The Influence of Judaism upon the Intellectual Development of Mankind.

 (By Bernhard Pomeranz.)

(Translated for The Hebrew by P.B.)

Who is there that is not familiar with the wonderful story of the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert? The historic narrative describes how the “pillar of fire” lighted their journeyings by night and the “ pillar of cloud ” protected their wanderings by day. This is symbolical of the later history of God’s chosen people.

For nearly two thousand years, the history of our race has been one of perpetual wandering through a wilderness of exile. The “ pillar of fire ” has been the symbol of that ardent enthusiasm for the national or Jewish ideal, which has sustained and guided us through the long nights of oppression and fanatical persecution. But, with the dawn of a brighter day, when the sun of tolerance, liberty and equality rises over us, we observe the “ pillar of cloud,” symbolical of selfishness, materialism, and indifferentism which have cast their shadow over the higher aims and ideals which should animate us.

The anti-Semitic movement which, in recent times, has sprung up in many continental centres, may prove after all a blessing in disguise, and serve to fan into flame the smouldering embers of a holy patriotism and enthusiasm, causing us to rally once more round the standard of Judaism. Then may we cry unto our enemies and detractors, “You have desired our death, but the Lord has made it our blessing.”

The activity of our enemies teaches a useful lesson, teaches us our duty, what we should do and what we should leave undone; the faults we should renounce, the virtues we should cultivate.

The best source whence to gain counsel and advice is the history of our own people, for therein we find the reflection of the spirit, the tendency and the destiny of our race.

Historia Magistra Vitæ said the Romans : That which is experience to the individual is to a nation its history. History lays bare to us the life of a nation and teaches us to adapt to our future conduct the lessons of the past; as was said by Israel’s greatest prophet to the people : “ Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations.”

The study of our National History is not only useful, but it is also interesting in the highest degree. There are two powerful reasons which make Jewish history particularly attractive, and its study so fascinating. Firstly: The history of nearly every nation other than our own is the history of a single race or nation, of its origin and development, a record of its relations with its neighbours, its successes and its failures; its decay and final extinction or absorption into another race. But the history of our people on the other hand brings us into contact with all the nations of the world, and is therefore universal. We meet with the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians and the Persians; our ancestors lived in the Greek, Macedonian and Roman Empires ; we came into contact with all the national groups formed during the middle ages, and are citizens at this day in every country of the globe. We meet all on our way in the study of the history of our eternal race.

Secondly : Israel was the first nation to lay the foundation of a so-called Philosophy of History. It was the first to perceive, underlying the struggles of rival nationalities and in the complications of national policies, a universal principle; and, recognising in its existence, a distinct purpose, proclaimed its history to be, and to be intended as such, a sure guide for all the world. Again, it was Israel that first formulated the axiom that “nations prosper by virtue and perish by vice.” It is, therefore, the originator of the fundamental principles of the world’s moral code. Neither the ancient mythologies nor heathen histories teach anything like that. Hesiod and Homer are silent about it just as are Herodotus and Tacitus. In the Homeric songs it is written that the gods do interfere with the destinies of nations and direct them according to their fancies and the end of the Trojan war is described as the realisation of the will of Zeus. But all we can learn is that the gods favored some above others from pure fancy, without a moral motive, without any regard to right and justice, and frequently in opposition to justice and morality.

I shall now endeavour to show when and how Judaism has influenced the moral and intellectual development of mankind and impressed it with the stamp of its own spirit, the understanding of which will also be an indication of the proper conception of our duty and a guidance for our conduct in the present and future.

The spirit, the essence of Judaism, can briefly be characterised in the words of the prophet, “ Love truth, love peace !” Judaism appeals to the mind and to the heart of man. Its fundamental doctrine is the unity of God, as the highest principle of the world ; the existence of fixed laws in nature and the unity of all forces and of all spirits. Judaism demands peace, peace of the man within himself, peace with his fellow man, and in its last consequence, the peace of the world. The whole tendency of Judaism is contained in two words : Monotheism and Messianism. To realise and to carry to victory these ideas, is its destiny in accordance with the prophecy: “You will carry the light of civilisation before all mankind.”

Let us now observe by the light of history when and how Israel has borne this spirit into the world. For this purpose we may divide our history into three epochs :

1. The Mosaic era to the return from the Babylonian exile.

 2. The Talmudic-Neo-platonic period.

 3. The time of our dispersion.

During the first epoch of Jewish national life, the influence of Judaism upon the non-Jewish world was, as a matter of course, limited, During that time our nation was preparing itself for its high mission, its literature was in a state of development. It was during this period that the ideas relating to God and Man underwent a process of fermentation and purification in the mind and heart of our people. But even at that time, this great intellectual movement, initiated chiefly by the prophets, had considerable influence upon other nations living in the neighbourhood of Canaan. This monotheistic doctrine pierced the dense clouds of Asiatic heathenism in every direction, and the God inspired Seers of Israel not only directed their fiery denunciations at their own race, but also at the inhabitants of the surrounding countries.

Through the Babylonian exile, and later under the rule of the Persians, the Jews came into close contact with the Babylonians and the Persians. Conflicting influences now asserted themselves—civilization and enlightenment from Judaism, darkness and corruption from those nations of whom we read in the Talmud: “ The names of the Angels, as they appear in the book of Daniel, they have borrowed from the Babylonian mythology, and thus grafted a foreign branch upon their own tribe.”

Part II.

It was only during the second epoch of Jewish national life that the influence of Jewish ideas made itself felt upon the heathen world. This was effected by the Bible, by means of its Greek translation, the Septuagint.

The Holy Writ, this book of books (of which even Goethe, the “ great heathen,” said that to it he owed in a great measure his education), was to the heathen world, up to the end of the third century, a book sealed with “ seven seals.” It was by its translation into Greek, the language understood and spoken by the civilized peoples of that time, that its contents became accessible to all civilized nations and the common property of mankind. “ The Septuagint,” says a prominent writer, “was the first apostle whom Judaism sent out to convert the world.”

One can imagine the powerful and even startling impression this work must have exercised upon the people of those days. A new field of thought, conception and principle was opened at once to the heathen world. Especially were the philosophical and cultured Greeks and Alexandrians struck by this original work of human intellect, feeling partly attracted yet partly repulsed by it, until the school of the Neo-Platonics, with their great and noble thinker, Philo, as leader, made them acquainted with the spirit of the sacred writings and, by means of an allegorical explanation of its contents, brought into harmony the Jewish with the Greek philosophical conceptions.

Even at that period we find Judaism at work welding the ideas of the Orient with those of the Occident by influencing the Neo-Platonism in Egypt through the Jewish philosophical school at Alexandria, and also by impressing its character upon the “ Gnosis ” through the Essenes, the forerunners of the Kabbala, in Palestine.

