THE GENERATION OF 1789.

 UNDER this title an article appears in the February number of the Revue des Deux Mondes, from the pen of M Guizot. It is a portion of an introductory essay which is soon to appear prefixed to a collection of M. Guizot's speeches, and has been permitted to appear in advance in the pages of the only French periodical in which the old and better days of French thought are still reflected. The theme on which M. Guizot mainly dwells is the confidence he feels in the restoration of public liberty in France. He owns that most of the ancient friends of freedom are weary, disheartened, and despondent, and that its new friends are few in number, and not ostensibly backed by public support. But his own faith in the triumph of political liberty is unshaken, because his faith in France and in French progress and civilisation is unshaken. Political liberty is the natural and necessary sequel, in his eyes, of the whole of French history and we must no more be made hopeless by the revival of the Napoleonic Empire than Englishmen who loved liberty ought to have despaired when the Stuarts seemed to be going to have everything their own way. France is in the main, and at times in her own despite, tending towards political liberty, and therefore her destiny, which is to be free, must be accomplished. We confess that these deductions from the philosophy of history do not give us quite so much comfort as they seem to give M. Guizot. If a man sets out with the theory that political liberty is the destiny of France, it is easy to prove that all things since the age of St. Louis have been moving in that one most desirable direction ; but if he sets out without any theory, he may not see things quite so favourably as M. Guizot sees them. The value of the whole method of looking at the past as a great vestibule through which man has marched to the inner shrine of modern civilisation, has yet to be decided. The speculator who hereafter attempts to determine it will have the advantage of finding this view amply represented and fully explained in the numerous works of M. Guizot. Whatever can be made of the theory has been made of it there, and he will readily acknowledge that, whether wholly, or partially, or in no degree true, it has at least given a charm and weight to the writings of its apostle. M. Guizot's tendency to sum up the results of his reflections on history in the language of a sensible and eloquent philosophy not rarely betrays him into platitudes which he loves because they are his own. But at the same time his anxiety to look at the past and present as a whole, and to seize on the binding tie which links together the centuries of modern Europe, imparts to his writings a character of elevation and largeness which justifies the reputation he has acquired. We are more moved to hope for the restoration of liberty in France by observing that French thought, though stifled, is not extinct, and that the Emperor is continually forced to treat the present system as temporary, than by reading what, in the eyes of a philosophical optimist, are the lessons of French history. But M. Guizot knows Fiance far too well, and has thought over the past history of France far too deeply to permit us to view with indifference any remarks he may have to offer on a subject so full of importance and interest as the " Generation of 1789."

M. Guizot goes unavoidably over old ground in most of what he says, he deplores the separation of the old nobility from the Revolution ; he does justice to the services which Napoleon rendered to the country ; he praises him for having seen that religion must be restored, and that a Court must be formed to satisfy the national taste for elegance and luxury and he repeats what has so often been said, that the Revolution was on the whole a great gain to France, and that those who most decry it would be very sorry to go back to the state of things which preceded it. He gives us something rather more new when he puts in a clear and intelligible form the leading political theories on which, as he says, the Revolution was based. There were, he thinks, three formulas which were running in the heads of men at the time, and by which they were overpowered and guided. The first of these formulas is this :— " No man is bound to obey laws to which he has not consented." The second is, " that power properly resides in the numerical majority." The third is, that "all men are equal." It is very convenient to have the leading ideas of the Revolution put in this concise form, although, as M. Guizot says, the wonder is that any men can ever seriously have entertained them. They are so wholly at variance with the facts of life, that we may be surprised how the facts did not put out the theories at once. But facts do not put out theories for a long time, when the theories are part of a whole mode of regarding life itself. We in England, who live in a country where there are visionaries so wedded to their interpretation of apocalyptic dates as to hold that the millennium has already begun, ought to be prepared for any tenacity of belief in theories that we find on the Continent. And those ideas which were working in the minds of the generation of 1789 were not isolated propositions to which, without preparation, they were invited to assent. They were the results of a whole way of thinking which had been gradually impressed on the mind of France by a series of writers of whom Rousseau was the latest, while at the same time he was the most influential, partly because he was the latest, and still more because he appealed more powerfully than any other to that side of the French intellect which unites sensibility with logic. M. Guizot only makes very slight reference to this; for to have really sketched the generation of 1789 would have required a volume, and not a few pages in a review ; but on the other hand, he calls our attention to two erroneous moral assumptions, which he thinks lay at the bottom of most of the intellectual and social errors of the Revolution. It is this part of his essay that strikes us as both new and valuable. No one acquainted with the French history and the French literature of recent times, can doubt that these moral errors, if we are to call them errors, have largely penetrated the French mind, that they appear at every turn and in every shape, and that no legacy which the generation of 1789 left to its successors has been more fruitful of consequences both for good and evil.

The first of these assumptions in the sphere of morality is that man is naturally good, and that it is society that sets him wrong. This was a doctrine that the men of the Revolution laid to heart. They were fired with a hope and sustained by a conviction that all Frenchmen were like imaginary Roman citizens presented to them in the fictions of popular history— ardent, noble, self-denying, grand ; and that it was only rogues of aristocrats, and priests, and English who made the modern world so much lower and feebler than the ancient. They, too, were Romans, they exclaimed, as they heard of Brutus, and Cincinnatus, and Cicero. They were all that was or ever had been of great and good. Living in a time of excitement, unused to think, and devoid of experience in great changes, they felt as young enthusiasts feel at the end of a novel, whom fancy persuades that they are as lovely and constant as the heroine, and as noble, and graceful, and fortunate as the hero. But the same mode of regarding man and society appears in the newest works of French literature. The whole burthen of Les Misérables is that all men and women, even down to convicts and their companions, are very good and very great, but that society corrupts and crushes them. This, as M. Guizot remarks, presents a rather startling contrast to the teaching of the Bible, that we are all, conceived in sin and have all gone astray. We may be sure that, as there is so startling a contrast, the theory of the men of the Revolution was in some sense wholly wrong. But, in another sense, it may be, in a large degree, true. If we look to the individual man as he appears to himself in the presence of God, there is no truth but the one truth, that he is desperately wicked. This is the sentence which every heart capable of comprehending the idea of holiness passes on itself. To the end of the world, in our age as much as in another, this will remain true. But man has a different feeling when he thinks of himself in relation to other men, and to the place which he occupies on this earth. He then becomes conscious of a nature which is not wholly bad, but is in a great part good—which is capable of ridding itself, in fancy and for a moment, of the presence of evil—and which might issue in far nobler fruits than it does if it were allowed, if men lived together to make each other better, if intellectual light were permitted to beam on their darkness, and if a place for repentance were given to the erring. This seems to us as true as the doctrine of inborn sin does when applied, as the Bible applies it, not to man in society, but to the individual in the presence of his Maker. But Catholicism had attempted to bind society within the rules, and to judge it by the doctrines, which the Bible applies to individuals. And nothing could be more natural, nor, perhaps, at one time more salutary. Modern society derives much of its elevation from the action of Catholicism on the individual. But the time came when the error of judging the world, and its social life and its governments, by the standard of an individual in his devotional moments, grew oppressive. Man required a new fountain of belief in himself, and in the possibility of what he might and could do in this life, in order to dispel the torpidity and despair which had taken possession of society when the doctrine of the worthlessness of man in the sight of God had passed, as in the Europe of the eighteenth century, into the doctrine of the worthlessness of the mass of mankind in comparison with the claims of the few who are born to govern.

The second of these moral errors was that man is all-powerful. It seemed to the generation of 1789, when on the eve of the Revolution, as if everything might be done, and happiness secured, and the beauty of humanity displayed on earth, if only man rose in his power, and hurled into dust his oppressors, and the enemies of his advancement. This feeling, too, is little in harmony with the teaching of the Book which says that man is weak and frail and that he must bear his burthen meekly, and walk humbly and as a pilgrim in the world. But for society, such as society under a monstrous compromise between Catholicism and the State had got to be in France a hundred years ago, the idea of the power of man—the belief that he could make things indefinitely better if he pleased—was an idea involving far more of good than evil. That society can be so remodelled as to make the individual what he ought to be, and that the real remedy for human misery is to reconstitute society, are positions which have been strained far beyond the limits of truth in the writings of such men as Victor Hugo. But it was perfectly true that society had wrapped itself up in a cloak of old, complicated, fine-spun errors, and that a vigorous effort was necessary to tear this cloak away and it was most salutary for France that the men of the Revolution did, in a large measure, tear it away. That an attention to man's happiness and comfort and intellectual advancement in this life is, at this period of the world's history, essential for the promotion of his religious life, has been among the greatest of the truths which a slow and often unwelcome experience has brought home to the minds of the present generation; and it was the men of revolutionary France who, more than any others, first set the idea of this afloat. It is quite true that society is badly constituted, and was far worse constituted seventy or eighty years ago ; and it is also true that the improvement of society is, in many cases, the only door to the improvement of the individual. French writers have pushed these truths beyond the limits of absurdity, and have worked themselves into a belief that Society alone is in fault when the individuals errs ; but in itself, the notion of looking to society principally, and to the circumstances in which he may be placed, as determining whether man generally is to become better or worse in Europe, is one the truth of which is attested not only by reflection on current history, but by the efforts now made on every side to improve the condition of those on whom society presses severely, as the indispensable preliminary to improving the sufferers themselves.

