, maintained by physicians with a Western medical training. The regular payment of troops requires sound public finances. Sound public finances require business ability and a productive economy. And the economy must be productive, not only of agricultural produce for feeding the troops, but of industrial skill for the manufacture of armaments in the Western style. A non-Western army that depended for its armaments entirely on imports from the West, without any plant, or any corps of technicians, for manufacturing them at home, would be in an intolerably precarious position.

For these reasons a World which had rejected the Early Modern Western ecclesiastical civilization found itself constrained in the end to adopt the Late Modern Western secular civilization unreservedly; but the time that it took for would-be minimal Westernizers to learn by experience that their choice was one between all and nothing was very different in different cases. In Turkey, more than 200 years passed between the first experiments in adopting fragments of Western military technique in the early eighteenth century and Mustafā Kemāl Atatürk’s wholehearted option for total Westernization in A.D. 1919–28. In China more than half a century passed between the first moves towards Westernization, under the shock of military defeats by Western Powers during the years A.D. 1839–61, and the triumph of the Kuomintang in A.D. 1923–8 with a programme of total Westernization by stages—an enterprise which eventually failed and, in failing, opened a door for the entry of Communism. On the other hand the pioneer Westernizers Peter the Great in Russia, Mehmed ‘Alī in Egypt, and the inaugurators of the Meiji Era in Japan all alike perceived that they must Westernize without reservations, and must extend this total revolution to every department of human activity, if they intended to be successful in preserving their societies by mastering Western military technique.

In thus resigning itself, sooner or later, to an unlimited Westernization in this second encounter with the Modern West, the non-Western World was condemning itself, as we have observed,4 to be implicated in the spiritual crisis by which a secularized Western Society was to be overtaken within 300 years of the seventeenth-century Western spiritual revolution. In a Late Modern Age of Western history the Western Civilization to which the non-Western World was reluctantly capitulating was more enigmatic than was suspected at the time either by the proselytes or by the native Westerners themselves. In what did this imposing Late Modern Western Civilization consist? That was a question which confronted every Westernizer who came to recognize—as all Westemizers did sooner or later—that the price of self-preservation was nothing less than the adoption of the Western Civilization in toto, without reservations. The non-Western men of genius who divined this hard truth, and acted on their insight, were all inclined to take the Late Modern Western Civilization at its technological face-value. They saw it as a cornucopia out of which they could draw techniques that would be of practical use in the military, political, and economic fields.

This superficial view of the contents and character of the Late Modern Western Civilization was a pardonable one at the time, because this was the picture of the Western Civilization that the contemporary Western exponents of it were deliberately presenting. Peter the Great would have been confirmed in his estimate of the West’s genius if he had read Sprat’s history of the Royal Society. Sprat and his contemporaries were painting their picture of the West in complete good faith. Yet, in the historical perspective given to Posterity by the lapse of 300 years, this narrowly utilitarian seventeenth-century self-portrait looks like an expression of the Late Modern West’s reaction against the evils of Western religious fanaticism in the immediately preceding age, and not like an objective self-appraisal; and it was assuredly a misrepresentation, and indeed almost a caricature, of the actual spirit of the Western Civilization either at the close of the seventeenth century or in any subsequent generation.

Thomas Sprat (vivebat A.D. 1635–1713) and Joseph Glanvill (vivebat A.D. 1636–80) were, both of them, clergymen of the Church of England. Sprat ended his ecclesiastical career as a bishop; and he was evidently unconscious of there being any incompatibility between his endeavours as a churchman and his endeavours as the secretary of the Royal Society. In promoting an interest in Technology, he was seeking to provide a psychological substitute, not for Religion, but for religious fanaticism.5 He deplored the decay of religious belief, which he correctly foreboded.6 He believed that ‘the spiritual vices of this age’ were largely responsible for this drift towards scepticism. He was convinced that ‘the most efficacious remedy that Man of himself can use is not so much the sublime part of divinity as its intelligible and natural and practicable doctrines’7 derived from Man’s dispassionate study of God’s revelation of Himself in Nature. Sprat’s outlook was, in fact, the same as Locke’s, whose first draft for an essay on Toleration was composed in A.D. 1667, the year in which Sprat’s history of the Royal Society was published. In A Letter concerning Toleration, which was composed in A.D. 1685–6 and was published in A.D. 1689, Locke did not denounce the spirit of Christianity as being exclusive and intolerant; he deprecated the spirit of exclusiveness and intolerance as being un-Christian.