In such manner the ground was prepared for the growth of a new doctrine, Christianity. By lifting the Bible out of the prescribed circle of the Hebrew scholars to whom alone its language was intelligible, and by the endeavours of the Jewish savants of Alexandria to accommodate the sacred writings to the philosophical mind of the Greek thinkers, the conviction gradually took hold of the heathen world’s representatives, that they had hitherto lived in utter darkness, and that a better and truer doctrine was now before them. They became conscious of the littleness of their mythology, and the depravity of their morals, but they were deficient in moral strength to elevate themselves to the ideal height of the Jewish doctrine. Then arose men who undertook the work of mediators, who, in order to introduce part of the Jewish doctrine into heathenism, made concessions to the latter, diluting Judaism to make it tasteful to the heathens, and thus originated a religion which, thanks to the duplicity of its character, was able to propagate and make its way in the world, but which, still in consequence of its duplicity, became necessarily the enemy of its parent, Judaism. But not only indirectly by Christianity did Judaism give a great impulse to the intellectual life of mankind, but for a lengthened period it had a direct influence upon the mind and heart of the deeply agitated heathen world.

For it is an erroneous impression, that Judaism intended to remain a national religion only without showing any inclination to proselytism. This opinion is founded upon the fact, that, with the sole exception of the converting of the Idumaces by force, Judaism has never made proselytes by fire or sword. That the aspiration to become a universal religion, as announced by the prophets, did exist and that about two hundred years before and after the Christian era the doors of Judaism were open and thousands of heathens became converts—of this there is no doubt whatever. It is proved by the many stories of conversion, which Talmudic tradition has preserved ; also by the writings of contemporary Greek and roman authorities, who censure the apostasy of their countrymen and appear angry at the influence and adoption by them of Jewish spirit. For many of these proselytes, particularly for the “ metuentes,” who only observed certain Jewish morals and customs, without having accepted the totem of the union, Judaism was in most instances only a state of transition from heathenism to Christianity. Yet many became Jews pure and simple and remained true Jews for ever. It was only in later times, when experience showed the instability of conversion, politically as well as from a religious point of view, that Judaism ceased its efforts at proselytising and expressed just anger at the disappointments experienced, in the words : “Proselytes are the most dangerous disease on the body Judaic.”

This seclusion from the outside world was in reality the result of obedience to the law of self preservation as, after the loss of their political independence the Jews were scattered over countries, where the new creed gradually took firm root, and with increasing strength and power, lessened its tolerance. The new creed did not feel secure in the possession of its inheritance, as long as there existed a people who denied its right of ownership. It was therefore a vital matter either to christianise the Jews or to eradicate them absolutely and entirely. That was the cause of the first missionary mania, of the period of hatred and destruction that evolved canonical laws against the Jews, and the bloody persecutions and fanatical disputations.

But this struggle, which on the part of Judaism was purely defensive and carried on with intellectual weapons only, assisted considerably in the strengthening of the Jewish ideas and their propagation amongst mankind. Already the disputations from which the Church expected great advantages, had an opposite effect and caused doubts in many a Christian’s heart. This gave birth to a new branch of literature, called Apologetics, intended originally only to serve as a means of defence against the attacks of religious opponents. From this branch, even non-Jewish opponents of the Church took their sharpest weapons of attack. From the publication of the contra-gospels, written by Jews in the second century, and causing much trouble to the fathers of the Church, up to the time of Frederic the Great, Voltaire and other freethinkers ; all the opponents of the established Church found material for their effective and disintegrating polemics in the writings of the Jewish philosophers.

This circumstance explains the fury of the Church against Jewish literature and its endeavours to destroy by fire the Talmud and other literary products of Jewish intellect. But these endeavours of the Church missed their aim.

Here again we see Judaism exercising a lasting influence upon the modern world. The strife, provoked by the Church against the value of the writings of the Jews of that period, caused Reuchlin and other men well versed in Hebrew, to defend Jewish literature. A great literary battle was fought for and against it. The most prominent men of that age and the representatives of the universities entered the arena, and the strife ended with an unquestionable victory for Jewish literature and saw the appearance of a man, who was destined, with Bible in hand, to make a breach in the rotten walls of the Church—the appearance of Martin Luther.

Part III.

The Reformation, which founded the Protestant Church, was, as regards Judaism, a great step towards the truth and a return to the ancient faith. The more any sect frees itself from superstition and dogma, the nearer it approaches the original source of religion, the doctrine of Judaism. One of the consequences of the reformation was the deeper study of the Hebrew language by Christian learned men, and a deeper insight into our literature by the help of the works of Jewish linguists and commentators, such as Raschi, Ebsn Esra and Kimchi, who materially assisted in the understanding of our sacred writings and the fructification of contemporary Christian writers with the Jewish spirit.

A revolution, similar to that effected in the Occident by Judaism giving an impulse to Christianity, was accomplished, seven hundred years later, in the Orient by the foundation of the Mahomedan religion.

It is well known that Mahomed communicated to a great extent with Jewish learned men, and was made acquainted by them with the Bible and the hagadic part of the Talmud. It was this acquaintance with the Jewish sacred writings, that induced him to free his fellow natives from heathenism and convert them to Monotheism. Mahomed, says Renan, was at a certain time of his life a Jew, and it can be maintained he remained a Jew all his life long. The Koran is imbued by a Jewish spirit. Mahomed has made the Jewish ideas with all their traditions and rites conform to the intellect and feeling of the Arabs, he “ Arabified " Judaism. In company with these “ Jewdified ” Arabs, with the Moors of the Pyrenaic peninsula, the Jews worked hard during the middle ages to preserve science to the world. This is one of the greatest services Judaism has done to mankind. Whereas over the whole of Europe there was entire darkness ; as with the call: “ God wills it ” crusades were undertaken and tens of thousands of families put to death, while wonders and relics are almost the only theme under discussion over the whole of the Occident; while Christianity was submerged in a bottomless abyss of superstition without the slightest inclination for the investigation of truth and science : during all that time the Jews remained on the path of science and worked to increase human knowledge. There existed during those times a legion of deep Jewish thinkers, prominent physicians, natural philosophers, and last, but by no means least, translators of the Greek and Arabic literature for the benefit of Europeans.

By translating the works of the Greek philosophers and naturalists into Arabic, and the philosophical and medical works of Arabic thinkers and savants into Latin, they provided the Occident with a knowledge of classical antiquity, and by doing so and also by making Europe acquainted with the philosophy and natural science of the Moors, they greatly assisted in the revival of science in Europe and became thus the standard bearers of Humanism in the fifteenth century.

And from another quarter the enlightening influence of the Jewish-Spanish school made itself felt, by giving birth to one of the greatest thinkers Judaism ever has produced, Spinoza. Spinoza, prompted by the writings of Ebn Esra, lays, through his Biblical and political treatises, the foundation of a rational investigation of the Bible and thus becomes the apostle of freedom of conscience. Urged thereto by the works of Maimonides and a study of the Kabala, he introduces with his “ Ethica more geometrico demonstrata” a mathematical method of investigating the science of metaphysics, and becomes the principal founder of modern philosophy.