No view of the French Revolution, and of that general revolution throughout the civilised world which appeared most signally in France, appears to us more true than to regard it as a revolt against the double process of applying the truths revealed in the individual sinner and saint to the body of human society, and of at the same time acquiescing in the substitution of military tyranny and oligarchical caste when this application proved practically impossible. It was a great thing that, when this process had been carried on triumphantly for some time, men should at last have dared to say that they felt much better and more noble than they were supposed to be, and that they were determined to give themselves a chance of showing what they could be. No wonder that in spite of all its horrors, in spite of all its mischievous errors about equality and the rights of the majority, and in spite of all the palpable sophistries it had borrowed from Rousseau—the generation of 1789, which dared to say this, is still held in honour by France. We in England have embraced the main truths on which this generation seized, and have embraced them much more gradually, quietly, and sensibly, because our preparation had been long going on, and because Protestantism is so much more elastic than Catholicism in recognising the claims of the world beside those of the Church. It is with the greatest ease that, in England, we make our Protestantism square with the social facts around us, and the social theories that prevail. English Protestantism so readily incorporates secular views of man and his duties below that it incorporates them insensibly. That which, for the sake of our national pride and our peculiar scheme of society, we wish to be true, our religion easily permits us to think true. But Catholicism resisted far more strenuously the inroads of a set of opinions which it thought adverse to Christianity; and this gave rise to a struggle in France which is still going on, and the issue of which still divides the French mind.— Saturday Review.

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW ), Friday 12 June 1863, page 6

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/13079913

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE.

 By M. ISAACS.

Modern times have seen the resurgence of nationalistic spirit in virulent form, in which the life of the individual is subjected entirely to the overwhelming demands of the State in which he lives. In some countries, such as Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, individuality was completely repudiated, so much so that human lives and humanity generally were regarded as inanimate objects or as pieces of machinery, to be employed at the will of the State which exercised dominion over them. Such a condition can only result in an utter brutalisation of man and his fellows, and this is the warning note trumpeted throughout his book, "Nationalism and Culture," which Rudolf Rocker never wearies of sounding.

This monumental work, within its framework of the socio-political development of contemporary society evolves a philosophy of individual liberty and freedom that is akin to the anarchistic systems of Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin. The trend of modern political thought is to regard the nation as everything and the citizen, as nothing. Behind the "will of the nation exist the selfish interests of those who feel themselves called to interpret this will in their own sense, and to impose it by force on the people." In tracing the development of this outlook and disclosing its origin, the author reveals a passionate and fiery opposition to any thought which, either in theory or practice, shackles and impedes the right of the individual to a full and effective expression of his own nature.

The will to power has always been one of the strongest motives in the development of human social forms, and starting from this premise Rocker builds up a theory of social progress that is as novel as it is illuminating. Not that he disregards the economical concepts that form the keystone of general socialist philosophy. On the contrary, Rocker, readily admits that the Marxian doctrine of economic necessity plays some part in the evolutionary process of civilisation, but criticises those socialist thinkers who make of economic determinism the immutable and fundamental substratum of society. In its place he would set the "brutal spirit, of mastery," whose influence he traces throughout the whole course of history.

It is in communal organisation, in the ordering and government of communities, states and nations that the desire for power finds its greatest expression. Church and state are the forms within whose framework institutions of political power can exercise the coercive authority that bolsters up their continued existence. Such institutions, however, are always the instruments of small minorities seeking to impose their will upon the people as a whole, concealing behind a welter of high-sounding principles and seemingly noble ideals, real ambitions of perpetuating the powerful grip in which they clasp all social intercourse.

The quest for power, the tyrannous imposition of the authority of the state, are the antagonists of cultural achievement which, for Rocker, provide for mankind the summum bonum of human happiness and self-expression. Cultural advance and, for that matter, culture generally, expresses "the anonymous force of the community" as a whole, as opposed to the notion of power "which always reverts to individuals or small groups of individuals." Here, then, lies the quintessence of Rocker’s theory, namely, that only in a society in which the State has completely disappeared will man be able to indulge to the full his cultural motivations, his cultural energies. Thus Rocker exclaims:

"Power always acts destructively, for its possessors are ever striving to lace all phenomena of social life into a corset of their laws to give them a definite shape. Its mental expression is dead dogma; its physical manifestation of life, brute force. This lack of intelligence in its endeavours leaves its imprint likewise on the persons of its representatives, gradually making them mentally inferior and brutal, even though they were originally excellently endowed. Nothing dulls the mind and soul of man as does the eternal monotony of routine, and power is essentially routine."

And later on:

"Power is always the sterile element in society, denied all creative force. Culture embodies procreative skill, creative urge, formative impulse, all yearnings for expression. Power is comparable to hunger the satisfaction of which keeps the individual alive up to a certain age limit. Culture, in the highest sense, is like the procreative urge, which keeps the species alive. The individual dies, but never society. States perish, cultures only change their scene of action and forms of expression."

There are many similar expressions of the inherent enmity between nationalism, the bulwark of power, and culture, and it is only natural that the stronger the state, the more completely "man's cultural activity comes under the control of power, the more clearly we recognise the fixation of its forms, the crippling of its imaginative creative vigour and the gradual atrophy of its productive will."

Thus, in his analysis of the social theories of Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel and a host of others, Rocker emphatically drives home his main contention that in all cases of centralised authority, man deals another blow to the progress of cultural integration. Some forms of state authority may be milder than others, thereby permitting some degree, of cultural extension. But, inevitably, as soon as freedom of expression impinges upon and threatens to curb the jealously guarded sway of despotic power, the cloak of benevolence is violently thrust aside, and autocracy ruthlessly asserts itself once more.

. . .

The state is a concept that the human mind will find exceedingly difficult to abolish as an indispensable condition and prerequisite of human association exercising the fullest freedom and independence. Yet Rocker cogently and effectively argues that it is in the free interplay of human relationships and adherence that man can attain mastery over his environment. Man measures his cultural stature by the manner in which he elaborates and plans, in a purposive and deliberative fashion, the elements of nature, moulding them to his use so as to serve all human ends and accordingly breaking down the artificial barriers of race and language of political forms and economic orientations.

''The history of the state," Rocker says, "is the history of human oppression and intellectual disfranchisement. It is the story of the unlimited lust for power of small minorities which could be satisfied only by the enslavement and exploitation of the people." After speaking of Italy, Hungary, Poland, Austria, Russia and Germany (Rocker wrote his book in 1936—Ed.) he goes on: "that along this pathway there lies no rosy future for men is clear to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear... It is not the form of the state, it is the state itself which creates the evil and continually nourishes and fosters it. The more the government crowds out the social element in human life, or forces it under its rule, the more rapidly society dissolves into its separate parts; which then lose all inner connection and either rush thoughtlessly into idiotic collisions over conflicting interests or drift helplessly with the stream, not caring whither they are borne."

In an epilogue written in 1946, Rocker applies his conclusions to the immediate contemporary scene and finds in Russia a new absolutism whose internal and external forms greatly surpass anything that had been achieved by the power politics of old time absolutisms. In what he sees as Russian imperialism he discerns a future menace to world security, inasmuch as he claims that the Russian leaders have acquired an insatiable thirst for power which constitutes a greater danger to general culture and social progress than any other form of tyranny. Russia is breeding a nationalism which bids fair to surpass in oppression and subjugation not only capitalism, but also the worst forms of German Nazism. For this reason Rocker holds that a real federation of European peoples is the only means of bridging the hostile rivalries between European national groups, fostered and encouraged by a narrow-minded nationalism detrimental to all civilisation.

No thinking person can be but greatly disturbed and stimulated by this remarkable opus, disturbing because those who believe in democracy generally can only envisage democracy operating within the limits of national entities, and stimulating because the book opens up new vistas to be pursued in the never-ending search for eternal peace among humankind. With Rocker we can reiterate the words, of the French historian, Edgar Quinet: "The peoples will not rise to greater heights before they have fully realised the depth of their decline."

* Nationalism and Culture, by Rudolf Rocker. Translated from the German by Ray E. Chase. Rocker Publications Committee, Los Angeles, California.

Australian Jewish Forum (Crows Nest, NSW.), Wednesday 1 December 1948, page 26 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/266821256/29907662

BARBARISM AS AN IDEAL

 An Examination of a Tendency in World Affairs

By S. M. Melamed, in the “Reflex”

The age old barbardom, which for centuries lay fettered and hidden beneath the rigorous forms of an old culture, is now awakening again, at a time when the cultural process has been completed and that of civilisation begun—that bellicose, virile joy of one’s own strength which only holds in contempt the rationalistic thinking of the epoch which is satiated with literature—that unbroken instinct of the race which wishes to live differently than under the pressure of studied books and theoretical ideals.—Oswald Spengler, “Hours of Decision,” p. 12.

No other generation in the western world has witnessed as many transvaluations as our own. They are of world historic significance not because they jeopardise economic, political and social systems or theological concepts, but because they affect man’s very soul. The startling political events of our time are but the accompanying phenomena of deep spiritual transformations. Many of our most ingrained convictions and deep-rooted beliefs, which grew out of a long and slow evolutionary process, are being destroyed before our very eyes. The speed with which these startling developments have taken place has so anesthetised the Occidental that but few people understand their historical significance. Neither the rise of Christianity, the destruction of the Roman Empire, nor the French Revolution can be compared in significance with the startling drama now being enacted here before our eyes.

The change in the form of government of a great nation is not necessarily a world historic event. Even a new spiritual allegiance of a people need not change the rhythm of the world historic process. But when the conception of man as a spiritual being and as the central figure of life is ruthlessly attacked and he is reduced to a purely economic atom, as in Marxist Russia, or to a purely zoological creature, as in Racial Germany, humanity is faced with the startling drama now being enacted here before our eyes.

For thousands of years the foremost representative of Occidental culture ought to impress upon man that he is the meaning and goal of all life. Religion pictured him as the crown of creation and as the highest peak in the cosmic process. In the making of man, so the religious myth of the Bible goes, God almost exhausted His creativeness. Although fashioned out of dust, man is not a part of nature only but partakes of the divine spirit. In the figure of the Redeemer, the idea of man’s close relationship to God finds its most powerful expression.

While religion placed man above brute nature by emphasising his relationship to God, philosophy stressed his spirituality. In foregoing his desire, in modifying his urge and in overcoming his instincts, in order to help his fellow man, man rises above nature and attains true humaneness. This doctrine of man was most impressively pronounced by Socrates and Plato. Forgotten during the Middle Ages, it was given new life by the Renaissance and Reformation and held sway until the World War.

