4 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND. [lect. 
Those vague flourishes usually consisted in some 
reference to what was called the advance of civilisation. 
No definition of civilisation was given; it was spoken 
of in metaphorical language as a light, a day gradually 
advancing through its twilight and its dawn towards its 
noon ; it was contrasted with a remote ill-defined period, 
called the Dark Ages. Whether it would always go on 
brightening, or whether, like the physical day, it would 
pass again into afternoon and evening, or whether it would 
come to an end by a sudden eclipse, as the light of 
civilisation in the ancient world might appear to have 
done, all this was left in the obscurity convenient to a 
theory which was not serious, and which only existed for 
the purpose of rhetorical ornament. 
It is a very fair sample of bad philosophising, this 
theory of civilisation. You have to explain a large mass 
of phenomena, about which you do not even know that 
they are of the same kind—but they happen to come into 
view at the same time— ; what do you do but fling over 
the whole mass a word, which holds them together like 
a net ? You carefully avoid defining this word, but in 
speaking of it you use metaphors which imply that it 
denotes a living force of unknown, unlimited properties, 
so that a mere reference to it is enough to explain the 
most wonderful, the most dissimilar effects. It was used 
to explain a number of phenomena which had no further 
apparent connexion with each other than that they happened 
often to appear together in history ; sometimes the soften 
ing of manners, sometimes mechanical inventions, some 
times religious toleration, sometimes the appearance of 
great poets and artists, sometimes scientific discoveries, 
sometimes constitutional liberty. It was assumed, though 
it was never proved, that all these things belonged together