During the 18th century the tendency of religious thought be came more liberal, more tolerant. This tolerance emanated from puritanical, Bible-loving England. It made itself appreciated throughout France and Germany where Lessing and Herder were the champions of the newly awakened freedom of thought. These liberal ideas were closely allied to the spirit of Judaism and were more in sympathy with the teachings of the Old Testament rather than the New.

Renan, not without reason and justice, calls the prophets the first true socialists. These prophets, who detested injustice, who had fiery words of condemnation for every kind of oppression, exploitation and slavery, who with all the enthusiasm of their great souls preached absolute equality in the eyes of the law and the possible perfect equality of ownership; these prophets who, as a means to counteract undue accumulation of property, had instituted the year of release :—these prophets gave to the world the socialistic idea three thousand years ago. It was the office of their successors, such men as Lassalle and Marx, to make the spark a blazing flame.

Thus we see Judaism during the whole course of its history in the workshop of humanity, industrious, courageous and untiring, working for the realisation of its ideals : truth and peace ; unity as a principle of the world, and unity as a principle for life.

And not without success.

Unity as a principle of the world is accepted to-day and taught by modern science ; in unity as a principle of life in the progress of humanity the better part of mankind already believes.

If these ideals are not yet fully realized it is not the fault of Judaism, but the cause is heathen sensuality, in the chains of which the larger part of mankind is still fastened, for, as the poet says:

Dass in der Wiege

Die Menschheit noch liege

Beweisen zur Genüge :

Mönch, Sclave und Kriege.

Therefore our mission is not yet finished. Therefore it will be our duty to fight with all our power against the spirit of darkness and injustice, against narrowminded dogmatism and bigotry, the greatest enemies of enlightenment, progress and Judaism.

Australasian Hebrew (Sydney, NSW ),  November 1896 

u/nla.news-article261028086

DIDEROT.*

In these volumes on the life and labours of Diderot and his colleagues on the Encyclopedia Mr. John Morley closes a series of studies on the literary preparation for the French Revolution. The former works dealt with Voltaire and Rousseau, and the present is appropriately devoted to the man whose name is always associated with these as one of the great intellectual precursors of the Revolution. The work is characterised by all of Mr. Morley's thoroughness of treatment, which shuns no labour requisite to the full elucidation of its subject. Its style is admirably clear, trenchant, sinewy, and is a fitting vehicle for the keen, strong intelligence and energetic thought. The series of which it forms a part cannot but be attentively studied by every one who desires to attain to an adequate comprehension of the prolific 18th century, which, after it had, under the influence of a passing reaction, been despised as superficial and merely destructive by a couple of generations, we have been made to see, by the labours of such men as Carlyle, Leslie Stephen, Lecky, and Morley, was one of the most noteworthy eras of the intellectual activity and reforming progress of the world.

Denis Diderot was born in 1713, being thus, Mr. Morley reminds us, a few months younger than Rousseau, nearly 20 years younger than Voltaire, two years younger than Hume, and 11 years older than Kant. His family had been cutlers at Langres for two centuries in direct line. Like so many of the 18th century reformers, he was a pupil of the Jesuits. He was reduced to live by his wits as a man of letters. His life for many years was conducted among harassing conditions, and "haggard perplexities." But the squalid adversity he had occasionally to endure left no "sour sediment" in his temper. His spirit was always cheerful and carelessly indifferent to the spite as to the gifts of fortune. " If he found himself absolutely without food and without pence, be began moodily to think of abandoning his books and his pen, and of complying with the wishes of his father. A line of Homer, an idea from the Principia, an interesting problem in algebra or geometry, was enough to restore the eternally invincible spell of knowledge." The versatility displayed by his work in mathematics, philosophy, social science, poetry, and criticism, is wonderful; but, owing to some indifferent stewardship of his splendid talents, it is the fact that "he, perhaps alone in literature, has left a name of almost the first eminence, and impressed his greatness upon men of the strongest and most different intelligence, and yet never produced a masterpiece." Of his highly variable work Mr. Morley presents an interesting and impartial account. He does not stint his condemnation of the indecency of some of Diderot's lighter productions, and in regard to one of them says that after glancing into it he felt the propriety of Carlyle's injunction, " to bathe himself in running water, put on change of raiment, and be unclean until the evening." Neither does he spare censure on the astonishing bad taste with which Diderot, in one of his more serious works, put some highly plain-spoken discussions of an almost undiscussible subject into the form of dialogue, in which a young lady of his time was given as one of the interlocutors. The justness and quick intelligence of his art-criticisms receive warm praise, and his anticipations of the leading thought of Lessing's Laocöon are pointed out. But it is admitted that his writings fail to explain the secret of his great reputation among his contemporaries. "Like Dr. Johnson, he was a great converser rather than the author of great books," and "his personality invested his talk, as happened in the case of Johnson and of Coleridge, with an imposing interest and a power of inspiration which we should never comprehend from the mere perusal of his writings."

Diderot's place in the literary history of his century is much less due to any single work from his pen than to his share of the production of what was regarded as the most wonderful intellectual edifice ever raised by the mind of man, and which proved one of the most potent agencies in the epoch of fundamental change soon setting in. We refer to the great Encyclopaedia, of which Diderot was the originator, the editor, and by far the largest contributor. It was Diderot's initiative which supplied the germ of this famous work, and it was his devoted slavish labour for many years which brought the daring scheme to a successful conclusion. Of this undertaking Mr. Morley supplies an interesting and valuable narrative. He draws attention to the independence assumed by Diderot and his illustrious colleague D'Alembert, and their consciousness of the power and exaltation of the calling of men of letters as qualities which "marked the rise of a new teaching order, and the supercession of the old. The highest moral ideas now belonged no longer to the clergy, but to the writers; no longer to official Catholicism, but to that fertilising medley of new notions about human knowledge and human society which then went by the name of philosophy." It was from the writers rather than from the ecclesiastics that the high ideas came, which reacted on the church itself, and raised it to a higher level of intellect and morality. " It was no Christian prelate, but Diderot, who burst the bonds of a paralysing dogma by the magnificent cry, Détruisez ces enceintes qui rétrécissent vos idées! Elargissez Dieu !" In the meantime the Church had no weapons to oppose to the reforming efforts of the new literary and scientific teachers, save relentless persecution. "Official religion was then a strange union of Byzantine decrepitude with the energetic ferocity of the Holy Office." " Yet," says Mr. Morley, "I should be sorry to be unjust. It is to be said that even in those bad days, when religion meant cruelty and cabal, the one or two men who boldly withstood face to face the King and the Pompadour for the vileness of their lives, were priests of the church. In spite of the utmost efforts of the church, supported by the Government, and in spite of the discouragement and desertion of many of the most valued of its contributors, the great work went on, thanks above all else to the amazing energy and persistency of Diderot.