In the plastic arts, too, the appreciation of man’s position in life found its expression in the glorification and idealisation of his figure. The great artists of classical antiquity and of the Renaissance were captivated and inspired not by the phenomena of brute nature but by suffering, aspiring and thinking man. This tendency only reflected the spirit of these respective periods.

It was this concept of man as the central figure of life, and as the crown of creation, which made modern culture possible. He created science in order to free himself from nature; he formulated jurisprudence in order to free himself from the natural instincts and urges of his fellow man; he invented ethics in order to free himself from evil; he conceived politics in order to safeguard his liberty and happiness, and he developed economic and social forms in order to free himself from want. In all his efforts, endeavours, and struggles, he was primarily animated by one desire—to preserve his spiritual individuality. Whether believer or heretic, he was inspired by the thought that he was the crown of creation.

II

“Man is a beast. I will repeat it again and again. All the moralists and social ethicists who seek to escape . . . are only beasts with broken teeth.” Such is the ethical doctrine of Oswald Spengler, the greatest German intellectual figure since the days of Nietzsche, as formulated in his latest book. “Hours of Decision” (p. 14). This conception of the beast-man is an extension of Schopenhauer’s will-man and Nietzsche’s blonde beast. That man is not a creature made in the Image of God but only a part of brute nature has become the basic conviction of Marxist Russia, Caesaric Italy, and Racial Germany.

Birth, marriage, and death, the most solemn moments in man’s career, have become of trivial significance in Soviet Russia. Burial is a profane and prosaic act as unsentimental as the disposal of any other worn out mechanism. Marriage is a matter of mere registration and birth a purely animal process. In Fascist Italy, the Government seeks to increase the population so that the cannon fodder of the country be increased. The quantity producing rabbit and the quality developing horse are the symbols and sources of inspiration of this policy. The Italian is taught to think in purely zoological terms upon the most important phenomenon of life. In Nazi Germany the new formula for the birth of a child is “Das Weib Gebirt das Tier" (“The woman gives birth to the animal”). Marriage and birth have not been profaned and secularised in Italy and Germany for reasons of political expediency, but the general tendency is no different than that of Russia.

It is no mere coincidence that in these three countries in which man has been deposed from his pedestal and reduced either to an economic atom or to a zoological creature that the sciences of man, with jurisprudence as their focal point, have been practically abolished and eliminated. The old systems of jurisprudence have been done away with and the new “systems” are merely expressions of the changing moods of arbitrary despots. Not basic laws and juridic principles, but arbitrary decrees prompted by expediency, caprice or ambition or malice are the corpus juris from which justice is drawn. The reintroduction of the torture chambers in Italy, Germany and Russia, as well as the summary executions of mere suspects of political opposition or resentment, testify best to the complete abrogation of the rights of man in these countries. Animals and mechanisms have no right. Since in these countries man is only considered to be beast or machine he cannot be the subject of rights, but like all other things he can only be an object of law.

III.

The most striking feature of the neo-barbaric world concept is its vehement rejection of reason and intellect. The social, political and economical degradation of the scholar and savant in Russia, Italy and Germany is only an expression of a powerful anti-intellectual tendency which originates in emotional mysticism. Even in Russia, with its artificial rationalisation of life and its adoration of applied science, only the Marxist scientist is tolerated. In all three countries the freedom of the mind and its accompanying attributes, such as intellectual honesty, sincerity, and idealism, are considered to be the contemptible legacies of decadent liberalistic and rationalistic regimes which must be uprooted. The position of men of the spirit, such as poets, artists, scientists, religionists, philosophers and scholars, is almost comparable to that of the lower castes of India. Not intellect, but will, not mind, but physical energy, not spiritual, but robust virility, is the standard of cultural life.

In Russia all professional men with the exception of engineers are most exploited by and receive less consideration from the State than any other group. It is almost unknown for working men not to be paid on time, whereas physicians, teachers, and laboratory workers often must wait months for their meagre wages. And when they do receive their wages they cannot buy nearly as much with them as can other groups. But worst of all they are regarded as potential political heretics and are treated accordingly. In Italy, the hotbed of intellectual individualism since the days of the Renaissance, every teacher from the grade school to the university is expected to teach a minimum and preach a maximum. He must constantly bring the message of Mussolini the Redeemer to his pupils. In Germany the granting of academic diplomas is predicated upon at least six months service in a labour camp. When Max Planck, the dean of German science, came to Hitler to plead for his colleagues who were deprived of their positions, he was told that ‘‘scientists being fools should not interfere in matters of the State but should mind their own affairs." As late as May 1934, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Enlightenment, in an article in his paper, "Der Angriff,” said:—

“. . . the intellectuals are an idle and generally worthless lot and in our age which demands real men they are merely in the way,”

And further he says:-—

"The intellectuals are failures and have fallen down at all decisive moments. And now when a simple labourer, an ordinary front soldier, has succeeded in making himself the leader of Germany, they are simply dying of envy and wounded self-conceit.”

It was therefore entirely consistent when some two weeks later Herr Zander, director of schools in the Berlin-Brandenburg province, proposed that the time devoted to the three R's in grammar school be reduced one-third, and that the time thus saved be devoted to physical training.

This contempt for intellectuality and its representatives finds its justification and explanation in the denial of man and in the deification of the State. Only the State has reason and it is omniscient. Consequently the mind of the individual must be subservient to that of the State, and its refusal to do so may forfeit the individual’s right to exist. Such was also the guiding principle of the Inquisition—believe or be killed!

IV.

The profound contempt for human reason so characteristic of the neo-despotism is the cultural legacy of the German Romantic School of Philosophy. Oswald Spengler is the latest powerful tremor of this tendency in German cultural life. His major opus, “The Decline of the West,” is not so much a new philosophy of history as a panegyric to the irrational, emotional, and mystic side of human life. Rationalism to him is akin to original sin. It is the source of all human aberration, the embodiment of all decadence, the clearest symptom of cultural degeneration and the agent which spells ruin to the virility of life. Rationalism to Spengler includes every manifestation of the Western mind of the past 300 years—Puritanism, Idealism, Materialism, and Romanticism. He rejects Rousseau as well as Kant, Voltaire as well as Holbach, Owen as well as Marx. They are all guilty of the crime of attempting to introduce a definite order into life and seeking to divert world history into a definite channel. All the great mottoes of modern times, such as freedom, equality, historical progress, the happiness of the greatest number, and the like, are sheer demagoguery, for human history is only war history. Hence the doctrine of and the will to international peace is an attempt to violate the . . historical process.

The unadulterated historical process manifests itself with elemental force and sweeps aside the artificialities created by the various rationalistic schools. The highest spiritual reality is not knowledge, but the religious myth. The ancient motto, “I believe because it is absurd," testifies to realistic understanding of the world. The highest political reality is the power of the great conqueror who heralds the coming of a new culture. Hence liberalism and democracy are signs of degeneration. Whenever the masses raise their heads culture is doomed, for only the great individual, privileged with unrestricted freedom, is the source of all culture. The highest social reality is the lord of the manor, the nobleman. It is he who gives life its form and colour. The domination of the myth, conqueror and nobleman form the higher order, and that of reason, masses and peace form the lower order. At present, the lower order prevails, and its continuance spells the inevitable destruction of our present culture and civilisation, says Spengler.

This deep-seated attraction to the mythical and repulsion from the rational expressed itself in Spengler's construction of the philosophy of history. All cultures are distinguished from one another by definite border lines which cannot be crossed. The ancient Babylonian culture had nothing in common with the Hindu or Chinese and the Arab had nothing in common with the Germanic. All these cultures arise within a certain landscape upon which they flourish, decay, and die like living organisms. Occidental culture, having been weakened and undermined by rationalistic rust, is about to collapse. The only culture visible on the horizon, capable of replacing the dying culture of the West, is the Russian. That the latter is overwhelmed with Marxistic rationalism which he elsewhere pronounces to be the embodiment of decadence, does not deter him from visualising a glorious coming Russian culture. For not that he hates rationalism less, but that he loves the mailed fist more. The complete suppression of democratic rule in Russia, the permanent degradation of reason, the absolute domination of the subjugator, and the idealisation and worship of might, appeal powerfully to Spengler’s romantic senses.

There is something sadistic in Spengler's conception of political history just as there is something fatalistic and arbitrary in his conception of the philosophy of history. When the masses are chained, oppressed, maltreated, tortured, and whipped by the rod of the despot, it is the normal order of things, but when they are free and happy and masters of their own destiny, history is moving with seven league boots towards catastrophe. When reason prevails, science flourishes, and life moves along an even keel, decadence is already to be seen on the horizon. But when the mind is enveloped in myth, and culture is only the privilege of the few, life attains its highest peak. If this Spenglerian doctrine is valid, Occidental history of the past three centuries is only an uninterrupted, typographical error of destiny.

There is nothing universal in man’s culture, says Spengler. All the great cultures have their own truths, logic, science, art, etc., which have no meaning or value to any other culture. A great culture is a spiritual individuality which absolutely excludes and denies any other personality. Modern man would be no worse off if the civilsations of classical and Oriental antiquity had never existed, for the languages and symbols of each culture can be understood only by its own period and people.

This cultural determinism bordering on fatalism is no less theology than is the economic determinism of Marxism. The great cultures of history, far from being encased in Chinese walls, actually empty into one another. Thus modern man derived his geometry from ancient Egypt, his foundations of algebra from the Arabs, his philosophy and art from ancient Greece, his jurisprudence from ancient Rome, his religious world picture from ancient Palestine, etc.

This theory of isolated cultures has many implications. Its presumptions are first a denial of one humanity, second, a division of the human race into aristocratic and non-aristocratic peoples, and third the supremacy of blood over mind. These presumptions have no foundation in fact. As a matter of fact all men are governed by the same laws of the mind. The history of science, philosophy and religion are replete with instances of simultaneous but independent discoveries by men of different cultures. Thus the atomic theory was discovered contemporaneously in ancient India and in ancient Greece. The conception of one God was also evolved simultaneously in ancient Egypt, Judea, and China. Gunpowder and glass were developed in China and in Europe independently of one another. Nothing, however, testifies more powerfully to the oneness of the human consciousness than the history of numerals which were developed independently of one another in all the ancient centres of civilisation.

