upon us the need for constructive planning. I can but think that while it gives no reason for supposing that creative power attaches ex officio to general ideas, it does encourage us to believe that a philosophy which should articulate and consolidate the ideas to which our social practice commits us would clarify and guide our future endeavor.
Time permits of but one illustration. The present situation presents the spectacle of the breakdown of the whole philosophy of Nationalism, political, racial and cultural. It is by the accident of position rather than any virtue of our own that we are not sharers in the present demonstration of failure. We have borrowed the older philosophy of isolated national sovereignty and have lived upon it in a more or less half-hearted way. In our internal constitution we are actually interracial and international. It remains to see whether we have the courage to face this fact and the wisdom to think out the plan of action which it indicates. Arbitration treaties, international judicial councils, schemes of international disarmament, peace funds and peace movements, are all well in their way. But the situation calls for
more radical thinking than that which terminates in such proposals. We have to recognize that furtherance of the depth and width of human intercourse is the measure of civilization; and we have to apply this fact without as well as within our national life. We must make the accident of our internal composition into an idea, an idea upon which we may conduct our foreign as well as our domestic policy. An international judicial tribunal will break in the end upon the principle of national sovereignty.
We have no right to cast stones at any warring nation till we have asked ourselves whether we are willing to forego this principle and to submit affairs which limited imagination and sense have led us to consider strictly national to an international legislature. In and of itself, the idea of peace is a negative idea; it is a police idea. There are things more important than keeping one's body whole and one's property intact. Disturbing the peace is bad, not because peace is disturbed, but because the fruitful processes of coöperation in the great experiment of living together are disturbed. It is futile to work for the negative end of peace unless we are committed to the positive
ideal which it cloaks: Promoting the efficacy of human intercourse irrespective of class, racial, geographical and national limits. Any philosophy which should penetrate and particulate our present social practice would find at work the forces which unify human intercourse. An intelligent and courageous philosophy of practice would devise means by which the operation of these forces would be extended and assured in the future. An American philosophy of history must perforce be a philosophy for its future, a future in which freedom and fullness of human companionship is the aim, and intelligent coöperative experimentation the method.
THE END
INDEX
- Absolutism, [89], [112], [115], [124]
- America, philosophy in, [123-132]
- "Americanism," [124]
- Anti-Semitism, [100-101].
- A priori, [39-44], [126], [129]
- Authority, [52-54]
- Bentham, [56]
- Bergson, [4]
- Bernhardi, [34-35], [52], [118]
- Bourdon, [107-108]
- Burke, [93-94]
- Chamberlain, [101 n.]
- Cosmopolitanism, [67], [75], [85], [99]
- Culture, [91]
- Descartes, [92]
- Despotism enlightened, [53]
- Dialectic, [70], [118]
- Duty, [24], [50-57]
- Education, [14], [72], [73]
- Empiricism, [41], [43], [126-129]
- Enlightenment, the, [37-39], [59], [92], [103]
- Eucken, [36], [55]
- Evolution, [112]
- Fichte, [68-80], [85-87]
- Formalism, [51]
- Freedom, [18], [25], [30], [33-35], [47], [51], [71], [115].
- French Revolution, [57], [94], [103]
- French thought, [52], [91-94], [95], [100]
- Germania, [104]
- Germany, [14-16], [28], [29-31], [32-33], [36], [71], [78-81], [84-85], [88], [91-93], [94-98], [106-107]
- Haym, [107]
- Hegel, [94-95], [107-120], [125]
- Heine, [17], [18], [76], [83], [84-85]
- Herder, [112]
- History, [5-6], [59-67], [98-102], [107-119], [121]
- Hoffman, [81]
- Idealism, [28], [39], [70], [82], [107], [123], [130]
- Ideas and action, [3-15], [123-132]
- Individualism, [49], [72]
- Intelligence, [54-56], [126-128]
- Jena, [68]
- Kant, [19-40], [47-58], [59-67], [119-121]
- Kultur, [62-64]
- Lange, [78]
- Lasalle, [77]
- Law, [20-25], [116]
- Leibniz, [59], [112]
- Luther, [16], [27], [71], [87]
- Marx, [6], [110 n.]
- Militarism, [52]
- Napoleon, [67], [78-79]
- Nationalism, [67], [81], [86], [87], [115]
- Nietzsche, [28], [34], [58]
- Pantheism, [77], [82]
- Parliaments, [117]
- Personality, [48]
- Pfleiderer, [105]
- Philosophy, [7-18], [123-132]
- Property, [74]
- Psychology, Social, [82]
- Race, [100-101]
- Religion, [20-21], [26-27], [95]
- Rights, [52], [57]
- Romanticism, [81], [104], [122]
- Rousseau, [61], [91]
- Schelling, [82 n.]
- Scholar, [72]
- Science, [21-23], [28]
- Socialism, [74-75]
- Social motives, [60-61]
- Society, [64-65]
- State, [64-65], [66-67], [73-77], [110-118]
- Subjectivism, [49], [81]
- Supersensible, [23-25]
- v. Sybel, [78-80]
- Tacitus, [104]
- Taine, [14]
- Universalism of Germany, [36], [106-107]
- Urvolk, [101-102]
- Utilitarianism, [57-58]
- Volks-seele, [82]
- War, [35-36], [89], [97], [118-120]
- World-heroes, [112]