The character of the movement of philosophic and scientific revolt of which the Encyclopædia was the outcome and the fruit, is admirably discussed in the luminous pages of Mr. Morley. He especially dwells on its humanising tendency and the social aim of alienating the social wretchedness of mankind, which was so conspicuously kept in view throughout these 40 vast folios. The philosophy of the encyclopaedists was, as anybody can now see, imperfectly thought out. But "if the metaphysic of these writers had been a thousandfold more superficial than it was, what mattered that so long as they had vision for every one of the great social improvements on which the progress, and even the very life, of the nation depended?" "It was this band of writers, organised by a harassed man of letters, and not the nobles swarming round Lewis the Fifteenth, nor the churchmen singing masses, who first grasped the great principle of modern society, the honour that is owed to productive industry." If it is affirmed that the Encyclopaedists deliberately prepared the way for a political revolution, "let us remember that what they really did was to shed the light of rational discussion on such practical grievances as even the most fatuous conservative in France does not now dream of bringing back." In regard to religion the Encylopædia represented the principle of rationalistic scepticism, and reserved its attacks for sacerdotalism. At the same time the work excited an indirect influence on religious thought. By its means "secular knowledge was made to present a massive and sumptuous front. It was pictured before the curious eyes of that generation as a great city of glittering palaces and stately mansions; or else as an immense landscape, with mountains, plains, rocks, waters, forests, animals, and a thousand objects, glorious and beautiful in the sunlight. Theology became visibly a shrivelled thing. Men grew to be conscious of the vastness of the universe." "As," says Mr. Morley, in concluding his important chapter on this grand work, " I replace in my shelves this mountain of volumes, 'dusky and huge, enlarging on the sight,' I have a presentiment that their pages will seldom again be disturbed by me or by others. They served a great purpose a hundred years ago. They are now a monumental ruin, clothed with all the profuse associations of history. It is no Ozymandias of Egypt, king of kings, whose wrecked shape of stone and sterile memories we contemplate. We think rather of the grey and crumbling walls of an ancient stronghold, reared by the endeavour of stout hands and faithful, whence in its own day and generation a band once went forth against barbarious hordes to strike a blow for humanity and truth."

In the second volume of his book, while still pursuing the thread of Diderot's life, Mr. Morley introduces sketches of three other noticeable contributions to what we may call the revolutionary literature of that day. We refer to the book of Helvetius on L'Esprit, Abbe Reynal's History of the Indies, and Baron Holbach's famous System of Nature. In this book, with its avowed atheism and materialism, and its fierce denunciations of the crimes and injustices of civil governments, were "gathered up all the scattered explosives of the criticism of the century, into one thundering engine of revolt and destruction." The vigorous attacks of the book on the "religious and political errors which have changed the universe into a valley of tears" form, says our author, "an incessant refrain that sounds with hoarse ground-tone under all the ethics and the metaphysics of the book." Some of its pages make us feel "as if Robespierre were already haranguing in the National Assembly, Camille Desmoulins declaiming in the gardens of the Palais Royal, and Danton thundering at the Club of the Cordeliers. We already watch the smoke of the flaming chateaux, going up like a savoury and righteous sacrifice to the heavens." Its author "lived to get a glimpse of the very edge and sharp bend of the great cataract. He died in the spring of 1789. If he had only lived five years longer he would have seen the great church of Notre Dame solemnly consecrated by legislative decree to the worship of Reason, bishops publicly trampling on crosier and ring amid universal applause, and vast crowds exulting in processions whose hero was an ass crowned with a mitre."

Our author, in his account of the declining years, which were also cheerful and peaceful years, of Diderot's life, glances at the imbecility by which the clergy were blinded to the nature of the position. In their complaints against the resolute attacks against the system of which they were the official champions, "we have no word of recognition that the only remedy for a moral disease is a moral remedy. The single resource that occurred to their debilitated souls was the familiar armoury of suppression, menace, violence, tyranny." In the midst of the rapid,smooth, arrowy drift of the current to the cataract that was now inevitable, the life of the weary but staunch and strenuous fighter whom we have under notice quietly passed away in 1784. With all his faults of conduct and temperament, his fitfulness of intellectual power, the somewhat slapdash and impromptu character of much of his best work, he had from the first to the last fought on the side of enlightenment, and progress, and equal justice, and human liberty ; and it is not for the generation which shares in the triumphs he helped to win to judge him unkindly.

* Diderot and the Encylopædists, by John Morley. London; Chapman and Hall 1878.


Australasian (Melbourne, Vic.), 19 October 1878, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article143001846

THE DANGER OF EUROPE

BY SIR PHILIP GIBBS.

X.—THE FAILURE OF CIVILISATION.