Nor is the second presumption of aristocratic and plebeian peoples and cultures to be accepted without qualifications. Spengler’s own countryman, Felix von Luseban, one of the greatest anthropologists of modern times, completely denies the existence of superior and inferior peoples. So do those savants such as Montesquieu, Taine, Buckle, Darwin, and Lamarck, who maintain that the environment primarily gives a people its character and creativeness. Thus far, Spengler as a scientist has not discovered any concrete facts which may make the theories of his adversaries obsolete.

The same may be said of Spengler’s third presumption of the supremacy of blood over mind. Here again another great countryman of Spengler, Goethe, who was also a great scientist in his own right, maintained that the human mind cannot lay bare the innermost secrets of nature. Whether and how blood influences mind ethnically man has no means of discovering. All that man can detect is that the environment influences the mind, especially in art, religion, and science.

 The cultural clannishness with its absolute lines of demarcation of Spengler is only a glorified form of barbarism. Every barbarian considers the members of every other tribe to be the enemy which must be annihilated. The barbarian delights in the gleaming sword and the mailed fist and worships the conqueror. He surrenders to his instincts and is guided by his emotions, and when in quest of food, shelter, etc., his conduct is indistinguishable from that of the beast. But it is in these very manifestations of man's urges, instinct and emotions that Spengler sees the height of life and the source of all creativeness. His entire philosophy thus becomes a pæan to barbarism.

V.

The history of Western Europe coincides and is interlinked with the history of Christianity. Since the destruction of the Roman Empire, the great spiritual and artistic movement of Europe, whether mystical or rationalistic in form, was deeply anchored in the Christian world picture. It is only since the middle of the 18th century that the representatives of the natural and social sciences began to disregard Christian thought, although many of them continued their adherence to the church. By the beginning of the 20th century the representatives of the science were sharply divided into two camps —religious and anti-religious. This is especially true of Germany, where the Monistic Society represented the anti-Religious and the Kepler Society the religious groups. This division, although it stirred the educated groups, did not affect the masses. Not the onslaughts of science upon religion but those of Marxism estranged a great part of the city populace from the church, which now became not anti-religious but simply non-religious. Even in the Marxist camps defenders of religion were not lacking.

It was only with the rise of Nazidom that an anti-Christian wave swept the country. As early as 1921 the life of the priests in the villages of Catholic Bavaria began to become uncomfortable. In the large cities the representatives of Christianity became objects of attack and derision. Even the figure of Christ was subjected to scorn and humiliation. Hundreds of thousands of vociferous Nazis, jingoists, extreme nationalists, racialists, and neo-pagans suddenly discovered that Christianity is a foreign plant which has been sown upon German soil, and that Jesus was only a son of a foreign people which can never fathom the German mind. This anti-Christian movement won such adherents as General von Ludendorff, who served to legitimate this tendency in the eyes of the populace. It gained in strength in proportion to the success of National Socialism. When the latter finally triumphed, a bold attempt was made not only to dechristianise the church, but to introduce in its stead Germanic paganism of old. The figure of Jesus, symbolising meekness, piety, charity, and goodness was considered to be suitable only for slaves. A powerful and dominating people like the Germans require the inspiration of Wotan, who radiates might, energy, bellicosity, and severity.

This anti-Christian, pagan movement which assumed such ugly forms was fathered by Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler. Nietzsche was the first to teach the Germans that Christianity is slave morality, which was born out of a rebellion of slaves against lords. His ideals of the blonde beast and of the superman were incompatible with the basic concepts of Christianity. “The Christian God Concept,” he says in his “Anti-Christ,” “God as the God of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit, is one of the most corrupt God concepts that has ever come upon this earth.” In thus declaring war against Christianity, Nietzsche called into being those latent heretic forces which began to spread with the industrialisation of Germany.

But Oswald Spengler, even more than Nietzsche, has contributed to the development of the anti-Christian movement in Germany. In describing Christianity as a phenomenon of the so-called Magian or Arabic culture, which died with the rise of the German culture, Spengler impressed upon his country men that Christianity is not only a strange plant upon German soil, but actually belongs to a lost and petrified world. Preferring the world of action to the world of the spirit, Spengler sides with Pilatus and not with Jesus. World history is a realm of action and not of dreams, of facts and not of sentiments. "Since Christianity represents the second it must be rejected.

Spengler’s “Decline of the West” was read and accepted by millions of his countrymen in the Fatherland. Coincident with the spread of Spenglerism, such anti-Christian publicists of previous generations as Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner, experienced great revivals. So charged was the German air with anti-religious sentiments that Fritz Mauthner’s monumental “Atheism and its History in the West,” in four large volumes totalling 2,200 pages, ran through five editions in five years. So was the ground prepared in German literature, philosophy, theology, and historiography for the growth of pagan tendencies culminating in Nazi religious profaneness and barbarism.

In the cities of the English speaking world one very seldom finds such streets as Hume Street, Beacon Street, Milton or Shakespeare Avenue. But in Germany every city and town has its Goethe Strasse, Schiller Strasse, Kant Strasse, Hegel Strasse, Fichte Strasse and Schopenhauer Strasse. The memory of almost every German poet, scientist, philosopher and artist of note is perpetuated for the populace by streets named after him. No other country in the West has as many statues in bronze and marble erected to its great representatives of the spirit. The people considered the men of the spirit to be the true heroes of the nation, holding them in greater esteem than conquerors, warriors and statesmen. Every German took pride in his being associated with the "people of poets and thinkers." The respect for intellectual achievement or even for mere intellectual occupation is traceable to the influence of Immanuel Kant, Germany's greatest philosopher, who made reason the source of all reality. His philosophical theories created social values in Germany by making the intellectual the centre of social life. Just as no popular meeting in England can be successful unless graced by the presence of a prince of the blood, so could no popular meeting in Germany be of importance unless addressed by an outstanding intellectual. For over a hundred year the intellectual was the axis of social life in Germany, until the Nazis rose to power and decreed that the intellectual was a superfluous being who contributed nothing to German strength and might. From the present hostile attitude towards the intellectual in Germany, one can readily appreciate the great position he must have held in former days. The startling anti-intellectual movement culminating in the worship of ignorance and vulgarity is the product of a slow historical process which has but recently come to a head. One need only page the major works of German poetry and philosophy of the last generation to appreciate that the German attitude towards life was undergoing a radical change. Since Nietzsche's battle cry of the transvaluation of values, even his adversaries began to adopt a critical attitude towards the old order and old concepts. In the first decade of the 20th century, there was already visible in German thought a growing enmity towards the values of the nineteenth century, viz., intellectualism, mechanism, historicism, and all those life concepts which spring from a rationalistic understanding of the world. By 1930 German poetry and German philosophy reflected an ever growing irrationalism and mysticism. In the 19th century the motto of cultured Germany was reason—in the 20th century it was life. Not concepts but instincts, not ideas but urges, not definitions but sentiments are now considered to be the sources of truth. In modern German philosophy figures like Wilhelm Dilthey, Nicolai Hartmann, Friedrich Grave, Mueller Freienfels, and Oswald Spengler give powerful expression to this tendency. This forte chord in German contemporary spiritual life became fortissimo at the end of the war, when the Germans realised that great world historic decisions are made not by superior thought but by superior deeds. The cult of reason was transformed into the cult of instinct.

This anti-intellectual tendency was not confined to Germany alone. In Russia, where intellectual life was less developed than it was in Germany, but where, nevertheless, the representatives of the spirit were held in high esteem, a new attitude towards the old values became noticeable at the conclusion of the abortive revolution of 1905-06. This revolution was engineered in large measures by the intellectuals and academic youth. Some of them, like Gorki, Audrieff and Trotsky were notable figures in Russian letters. The entire Socialist Revolutionary party deduced its programme of action from purely intellectual theories. The failure of their revolution compromised the faith of the Russian youth in intellectualism. Almost overnight a swing from intellectualism to mysticism, and from rationalism to sensualism took place. The hitherto esteemed Russian classics of Dostoievsky and Tolstoy were relegated to the background, and Artzibaskeff, the author of the highly pornographic novel “Sanine,” became the literary hero of the day. Not spiritual depth or intellectual truth but urges and instincts became the ideal.

From 1906-14 one of the main tasks of the Russian Minister of Education was to suppress sexual orgies in the secondary schools of the country. Within a very short time the idealistic clan of the Russian youth vanished and paganism became the order of the day. Might became the greatest object of adoration, and the great man was identified with the powerful man.

This demoralisation of Russian life, culminating in the figure of Rasputin, enabled a determined group of Bolshevists to ride into power and to maintain it ever since. So did the manifestation of purely psychological forces pave the way for paganism and barbarism in important European centres.

That this neo-paganism in central and eastern Europe which has degenerated into economic and political barbarism is not a mere caprice of history can best be seen from the reception which Spengler’s “Decline of the West” has received in these countries. In Germany alone over 300.000 copies of this work were sold during the first six years after publication. In Austria it received the greatest popular reception since Weininger's “Sex and Character” appeared in 1906. It was read with equally great gusto in Hungary, Russia and Italy. Only in France, England and America did it fail to impress the reading public, and was politely rejected in all these countries.

Oswald Spengler, the apostle of the new Caesarism, has impressed himself upon peoples who were vanquished either politically or psychologically. Their defeat developed in them a veritable hunger for might. In power they saw their only salvation. To attain it, it was necessary to transvaluate life from reason to will, from intellect to instinct, from idea to urge. Guided by these forces, the order of the jungle settled upon the major part of the European continent. Barbarism became the ideal.

Australian Jewish Herald (Melbourne, Vic.), Thursday 17 December 1936, page 5

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/260975975/29158516#

THE NOACHIAN DELUGE.

 LECTURE BY DR. ROHNER.

