It faced the remnant of the Empire itself under its last strong Emperor and its last strong General and beat it. It faced the anarchic Warlords that broke away from the dying Empire and beat them. The First Foundation, with its superior science, took over the barbarized planets that surrounded it. All had been planned by Hari Seldon, long dead now. Its freedom to move lay along only one certain line and when it moved in that direction, a new horizon of development opened before it. Periodically, it faced a crisis in which the variables of human intercourse, of the social and economic currents of the time constricted about it. It began as a small community of Encyclopedists lost in the emptiness of the outer periphery of the Galaxy. In Foundation (Gnome, 1951) and Foundation and Empire (Gnome, 1952) are told the first three centuries of the history of the First Foundation.
The existence of the other, the Second Foundation, was drowned in silence. Carefully, he set up two colonies of scientists that he called "Foundations." With deliberate intention, he set them up "at opposite ends of the Galaxy." One Foundation was set up in the full daylight of publicity.
He set about to remedy the situation, to bring about a state of affairs that would restore peace and civilization in a single thousand of years. He foresaw (or he solved his equations and interpreted its symbols, which amounts to the same thing) that left to itself, the Galaxy would pass through a thirty thousand year period of misery and anarchy before a unified government would rise once more. It was Seldon, then, who foresaw, against all common sense and popular belief, that the brilliant Empire which seemed so strong was in a state of irremediable decay and decline. And the size of the human masses that Seldon worked with was no less than the population of the Galaxy which in his time was numbered in the quintillions. The larger the mob, the greater the accuracy that could be achieved. The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically. Psycho-history was the quintessence of sociology, it was the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations. It was he who brought the science of psycho-history to its full development. Hari Seldon was the last great scientist of the First Empire. Human beings had forgotten that any other form of existence could be.
It had included all the planets of the Galaxy in a centralized rule, sometimes tyrannical, sometimes benevolent, always orderly. The First Galactic Empire had endured for tens of thousands of years.
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