Before 1914 civilisation seemed safe, and rather good. It seemed to most of us who thought about the matter at all—the majority of people took it for granted—that we had definitely beaten the evil forces that make for the misery of mankind. The brute beast in human nature seemed to be chained up for ever, at least over wide territories of the civilised world, though occasionally it might escape in wild places like the Congo or in the slums of great cities.
We had passed (we believed) through dark periods of history into the Enlightened Age. The old gaiety and idealism and faith of the Middle Ages which had redeemed the brutality and ignorance of those times had been followed by the cruelty of religious wars, and then by the passionate outbreak of the French revolution, with its wild cry of liberty and equality, and then by the long agony of the Napoleonic wars, which left Europe exhausted and miserable. After that the invention and development of industrial machinery revived the prosperity of many nations, but produced a reign of ugliness and a new tyranny of wealth over sweated labour, which was worse in England, certainly, than the period of warfare. It took the people from the fields into the factories, were they were subject to poisonous conditions and economic slavery. It stunted their souls as well as their bodies, it withered the beauty of children fastened to the looms. It created the slum, with its foul habitations, its criminal outcasts, its gin palaces, its thieves' kitchens, its debtors' prisons, with the gallows waiting for those caught in the wheels of "justice." Even the London of young Charles Dickens was a city in which tragedy and brutality, cruelly and crime, lurked in dark courtyards, narrow alleys, work-houses, foundling hospitals, prisons, and schools. The names of Squeers, Fagin, Little Dorrit, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield recall to one's mind the misery inflicted upon young children, and the dark shadows that lurked behind the smug respectability of early Victorian London. But thanks to men like Dickens, and a gallant band of reformers and idealists, the worst evils of industrialism were gradually removed. The cruelty of the penal laws, which had sentenced men and women and young boys and girls to long terms of penal servitude, or death itself, for petty crimes produced by the evil conditions of their life, were abolished. Primary education was established, raising the standard of life and manners. A wave of Liberalism and humanitarianism gave the working people a chance of decent life, enabled them to gain political liberties, and thereby many reforms in the condition of their labour, and, above all, so penetrated the spirit of the people in all classes that cruelty was checked, brutality refined, and civilisation secured, it seemed, to a very notable extent. In many countries of the world, notably the United States, Germany, and England, there was a rapid progress in the quality and character of social life.
The majority of the population was well fed and well dressed, with a constantly rising standard of home comfort. The higher luxuries and beauties of life which in old days had been the privilege of a small aristocratic class were enjoyed as a matter of course by an immense middle class. Education was free to all, and books multiplied and cheapened so that there was hardly a barrier to knowledge.
This widespread education, though often trivial in its quality, owing to the flood of popular and frivolous literature, had a great effect upon the minds of peoples. It made them tolerant of other people's ideas and creeds, taught them sympathy with suffering. Art was popularised. Beauty was no longer the perquisite of rich and leisured folk. In public museums and picture galleries; in prints and papers, the poorest citizen could, if he liked—many did— enjoy the great masterpieces of all times, or reproductions of them, and understand their spiritual message to the world. All over Europe, except in the most backward countries, there was rapid advance of knowledge, an immense enthusiasm for liberal ideals, a steady improvement in the ordinary code of manners and morals. In millions and hundreds of millions of little homes there was not only comfort in a material way, but also a spirit of well-being, of peace, and security. The young generation had a wonderful time. Parents were no longer severe in their discipline, schools were places of delight, or at least not places of terror, as in earlier times.
In every phase of life from childhood upwards brute beast was chained up and kept out of sight. Many believed that it had died a natural death, killed at last by education and enlightenment, never to arise again in the heart of the civilised world.
When so many people were reading pleasant novels and poetry from which the ugly realities of life were left out, or listening to good music and sentimental ballads, attending lectures on charity and good citizenship, learning every day of some new scientific invention for the benefit of mankind, and bringing up their children to nice behaviour with a decent code of ethics and a sense of duty to their fellow creatures, it seemed, on good evidence, that civilisation was well established, and on its way to nobler and more splendid things. Men like H. G. Wells dreamed of a modern Utopia, where even law and punishment would be unnecessary, where there would be a bath in every bedroom, and new wonders of science applied to the comfort everyday life. It was all so comfortable, so safe, so hopeful, so genteel—for all but the very poor—until August, 1914!
Then, in Europe, everything crashed. The brute beast was unchained again, not dead, but terribly alive. All the nice little ideas of education, all its bright little code of decency and kindness, all the dreams of poets, the hopes of idealists, the watchwords of religion, the manners and morals of a generation without brutality, went down into the pits where men blew each other to bits with high explosives, choked each other with poison gas, sniped each other through telescopic sights, bombed each other's cities from aeroplanes, lived in earth-holes like the ape men of the cave age, gave up the daily bath, and were eaten by vermin, abandoned chivalry and killed each other in a shambles of mud and blood, using all their knowledge, all their science, all their civilised possessions to increase the sum of human slaughter. . . Civilisation had failed.
It has not yet recovered. Looking around Europe to-day, one must admit that there has not only been a definite breakdown of civilisation, but that all its heritage is gravely imperilled. After the devastating struggle of the last war and its awful consequences in human suffering and misery, Europe is stricken not only by a disease of its economic life, but by a disease of the soul. The chief symptoms of that disease are a deep pessimism which robs many people of the will power to resist avoidable evils, a loss of faith in any kind of Divine or spiritual purpose in life, an abandonment of the ethical code of Christianity, and a revival of pagan belief in physical force, tribal rights, and the material basis of life.
It was, of course, inevitable that the tremendous shock of the war should have broken the faith of many people from its old moorings. It smashed the foundations of philosophy in the minds of many simple men and women who had believed them to be so strong and enduring. All those nice, old, comforting watchwords of the Christian home seemed like mockery. "God is love." They had believed that. But now, in time of war, their preachers taught from a text of God is Hate. They were not to for give their enemy "seventy times seven" but to go on hating him and killing him and hating him as much after war as before it. "See how these Christians love one another!" said the old pagans, and the very moon laughed down on the trenches where masses of men waited for another attack at dawn, all Christians, worshipping the same God, using the same prayers. . . . Perhaps somewhere God wept.
After the war there was a further loosing of the old restraints which had belonged even to those who merely kept to the Christian code of ethics by tradition and custom rather than by faith and conviction. In the celebrations of victory in many cities and countries it was a new paganism in full riot—wild pagan women, the ecstasy of pagan youth liberated from the dark jungles of death, an orgy of joy in the life of the senses which had been so thwarted and denied during the years of war. I saw it from one end of Europe to the other, in dancing halls, in the night life of European capitals, in its streets. Christianity itself reeled.
The reaction came with disappointed hopes. It came most sharply to those who had held on to idealism, not yielding to paganism. Hundreds of millions of people among victor nations and vanquished had only reconciled themselves to the war because of the promise that after that bloody sacrifice the world would be "made safe for democracy," that militarism would be dethroned for ever, that the common folk of Europe would be safe in their homes, with a better chance of reward for their labour, with brighter and cleaner lives, with justice and liberty and peace as their payment for their war work. Those things did not happen. They have not happened yet. There is less reward for labour in Europe—no chance of labour even for millions of men in many countries—and less safety for the common folk, and no kind of justice or liberty or peace between nation and nation, but a rising tide of hatred, new causes of quarrel, preparations for another and different kind of war. The leaders of the world have failed. The people of Europe have failed. Cynicism and fatalism have replaced the generous emotion that uplifted many hearts for just a little while after peace. Now they are back again on the basis of Force. Might is Right between nation and nation, as in the old days of the robber barons, and worse than in those days, because the barons, on the whole, were not bad fellows, and had a certain kind of chivalry. Is it any wonder that there is a disease of the soul in Europe—the creeping paralysis of despair?
Somehow or other education has failed. What was the use of all those schools and colleges, all those pleasant novels and pretty poems, all the newspapers with their quick, cheap news, if the end of it is to be—Armageddon and poison gas?
What was the cause of that failure of education in the Enlightened Age? It was, I think the evil spirit of Nietzsche with his gospel of force which invaded German philosophy, and the complete indifference, or rather the absolute antagonism, of the military, and aristocratic castes in all European countries to the liberal ideals of the common folk. Teachers and preachers in most of these nations had not advanced with the spirit of the age. They were in England, as well as in France, the supporters of militarism, "Jingoes" of the most advanced type, and recruiting agents for the army and navy. Their motives were admirable, their patriotism was high minded, but their education, mostly classical and unscientific, did not enable them to see that the industrial system established in Europe was dependent on peace, and that the advancement of science had been so rapid that a war between highly civilised nations would be utterly different from the old style of warfare, in which professional armies had the field to themselves, and, whatever the fortunes of war, did not affect very much the life of their people.