The first of the winter course of lectures in aid of the Wangaratta Athenæum was delivered on Friday evening by Dr. Rohner, of Chiltern, who selected for his subject " The Noachian Deluge, viewed in the light of modern science and criticism."

 The lecturer alluded in the first place to the theory of the literal inspiration of the Bible, and said "in nursery, school and pulpit professed Christians are still taught that a denial of this assertion (literal inspiration) is rank infidelity, heresy and atheism. He who dares to doubt that the Bible teaches correct astronomy, geology, history and geography, is still denounced as a heretic by the pretended leaders of Christian thought, with the same amount of acrimony and vehemence as was Galileo, the discoverer of Jupiter's satellites, by the Holy Office. Notwithstanding the marvellous discoveries of modern science, and the flood of light let in thereby ; in spite of a more liberal interpretation and criticism of the literatures of all ancient religions, "we are still expected to believe that man was created in some fancy place in Central Asia, called Eden; that there were men in those primitive days, so-called Patriarchs, who lived to the age of upwards of a thousand years ; and that the same Jehovah who after the creation of man pronounced this work as " good," nevertheless repented again in the days of Noah, and in His almighty wrath determined to destroy the whole human race by an universal flood. Although science has long ago disproved the unity of the human race ; although physiologists have established the fact that an advancing civilisation is the best guarantee for a higher average of human life ; yet, not withstanding these facts, the book which contradicts and denounces the triumphant and laborious results of modern science is still forced upon us as an inspired and infallible work, unparalleled in the literature of all ages. It is held blasphemous to suggest that the Persians, the Chaldeans, the Brahmins, the Egyptians, and the Mahometans had and still have sacred works similar to our venerable Bible, and that these works are held to be equally inspired and infallible by a far larger number of believers than the ranks of Christianity are able to muster. We are placing ourselves outside the pale of Christianity if we look upon those precious relics of what we are pleased to term pagan religious literature as at all analogous productions to our sacred writings. The Zendavesta, the Vedas, the Shaster, the Koran, though recognised and highly esteemed by large numbers of devotees as their holy writ, as their text books of religious instruction, we are not even allowed to rank as qualitatively similar works to our Bible. Our idolatrous worship of the book has brought a majority of Christians to believe that the Bible is altogether an exceptional work — the exclusive work of God, and as such it is considered blasphemous to examine or call in question any statements whatsoever made in its pages from Genesis i. to the last of Revelations. We must either believe in the literal truth of all its writings, or be excommunicated and anathematised. Without waiting to face so formidable an alternative, I shall venture in this evening's discourse a brief and impartial examination of the most prominent details of that beautiful legend generally known as the " Flood of Noah." Dr Rohner then gave a succinct account of the Biblical narrative, remarking at its conclusion, " such is the simple succession of ideas in this narrative, which is finished in the graphic style of a painter who dipped his brushes into the glowing and gorgeous colors of an Oriental imagination." The lecturer then proceeded: — " In chapter vi. verse 7,the Lord says, ' I will destroy man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth : both man and beast and creeping things, and fowls of the air ; for it repenteth me that I have made them.' It is somewhat singular why the fishes in the waters were exempted from, this wholesale destruction, as if is hard to see why a voracious shark should be dealt with more leniently than an innocent dove. I suppose the miracle of drowning fish in water would not have found credence even in the credulous days of old Noah. But what is still more singular than this exemption of the fishes from destruction is, the contradiction of this very threat of extermination in one and the same breath, by giving the pious Noah a distinct and positive order to build an ark, in which to save, not only himself and his family, but representatives of all the beasts of the earth and the fowls of the air, and, as the text has it, ' to keep them alive.' This killing with one hand, and saving with the other, is a mark of indecision of character which only the man of a rude age could attribute to the Deity. The train of ideas here is so obviously anthropomorphous that the human nature of the penman of these passages can by no means be mistaken." After criticising the ark, its shape and unadaptability, the lecturer assumed the ark to be finished and " ready to take in her cargo of eight human passengers and a complete menagerie of all the animals of this earth, from a mosquito to an elephant, including 12 months' provisions for the lot. Imagine then this enormous task, to collect from all parts of the world seven pairs of clean and two of unclean beasts. To carry out this properly there would be required an immense number of paid agents all over the world to collect and bring to Noah, say the ice-bear from the polar regions, the lion from Africa, the elephant from India, the giraffe from Nubia, the kangaroo from Australia, the condor from America, the gigantic eagle from the Swiss Alps, and all the poisonous snakes, reptiles, and other vermin from every nook and corner of the globe." Dr Rohner then at some length proceeded to criticise and show the utter unreliability of statements contained in a work by the Rev. Joseph Baylee, D.D., which professed to explain all about the ark and its inhabitants. The book, he said, was written upon a plan common among theologians who assume the truth of a statement first, and then endeavour to prove it by unsupportable evidence. After dealing with Dr Baylee, the lecturer went on to the statement contained in Genesis i. 11. " Here we have a fine specimen of Hebrew meteorology in a poetical garb, about which it does not matter whether it be regarded as inspired truth or literal truth, for neither view can make the extravagant statements made in these passages convey the slightest amount of truth. In close connection with the forty days and nights' rain is the rising of the ark fifteen cubits above the highest mountains of the earth, or, as the text has it, Genesis vii. 20, "fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail, and the mountains were covered." This is an enormous rainfall ; indeed, a rainfall that would set all the rain gauges of the meteorologists at naught. On the Malabar coast of the East Indian Peninsular, at 11 deg. 30 min. from the equator, the fall of rain in a year amounts to 123 inches, or to a lake of water 10 feet deep ! But what is this, the highest known rainfall on the globe, in comparison with the rise of the waters of the Noachian flood. If, in the days of Noah, the mountains of the earth were of the same size as they are now, and if the Hebrew cubit is taken for 18 inches, the waters must have stood exactly 29,024 ft. 6 in. above the level of the sea, for Mount Everest is put down at 29,002 ft. above the level of the sea. According to Buchan's work on meteorology, the following are a few of the most remarkable quantities of rain which have been accurately recorded : — "At Joyeuse, in France, 31.19 in. in twenty-two hours ; at Geneva, 30 in. in twenty- four hours; at Gibraltar, 33 in. in twenty-six hours; on the hills above Bombay, 24 in. in one night ; and on the Khasia Hills, north-west of Calcutta, 30 in. on each of five successive days." " So far as we know," says the same author, " the heaviest annual rainfall at any place on the globe is 600 in. on the Khasia Hills, 500 in. of which fell in seven months during south-west monsoons." Now, taking the most favorable view of the case, and assuming that it rained during those forty days and nights at the rate of 48 in. during each twenty-four hours, as it did in Bombay for but one night, we only obtain a rainfall of 1920 in., or about 160 ft. — not water enough for the Himalayan Mountains to take a footbath in. The above examination will show you on how frail a foundation stands the assertion of orthodox divines ; that all the statements contained in the Bible are literally true." The lecturer then quoted James Heywood and Dr. Pye Smith with reference to the extraordinary and childish ideas prevalent in ancient times as to atmospherical phenomena, to the atmosphere and the shape of the earth, their utter ignorance of meteorology, &c., all demonstrating their inability of understanding, and consequently correctly interpreting the phenomena of nature. After a rapid sketch of modern scientific teaching as regards meteorology, the lecturer proceeded : " We said above that the ark had neither rudder nor sails, but we cannot find fault with the architect on this account, as he evidently must have foreseen the event of the ark sticking in an ocean of permanent ice 15 cubic feet above the highest mountain, where sails and a rudder would have been worse than useless. What Noah did at this time for water has remained an enigma since ; for if it could have rained at an altitude of 30,000 feet above the level of the sea, it would have rained rocks of ice large enough to break up the strongest iron-clad, let alone an unwieldly chest built of pine or gopher wood."

