Prior to that, society, nations and individual persons were assumed to be fixed in their stations in life. There was no sense of development or progress, or the possibility of modernization; life simple went on as it always had before, or perhaps in cycles. One was born into a certain station in life, one died there, and one’s children continued in the same station through time immemorial. One has to have a sense of fatalism about it all: birth, life death, and stagnation. As the Christian Bible, then accepted almost universally in Europe, put it rather starkly: “Dust thou art and to dust thou wilt return.”