[散文分享] Excerpts from "Growth and Decay" by Will Durant

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Excerpts from "Growth and Decay" by Will Durant
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We have defined civilization as "social order promoting cultural creation." It is political order secured through custom, morals, and law, and economic order secured through a continuity of production and exchange; it is cultural creation through freedom and facilities for the origination, expression, testing, and fruition of ideas, letters, manners, and arts. It is an intricate and precarious web of human relationships, laboriously built and readily destroyed. ....
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History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large. ... History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness,and man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to frequently occurring situations and stimuli like hunger, danger, and sex. But in a developed and complex civilization individuals are more differentiated and unique than in a primitive society, and many situations contain novel circumstances requiring modifications of instinctive response; custom recedes, reasoning spreads; the results are less predictable. There is no certainty that the future will repeat the past. Every year is an adventure.
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* X! u/ i) k, R4 }- i+ p& f. \公仔箱論壇(If we) ask what determines whether a challenge will or will not be met, the answer is that this depends upon the presence or absence of initiative and of creative individuals with clarity of mind and energy of will (which is almost a definition of genius), capable of effective responses to new situations (which is almost a definition of intelligence). ... It is tempting to explain the behavior of groups through analogy with physiology or physics, and to ascribe the deterioration of a society to some inherent limit in its loan and tenure of life, or some irreparable running down of internal force. Such analogies may offer provisional illumination, as when we compared the association of individuals with an aggregation of cells, ...But a group is no organism physically added to its constituent individuals; it has no brain or stomach of its own; it must think or feel with the brains and nerves of its members. When the group or civilization declines, it is through no mystic limitation of a corporate life, but through the failure of its political or intellectual leaders to meet the challenges of change.: q$ x: g, v  R# c+ ]) r+ a
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Life has no inherent claim to eternity, whether in individuals or in states. Death is natural, and if it comes in due time it is forgivable and useful, and the mature mind will take no offense from its coming. ... As life overrides death with reproduction, so an aging culture hands its patrimony down to its heirs across the years and the sea. Even as these lines are being written, commerce and print, wires and waves and invisible Mercuries of the air are binding nations and civilizations together, preserving for all what each has given to the heritage of mankind.