Governments did almost nothing but resist.
Even gunpowder and ordnance, the great weapon of government,
showed little development between 1400 and 1800. Society was
hostile or indifferent, as Priestley and Jenner, and even Fulton,
with reason complained in the most advanced societies in the
world, while its resistance became acute wherever the Church held
control; until all mankind seemed to draw itself out in a long
series of groups, dragged on by an attractive power in advance,
which even the leaders obeyed without understanding, as the
planets obeyed gravity, or the trees obeyed heat and light.
The influx of new force was nearly spontaneous. The reaction of
mind on the mass of nature seemed not greater than that of a
comet on the sun; and had the spontaneous influx of force stopped
in Europe, society must have stood still, or gone backward, as in
Asia or Africa. Then only economies of process would have counted
as new force, and society would have been better pleased; for the
idea that new force must be in itself a good is only an animal or
vegetable instinct. As Nature developed her hidden energies, they
tended to become destructive. Thought itself became tortured,
suffering reluctantly, impatiently, painfully, the coercion of
new method. Easy thought had always been movement of inertia, and
mostly mere sentiment; but even the processes of mathematics
measured feebly the needs of force.
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