§ 6
Peter came on Wednesday. It was not until Friday that Oswald found an opportunity to deliver his valediction. But he had rehearsed it, or rather he had been rehearsing experimental fragments of it for most of the night before. On Thursday night the cloudy malaise of his mind broke and cleared. Things fell into their proper places in his thoughts, and he could feel that his ideas were no longer distorted and confused. The valediction appeared, an ordered discourse. If only he could hold out through a long talk he felt he would be able to make himself plain to them....
He lay in the darkness putting together phrase after phrase, sentence after sentence, developing a long and elaborate argument, dipping down into parentheses, throwing off footnotes, resuming his text. For the most part Joan and Peter remained silent hearers of this discourse; now his ratiocination glowed so brightly that they were almost forgotten, now they came into the discussion, they assisted, they said helpful and understanding things, they raised simple and obvious objections that were beautifully overcome.
“What is education up to?” he would begin. “What is education?”
Then came a sentence that he repeated in the stillness of his mind quite a number of times. “Consider this beast we are, this thing man!” He did not reckon with Peter’s tendency to prompt replies.
He would begin in the broadest, most elementary way. “Consider this beast we are, this thing man!” so he framed his opening: “a creature restlessly experimental, mischievous and destructive, as sexual as a monkey, and with no really strong social instincts, no such tolerance of his fellows as a deer has, no such instinctive self-devotion as you find in a bee or an ant. A solitary animal, a selfish animal. And yet this creature has now made for itself such conditions that it must be social. Must be. Or destroy itself. Continually it invents fresh means by which man may get at man to injure him or help him. That is one view of the creature, Peter, from your biological end.” Here Peter was to nod, and remain attentively awaiting the next development. “And at the same time, there grows upon us all a sense of a common being and a common interest. Biologically separate, we unify spiritually. More and more do men feel, ’I am not for myself! There is something in me—that belongs to a greater being than myself—of which I am a part.’... I won’t philosophize. I won’t say which may be in the nature of cause and which of effect here. You can put what I have said in a dozen different ways. We may say, ’The individual must live in the species and find his happiness there’—that is—Biologese. Our language, Peter. Or we can quote, ’I am the True Vine and ye are the Branches.’” Oswald’s mind rested on that for a time. “That is not our language, Peter, but it is the same idea. Essentially it is the same idea. Or we can talk of the ’One and the Many.’ We can say we all live in the mercy of Allah, or if you are a liberal Jew that we are all a part of Israel. It seems to me that all these formulæ are so much spluttering and variation over one idea. Doesn’t it to you? Men can quarrel mortally even upon the question of how they shall say ’Brotherhood.’...” Here for a time Oswald’s mind paused.
He embarked upon a great and wonderful parenthesis upon religious intolerance in which at last he lost himself completely.
“I don’t see that men need fall out about religion,” was his main proposition.
“There was a time when I was against all religions. I denounced priestcraft and superstition and so on.... That is past. That is past. I want peace in the world.... Men’s minds differ more about initial things than they do about final things. Some men think in images, others in words and abstract ideas—but yet the two sorts can think out the same practical conclusions. A lot of these chapels and churches only mean a difference in language.... Difference in dialect.... Often they don’t mean the same things, those religious people, by the same words, but often contrariwise they mean the same things by quite different words. The deaf man says the dawn is bright and red, and the blind man says it is a sound of birds. It is the same dawn. The same dawn.... One man says ’God’ and thinks of a person who is as much of a person as Joan is, and another says ’God’ and thinks of an idea more abstract than the square root of minus one. That’s a tangle in the primaries of thought and not a difference in practical intention. One can argue about such things for ever.... One can make a puzzle with a bit of wire that will bother and exasperate people for hours. Is it any wonder, then, if stating what is at the root of life bothers and exasperates people?...