Whatsoever some people boast of the antiquity of places and names, or of the pomp of their outward worship; others, of the reformation of their discipline; all, of the orthodoxy of their faith—for every one is orthodox to himself—these things, and all others of this nature, are much rather marks of men striving for power and empire over one another than of the church of Christ. Let any one have never so true a claim to all these things, yet, if he be destitute of charity, meekness, and good-will in general towards all Mankind, even to those that are not Christians, he is certainly yet short of being a true Christian himself.… The Gospel frequently declares that the true disciples of Christ must suffer persecution; but that the church of Christ should persecute others, and force others by fire and sword to embrace her faith and doctrine, I could never yet find in any of the books of the New Testament.… Neither Pagan nor Mahometan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion. The Gospel commands no such thing. The church which ‘judgeth not those that are without’ (1 Cor. v. 12–13) wants it not.8

Both Locke and Sprat are patently sincere in professing that their aim is, not to undermine Christianity by inciting people to withdraw their treasure from it, but to preserve Christianity by purging it of fanaticism in accordance with Christ’s own principles and precepts. Even the French déraciné Bayle, who had suffered more severely from seventeenth-century Western Christian intolerance than either of these two English contemporaries of his, and had been carried by the same reaction against fanaticism into reacting against religion itself to some extent, would perhaps have flinched from acknowledging this even in the privacy of his own heart. Bayle’s published works give the impression that he was, himself, a victim of the artful ambiguity that was his master-weapon in his assaults upon the rearguard of the seventeenth-century fanatics. The eighteenth century, which saw the Late Modern West’s anti-religious mood expressed without ambiguity or reserve by Voltaire, also saw a revived Christian faith preached by Voltaire’s contemporary Wesley; and it is significant that this revival should have started in the generation that saw the recession go farthest. The seventeenth-century secularizing movement in the West was bound, as has been suggested in the eleventh chapter of this book, to evoke a counter-movement sooner or later, because Religion is an essential element in Human Life which cannot ever be ignored or repressed for very long at a time.

Thus it would be no exaggeration to say that the twentieth-century spiritual crisis in the West was already implicit in the seventeenth-century spiritual crisis there, and that this coming crisis was working up, under the surface, throughout a Late Modern Age of Western history which was witnessing a progressive reception of the Western Civilization by the rest of the World. This would mean that the Late Modern Western Society was seriously, though unintentionally, deceiving the contemporary Westernizers in giving them the impression that a transient secularizing phase of the Western Civilization was the whole of the Western Civilization as this had been, was, and was to be. It would also mean that the Westernizers, in their turn, were unintentionally deceiving their simple-minded non-Western compatriots in taking this deceptive Western presentation of the West at its face-value.

The Westernizers, however, can hardly be blamed for having overlooked the unsolved religious problem that, all the time, was gnawing at the West’s vitals, since Religion did not head the queue of these distracted Westernizers’ cares. The deficiency of which they were conscious in their own societies, and which they were seeking to make good by drawing on the resources of the West, was a deficiency, not in their ancestral religion, but in their traditional technology. Western technology was, for them, the one Western pearl of great price which they felt themselves constrained to buy even at the cost of selling all that they had.9 It did not occur to them that Western religion was any concern of theirs. So they committed themselves and their compatriots unreservedly to the secularizing Late Modern phase of the Western Civilization without realizing that this phase was necessarily ephemeral. Indeed, in putting themselves through the agonizing ordeal of renouncing their ancestral ways of life and adopting an alien Western way instead, they found consolation in the conviction that, at this grievous price, they were purchasing the privilege of living happily ever after in a ‘Civilization’ that was definitive. The sequel was to show that what they had purchased in fact was the penalty of being implicated in an imminent Western spiritual crisis.

A. Pagans and Atheists Have Been No Worse than Christians

The fear and the love of God are not always the most powerful motives of human actions.… So it ought not to be taken as a shocking paradox, but ought rather to be accepted as something quite natural, that people who profess no religion should be impelled towards good conduct by the stimuli of innate character— accompanied by a love of good repute, and sustained by a fear of discredit—more powerfully than other people are impelled by the voice of conscience. We ought to feel much more deeply shocked when we see so many people who are convinced of the truths of Religion and yet at the same time are plunged in crime. It is even more strange that the idolators of the Pagan World should have performed good actions than it is that atheistic philosophers should have lived good lives. For the idolators ought to have been impelled towards crime by their very religion; they ought to have believed that, in order to fulfil the aim and essence of Religion by achieving the imitation of God, they must be dishonest, envious-hearted, loose-lived, adulterous, addicted to unnatural vice, and so on. From this we may conclude that those idolators who did lead upright lives were governed solely by the ideas of Reason and by the ideals of Uprightness, or else by the desire for good repute or by innate character or by other motives that can all be found in the minds of atheists. Why, then, should one expect to find a higher moral standard under the reign of the idolatry of the Pagan World than under the reign of irreligion? But be careful, if you please, to observe that, in speaking of the good conduct of some atheists, I have certainly not been crediting them with veritable virtues.… Their performances were merely ‘brilliant sins’, splendida peccata, as Saint Augustine has characterized all the noble deeds that stand to the Pagans’ account.10