Ovens and Murray Advertiser (Beechworth, Vic.), Monday 22 July 1872, page 2

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/196858735

"I may in this place also mention the fact that a similar chest was built in the beginning of the seventeenth century by Janson, a Dutch shipwright, according to the measurement of the ark, but although it was covered with pitch, inside and outside, it went to pieces immediately, and since then I am not sure that any shipbuilding firm tried the same experiment again. But to return to our subject. We know that the capacity of the atmosphere for the supply of rain is so limited that according to the calculations of Bergbares and Johnston in their rain gauges of the world, the total average fall of rain in a year over the whole globe is only five feet in depth. But enormous as the quantity of water already is, which we assumed covered the land, it would have, nevertheless, required four times that quantity ; for unless the water stood up like a wall around the shores of the ocean, as it did sometime after during the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea, it would have been impossible for the floods to rise to a height of 29,024 feet and 6 inches, without the level of the oceans being swelled to the same extent. In either case, I ask where did all this water come from ? This was a species of creation of water which did not previously exist on the globe. And, again, after it had served its purpose of drowning all men with the rest of crawling creatures, where did the water go to ? for it is evident it could not have returned again through ' the windows of heaven,' otherwise we would not have had the grand spectacle which concludes this tragedy — the rainbow — because the sun would have been covered by clouds thousands of miles thick, in order to hold, in the form of gas or vapor, such a mass of water. You may remember that the first question, where the waters came from ? was satisfactorily answered by the celebrated Whiston, who asserts that the earth must, at the time of the Flood, have passed through the tail of a comet, and that its contact with the earth dissolved the cometary vapor or matter into water; but he forgets to account afterwards for the disappearance of the liquid element when it was no longer required. But let us hear the testimony of the most sensible and least-bigoted English divine — Dr. Pay Smith. He remarks with respect to the supply of rain, that 'If we were to imagine the air to be first saturated with moisture to the utmost extent of its capacity, and then to discharge the whole quantity, it would bear a very inconsiderable proportion to the entire surface of the globe ; a few inches of depth would be its utmost extent. ' It is indeed the fact,' continues the same learned divine in his work ' On the relation between Holy Scripture and some parts of Geological Science,' that upon a small area of the earth's surface, yet the most extensive that comes within experience or natural possibility, heavy and continuous rain for a few days often produces effects fearfully destructive by swelling the streams and rivers of that district, but the laws of Nature as to evaporation, and the capacity of atmospheric air to hold water in solution render such a state of things over the whole globe not merely improbable but absolutely impossible.' But without attempting to enter into a minute examination verse by verse of the whole account of the Noachian Deluge, an examination moreover which the further you proceed with it seriously, and taking it in good earnest for literal truth, the more you get disgusted with the task, I shall at once, and without piling on the critical agony proceed to the conclusion of the narrative, Genesis viii. 18 and 19, where it says ' And Noah went forth, and his wife and sons and sons' wives with him ; every beast, every creeping thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark.' Now, it is very easy for the writer of this chapter, inspired or uninspired, to say that Noah, in company with his family and his zoological exhibition, went forth out of the ark on a certain day, but it is not quite so easy to conceive what he and his animal companions had to live on immediately after they landed; for, in harmony with the Biblical narrative, we must assume that their twelve months' stock of provisions was used up during the sea voyage, and that the surface of the earth after the flood must have been entirely destitute of all vegetation or any other kind of food. But, even supposing Noah to have had plenty of food for himself and his motley stock of animals, it is difficult to comprehend how he could, with only eight hands at his disposal; manage to send all the beasts back to their original climates and habitations — the polar bear to Siberia, the lion into the desert of Sahara, the kangaroo to Australia, the dodo to New Zealand, the tiger and elephant to India, the ourang-outang to Bornea, the gorilla to Equatorial Africa, the condor to the Andes, &c. ; for surely all these animals could not have found the climate of the slope of Mount Ararat, wherever that mountain was, suitable to the requirements of their organisations and constitutions, even if we were to allow that the carnivorous animals resumed the peaceful and accommodating habits possessed by them in Eden, and did not interfere with lambs, kids, hares, and other equally harmless and defenceless creatures whom it must have been the plan of Jehovah to protect with as much care as the leopard, the wolf, and the hyæna. But, enough ! Let us close the Book of Books with this last illustration of the insurmountable difficulties and obstacles to a literal interpretation of the historical truth of the Noachian Deluge, and let us instead proceed to examine one or two of the most ancient parallel accounts of the hypothetical cataclysm in order to see which is the original and which the copy. It is not a little curious that of all mythological tales and legends there is not a single one which, in its principal outline and features, is so common amongst the most divers nations of the earth as is the mythical account of an universal deluge.

 The Hindoos, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Peruvians, the Brazilians, the Mexicans, the original inhabitants of Cuba, &c., &c., have all their own particular version, with a locally different coloring of a catastrophe similar to that known to us under the name of the Deluge of Noah. This fact can only be satisfactorily explained on the ground that local inundations led the several peoples to generalize the idea to the extent of an universal cataclysm — and after all, it cannot be considered so very wonderful that similar impressions should produce similar effects on similarly constituted mental organisations. The only infallible revelation made to all men alike is the revelation of the phenomena of nature. It is this sacred Book of Nature which exhibits the glory of the Unnameable One in every page with such surpassing power and beauty, and not the barren theological incrustations of dogmas and anthropomorphous creeds contained in what is generally termed sacred literature. Religions are neither contained in, nor dictated by, books, no matter how ancient. They originated from, and are based on, the ever present emotional element of our minds; they spring invariably from the fresh and warm well of the human heart itself. History teaches us plainly that all nations were in their infancy addicted to fetishism and polytheism, because their childish minds could not grasp the one in the many aspects of nature ; every physical phenomenon had its own divinity, and it was at a very late period that mankind arrived at a knowledge of one God ; and from this rule the Jews, the chosen of Jehovah, make no exception, as their own sacred books abundantly prove. But, to return to our subject, it has been settled by the best critical talent of modern days, that of all the Asiatic legends of the flood, the most ancient, and, so to speak, the prototype of them, is that of the Hindoos."

 The lecturer related the Hindoo story of the flood as contained in the epic poem Mahabarata, and compared it with the narrative in Manu Satya, referred to the Chaldean legend of the deluge, and endeavored to show that the latter had furnished the basis of the Hebrew account, having been transplanted to Canaanitish soil, and accommodated to Jewish requirements. He asserted " that the best Biblical scholars of Germany are unanimous that the origin of this Biblical legend does not date farther back than the period of the Babylonish exile." In connection with this, the lecturer quoted a remarkable passage from the first book, sec. 19, of Flavius Josephus' controversial essay against Apion, relative to the antiquity of the Jews, and attempted to prove that the Jews had borrowed the " legend of the flood" from the Chaldeans, and that they had adopted it for their own purposes, with only a slight alteration of names. After stating that time would not allow him to bring before his audience a great number of facts bearing on the narrative in question, such as matters of chronology, the Babylonish solar and lunar years, the geographical position of the scene, etc., the lecturer went on to say :—' Only one more remark, and I have done. As I may have been considered by some to have, perhaps, too freely adopted and used a method of interpreting Scripture, in dealing with the legend of the Noachian deluge, greatly at variance with the orthodox and stereotyped commentaries in the Bible of a Kitto and a Scott, &c., I desire, in conclusion, and before I take final leave of my subject to draw your attention to a very important point with respect to the proper method of interpreting the so-called Sacred Scriptures, that point being, never to lose sight of the fact that the Bible has been thoroughly proved to be the unmistakeable work of human hands as much as any other book that was ever written; that of that book we have neither a complete manuscript by the pretended original authors of the different component parts, nor a correct text of the whole work with the Divine stamp of infallibility on its title-page ; not to speak of the almost countless errors which are contained in the translations into modern languages, which are circulated in thousands of copies amongst the unlearned and blindly-believing masses as the only true Word of God, and that whilst the number and selection of the Canonical books vary with the various Christian sects, all claiming to present the only true copy of the Word of God, it is extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible to arrive at a satisfactory decision between the contending parties. I have, therefore, for my own guidance laid down this rule, to read and inwardly digest the book, like any other book of Classical antiquity, and to hold fast what is good in it, of which I admit there is a great deal, and to reject what is bad, of which I confess there is no inconsiderable amount. Another good and safe rule in reading Scripture is, in my opinion, that whenever we meet with passages, doctrines and sentiments against which our reason, our hearts and our humanity revolt, we should carefully avoid ignoring the voice of our conscience ; following the inspiration of our heart and common sense rather than the doubtful inspiration of passages breathing hatred, vengeance, and eternal damnation. The lecturer instanced the lex talionis of Moses as opposed to the mild and merciful teachings of Christ, and contrasted the teaching of David in the 109th Psalm, the ' prayer of curses,' with the prayer of Christ, 'who in his very death-agony blessed his mortal enemies and prayed to His Father to forgive them on account of their ignorance,' and proceeded : ' In spite of the plainness and obviousness of meaning in these and a thousand similar passages, we are told by over, or rather, mislearned theologians that it requires a vast deal of learning to understand the Word of God, and that it is a great presumption to follow the light of human reason in its interpretation. Christians of the Reformed Church especially should remember that the leading motto of the Reformation was, 'Freedom of inquiry and the right of private judgment.' They should remember Luther's words to his faint-hearted friends before he went to the Diet of Worms, ' I will go if there were as many devils as there are tiles on the roofs of the houses,' may with equal justice and propriety he applied to those unyielding and stubborn opponents of social, political, and religious progress within their own Church. But this right of private judgment is so sparingly used, and so little encouraged in our days, that a man who in church would venture to give expression to his own private views, in contradiction to the parson preaching a sermon, would most likely be silenced by an outraged crowd, and cried down, or ejected by the congregation. The true Word of God, you may be sure, requires no learning to understand it ; for if it did, God would be something like the father who offered hard nuts to his children as food, knowing at the same time that the teeth were not strong enough to crack them. If the Bible contains the true Word of God, the meaning of that Word must be clear, distinct, and unmistakeable. But so far from this being the case, every reader has his own construction and interpretation, which he prefers to that of every one else. Limiting our remarks to the New Testament alone, we find that Tischendorff in comparing the three most ancient codices, the Sinaitic, the Vatican, and the Alexandrian, with our English authorised version, establishes at least ten different readings to each page of his annotated edition of the New Testament text, or above 4000 variations between the first chapter of Matthew, and the last of Revelations. Now, it does not seem to require so vast an amount of learning to see and comprehend that a book which admits of so great a variety of readings, cannot convey a clear and distinct idea of its import or purpose. This same sentiment is-very tersely expressed in that apple of discord, ' Essays and Reviews,' by Benjamin Jowett, the equally courageous and learned author of the article, ' On the Interpretation of Scripture,' where he says, ' If words have more than one meaning, they may have any meaning.' Instead of being a rule of faith or of life Scripture becomes the expression of the ever-changing aspect of religious opinions. The unchangeable Word of God in the name of which we repose, or are expected to repose, is changed by each age and each generation in accordance with the passing fancy. The book in which we believe all religious truth to be contained is the most uncertain of all books because interpreted by arbitrary and uncertain methods."

