TWELVE VITAL DATES IN WORLD HISTORY

THE IDEA OF CREATING a list of twelve vital dates in history came to me at Manila as I was preparing to set sail across the Pacific to America. It came at an appropriate moment, for it found me struggling with the problem of dates in working on the first volume of The Story of Civilization.

We have defined civilization as “social order promoting cultural creation.” 07It 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.

WHAT IS THOUGHT? It baffles description because it includes everything through which it might
be defined.

Why do we become more conservative as we age? Is it because we have found a place in the
existing system, have risen to a larger income, and have invested our savings in an economy,
which any significant revolt might alter to our loss?

In preparing these chapters I have often looked into my 1929 ebullition, The Mansions of Philosophy, to avoid repeating old sallies and arguments.

Shall we define our terms? Historically, religion has been the worship of supernatural powers.
Webster defines morality as “the quality of that which conforms to right ideals or principles of
human conduct.”

In the year 1830, a French customs official named Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes
unearthed in the valley of the Somme some strange implements of flint now interpreted by the
learned as the weapons with which the men of the Old Stone Age made war.