CORRESPONDENCE
The War
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]
Dear Sir,—The war and the new problems created by it are engrossing the attention of the entire British nation. Outwardly the life of London goes on pretty much as usual. Under the surface there is a tremendous lot of fermentation and premonition. It seems certain that the war will be accompanied or followed by a social readjustment on a scale hitherto undreamed of—and this readjustment will be entirely in a democratic and socialistic direction.
That a great financial crisis is due one can hardly doubt. So far the weaker elements in the commercial and industrial world have been carried along by artificial support, but that cannot go on indefinitely. Whether the moratorium be extended or not, the crash must come sooner or later. People are realizing this, and it has already caused a tremendous awakening. In the end it will mean additional surrenders on the part of the wealthy classes. The Kaiser has solved not only the Ulster and suffrage questions, as some one said the other day, but the whole question of social reorganization. What would have had to be taken under ordinary circumstances will now be given. This may seem an optimistic view of the whole thing, and may prove unwarranted at this point or that, but on the whole I think it will be found absolutely correct. A spirit of self-sacrifice is in the air, and I think the German war machine will prove possessed of just enough initial impetus to prevent that spirit from petering out without tangible manifestation. The more the Germans win to begin with, the longer the war becomes protracted, the more thoroughly will the spirit for which their ruling class stands be killed in the end.
Just how the financial precariousness of the European situation will affect America no one can hope to foretell with any certainty. It is possible that the distress of one continent will bring a “boom” to the other. But I doubt it. I believe that we shall have to suffer with the rest of the Western World, and if that proves so, it means that we shall have an outbreak of internal strife hardly less serious than the external strife on this side of the water. We are indeed—turn wherever we may—on the threshold of grave and portentous events, and may the Spirit of Life grant us all strength and patience and faith to live through them. There is a great darkness ahead of us—an ordeal of fire for the whole civilized portion of mankind—but beyond it awaits us the long, sunlit day of world-wide peace.
Edwin Björkman
London
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]
Dear Sir,—I have just read your September editorial on War. How powerfully and terribly you write on the subject. I hope it may be read everywhere.
George Burman Foster
Chicago
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]
Dear Sir,—I am an old man. I watch with pain, almost with incredulity, the spectacle that Europe presents to the world. I see England fighting “lest the lights of freedom go out throughout the world.” I see Germany fighting lest God and civilization be obliterated by barbarians. I see France fighting for her honor, her freedom, her existence. I see everywhere murder, and misunderstanding. So I write to you to thank you for the attitude you have taken: the big attitude. It will be remembered. It will have effects that, when you are old, as I am to-day, will bring you contentment. You have fought a better fight than any of the commanders in the field.
Senex
Cincinnati
“Piety”
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]
Dear Sir,—Your correspondent “Twentieth Century” who writes under the above heading in the August Forum is surely in a bad temper. His letter is good evidence in favor of the theory that our beliefs are determined by our wishes. He objects strongly to the doctrines propounded in the tract he mentions, particularly to the use of the word “damned,” and, if he had the power, would stop the publication of such objectionable matter.
The only reason he gives for this is that he dislikes it very much and won’t have Christianity of that brand at any price.
Now why is he so hot about it? Why does he use such epithets as “stupid,” “disgusting,” “criminal lunatics,” etc.? If these doctrines are false, no one will be hurt by them—it may even be that some will be restrained from evil deeds by the teaching. On the other hand, if they are true, and no one can demonstrate their untruth, he and all those who despise the warning may find themselves in sorry case. Anyway Christians will try to get on without him and may be encouraged to know that the faith is still able to arouse such violent opposition.
J. P. Dunlop
Berkeley, California
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]
Dear Sir,—Thank you for sending me the proof of Mr. Dunlop’s letter. Mr. Dunlop has evidently rigid convictions which no discussion could modify. He may justly retort that I myself have convictions which I am unwilling to modify. But that would not be true. I am willing to modify any and every conviction that I have, if new evidence and new advances in knowledge make it clear that I have been partly or wholly at fault. But Mr. Dunlop clings fast to what he considers the faith of his fathers, though the thinking world has long discarded the idea of a God of Love who is supposed to punish his children for their faults in this life by consigning them to the flames of hell, in which they will suffer eternally the agonizing torments of fire. It is impossible to reason with the well-meaning and sincere, but utterly ignorant, people who are capable of believing such absurdities.
I am glad that “Christians will try to get on without me.” I shall certainly succeed in getting on without the so-called Christianity which teaches that morality must depend essentially upon the fear of hell, not upon the love of God; and I will cheerfully take the risk of being punished for refusing to believe that God is in reality a fiend.
Mr. Dunlop assumes that I was in a bad temper when I wrote my previous letter. A certain sæva indignatio against lies and hypocrisy, wilful or unwilful, is entirely justified. Was Christ himself icily cold when he swept the money-changers and brawlers from the Temple? Did he speak in measured academic platitudes?
Mr. Dunlop does not realize that he believes what he believes merely because he has never used his brain, never investigated or tried to distinguish between the essential truth and the inevitable accretions of falsehood and folly. If he had been born in pagan times, he would probably have remained a pagan. In one age or country he would have sacrificed to Moloch: in another he would have worshipped Bacchus. But, of course, he cannot understand this.
I used the epithets “stupid,” “disgusting,” etc., because they seemed to me the most appropriate in connection with such a travesty of reason and religion as the tract referred to presented. And Mr. Dunlop is quite wrong when he says that “if these doctrines are false, no one will be hurt by them.” Generations of men, women and children have been hurt by them; hampered and cramped and narrowed by them; prevented from living their full, free lives, and driven from the comprehension and sustaining power of Christ’s Christianity by such grotesque inventions of little minds, striving to measure their God by their own paltry standards.
