It is not till after the outburst of science in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after that reawakening of the hopes of human powers which takes our minds back to the Greeks, that we find the conception of Humanity appearing in something like the form in which we can now imagine it. It will have been gathered from our chapter on Science and Philosophy how essential is the growth of organized thought to the realization of any unity in a progressive world. For the realm of thought is the only one in which no distinctions of race or nation are possible, but it must be thought in which agreement is reached. So long as men can differ, as they still do, on questions of human affairs, politics, social arrangements, or even archaeological matters where race or national predominance is involved, so far science does not exert her unifying sway. But in mathematics, physics, chemistry, all the matters in which it is impossible for a man to take another view because he is a Frenchman or a German—here we reach a haven of intellectual peace; and these calm waters are spreading over the world, in spite of the tempests.
To return to the educational point from which we started, we can see now another line of approach to unity in training our own minds and those of others. In some respects it is a surer way, though less direct. When studying the political life and history of other nations, even if we do so deliberately in order to find out what we owe to them, we are bound to be arrested here and there by things that we do not like, even among our best friends. The French may seem frivolous or less self-restrained than ourselves; they have had their sanguinary outbursts of revolution. Where they have impeded our own movements, as in colonization, we are the more conscious of their faults. Or we may feel that Americans have their materialistic vein. And so on. This with our best friends, who, no doubt, feel the same about us. But on the other line of approach, the study of the things on which men now agree without question, which they have built up steadily with co-operating hands, the mental effect is quite different. The opening vista leads us on, with growing admiration and confidence in the unbreakable solidarity of mankind. We know that Newton who completes Galileo, Maxwell who follows Laplace, Helmholtz who uses the results of Joule, can have no conflicting jealousies. Here quite obviously and indisputably all are fellow-workers, and before the greatness of their work the passions of rival domination in material things, the differences of national taste and habit, the quarrels of the past or the future, appear contemptible and insignificant.
They are not insignificant, as we know to our cost. But by dwelling on the things of greater moment and solidity, we train ourselves and others to reduce the elements of discord to their true proportion and allay the storm. The progress of a united mankind is thus an ideal, slowly realizing itself in time. But its realization is quickened and rendered wider and more beneficent, the more we think of it and believe in it. A blow comes, such as the present war, and seems to shatter the whole picture which so many hands have limned and so many eyes admired. Those who have followed its growth through the ages, know well that no such blow can finally destroy a living growth or even go very deep in injuring its features.
It is surely a commonplace that in proportion as western populations, from statesmen downwards, are animated by sentiments of comradeship which arise from considerations such as these, the danger of war must diminish and the possibilities of fruitful common action increase. Yet there is probably no country in Europe where any deliberate attempt is made to instruct the people in ideas which would most surely broaden their sympathies and lay the foundations of peace.
The argument takes us back for a moment to the essay on education. We left off there at a point where the old unity based on Greco-Roman culture was seen to be disappearing in a confused mass of new studies, partly suggested by modern languages and history, still more by the growth of science and the application of science to the problems of contemporary life. It may well be that in this conception of humanity, the co-operation of mankind in a growing structure of thought, we shall ultimately find the idée-mère under which all the other subordinate ideas in education may be grouped and inspired. This might take place if the notion were grasped in no narrow sense, but so broadly that all human thought, religion, and philosophy, art as well as science, might find their justification in it.
The advantage of putting the educational issue first has been already indicated. We can all get to work on it at once for ourselves, and it is a far more fundamental and, in some respects, easier thing to introduce a new idea into the minds of others than to alter the boundaries and political conditions of States. If we once achieved a general atmosphere of co-operation and goodwill in the world, the practical problems would be already more than half solved.
Discussion will take place, with more and more vigour as years go on, as to the various measures which have been described collectively as the establishment of a World-State. At what point could it be said that a World-State is in being? How can such a World-State be reconciled with the independent sovereignty of the several States comprised in it? What is to be the sanction imposing the decisions of the larger community on its constituent members? Such are a few of the problems involved in any advance towards the Kantian ideal of cosmopolitanism. None of them admit of a single definite answer. They do not belong to questions of pure theory, and we shall have to solve them slowly and with difficulty, seizing every favourable opportunity of a slight advance, avoiding grave obstacles, compromising with every possible friend.
But for the moment we seem likely to be overwhelmed by unchained passions which are the practical denial of everything that the ideal of humanity implies. Instead of co-operation we are faced by schemes of conquest and domination, and the simplest notion of brotherhood is limited to comradeship in arms for defence or attack. Many will be found to ridicule the idea that any real progress in unity has ever been made, or that the world can ever be envisaged except as an irksome enclosure of rival armed forces thirsting for the fray. But to those who are not prepared to accept this as the last word in human association the argument of this volume may have some weight. It will lead those who follow it to a quiet but well-grounded belief that the forces tending to unity in the world are different in quality, incomparably greater in scope than those which make for disruption. Discord is explosive and temporary, harmony rises slowly but dominates the final chord.
Like the great common purposes of science, the common tendencies of human action have in recent years suffered some eclipse through the bustle of our activity and the multiplicity of its detail. The colours, too, of a conflict of any kind are so much more vivid and arresting than the quiet and monotonous tones of a long piece of harmonious and co-operative work. The labours of such a bureau of international effort as is described in Chapter X appear to our pressmen and publicists so little interesting that they are practically ignored, and the results of scientific congresses, being of a highly specialized kind, are left perforce to those who can understand them. Yet it is precisely in these things, if our diagnosis is correct, that the most characteristic features of the age are to be found. For in them and in similar movements we see united the two fundamental human traits from which we started, reason and sympathy: reason winning triumphs over nature, sympathy realizing itself at last in a community of men devoting their powers to mutual aid. 'Idle dreams', it will be said, as we hurl more and more millions of our best youth to destruction by the most highly developed resources of science. Yes, but the same nations were only yesterday celebrating the services of Pasteur, Virchow, and Lister to a common humanity, and will do so again to-morrow or the day after.
It is in truth one of the most poignant features of the tragedy in which we are manfully and rightly bearing our part, that the community-sense in the world had never been so highly developed, or found so many channels in which to diffuse itself, as just at the moment when the blow fell. The socialist movements in all civilized countries have always had this as a leading motive; comrades and poor among themselves, these men have always been eager to stretch out a hand to those of like mind abroad. And in the last chapter we saw how among Christian communities throughout the world there has been in recent years a growing approximation. Neither the cause nor the effects of such forces can die away. They will reappear when the storm has passed and rebuild the wreck.