 " Similar in meaning, and equally momentous are the words of Baruch Spinoza, on the same subject and with which I intend to conclude my lecture. Spinoza says at the commencement of the seventh chapter of his ' Tractacus Theologico-Politicus,' ' That the Scriptures are the Word of God is in every body's mouth, and it is also said that they teach true happiness, and point out the way of everlasting life to man. But the thing itself is plainly judged of very differently, for the generality of men seem to care for nothing less than to live according to the precepts of Holy Writ, and whilst some are seen eager to parade their own conceits for God's word, others under pretext of zeal for religion seem only solicitous to force the rest of the world to think as they do themselves. Theologians, I say, have hitherto shown themselves especially ingenious in extorting their own conceits and figments from the letter of Scripture, and in supporting their various conclusions by divine authority. They never proceed more rashly and with fewer scruples than when they set about interpreting the Scriptures. If they show anxiety about anything it is not lest they should connect error with the Holy Spirit ; but lest they themselves should be convicted of mistake, and so have their proper authority treated with contempt. But did mankind feel that hearty conviction of the excellence of the Scriptures which they are ready enough to avow with their months, they would pursue a very different manner of living ; their souls would not be disturbed by so many discordant passions nor distracted by such ardent hatreds; neither would they make so many and rash attempts to interpret Scripture, and to produce novelties in religion. They would not venture to embrace as scripture doctrine aught which was not most plainly set forth as such in scripture itself. Then, too, would sacrilegious men who have not feared to tamper with scripture (remember as the most flagrant instance of such tampering the promulgation of the Law under Josiah, B.C. 624, and the occasion thereof as recorded in 2 Kings xxii.) in many places have withheld their hand from such wickedness. But vanity and audacity have gone so far that religion is made at length to consist less in obeying the decrees of the Holy Spirit than in adopting and defending the commentaries and conclusions of men, the effect of which is that, instead of teaching charity and good-will, religion becomes the vehicle of hatred and discord in the world, and all under the name and pretext of zeal for sacred things. With such ills, moreover, has been associated superstition, which teaches men to despise reason and nature and only to admire and respect that which these alike ignore. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if some, whilst striving to excite a greater reverence and respect for Scripture, have actually explained it in such a way as to make its precepts seem repugnant both to common sense and nature. This is the reason why such profound mysteries have been supposed to lurk in Holy Writ, and why, in searching after these, to the entire neglect of useful truths many have lost their way, and have ascribed their own delirious dreams to the Holy Spirit, and expended their strength and ingenuity in defending absurdities. Let us, therefore, remember and constantly bear in mind that true religion is not to be found in the books of men, and that the true God is not worshipped exclusively either in Jerusalem or on Mount Gerizim, but as the Great Master said, in our hearts."

MAN'S PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE.

 By Alfred Russel Wallace.

The following remarkable article, taken from the New York Independent, is by the joint discoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection. Dr. Wallace and Herbert Spencer are now the only survivors of that small band of English scientists, including Darwin, Huxley and Tyndall, who introduced and defended the theory of natural selection, which has so profoundly influenced all philosophy.

 It is a most remarkable thing to find a great scientist like Wallace arguing on scientific grounds for a reading of man's place in the physical universe, which so exactly echoes Bible teaching. Dr. Wallace says : —

 " To the early astronomers the earth was the centre of the visible universe, sun, moon, planets, and stars all alike revolving around it in more or less eccentric and complex orbits, and all were naturally thought to exist as appendages to our globe and for the sole use and enjoyment of man—' the sun to rule by day, the moon and the stars to rule by night.' But when the Copernican system became established, and it was found that our earth was not specially distinguished from the other planets by any superiority of size or position, it was seen that our pride of place must be given up. And, later, when the discoveries of Newton and of the many brilliant astronomers who succeeded him, together with the ever-widening knowledge derived from the growing power and perfection of the telescope and of improved astronomical instruments, showed us the utter insignificance even of our sun and solar system among the countless hosts of state and the myriads of clusters and nebulæ, we seemed to be driven to the other extreme and to be forced to recognise the fact that this vast, stupendous universe could have no special relation to ourselves any more than to any other of the million suns and systems, many of which were probably far grander and more important than ours, and perhaps fitted to be the abode of more highly organised beings.

 During the last half-century, and perhaps much longer, popular writers have often dealt with the problem of the habitability of the planets by intelligent beings, and the probability of other suns being attended by other trains of planets similarly inhabited, and the most diverse and even opposing views have been held as to the inferences to be drawn from these supposed facts. Sir David Brewster held them to be almost essential to an adequate conception of the power and wisdom of the Deity, and in some way bound up with the doctrines of Christianity, and this has been the view of many of the teachers of religion. On the other hand, the tendency of all recent astronomical research has been to give us wider views of the vastness, the variety, and the marvellous complexity of the stellar universe, and proportionally to reduce the importance of our little speck of earth almost to the vanishing point, and this has been made use of by the more aggressive among modern sceptics to hold up religious creeds and dogmas to scorn and contempt. They point out the irrationality and absurdity of supposing that the Creator of all this unimaginable vastness of suns and systems, filling, for all we know, endless space, should have any special interest in so pitiful a creature as man, the degraded or imperfectly developed inhabitant of one of the smaller planets attached to a second or third-rate sun ; while that He should have selected this little world for the scene of the tremendous and necessarily unique sacrifice of His Son in order to save a portion of these " miserable sinners" from the natural consequences of their sins, was, in their view, a crowning absurdity too incredible to be believed by any rational being. And it must be confessed that the theologians had no adequate reply to this rude attack, while many of them have felt their position to be untenable, and have renounced the idea of a special revelation and a supreme Saviour for the exclusive benefit of so minute and insignificant a speck in the universe.

 THE LATER SCIENCE.

 But during the last quarter of the past century the rapidly increasing body of facts and observations leading to a more detailed and accurate knowledge of stars and stellar systems have thrown a new and somewhat unexpected light on this very interesting problem of our relation to the universe of which we form a part; and although these discoveries have, of course, no bearing upon the special theological dogmas of the Christian, or of any other religion, they do tend to show that our position in the material universe is special and probably unique, and that it is such as to lend support to the view, held by many thinkers and writers to-day, that the supreme end and purpose of this vast universe was the production and development of the living soul in the perishable body of man.

 The Agnostics and Materialists will no doubt object that the want of all proportion between the means and the end condems this theory from its very foundation. But is there any such want of proportion ? Given infinite space and infinite time, and there can be no such thing as want of proportion if the end to be reached were a great and worthy one, and if the particular mode of attaining that end were the best, or perhaps even the only possible one ; and we may fairly presume that it was so by the fact that it has been used and has succeeded. 

The development of man as a spiritual being with all his intellectual powers and moral possibilities is certainly a great end in itself, so great and so noble that if a universe of matter and ether as large as that of which we have now obtained some definite knowledge were required for the work, why should it not be used ? Of course, I am taking the view of those who believe in some intelligent cause at the back of this universe, some creator or creators, designer or designers. For those who take the other view, that matter and ether, with all the laws and forces without which they could not exist for a moment, are in their essential nature eternal and self-existent, no such objection is tenable. For the production of life and of man then becomes merely a question of chance —of the right and exact combination of matter and its complex forces occurring after an almost infinite number of combinations that led to nothing. On this view the argument as to our unique position, derived from the discoveries of the new astronomy, is even more forcible though hardly so satisfactory, because it also teaches us that if man is a product of blind forces and unconscious laws acting upon non-living matter, then, as he has been produced by physical law, so he will die out by the continued operation of the same laws, against which there is no appeal. These laws of nature have been finely described in the late Grant Allen's striking philosophical poem, which he has entitled ' Magdalen Towers,' and which was written when he was an undergraduate at Oxford : —

 They care not any whit for pain or pleasure,

 That seems to us the sum and end of all, 

Dumb force and barren number are their measure,

 What shall be shall be, though the great earth fall.

 They take no heed of man or man's deserving,

 Reck not what happy lives they make or mar.

 Work out their fatal will unswerv'd, unswerving,

 And know not that they are !

 It is the object of the present paper to set forth the nature of the evidence bearing upon man's position in the universe and to summarise the various lines of research that converge to render it at least a thinkable and rational hypothesis. Although most of the facts and conclusions are well known separately, and have been set forth by both scientific and popular writers, I am not aware that they have been combined as I now attempt to combine them, or the conclusions drawn from them which seem to me to be the obvious ones.

 Are the Stars Infinite in Number ? 

— It has often been suggested that the stars are infinite in number and that the steller universe is therefore infinite in extent ; and if the preponderance of evidence pointed in this direction our inquiry would be useless, because as regards infinity there can be no difference of position. In whatever part of it we may be situated that part can be no nearer the centre than any other part. Infinite space has been well defined as a circle, or rather a sphere, whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

 As the telescope increased in efficiency through the labors of Dollond and Herschel it was found that every increase of power and of light due to increased diameter and of object-glass or mirror greatly increased the number of visible stars, and this increase went on with approximate equality of rate till the largest modern telescopes were nearly reached. But latterly increased size and power has revealed new stars in a smaller and smaller proportion, indicating that we are approaching the outer limits of the starry system. This conclusion is further enforced by the fact that the numerous dark patches in the heavens where hardly any stars are visible, and those seen are projected on intensely dark background, as in the ' coalsacks' of the southern hemisphere and rifts and channels in the Milky Way itself, continue to present the same features in telescopes of the very highest powers as they do in those of very moderate size. This could not possibly happen if stars were infinite in number, or even if they extended in similar profusion into spaces very much greater than those to which our telescopes can reach, because in that case these dark backgrounds could be illuminated by the light of millions of stars so distant as to be separately invisable, as in the case of the Milky Way itself. The only other explanation would be that the star-system is penetrated in several directions, by perfectly straight tunnels of enormous length compared with their diameter in which no stars exist, and this is considered to be so improbable as to be unworthy of consideration.

 The same conclusion is reached by means of that powerful engine of research, the photographic plate. When this is exposed in the focus of a telescope for three hours, a much greater number of stars are revealed than any telescope can detect, but longer exposures add less and less to the number, again indicating that the limit of stars in that direction is nearly reached. 

Yet again, the method of continuing the stars of the various astronomical magnitudes gives a similar result. At each lesser magnitude the number of stars is about three times greater than that of the next higher magnitude, and this rule applies with tolerable accuracy down to those of the ninth magnitude. The total number of visible stars from the first to the ninth magnitude is about 200,000. Now, if this rate of increase continued, the number down to the seventeenth magnitude, the faintest visible in the best modern telescopes, would be about 1,400 millions. But both telescopic observation and photographic charts show that there is nothing approaching this number, it being estimated that the total number thus visible does not exceed 100 millions — again proving that as our instruments reach farther and farther into space they find a continuous diminution in the number of stars, thus indicating an approach to the outer limits of the stellar universe. 

AN ISLAND IN SPACE !