Spiritually the rulers of Europe, their system of education, and their influence of youth of the well-to-do classes, were not in pace with the advance of science or with the liberal thought of all those reformers, idealists, and peaceful citizens who believed the world had finished with the barbarism of international conflict except in outlying regions beyond the pale of civilisation. In France, in Germany, in Russia, even in England, the old regime, the traditionalists, the military caste, was less educated in the spiritual values of life than the writers of books and their average readers, and hopelessly out of touch with the spirit of tolerance which had permeated the common thought of civilised peoples. Education failed because its most advanced teaching had failed to enter the minds of the rulers, their statesmen, their castes, and their military academies. They were thinking in terms of the eighteenth century instead of the twentieth.
Indeed, it is true to say that mankind as a whole had not caught up morally or spiritually with the scientific discoveries of their age. Nor have they done so yet. In the old days knowledge progressed so slowly that men were able to adapt themselves to its revelations. Their moral nature advanced with their control of natural forces. They remained masters of the instruments invented for their use. Their mind were superior to their machines. But see what has happened during the past hundred years, even during the past twenty years. Scientists suddenly broke through to knowledge which had been veiled from mankind through all the ages. In less than a hundred, years they have discovered the knowledge of forces which were unknown or but dimly apprehended for two thousand years before. They created engines which revolutionised all the age-long habit of mankind, and altered the natural conditions of life as it had been lived since the beginning of history. These engines, increasing in power, in speed, in intricacy of action, so that many of them seem not only human but superhuman, have put a responsibility upon the moral character of men to which they are not yet equal.
Men are not the masters of machines. Machinery is becoming the master of men. At least, it is exactly true to say that men have made no laws, have not risen to any new spiritual codes which control the use of those mighty engine which they have created.
It is the great betrayal of science. For science and all knowledge, should be adapted to the use of men, and should be used for the attainment of spiritual power in humanity, and surely not to destroy mankind. Yet to that we have come. Science is now the instrument of slaughter. The monstrous machines it has invented are a menace to the very life of their creators.
In the last war human courage, the noblest qualities of character, physical strength and beauty, were of no avail against mechanical force. What was the splendour of youth when some pig-like lout 40 miles away, might pull a string, and by liberating the force of a great gun send a high explosive shell to make a shambles in a crowded trench or a billet, behind the lines where heroes slept? What were the valour of soul, the dream of a poet, the vision of a great reformer, when some engine away in a muddy field could belch out death and destroy blindly the noblest of mankind? What is the value of human life itself, of its training towards civilised ideals, its care of youth its moral education, when thousands of men, the picked splendour of their race, may be swept down in an hour or less, torn to bits of blood and flesh, maimed, blinded, or maddened by a tornado of fire from massed guns, as I have seen? Surely, when it has come to that, mankind is not the master of machinery, but is at its mercy, which is merciless.
And it has come to worse than that, for since the last war guns have a longer range, a greater power of destruction, and bombs dropped from aeroplanes will destroy in greater masses not only the armed forces of a nation but its woman and children in crowded cities.
For thousands of years men of imagination, watching birds fly, dreamed of man's conquest of flight. That would be the most wonderful achievement, the most, beautiful, the highest reach of man, with all his other attributes, to Godhead. In less than 20 years after all those thousands the wonder has been achieved. Man flies more strongly and surely than the birds. He has flown above the clouds in the light of the sun. His speed of wing is miraculous. More wonderful than in the old tales of enchantment he can have breakfast in London, luncheon in Paris, and be home again for supper. Over cities and woods and fields his aeroplane flies faster than the eagle, like Mercury, the messenger of the immortal gods. And that gift to man from science has been grabbed for destruction, for the murder of babes in their beds, or dropping down death, on darkened cities. What an outrage against God What a betrayal of knowledge! What a surrender of man's moral nature to devilish powers!
These powers are uncontrolled by civilisation. There is no law for their limitation or use. They are getting out of hand, and are a direct threat to mankind. The old vicious system of competition in armaments is taking place with aeroplanes. France has 2500. Because of that, Great Britain, almost defenceless in the air, has voted credits for new aircraft. Russia is buying aeroplanes from British manufacturers and Germans. Germany is hastening up with "civil aviation," destined for war purposes. As soon as the next war is declared the wretched peoples of these nations will find themselves defenceless against their own destruction, although they are able to destroy others. For one lesson of the last war was this— One cannot guard the passes of the air against hostile craft.
There must be an international law for the abolition of aerial bombing, or the greatest cities of Europe will be laid low by this evil use of the greatest scientific achievement of mankind. Those very words were used to me, a day before I have written them down, by the most famous manufacturer of weight carrying planes in England. He said, "Though it would mean my ruin, I would vote for any international compact to abolish all aeroplanes for military purposes, and would go willingly to the workhouse if I thought that public opinion had destroyed my own inventions for bomb-carrying and bomb-dropping."
I believe the scientists of the world would be willing to make a compact for the control of the powers they have created. If not, I believe civilised mankind itself must arise and destroy the unlimited use of those powers, before it is itself destroyed. Science applied to destruction is a new diabolism, worse than that old black magic of the past, more devilish, more blasphemous, and more damnable, because it is not based on the dark superstitions of ignorant souls, but upon knowledge almost Divine in its intelligence.
Christianity has failed, because of the infidelity of Christians. Education has failed, because of its low standards of moral values and its allegiance to old catch-words and outworn ideas. Science has been betrayed by the scientists. And now democracy itself has broken down.
It is the fashion to sneer at democracy, even to abuse it. In many nations of Europe one sees a reaction of autocratic forms of government, either by monarchy or dictatorship. Parliamentary forms of government are thrust on one side, or utterly overthrown, though they were fought for as the one precious safeguard of liberty through centuries of history. Mussolini is now the hero of the reactionary mind, not only in Europe but in the United States of America, where the Klu Klux Klan is another name for "Fascism."
Democracy certainly failed. It failed to defend itself against the propaganda of hate and national egotism which was pumped into its brain and heart. It failed to live up to its own ideals and interests when, in Russia, it allied itself with a new form of tyranny, in Germany to the arrogance of a brutal militarism, and now, in France, to the gospel of Poincare. It is no wonder that democracy is almost a term of abuse and ridicule, for the democrat hauled down his colours, and made a pitiful surrender of his soul. But I am one of those who still believe in the spirit of democracy, in the government of the people by the people. It is true that democracy has not so far shown itself more tolerant than autocracy, less inclined to go to war than when it was under the heel of military despotism, more intelligent in world affairs than the old autocratic diplomacy. The French people supported Poincare in his most rigid measures, the Italian people supported Mussolini in his adventure at Corfu, everywhere the people are easily inflamed to fever by appeals to national pride (of the "hundred per cent." variety) and patriotic egotism.
Nevertheless, it is only by an enlightened democracy that the world can have peace, only by the morality and the power of democracy itself, raised to higher standards of fair play, and nobler visions of human brotherhood, saner views on the common interests of nations, that humanity can make a move forward to a better civilisation. We are not going to move forward by the intolerance of autocratic government, or by the revival of militarism. Unless the peoples of Europe regain the liberties of Parliamentary government, control of the political machine, freedom of speech and thought, and, above all, the old idealism which animated the liberal thought of all their leaders in the past, democracy will find itself enslaved, and civilisation will hardly escape all the perils I have named.
As it stands now, bewildered, crippled, demoralised, and disillusioned, swinging back fast to reactionary ideas, democracy is not equal to its task or its destiny. It must be inspired by a new philosophy of life, beginning with tolerance of other peoples, rising to a spiritual plane of thought in which men shall master the tyranny of mechanism, dedicate science to life and not to death, and re-establish moral law in their own souls, not for national unity alone, but for human service.
Democracy, the common will of common folk, believing in peace, desiring a better standard of life, ready for conciliation, loyal to fair play, not quick to quarrel, with Christian ethics, if not Christian faith, holding fast to a high code of honour, loving beauty, and charity, and human kindness, killing the Brute in man, and looking into the light of knowledge, can save civilisation from that downfall which is threatened. I see no other way in which civilisation can be saved, and no other way of escape from the danger of Europe, which is creeping close. - (Concluded.)

