Recent Developments in European Thought

by Unknown

The material fruits of science are among our most familiar wonders—the motor-car, the aeroplane, wireless telegraphy. But it is not sufficiently realized how all these things and the like are dependent upon the co-operation of a multitude of minds, the collective rather than the individual capacity of man. Men had dreamt for ages of flying, but it was not until the invention of the internal combustion engine that bird-like wings and the mechanical skill of man could be brought together and made effective. It is Humanity that flies, and not the individual man alone. The German Daimler, the French Levassor, are the two names which stand out most prominently in this later development of engineering as our own Watt and Stephenson stand in the history of the steam-engine. Wireless telegraphy offers a similar story. Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz, Lodge, Marconi; the names are international. In 1913, before ever the League of Nations had been planned, Lord Bryce was telling an International Congress in London that 'the world is becoming one in an altogether new sense.... More than four centuries ago the discovery of America marked the first step in the process by which the European races have gained dominion over nearly the whole earth. As the earth has been narrowed through the new forces science has placed at our disposal, the movements of politics, of economics, and of thought, in each of its regions, become more closely interwoven. Whatever happens in any part of the globe has now a significance for every other part. World History is tending to become one History.'

The war, tragically as it has shaken this growing oneness of mankind, has not destroyed it. In some ways it has even stimulated growth. Against a background of blood and fire the League of Nations has been forced into actual being, and the long isolation alike of the ancient East and the youthful West has been broken down at last. Within the State, again, even allowing for all setbacks, the efforts at social solidarity have on the whole been strengthened, not weakened. This war his been an accelerator of, not, as the Napoleonic, a brake upon, reform. Many reforms, especially in England, which had been long discussed and partly attempted before the war, were carried out with dispatch at its close. This was the case with education, with the franchise and with measures affecting the health, the housing, and the industrial conditions of the people. And there is now a greater and stronger demand among us for a further advance, above all for making every citizen not merely or even primarily a voting unit, but a consciously active, consciously co-operative, member of the community.

Comte, who died in 1857 just before our period, was perhaps the clearest voice in Europe to herald both movements: the advance to international unity, and social reform within the State. It was he who, under the title of Western Republic, proclaimed the existence of a real unity of nations, whose business it was to strengthen themselves as a moral force, to act as trustees for the weaker people and lead the world. It was he who, in the phrase 'incorporation of the proletariate', summed up all those social reforms in which we are immersed, which aim at making every citizen a full member of his nation. Like all ideals it was far easier to conceive and to respect than to foresee or to secure the necessary means to put it into effect. Perhaps the perfect symmetry of the plan, the over-sanguine hopes of the man who framed it, have even proved some hindrance to its rapid spread. It has seemed, like Dante's polity in the De Monarchia, to take its place rather among the utopias than the practical schemes of reform, and when men saw the infinite complexity of the problems and met the living lions in the path, they suffered the comparative depression which we have noticed as a feature of the age.

Here indeed it would appear that we have reached one of the most serious cross-currents in recent European thought. In science, in philosophy, in politics, and in social economics, though we see the goal at least in outline, we are in some danger of being overwhelmed by the difficulties of the pursuit. Our vision is somewhat clouded and our steps hampered by the entangling details of the country between. It is substantially the same problem which faces us both in the philosophical and the practical sphere, and the analogy between the two is instructive. Spencer's synthesis, which we instanced as the last encyclopaedic attempt to present all knowledge—at least all scientific knowledge—in one system, has been riddled fore and aft by hostile shot, though in the end more of it may be found to have survived than is seen at present above water. The philosopher who in our generation has acquired the European vogue most comparable to that of Spencer is Bergson. Now Bergson has dealt some of the shrewdest blows at Spencer's system, but he does not set out to construct a rival system of his own. He is most careful to say that he is not doing this, that any such work must be done by later workers, that he is only making suggestions for a new point of view. It is interesting to note in general terms what that point of view is, as we shall have occasion later on to revert to it. It rests on a new interpretation of the nature and growth of conscious life. He is in short a semeur d'idées-force rather than an encyclopaedist or a system-maker. The difference is characteristic of the age and might be traced in the other contemporary schools, the pragmatists, the new realists, and the rest. The new Descartes is looked for but not announced. Perhaps when he arrives he will prove to be a whole army and not a single man. But if an army, it will need a better co-ordination, a more clearly defined common spirit, than is at present apparent in the philosophic hosts.

A similar perplexity in the practical sphere has a similar cause but a graver urgency. The multiplicity and contrariety of the facts are upon us as we face in practice the ideals which we have accepted from the earlier thinkers, from the century of hope. In science and philosophy we feel that the cause of unity may with some safety be left to look after itself. If the new Descartes does not appear in person, we may have confidence that plenty of inferior substitutes will be found, who, if they work together, will keep alive the great task of unifying thought. For in this region the nature of things assists our efforts and will sooner or later get the work done. The stars in their courses are fighting for us and for unity. But in the world of wills the task is tenfold more difficult and the dangers imminent. The poor and labouring millions, the oppressed and dissatisfied nations, are forcing the door, and though there is fair agreement in theory as to how they should live and work together in peace, yet the realization is by no means automatic, and the difficulties thicken as we come nearer to them.