“Personally, I should say now that all religions are right, and none of them very happy in the words and symbols they choose. And none of them are calm enough—not calm enough. Not peaceful enough. They are all floundering about with symbols and metaphors, and it is a pity they will not admit it.... Why will people never admit their intellectual limitations in these matters?... All the great religions have this in common, this idea in common; they profess to teach the universal brotherhood of man and the universal reign of justice. Why argue about phrases? Why not put it in this fashion?”...
For a long time Oswald argued about phrases before he could get back to the main thread of his argument....
“Men have to be unified. They are driven to seek Unity. And they are still with the individualized instincts of a savage.... See then what education always has to be! The process of taking this imperfectly social, jealous, deeply savage creature and socializing him. The development of education and the development of human societies are one and the same thing. Education makes the social man. So far as schooling goes, it is quite plainly that. You teach your solitary beast to read and write, you teach him to express himself by drawing, you teach him other languages perhaps, and something of history and the distribution of mankind. What is it all but making this creature who would naturally possess only the fierce, narrow sociability of a savage family in a cave, into a citizen in a greater community? That is how I see it. That primarily is what has been done to you. An uneducated man is a man who can talk to a few score familiar people with a few hundred words. You two can talk to a quarter of mankind. With the help of a little translation you can get to understandings with most of mankind.... As a child learns the accepted language and the accepted writing and the laws and rules of life it learns the community. Watching the education of you two has made me believe more and more in the idea that, over and above the enlargement of expression and understanding, education is the state explaining itself to and incorporating the will of the individual....
“Yes—but what state? What state? Now we come to it....”
Oswald began to sketch out a universal history. There is no limit to these intellectual enterprises of the small hours.
“All history is the record of an effort in man to form communities, an effort against resistance—against instinctive resistance. There seems no natural and proper limit to a human community. (That’s my great point, that. That is what I have to tell them.) That is the final teaching of History, Joan and Peter; the very quintessence of History; that limitlessness of the community. As soon as men get a community of any size organized, it begins forthwith to develop roads, wheels, writing, ship-building, and all manner of things which presently set a fresh growth growing again. Let that, too, go on. Presently comes steam, mechanical traction, telegraphy, the telephone, wireless, aeroplanes; and each means an extension of range, and each therefore demands a larger community.... There seems no limit to the growth of states. I remember, Peter, a talk we had; we agreed that this hackneyed analogy people draw between the life and death of animals and the life and death of states was bad and silly. It isn’t the same thing, Joan, at all. An animal, you see, has a limit of size; it develops no new organs for further growth when it has reached that limit, it breeds its successors, it ages naturally; when it dies, it dies for good and all and is cleared away. Exactly the reverse is true of a human community. Exactly? Yes, exactly. If it can develop its educational system steadily—note that—if it can keep up communications, a State can go on indefinitely, conquering, ousting, assimilating. Even an amoeba breaks up after growth, but a human community need not do so. And so far from breeding successors it kills them if it can—like Frazer’s priest—where was it?—Aricia? The priest of Diana. The priest of The Golden Bough....”
Oswald picked up his thread again after a long, half dreaming excursion in Frazer-land.
“It is just this limitlessness, this potential immortality of States that makes all the confusion and bloodshed of history. What is happening in the world today? What is the essence of it all? The communities of today are developing range, faster than ever they did: aeroplanes, guns, swifter ships, everywhere an increasing range of action. That is the most important fact to grasp about the modern world. It is the key fact in politics. From the first dawn of the human story you see man in a kind of a puzzled way—how shall I put it?—pursuing the boundary of his possible community. Which always recedes. Which recedes now faster than ever. Until it brings him to a fatal war and disaster. Over and over again it is the same story. If you had a coloured historical atlas of the world, the maps would be just a series of great dabs of empire, spreading, spreading—coming against resistances—collapsing. Each dab tries to devour the world and fails. There is no natural limit to a human community, no limit in time or space—except one.
“Genus Homo, species Sapiens, Mankind, that is the only limit.” (Peter, perhaps, might be led up to saying that.)...
