With my whole life I believe in the possibility and value of worldwide friendliness and cooperation. I am writing to discuss not the attainability or the merits of peace, but ways of achieving it; not to criticize present activities on its behalf, but to indicate the promise of a neglected approach and to present a program which should, I believe, find its place in the great "peace movement."
Must peace be achieved and maintained by brute strength, regardless of sense and sentiment, or may it be gained through intelligence, humanely used? Must the pathway thereto be paved with human skulls, builded with infinite suffering and sacrifice, or may it he charted by scientific inquiry and builded by the joyous labor of mutual service and helpfulness? Is it possible, in the light of the history of the races of man, to doubt that we must place our dependence on intelligence sympathetically employed, not on physical prowess? To me it seems that peace must be achieved peacefully, not by the clash of arms and bloodshed.
But even if we grant that science is our main hope, there remains a choice of methods. On the one hand, there is the way of material progress, physical discovery and feverish haste to apply every new fact to armament; on the other, that of biological research, social enlightenment, and ever-increasing human understanding and sympathy.
Firm believers in each of these possible approaches, through science, to international peace, are at hand. The one group argues that nations, like individuals, must be controlled in all supreme crises by fear; the other contends that civilization has developed in enlightened human sympathy a higher, a more worthy, and a safer control of behavior.
As a biologist and a believer in the brotherhood of man, I wish to present the merits of sympathy, as contrasted with fear, and to plead for larger attention to the biological approach to the control of international relations. For I am convinced that the greatest lesson of the present stupendous world-conflict is the need of thorough knowledge of the laws of individual and social human behavior. Surely this war clearly indicates that the study of instinct, and the use of our knowledge for the control of human relations, is incalculably more important for the welfare of mankind than is the discovery of new and ever more powerful explosives or the building of increasingly terrible engines of destruction.
During the last half-century the physical sciences, technologies, arts and industries, have made marvelous advances. At enormous cost of labor and material resources there have been discovered and perfected means of destroying life and property at once so effective and so terrible to contemplate that preparedness for war seemed a safe guarantee of peace. But who is there now to insist, against the evidence of blood-drenched Europe, that material progress, physical discovery, and armament based thereupon, assure international friendship?
Only if one of the nations should discover, and guard as its secret, some diabolically horrible means of destroying human life and property by wholesale and over materially unbridged distances, can armaments even temporarily put an end to war. In such event—and it is by no means an improbability—the whole world might suddenly be made to bow in terror before the will of the all-powerful nation. Before this approaching crisis, can we do less than earnestly pray that the translation of physical progress into armament may be halted until the brotherhood of man has been further advanced? Dare we stop to contemplate what would happen to-morrow if Germany, with half the civilized world arrayed against her, should come into possession of some imponderable, and to the untutored mind mysterious, means of directing her torpedoes, exploding magazines, mines, shells from distant bases? Undoubtedly we are close upon the employment of certain vibrations for this deadly purpose. Shall we veer in time and take a safer course, or are we doomed to the inevitable?
For the certain result of pushing forward relentlessly on the path of preparation for war—in the name of peace—is the dominance of a single nation and the destruction or subjugation of all others. This is as inevitable as is death. If we would preserve and foster racial and national diversity of traits, promote social individuality as we so eagerly foster the diversity of selves, we must speedily focus attention upon human nature and seek that knowledge of it which shall enable us to control it wisely rather than to destroy it ruthlessly.
Even were I able to do so, I should in no degree belittle the achievements of the physical sciences and their technologies, for I believe whole-heartedly in their value, and long for the steady increase of our power to control our environment. But when these achievements are offered as means of creating or maintaining certain desired conditions of individual and social life, I must insist that other knowledge is essential—nay, more essential—than that of the physicist or chemist. Knowledge, namely, of life itself.
Most briefly, the situation may thus be described. In peace and in war there are two large, complex and intricate groups of facts to be dealt with by those who seek the welfare of man. The one group comprises the phenomena of physical nature as the condition of life—environment; the other is constituted by the phenomena of life and the relations of lives. Those who sincerely believe in preparedness for war as a preventive measure, misconceive and attempt to misuse the emotion of fear and its modes of expression. It is as though we should strive tirelessly to develop machinery and methods for educating our children, the while ignorant of the laws of child development and branding as of no practical importance the fundamentals of human nature.