To speak frankly, it must be said of the Pagans, to their credit, that they certainly did not live in accordance with their principles. It is true that, in the Pagan World, moral corruption did go to extremes; but in that world there were always many people who did not follow the example of their false gods, and who gave the ideals of Uprightness the precedence [even] over an authority so great [as that of their pagan religion]. What is strange is that the Christians, whose system is so pure, are hardly an inch behind the Gentiles in their plunge into vice. It is a serious error to imagine that the moral practice of a religion will correspond with the doctrines in its confession of faith.11

People who have had some acquaintance with Spinoza, and the peasants of the villages where he lived in retirement for some time, concur in saying that he was a man of good character socially (d’un bon commerce)—affable, honest, consciencious, and extremely strict in his morals. This is strange; yet, at bottom, it ought to give no greater cause for astonishment than the spectacle of people leading very bad lives in spite of their being completely persuaded of the truth of the Gospel.12

B. Muslims Are No Worse than Christians—Except at the Trade of Making Infernal Machines

How is one to resist conquering armies that come demanding signatures? Ask the French dragoons, who plied this trade in 1685; the answer that you will get from them will be that they will guarantee to make the whole World set its signature to the Alcoran, provided that they are allowed time enough to apply the commandment ‘Compel them to come in’.… The debt has to be acknowledged: the kings of France resorted to Mahometan methods for establishing Christianity in Frisia and in Saxony, and the same violent means were used to establish it in Scandinavia.… The same methods were resorted to for dealing with [Christian] sects that dared to condemn the Pope; and they are going to be resorted to in India as soon as the power to apply them is there.

Now the manifest moral of all these examples of Christian behaviour is that the fact of Mahomet’s having propagated his religion by force can no longer be used against Mahomet [by Christians] to Mahomet’s prejudice. If you doubt this, consider what Mahomet would be able to say in presenting an argumentum ad hominem: ‘If force were bad intrinsically, there would never be an occasion on which it would be legitimate to use it. But, now, you Christians have been using force from the fourth century [of your era] down to the present day, and you maintain that, in doing this, you have not been doing anything on which you cannot congratulate yourselves heartily. So you are bound to admit that this method is not bad intrinsically; and consequently I, Mahomet, have been acting legitimately in resorting to force since the first years of my prophetic call. It would be absurd [for you Christians] to maintain that something which would have been gravely criminal in the first century [of your era] becomes right in the fourth though it is not right in the first. One could have maintained this if, in the fourth century, God had laid down new laws; but am I not right in thinking that you rest your case for justifying your conduct from the time of Constantine down to the present day on these words in the Gospel—“Compel them to come in”—and on the [religious] duties of princes? Well, on this showing, you ought, if you had had the power, to have used force from the very morrow of the Ascension.’13

The Mahometans, according to the principles of their faith, are under an obligation to use violence for the purpose of bringing other religions to ruin; yet, in spite of that, they have been tolerating other religions for some centuries past. The Christians have not been given orders to do anything but preach and instruct; yet, in spite of this, from time immemorial they have been exterminating by fire and sword all those who are not of their religion.… We may feel certain that, if the Western Christians, instead of the Saracens and the Turks, had won the dominion over Asia, there would be today not a trace left of the Greek Church, and that they would never have tolerated Mahometanism as the Infidels have tolerated Christianity there.14

Once upon a time, people who had the Popes’ ear could make the best part of Europe uninhabitable for a man whom they had definitely taken it into their heads to label as a heretic; and this poor wretch could then well apply to them, mutatis mutandis, certain passages of Psalm cxxxix. So it is not surprising that Peter Abelard should have wanted to go in search of peace among the Mahometans or the Pagans. His hope was that, at the price of paying tribute, he would enjoy freedom to profess Christianity beyond the sphere of activity of Odium Theologicum; and he was afraid that, short of taking this step, he would find himself imprisoned in this sphere for ever.15

Some Christian authors give tongue to a very ridiculous story concerning the credulity of the Mahometans on the subject of miracles (QQ).16 Monsr. Simon has been blamed for some things that he has published which tend to extenuate the infamy of Mahometanism.… But, if he is right in essentials, he deserves commendation, for one ought not to foment the hatred of evil by the trick of painting it blacker and more hateful than it is in fact.17

I am not suggesting that Christians are laxer morally than Infidels, but I should hesitate to assert that they were less lax. The accounts given by travellers are conflicting.18

I do not know whether one ought to venture to expose oneself to being judged on one’s culture (moeurs); but, if the Infidels were to agree to submit to a competitive examination in which the marks were to be awarded for intelligence, for learning, and for the military virtues, we ought to take them at their word; for, on these terms, they would inevitably be beaten at the present day. On all these three points they are far inferior to us Christians. We enjoy the fine advantage of being far better versed than they are in the art of killing, bombarding, and exterminating the Human Race.19