As I said before, it is time that the narrow-minded reactionaries should be taught that they are not the pillars of the true Church and the pillars of
the ideal society that they have supposed themselves to be; they are neither good, nor pious, nor useful. They are the real enemies of knowledge, reason, Christ and God. They try to murder childhood with ghastly lies about hell-fire; they try to enchain manhood and womanhood in shackles of mediæval, nonsensical, character-rotting superstitions.
Twentieth Century
New York
American Industrial Independence
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]
Dear Sir,—The peril of dependence on foreign nations for production and over-sea transportation is demonstrated in the European war of 1914 as never before.
The loss of human life in this war will be appalling, the resulting sacrifice of the fruits of the labor of generations inestimable, and the loss of capital will be enormous.
We must use our best judgment to prevent these disastrous conditions from weakening our industrial capacity. This is the time when we should think and think hard about conserving and developing industrial independence.
We have issued the following announcement:
“To American Producers: Please report to us any article or articles (raw material or finished product) of use in agriculture, mining or manufacture in the United States, for the supply of which we are dependent upon any foreign country.”
We shall take up every article thus reported, investigate the possibility of successful production at home, and urge upon Americans the desirability of such changes in our existing tariff system as shall create new industries in every line where we are now partly or wholly dependent on foreign countries.
A. D. Juilliard
Chairman, Executive Committee,
The American Protective Tariff League.
New York
Eugenics in Wisconsin
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]
Dear Sir,—As supplementary to your editorial on Eugenic Tests, which appeared in the August issue of The Forum, I am submitting herewith my editorial on the general subject, which appeared in The Milwaukee
Daily News recently. As, of course, you know, Wisconsin, at the last session of its legislature, placed on its statute books a law requiring certain examinations and tests to be made before the intending groom could secure a license to marry. The law provoked widespread discussion and far from general approval. It was thought, in some quarters, to be too drastic to be capable of full and complete compliance. However, it is still on our statute books, and while some of its most drastic provisions, like the laboratory tests, are not being insisted upon, the belief is general that the law is doing some good along new and, heretofore, untried lines. It gives notice that something beside matrimonial misery must be a condition precedent to the marriage relation.
However, your editorial suggestion that popular education rather than drastic legal enactments should be employed to secure a reasonable standard of health preceding marriage, is undoubtedly sound and should lead to what ought be the much-desired condition. Legislation, here as elsewhere, is not the panacea of all the matrimonial ills of which we know. But silence is an inexcusable crime in the premises.
Duane Mowry
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
The Fourth Dimension
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]
Dear Sir,—With due deference to your valued journal, the article of Claude Bragdon, Learning to Think in Terms of Spaces, in your August number, is essentially illogical. The writer thus introduces his subject: “A point, moving in an unchanging direction, traces out a line; a line, moving in a direction at right angles to its length, traces out a plane; a plane, moving in a direction at right angles to its two dimensions, traces out a solid. Should a solid move in a direction at right angles to its every dimension, it would trace out, in four dimensional space, a hypersolid.”
Now this may pass current in blackboard geometry, but does not hold good in the abstract. The physical point is indeed extended to represent the line, and the physical line, to represent the plane, etc. But these concrete objects are not to be conceived as true geometrical figures, which are not movable, for motion presupposes sensuous experience. Only matter is movable. The true geometrical line is not the extension of the point, nor is the cube formed by the extension of the plane. When a point “moves” it is no longer a point, and when a cube “moves” it becomes annihilated.
“Student,” in a letter upon the same subject, speaks of a division of a cube into smaller cubes. But when a part of a geometrical figure is conceived the first figure is of necessity annihilated.
Mr. Bragdon, after expatiating upon the vastness of the firmament,
makes this extraordinary conclusion: “Viewed in relation to this universe of suns, our particular sun and its satellites shrink to a point. That is, the earth becomes no-dimensional.” The last word is in italics. Now this is manifestly a misconception, since the most minute atom, notwithstanding its insignificance in proportion to the universe, cannot be considered as an abstraction, which a point really is. Those who are not satisfied with the intuitive evidence of the limitation of space to three dimensions, solely because no logical proof can be adduced of this limitation, would do well to read the essay of Schopenhauer on The Methods of Mathematics, in which is cited as an instance of the undue importance of logical demonstration the controversy on the theory of parallels. The eleventh axiom of Euclid “asserts that two parallel lines inclining toward each other if produced far enough must meet,—a truth which is supposed to be too complicated to pass as self-evident and thus requires a demonstration…. It is quite arbitrary where we draw the line between what is directly certain and what has first to be demonstrated.” (The italics are mine.)
I believe with Schopenhauer, who quotes Descartes and Sir W. Hamilton in support of his contention, that the science of mathematics has no cultural value. Far from affording “a new way of looking at the world,” as Mr. Bragdon tries to convince us, “its only direct use is that it can accustom restless and unsteady minds to fix their attention.” That such mental concentration may be woefully misdirected is instanced in the cases of Swedenborg and Madame Blavatsky, reference to whom by Mr. Bragdon is alone sufficient to cause a sniff of suspicion.
Indeed your author himself, while evidently well versed in bookish mathematics, has been unable to free his mind of its limitations. Upon a basis of phrases devoid of significance he builds his extravagantly mystical speculation, which dissolves in the light of reason, “into air, thin air.”
Philip J. Dorety, M. D.
Trenton, N. J.