But even here, perhaps most of all here, it is the first word of wisdom to take stock of the favourable symptoms, to see clearly the forces on which we can rely in our forward march. And they are not far to seek in all classes and in every Western land. Read any account of an English community in the early nineteenth century, say George Eliot's 'Milby' in the Scenes of Clerical Life. How far more humane, more enlightened, and happier is the state of the succeeding community, the Nuneaton or Coventry of the present day! No question but the novelist would have welcomed as a convincing proof of her 'meliorist' doctrine the progress made in her own homeland in the century since her birth. We know by personal experience the general kindliness and cheerfulness of our fellow citizens, their tolerance, their readiness to hope, their prevalent orderliness and self-restraint. We are thinking perhaps of a certain tendency to slackness, a dangerous falling-off in the output of work. If that be so, we need only look at the activities of any playground, or of a class-room in a well-ordered school, to be sure of the future. The natural man, at least in our temperate climates, and as exhibited in the behaviour of his natural progenitor, the child, is all for vigour and experiment. It is we, the adult community, the trustees of the child, who are to blame if his maturity fails of the eager questioning and the untiring labours of his unspoilt youth.

But we are dealing in this volume rather with changes of thought than with the actual life of the times. Theories affecting the organization of work, the distribution of the product, and the government of society have had much to do with our present difficulties. They have arisen from the conditions of the industrial revolution and the doctrines of the political revolution which began about the same time, and they have reacted ever since on the work and wages, the life and government of the mass of Western men. They are discussed in our eighth chapter. It may be said broadly that in this sphere, as in philosophy, the old and simpliste doctrines have been criticized almost to the point of extinction, but that no new all-embracing practical synthesis has taken their place. The Marxian theory that social evolution has been due mainly to economic causes, that these have produced inevitably the present—or recent—capitalist system, which inevitably must be turned upside down in the interests of manual labour—this is no longer dominant in any Western community, though it is fighting a desperate battle in Eastern Europe. But it is equally true that the capitalist system, presented in an ideal and moralized form in the Utopias of St. Simon and Comte, is not generally accepted now as an ideal for industry. The spirit which Comte desired and believed would animate the moralized employer, acting as the providence of his workpeople, we look to find rather in a reconstituted and moralized State. We all share this hope in our degree, The Times as well as the Daily News, and we do not expect the new spirit to operate simply through the free-will and private capacity and initiative of individuals. The joint stock company has settled that.

What we are waiting and hoping for is the time when, under the aegis of a benevolent State, capital and labour may live together in many mansions and, like the monks of old, follow many rules of life. In this region our ideal of unity is more diversified than in the realm of thought, and there is no demand for a Descartes.

And here it is interesting to note that one of the most telling books on social reconstruction published since the war is by an international writer. This is Dr. Walther Rathenau, a German of Jewish descent, whose ideas have just been popularized by a Frenchman, M. Gaston Raphael[1]. He fits in well with our general argument by virtue of his double attitude, holding, on the one hand, that under the general supervision of the State, industry should be organized in various self-governing groups, 'Social Guilds' or 'professional syndicates' in which both employers and workmen would be included with representatives of the Government; while, on the other hand, he is emphatic that progress must proceed from a changed and widening mentality, and aim in turn at increasing the depth and capacity of the individual soul.

Our book has no special chapter on the League of Nations itself. The idea pervades the whole, and the subject was treated in detail in the first volume of this series (The Unity of Western Civilization, 1915). The history behind the League offers a striking analogy to the other struggles for unity of which we have spoken. There is the same advance from the idea of a unity dictated and controlled by one mind to a unity of spirit arising from the free co-operation of many diverse elements all aiming at the same general good. Down even to yesterday it seemed to many minds a necessary condition that one man, gathering in his hands the resources of one great State, should from that centre dominate the world. And in the dawn of human history it was no doubt often true, the only way in which the world could then advance. This was true for Alexander, the prototype of all the Roman conquerors, and true, conspicuously, for the Roman empire at its best. But, after the break-up of the empire, unity of this type became a delusive mirage, misleading all who, like the Holy Roman emperors, sought to enjoy it again. By the time of Napoleon it had become an anachronism of the most dangerous and reactionary kind. The world was then too vast, the freedom of men and nations too various and deeply rooted. Meanwhile a real unity, stronger than before, had been forming beneath the surface and needed fresh institutions to body it forth. This movement for unity has been, as we have seen, precipitated by the war into visible and decisive action. It had been simmering for three hundred years in 'Great Designs', 'Projects of Peace', Treaties of Arbitration, and Hague Conventions.