This description of civilization covers the essential features of
western civilization and the sequence of predecessor civilizations for
which adequate records exist.

Successive civilizations have introduced new culture traits and
abandoned old ones as the pageant of history moved from one stage to the
next, or advanced and retreated through cycles. Using this description
as a working formula, it is possible to understand the development
followed in the past by western civilization, to estimate its current
status and to indicate its probable outcome.

Long-established thought-habits cry aloud in protest against such a
description of civilization. Until quite recently the word
"civilization" has been used in academic circles to symbolize a social
idea or ideal. Professor of History Anson D. Morse of Amherst College
presents such a view in his _Civilization and the World War_ (Boston:
Ginn 1919). For him, civilization is "the sum of things in which the
heritage of the child of the twentieth century is better than that of
the child of the Stone Age. As a process it is the perfection of man and
mankind. As an end, it is the realization of the highest ideal which men
are capable of forming.... The goal of civilization ... is human society
so organized in all of its constituent groups that each shall yield the
best possible service to each one and thereby to mankind as a whole,
(producing) the perfect organization of humanity." (page 3).

Such thoughts may be noble and inspired; they are not related to
history. We know more or less about a score of civilizations that have
occupied portions of the earth during several thousand years. We know a
great deal about the western civilization which we observe and in which
we participate. Professor Morse's florid words apply to none of the