“What has the history of education always been? A series of little teaching chaps trying to follow up and fix the fluctuating boundaries of communities”—an image came into Oswald’s head that pleased him and led him on—“like an insufficient supply of upholsterers trying to overtake and tack down a carpet that was blowing away in front of a gale. An insufficient supply of upholsterers.... And the carpet always growing as it blows. That’s good.... They were trying to fix something they hadn’t clearly defined. And you have a lot of them still hammering away at their tacks when the edge of the carpet has gone on far ahead.... That was really the state of education in England when I took you two young people in hand; the carpet was in the air and most of the schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, writers, teachers, journalists, and all who build up and confirm ideas were hammering in tacks where the carpet had been resting the day before yesterday.... But a lot were not even hammering. No. They just went easy. Yes, that is what I mean when I say that education was altogether at loose ends.... But Germany was different; Germany was teaching and teaching in schools, colleges, press, everywhere, this new Imperialism of hers, a sort of patriotic melodrama, with Britain as Carthage and Berlin instead of Rome. They pointed the whole population to that end. They taught this war. All over the world a thousand other educational systems pointed in a thousand directions....
“So Germany set fire to the Phœnix....
“Only one other great country had any sort of state education. Real state education that is. The United States was also teaching citizenship, on a broader if shallower basis; a wider citizenship—goodwill to all mankind. Shallower. Shallower certainly. But it was there. A republican culture. Candour ... generosity.... The world has still to realize its debt to the common schools of America....
“This League of Free Nations, of which all men are dreaming and talking, this World Republic, is the rediscovered outline, the proper teaching of all real education, the necessary outline now of human life.... There is nothing else to do, nothing else that people of our sort can do at all, nothing but baseness, grossness, vileness, and slavery unless we live now as a part of that process of a world peace. Our lives have got to be political lives. All lives have to be made political lives. We can’t run about loose any more. This idea of a world-wide commonwealth, this ideal of an everlasting world-peace in which we are to live and move and have our being, has to be built up in every school, in every mind, in every lesson. ‘You belong. You belong. And the world belongs to you.’...”
What ought one to teach when one teaches geography, for instance, but the common estate of mankind? Here, the teacher should say, are mountains and beautiful cities you may live to see. Here are plains where we might grow half the food of mankind! Here are the highways of our common life, and here are pleasant bye-ways where you may go! All this is your inheritance. Your estate. To rejoice in—and serve. But is that how geography is taught?...
“We used to learn lists of the British possessions, with their total exports and imports in money. I remember it as if it were yesterday.... Old Smugs—a hot New Imperialist—new then....
“Then what is history but a long struggle of men to find peace and safety, and how they have been prevented by baseness and greed and folly? Is that right? No, folly and baseness—and hate.... Hate certainly.... All history is one dramatic story, of man blundering his way from the lonely ape to the world commonwealth. All history is each man’s adventure. But what teacher makes history much more than a dwarfish twaddle about boundaries and kings and wars? Dwarfish twaddle. History! It went nowhere. It did nothing. Was there ever anything more like a crowd of people getting into an omnibus without wheels than the History Schools at Oxford? Or your History Tripos?”... Oswald repeated his image and saw that it was good....
“What is the teaching of a language again but teaching the knowledge of another people—an exposition of the soul of another people—a work of union?... But you see what I mean by all this; this idea of a great world of co-operating peoples; it is not just a diplomatic scheme, not something far off that Foreign Offices are doing; it is an idea that must revolutionize the lessons of a child in the nursery and alter the maps upon every schoolroom wall. And frame our lives altogether. Or be nothing. The World Peace. To that we all belong. I have a fancy— As though this idea had been hovering over the world, unsubstantial, unable to exist—until all this blood-letting, this torment and disaster gave it a body....
“What I am saying to you the University ought to have said to you.
“Instead of Universities”—he sought for a phrase and produced one that against the nocturnal dark seemed brilliant and luminous. “Instead of the University passant regardant, we want the University militant. We want Universities all round and about the world, associated, working to a common end, drawing together all the best minds and the finest wills, a myriad of multi-coloured threads, into one common web of a world civilization.”