occur until the middle of the
fifteenth century. Then, as I have already said without specifying what
they were, a number of unforeseen events took place which opened the
door to the divine bridegroom of humanity.

I have said that in the fifteenth century after Christ a new principle
began to work in society; but I did not say that it was then for the
first time promulgated. Civilization was the organization of man's
mastery over Nature on a basis of self-interest; it was the giving
only so much of wealth and power to the many as was compatible with
the retention of one's own ascendancy. To be civilized, then, is
evidently not to be Christian any more than it is to be Buddhistic or
Judaic, socialistic or democratic. Everybody admits that one can be
civilized and be none of these things: just as one may be "cultured"
without being kind. In other words, it is consistent with being
civilized to be highly selfish; one need only be rationalized in one's
egoism. Indeed, civilization is the incarnation of self-interest. If
self-interest, its basic principle, should give way to social
interest; if the monopoly of social power should be broken and the
power transferred to the general will of the community; if the
community should relegate its administration to representatives, but
should prevent these by some social device from ever usurping the
power entrusted to them, then something new--something as different
from civilization as the airship from the horse-cart--would have begun
to establish itself. A new species of social order can be nothing
other than an order whose basic principle is totally new; and what
greater difference could exist in structuralizing tendencies than that
between self-interest and the interest of the community? Whenever the
latter gets the upper hand, it will be because Fate, the Cosmos, the
Universe, the force within unconscious evolution, has caught up the
song of the _Magnificat_. No such consummation of humanity has taken
place, but it is undeniable that in the fifteenth century the Word
entered like a seed into the soil of Fact. The Virgin's prophecy began
to fulfil itself.

Familiar to everybody, and quickly to be specified, are the wonderful
events which turned the vision into reality. One of these events was
the invention of gunpowder; another was the mariner's compass; a third
was the invention of paper; a fourth, the printing-press; a fifth was
the discovery that the earth goes round the