 But perhaps the most striking proof of the limited extent of the universe of luminous stars is that dependent on the laws of light. This has been long known to astronomers, and it has been very clearly and briefly stated by Professor Simon Newcomb, one of the profoundest of mathematical astronomers. He tells us to imagine a series of concentric spheres, each the same distance apart from the first, which includes only the stars visible to the naked eye. The space between each pair of these spheres will be in extent proportional to the squares of the diameters of the sphere that limit it ; and has the light we receive from each star is inversely proportional to its distance from us, it follows that if each region were equally strewn with stars of the same amount of light from each region, the diminution of light from each star being exactly compensated by the vastly greater numbers in each successively larger sphere. Hence it follows that if these concentric spheres were infinite we should receive an infinite amount of light from them, and even if we make an example allowance for stoppage of light by intervening dark bodies, or by cosmic dust, or by imperfect transparency, of the ether, we should at least, receive quite as much light from them as the sun gives us at noonday. But the amount we actually receive is so immensely less than this as to prove that the concentric spheres of stars beyond those visible to the naked eye cannot be very numerous. For the total light of all the stars is estimated to be not more than about one-fortieth of moon-light, which is itself only about one five hundred thousandth of sunlight. This proof of the limited extent of the stellar universe is therefore a very forcible one, and taken in connection with that afforded by telescopic research, as already described, is altogether conclusive.

(To be Continued)

Kerang New Times (Vic.), Tuesday 5 May 1903

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/221080798

TOLSTOY'S PLACE IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE.

 —————

EDWARD GARNETT, in " The Bookman." 

———

Tolstoy's significance as the great writer of modern Russia can scarcely be augmented in Russian eyes by his exceeding significance to Europe as symbolising the spiritual unrest of the modern world. Yet so inevitably must the main stream of each Age's tendency and the main movement of the world's thought be discovered for us by the great writers, whenever they appear, that Russia can no more keep Tolstoy's significance to herself than could Germany keep Goethe's to herself. True it is that Tolstoy, as great novelist, has been absorbed in mirroring the peculiar world of half-feudal modern Russia, a world strange to Western Europe, but the spirit of analysis with which the creator of " Anna Karenina" and " War and Peace" has confronted the modern world is more truly representative of our Age's outlook than is the spirit of any other of his great contemporaries. Between the days of " Wilhelm Meister" and of " Resurrection" what an extraordinary volume of the rushing tide of modern life has swept by ! A century of that "liberation of modern Europe from the old routine" has passed since Goethe stood forth for " the awakening of the modern spirit." A century of emancipation, of " Science," of unbelief, of incessant shock, change, and " Progress" all over the face of Europe, and even as Goethe 100 years ago typified the triumph of the new intelligence of Europe over the shackles of its old institutions, routine, and dogma (as Matthew Arnold affirms), so Tolstoy to-day stands for the triumph of the European soul against civilisation's routine and dogma. The peculiar modernness of Tolstoy's attitude, however, as we shall presently show, is that he is inspired largely by the modern scientific spirit in his searching analysis of modern life. Apparently at war with Science and " Progress," his extraordinary fascination for the mind of Europe lies in the fact that he of all great contemporary writers has come nearest to demonstrating, to realising what the life of the modern man is.

MODERN LIFE.

He of all the analysts of the civilised man's thoughts, emotions, and actions has least idealised, least beautified, and least distorted the complex dally life of the European world. With a marked moral bias, driven onward in his search for truth by his passionate religious temperament, Tolstoy, in his pictures of life, has constructed a truer whole, a human world less bounded by the artist's individual limitations, more mysteriously living in its vast flux and flow than is the world of any writer of the century. "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina," those great worlds where the physical environment, mental outlook, emotional aspiration and moral code of the whole community of Russia are reproduced by his art, as some mighty cunning phantasmagoria of changing life, are superior in the sense of containing a whole nation's life, to the worlds of either Goethe, Byron, Victor Hugo, Dickens, Thackeray, Maupassant, or any contemporary creator we can name. And not only so, but Tolstoy's analysis of life throws more light on the main currents of thought in our Age, raises deeper problems, and explores more untouched territories of the mind than does any corresponding analysis by his European contemporaries.

HUNGER FOR SPIRITUAL TRUTH.

It is by Tolstoy's passionate seeking of the life of the soul that the great Russian writer towers above the men of our day, and it is because his hunger for spiritual truth has led him to probe contemporary life, to examine all modern formulas, and appearances, to penetrate into the secret thought and emotion of men of all grades in our complex society, that his work is charged with the essence of nearly all that modernity thinks and feels, believes and suffers, hopes and fears as it evolves throughout the world in more and more complex forms of our terribly complex civilisation. The soul of humanity is, however, always the appeal of men from the life that environs, moulds, and burdens them, to instincts that go beyond and transcend their present life. Tolstoy is the appeal of the modern world, the cry of the modern conscience against the blind fate of its own progress. In the eye of science everything is possible in Humanity's life, the sacrifice of the innocent for the sake of the progress of the guilty, the crushing and deforming of the weak so that the strong may triumph over them, the evolution of new serf classes at the dictates of a ruling class. All this the nineteenth century has seen accomplished, and not seen alone in Russia. It is Tolstoy's distinction to have combined in his life-work more than any other great artist, two main conflicting points of view. He has fused by his art the science that divines the way Humanity is forced forward blindly and irresponsibly from century to century by the mere pressure of events, he has fused with this science of our modern world the soul's protest against the earthly fate of man which leads the generations into taking the ceaseless roads of evil which every Age records.

TOLSTOY AND WAR.

Let us cite Tolstoy's treatment of " War" as an instance of how this great artist symbolises the Age for us, and so marks the advance in self-consciousness of the modern mind and as a nearer approximation of the human spirit to a realisation of what life is. We have only got to compare Tolstoy's " Sebastopol" (1856) with any other document on war by the other European creators to perceive that Tolstoy alone among artists has realised war, his fellows have idealised it. To quote a passage from ourselves, let us say again that " ' Sebastopol ' gives us war under all aspects— war as a squalid, honourable, daily affair of mud and glory, of vanity, disease, hard work, stupidity, patriotism, and inhuman agony. Tolstoy gets the complex effects of ' Sebastopol ' by keenly analysing the effect of the sights and sounds, dangers and pleasures, of war on the brains of a variety of typical men, and by placing a special valuation of his own on these men's actions, thoughts, and emotions, on their courage, altruism, and show of indifference in the face of death. He lifts up, in fact, the veil of appearances conventionally drawn by society over the actualities of the glorious trade of killing men, and he does this chiefly by analysing keenly the insensitiveness and indifference of the average mind, which says of the worst of war's realities, ' I felt so and so, and did so and so ; but as to what those other thousands may have felt in their agony, that I did not enter into at all.' ' Sebastopol,' therefore, though an exceedingly short and exceedingly simple narrative, is a psychological document on modern war of extraordinary value, for it simply relegates to the lumber-room, as unlifelike and hopelessly limited, all those theatrical glorifications of war which men of letters, romantic poets, and grave historians alike have been busily piling up on humanity's shelves from generation to generation. And more : we feel that in ' Sebastopol ' we have at last the sceptical modern spirit, absorbed in actual life, demonstrating what war is, and expressing at length the confused sensations of countless men, who have heretofore never found a genius who can make humanity realise what it knows half-consciously and consciously evades. We cannot help, therefore, recognising this man Tolstoy as the most advanced product of our civilisation, and likening him to a great surgeon, who, not deceived by the world's presentation of its own life, penetrates into the essential joy and suffering, health and disease of multitudes of men ; a surgeon who, face to face with the strangest of Nature's laws in the constitution of human society, puzzled by all the illusions, fatuities, and conventions of the human mind, resolutely sets himself to lay bare the roots of all its passions, appetites, and incentives in the struggle for life, so that at least human reason may advance farther along the path of self-knowledge in advancing towards a general sociological study of man."

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Tolstoy's place in nineteenth century literature is, therefore, in our view, no less fixed and certain than is Voltaire's place in the eighteenth century. Both of these writers focus for us in a marvellously complete manner the respective methods of analysing life by which the rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the science and humanitarianism of the nineteenth century have created the modern world. All the movements, all the problems, all the speculation, all the agitations of the world of to-day in contrast with the immense materialistic civilisation that science has hastily built up for us in three or four generations, all the spirit of modern life is condensed in the pages of Tolstoy's writings, because, as we have said, he typifies the soul of the modern man gazing, now undaunted, and now in alarm, at the frightful array of the newly-tabulated cause and effect of humanity's progress, at the frightful meaninglessness, at the appalling cheapness and waste of human life in Nature's hands. Tolstoy may thus be defined in part as the modern soul's alarm in contact with science. And just as science's work after its first destruction of the past ages' formalism, superstition, and dogma is directed more and more to the examination and amelioration of human life, so Tolstoy's work has been throughout inspired by a passionate love of humanity, and by his ceaseless struggle against conventional religion, dogmatic science, and society's mechanical influence on the minds of its members. To make man more conscious of his acts, to show society its real motives and what it is feeling, and not cry out in admiration at what it pretends to feel—this has been the great novelist's aim in his delineation of Russia's life. Ever seeking the one truth—to arrive at men's thoughts and sensations under the daily pressure of life—never flinching from his exploration of the dark world of man's animality and incessant self-deception, Tolstoy's realism in art is symbolical of our Age's study of, and absorption in the world of fact, of the modern study of Nature, a study ultimately without loss of spirituality, nay, resulting in immense gain to the spiritual life. The realism of the great Russian's novels is, therefore, more in line with the age's tendency and outlook than is the general tendency of other schools of Continental literature. And Tolstoy must be finally looked on not merely as the conscience of the Russian world revolting against the too heavy burden which the Russian people have now to bear in Holy Russia's onward march of " Progress," but also as the soul of the modern world seeking to replace in its love of humanity the life of those old religions which science is destroying day by day. In this sense Tolstoy will stand in European literature as the conscience of the modern world.

Brisbane Courier (Qld.), Saturday 8 March 1902

 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/19154767