Japan offers a striking illustration of the way in which the new factor operates. An intelligent people in which the national sentiment was strong, but in which national self-knowledge was rudimentary because of the isolation of the nation, was suddenly brought into contact with other peoples; through observation of them, it learnt its own deficiencies and set about deliberately to remedy them in the light of its new knowledge; and in doing so has reorganised itself from top to bottom.
In England also national self-knowledge is beginning rapidly to increase in accuracy and extent. We have begun to compare ourselves at all points with other nations, and are no longer content with the good old creed, that everything British is best. We are learning in this way our weaknesses; and the knowledge is becoming a main cause of accelerated progress. The best illustration is, perhaps, the present stir over educational questions, which is directly due to the increase of national self-knowledge resulting from the observation of other nations.
But in the future our national self-consciousness will be enriched and fitted for the guidance of the national will in a still more effective manner than by the knowledge of our weaknesses being forced upon us by the nations who are our rivals in the world. In many directions—by the historians, the biologists, the anthropologists, the statisticians—data are being gathered for a science of society whose sure indications will enable us deliberately to guide the further evolution of the nation towards the highest ideal of a nation that we can conceive. In this way, it may be hoped, the modern nations will be able to avoid that danger which has destroyed the great nations of the past, and which has been the dark cloud shadowing the brilliance of the age of progress that resulted from increasing human intercourse and mutual understanding. In this way the free play of the spirit of inquiry, which in all earlier ages has been highly dangerous to the stability of nations and which, while it was the sole cause of progress, nevertheless destroyed many of the nations whom it impelled upon that path, will make for a greatly accelerated progress; and, at the same time, it will enable us to secure, by deliberate voluntary control, the bases of society, which in all previous ages have rested solely upon custom, instinct, and the religious sanctions.
Not by any voluntary surrender of the reason, not by any subjugation of the intellect to the dominion of obscure transcendental ideas, such as is preached by Benjamin Kidd, Chatterton-Hill[154] and others who have realized the disintegrating effects of intellect on earlier societies, but by a more strenuous use of our intellectual faculties, and by a growth of knowledge, especially a knowledge of the laws of human societies, will the stability and further evolution of nations be maintained.
The nations whose progress will rest upon this basis will be in a position very different from that of the older societies to which the emancipation of the intellect was fatal. They fell for lack of knowledge of natural laws, as soon as the progress of intellectual inquiry had weakened their instinctive and customary bases. The modern nations may reasonably hope that they are within sight of knowledge which will enable them to avoid these dangers and to continue their progress during an indefinitely long period. They may even hope to progress, not only in respect of the intellectual and moral tradition, but also in respect of racial qualities; for a better knowledge of the factors at work and of the laws of heredity will enable them to put an end to the influences now making for race deterioration and to replace them by others of the opposite tendency.
Such national progress will be truly teleological; it will be a progress whose direction will be determined by the desire of an ideal end present to the consciousness of all and striven after by the collective deliberation and volition of the nation.
Thus the group spirit, rising above the level of a narrow patriotism that regards with hostility all its rivals, recognising that only through the further development of the collective life of nations can man rise to higher levels than he has yet known, becomes the supreme agent of human progress.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] History of European Thought in the 19th Century.