Recent Developments in European Thought

by Unknown

Industrially the epoch is as clearly defined as it is in politics and science. For in 1871, the year of the Treaty of Frankfort, an act was passed after a long working-class agitation, assisted by certain eminent members of the middle class, legalizing strikes and Trade Unions. And now at the end of the war, all over the world, society is faced by the problem of reconciling the full rights, and in some cases the extreme demands, of 'labour', with democratic government and the prosperity and social union of the whole community. This is the situation discussed in our seventh and eighth chapters.

In philosophy and literature a similar dividing line appears. In the 'sixties Herbert Spencer was publishing the capital works of his system. The Principles of Psychology was published in 1872. This 'Synthetic Philosophy' has proved up to the present the last attempt of its kind, and with the vast increase of knowledge since Spencer's day it might well prove the last of all such syntheses carried out by a single mind. Specialism and criticism have gained the upper hand, and the fresh turn to harmony, which we shall notice later on, is rather a harmony of spirit than an encyclopaedic unity such as the great masters of system from Descartes to Comte and Spencer had attempted before.

In literature also the dates agree. Dickens, most typical of all early Victorians, died in 1870. George Eliot's last great novel, Daniel Deronda, was published in 1876. Victor Hugo's greatest poem, La Légende des Siècles, the imaginative synthesis of all the ages, appeared in the 'seventies. There have been many writers since, with Tolstoi perhaps at their head, in whom the fire of moral enthusiasm has burnt as keenly, nor have the borders of human sympathy been narrowed. Yet one cannot fail to note a less pervading and ready confidence in human nature, a less fervent belief that the good must prevail if good men will only follow their better leading.

Here then is our period, marked in public affairs by a progress from one conflict, desperate and tragic, between two of the leading nations of the West, to another and still more terrible which swept the whole world into the maelstrom; and marked in thought by a certain dispersion and depression of mind, a falling in the barometer of temperament and imagination, but also by a grappling with realities at closer quarters. No wonder that some have seen here a 'tragedy of hope' and the 'bankruptcy of science'.

But it must be noted at once that these obvious landmarks, though striking, are in themselves superficial. They require explanation rather than give it, and in some cases an explanation, much less tragic than the symptom, is suggested by the symptom itself. We may at least fairly treat them at starting simply as beacon-hills to mark out the country we are traversing. We have to go deeper to find out the nature of the soil, and travel to the end to study the vista beyond.

In making this fuller analysis of man's recent achievement, especially in the West, the first, and perhaps ultimately the weightiest, element we have to note is the continued and unexampled growth of science. Was there ever a more fertile period than the generation which succeeded Darwin's achievement in biology and Bunsen's and Kirchhoff's with the spectroscope? Both have created revolutions, one in our view of living things, the other in our view of matter. In physics the whole realm of radio-activity has come into our ken within these years, and during the same time chemistry, both organic and inorganic, has been equally enlarged. All branches of science in fact show a similar expansion, and a new school of mathematicians claim that they have recast the foundations of the fundamental science and assimilated it to the simplest laws of all thinking. Some discussion of this will be found in the chapter on philosophy.

It may serve as tonic—an antidote to that depression of spirits of which we have spoken—to consider that such an output of mental energy, rewarded by such a harvest of truth, is without precedent in man's evolution. No single generation before ever learnt so much not only of the world around it but also of the doings of previous generations. For since 1870 we have been living in an age as much distinguished for historical research as for natural science. If mankind is now to go down in a wrack of war, starvation, bankruptcy, and ruin, the sunset sky at least is glorious.

And there is tonic in another thought which rises from the very nature of this recent blossoming of knowledge. It marks the growing co-operative activity of mankind. The fact that science and research of every kind have advanced so rapidly is not only, or even primarily, a proof of the continued vigour of the human intellect, but of the stability of society, the coherence of social classes and nations, the readiness of the bulk of men to allow their more immediately productive work to be used for the support of those whose labours are in a more remote and ideal sphere. Science did not begin until the ancient priesthoods were enabled to pursue disinterested inquiries without the need of earning their daily bread. Civilization, we may be assured, is not threatened in its most vital part so long as the general will permits the application of the general resources to the promotion of learning and research without a claim for immediate marketable results. Our last generation has not only permitted but has encouraged this in all Western countries, and in other countries, such as China and Japan, influenced by the West. The money thus spent is vastly greater than in any equal period before, and the United States, the land of the fullest democratic claims, is also the land of the amplest generosity for scientific and educational purposes.

The growth of knowledge is a symptom not only of the collective capacity of living man but also of the continuity of the present age with those which had laid the earlier foundations. One school of vigorous action, and still more vigorous talk, advises our generation to be done with the past and make a fresh start on more ideal lines. This is not the voice of science, which, just in proportion to its growth, has shown more and more care for its origins and its past: and this is true at every stage in the history of thought. The Greeks, fighting for freedom and establishing in the city-state a new form of political organization for the world, were yet in their scientific evolution true and grateful successors of the priests who first compiled the observations necessary for the scientific study of the heavens and founded the art of medicine. The men of the Renascence, who were burnt and imprisoned for doubting the verbal inspiration of Aristotle and the Bible, were in fact going back to an earlier impulse than that of the scholastic philosophy. The mathematics of Pappus and the mechanics of Archimedes had to be carried further before the new sciences of which Aristotle had given the first sketch could be securely founded. The pioneers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries built therefore on the past, although accused of impiety and revolution; and it must be so with any intellectual construction which is to hold its own and form the future. So far from there being any opposition in nature between history and science, the two are but different aspects of one continuous enlargement of the human spirit, which sees and lives more fully at each great moment of its progress, and, so far as it is alive, is always informed by the real achievements of the past. We illustrate this advance in the marvellous record of our fifth chapter, and its spirit is summed up in the great saying of Benedetto Croce that 'all history is contemporary history'.

But the reader may here begin not unnaturally to feel some impatience with the argument, and to think that he is being carried into a region of ideal imaginings quite out of touch with the realities of blood and hatred and starvation with which we have been actually surrounded at the end of our period. It is well to be thus sharply reminded of the contrariety of facts, when we are sailing smoothly along on the current of any theory, whether of education or politics, religion or art. To get right with our objector, to set our sail so that the rocks in the stream may not completely wreck us, we will go back to the point where we were insisting on the obvious truth that the collective resources and capacity of mankind have of late enormously increased.