Examiner (Launceston, Tas. : 1900 - 1954), Saturday 9 February 1924, page 3

THE RULE OF REASON.

By Professor A. C. Fox.

THERE is a long and reputable tradition in Western civilisation about the rule of reason. It goes back to the ancient Greeks, than whom no single people have paid more homage to the rational quality in man, or used it to such telling effect. The tradition was emphasised again in the Middle Ages. This period was regarded for long as above all an age of faith — many said, of credulity; but recently there has been a striking revelation which does justice to the reasoning power of the Schoolmen. They were great arguers, and no one who uses argument can be what Plato called a misologist. . . Then, in the eighteenth century there was the so called Age of Reason, an age cold and formal in some respects, yet capable of much humanitarian zeal and revolutionary fervour. Its close saw the enormous upheaval of the French Revolution.

Our Age of Unreason.

 Now, we are not far from the 18th century, as history counts time, but we seem to be in a different world in respect to the great European tradition. It is not obvious that we place reason on the throne; indeed, we seem to accept David Hume's maxim that reason is and ought to be but the slave of the passions. It is not unfair to say that our period is more passionate than reasonable; it prefers to be moved forward by gusts of feeling rather than by the steady pressure of thought. Of course, we are scientific, and are proud of it, and never before has science had such empire. And is not science an enterprise of reason? Yes, though not so much on the side of its finished products— radios, refrigerators, aeroplanes, and the like— as in respect of its method. It is in using these products that most of us make our sole contacts with science: we know little about its method; and we can easily use the products in a thoroughly unscientific, i.e., irrational, way. If I value a radio set for its constant stream of jazz strains, or if my refrigerator makes me consume more food to my stomach's undoing, of again, if nations take advantage of invention to prepare for the passionate orgy of war: all this is not very striking testimony to outstanding rationality.

 Our Irrational Politics.

 To tell one's contemporaries that they are an irrational lot, that they are false to their great tradition, is very likely to evoke a swift and impatient denial. But let us look again. Everyone knows that in the realm of world politics there are two marked features, nationalism and dictatorship. Now nationalism can no doubt make shift to justify itself by reason, but equally without doubt it rests at bottom on such elements as fear and pride, which are emotional first and last. The drive towards national sufficiency is becoming a frenzy and an obsession; it cannot stand the cool scrutiny of intelligence. Then there are the numerous dictatorships which, despite their variations, are agreed upon hostility to democracy—to that political arrangement which is government by reasoned discussion. About 18 months ago a prominent Nazi told a London audience that his party has no time for the method of reasoned discussion. What it (and all other dictatorships) has time for is the method of appeal to the elemental passions of humanity; and it creates a justifiable suspicion that it is afraid of an appeal to reasonableness, and of the liberty of its subjects to think.

 Chaos in Art.

 It is not only in politics that this story is told. In its economic affairs the world would strike a planetary visitor as a madhouse. But move away from the twin realms of politics and business. Enter the domain of art in its wide sense, and see the same general condition. It is to be found in what is characteristically new in artistic productions. At one extreme of music is the crooner and all his family, who aim apparently at stirring, primitive emotion and nothing else; at the other extreme is the 'advanced' concoction whose striking claim to attention is its utter unintelligibility. The prose of 'new' novels has a trick of appearing as pure gibberish, while many up-to-the-minute poems may have a meaning, if one can tie one's mind sufficiently into knots. Painting has taken quite a new direction after many centuries; and although we may come in time to see where it is going, for the present it strikes most of us as an entirely aimless sprawl. It will profess to depict a human face, and present a weird jumble of alarm clocks, carrots, Towers, and eyebrows. In statuary we struggle to grasp the mind of Epstein and Henry Moore.

Darwin and Freud.

 What is the matter with us, and what has happened? It is altogether too glib to refer to the war. We must go behind that. In between ourselves and the 18th century Age of Reason, and before the war, stand the portentous figures of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. They have been made, perhaps despite themselves, the high priests of the irrational, and their influence upon the present is enormous. One of Darwin's books was the 'Descent of Man,' which has come to be understood popularly as a descent from the ape. His theory has been the cause of a general conviction, not only about our animal ancestry but also about our still savage mind. Formerly, man was defined as the rational animal: since Darwin it is a common axiom that he is a passional animal like all others, with a little extra intelligence. Freud is significant for the application to psychology, of this view of evolution, especially in his discovery of the primitive and instinctive 'unconscious' which dominates our feeble reason. He has given fresh point to Hume's dictum about the slavery of reason to the passions.

 Forsaking the Great Tradition.

 If these doctrines have sunk into the general Western mind, is it surprising that we are suffering from an epidemic of irrationalism? Of course, there have been such epidemics before, but what is peculiar about the present is that unreason and emotion justify themselves in the name of a scientific theory. The great tradition has it that knowledge is power, that man can outpace nature because he can think. Today, this tradition is being given the lie; strong feeling is said to be most proper to us, and more potent in human achievement than cool thought. Reason came on the scene as it were but yesterday, whereas passion has been garnering might and insight through ages of evolution. But, after all, it did not require Darwin and Freud — and Nietzsche — to teach men the power of emotion. The Greeks, from whom our great tradition comes, had themselves painfully emerged from barbarism and saw barbarian peoples all around them. It was just because of this that they clung so tenaciously to the power of thought, lest they should slip back along the all too easy way of unbridled emotion. The Middle Ages exalted reason (as well as faith) because they vividly remembered the passional chaos of the Dark Ages. God to them was essential reason, and a god-like world must be rationally ordered.

 The Power of Reason.

 Both Greeks and Medievalists were profoundly right. The only authority that can draw lasting respect from man is that which resides in the rational; the irrational may coerce and repress, it cannot win men and inspire them. The only force that makes steadily for order and progress is that of reasonableness; the gust of passion may produce marked change, but only in the manner of a tornado. Let him who doubts this look around him to day. The world's disorder is plainly not to be banished by further injections of highly-charged feeling. It will yield only to the onslaught of reason in its two fold character of hard thinking and fair treatment. For these are what reason brings, and in these lies its authority and its might. Reason is thinking: and this is to see a situation in its wholeness and with vivid clearness; it makes sense rather than nonsense. So long as we fog our minds with passion towards other classes or nations, we will be blind even to our own interests, for this is the nemesis of the irrational. And reason is also reasonableness, an impartial weighing of all conflicting claims, including our own, and with a firm intention of fairness. On this basis rests the beneficient rule of public law. The alternative is a short-sighted egotism which ends in over-reaching itself.

 The Paradox of Reason.

 There is a peculiarity about the rational which amounts to a paradox. It has the power to combine, and yet it insists on separating: it is both communalist and individualist. It is communalist because it presents a common platform on which all can meet, nay, on which they must meet. This is quite familiar. We always feel that if we can show the reasonableness of a proposal and that it has been thoroughly thought out, it ought to command general assent from those who can understand it at all. But contrast now what happens with emotion. We cannot be sure that emotion, apart from reasoned guidance, will be a uniting force. If any emotion should unite people, it is love; but the thoughtless affection of a parent may spoil the child and cause bitterness in the family. So it is that if a government, such as a dictatorship, relies upon strong feeling to bind its subjects to one another and to itself, it is trusting to a very shaky support. It is far better to rely on the fact that the citizens can see reason in the large lines of public policy, and that they freely share responsibility for them.
 But reason is also individualist. Its presence in a person tends to make him think for himself : and he who thinks for himself is likely to take his own line, and be more than an echo or copy of his fellows. It is no doubt for this reason that dictatorships prefer to have their subjects irrational, lest they should begin to think and question. But now we can see through the paradox. Because my reason makes me think for myself, it also by that fact asserts my freedom to think and to act as I think. But it tells me at the same time that I must think and act rationally, i.e. as I would expect all other persons to think and act. By my reason I am free to submit to a rule that aims at a wider good than mine, but in which mine is included. And my free rational action helps to make that good. In so far as any government seeks to impose any other rule, it stands condemned.
 The only dominion to which civilised man can submit is not that of dictatorship, or nationalism, or of class-consciousness whether capitalist, middle-class or proletarian. It is rather that rule by which civilisation itself has been brought about and sustained against many shocks, the empire of intelligence and justice, to which our great European tradition bears its splendid witness.

West Australian (Perth, WA : 1935,) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article32874385

A "BOXER" INTERVIEWED.

There is living in London—in fact, he holds a high position in a firm of Eastern merchants—a Chinese gentleman who has for many years belonged to the Boxers' Secret Society in China, and with whom a representative of the "Daily Express" has had a most interesting interview. "You English," he observed, speaking our language with remarkable fluency, "only look at Chinese matters from your own point of view. Ah! if you could only look at them from ours! Western civilization is to us a mere mushroom. It is a thing of yesterday. Chinese civilization is unnumbered thousands of years old. We consider ourselves at least two thousand years ahead of you.
 "There was a time when we had, like you, our 'struggle for life,' our race for wealth, our ambition for power, our haste and hurry and worry. We, too, had your clever inventions—gunpowder, printing, and the rest—but we have lived long enough to find out how essentially unnecessary all these things are. We have also had our periods of doubt, fanaticism, and dissension in matters of religion. We have had our martyrs, our Reformations, our Nonconformmists, our intolerance, and finally, our toleration. Yes, thousands of years ago.

 WISDOM FROM THE CENTURIES.

 "But, as I say, we have outgrown it all. From the experience of past centuries we have learnt wisdom; from the mistakes and disasters of our ancestors we have learnt that none of the things for which we strove were really worth striving for. Our passions and ambitions have settled down into a calm desire for happiness in this world; our religion is reduced to a philosophy of life which the test of the last two thousand years has proved to be absolutely sound.
 "We believe that the best thing to pursue in this life is happiness, and we teach our children that their happiness can only be secured by the performance of duty, by the observance of moral and business obligations, and by surrounding oneself with a circle of equally happy friends and relatives. If a Chinaman prospers beyond the lot which falls to his kindred, he finds his greatest happiness in sharing his good fortune with them. And in China we never cease to work. There is no such thing as 'retiring from business.' Work is part of our pleasure, because it is part of our duty.

A COMFORTABLE PHILOSOPHY.

"We believe in making the best of this life, which is the only one we know anything about for certain. That is the Be All and End All of Chinese philosophy. All through China you will find the same level, uniform spirit of content. You may think we live lives of ignorance and squalor and idleness, but I assure you it is not so. We are as well off as we want to be, and no man can improve on that.
 "Now, these being our circumstances, you of the western world come to us with what you call your new ideas. You bring us your religion, an infant of nineteen hundred years. You invite us to build railways so that we may fly from place to place at a speed which for us has neither necessity nor charm. You want to build mills and factories as to deface our beautiful arts and crafts, and produce tawdry finery in place of the beautiful textures and hues we have evolved after ages of experiment.
 "Against all this we protest. We want to be let alone. We want to be free to enjoy our beautiful country and the fruits of our centuries of experience. When we ask you to go away you refuse, and you even threaten us if we do not give you our harbours, our land, our towns. And now, having carefully considered the matter, we of the so-called Boxers' Society have decided that the only way to get rid of you is to kill you. We are not naturally bloodthirsty. We certainly are not thieves. But when persuasion and argument and appeals to your sense of justice are of no avail we find ourselves face to face with the fact that the only resource is to put you out of existence.

 THE MISSIONARY QUESTION.

"Consider your missionaries. They come, as I have said, with a new religion, upon the main principles of which they are bitterly divided among themselves. They tell us that unless we accept their decrees we shall suffer eternal punishment. They frighten our children and the more weak-minded of our older people and create all kinds of dissensions between families and individuals. No wonder that we will not tolerate them.
 "If we wanted your railways and machines we could, of course, buy them; but we do not. We have no use for them. We have learned to do without them. Yet you say you will force us to buy them, whether we will or no. Is that just? I say it is an impertinence—an outrage.
 "A good deal is made of the fact that we are not soldiers. Well, we have ceased to be soldiers, because we have become civilized. War is a barbarism. The effect of our having arrived at our present stage of civilization is that we have increased and multiplied beyond every other race on the face of the earth. In spite of our great mortality (which seems to be very shocking to you, although we recognise in it only a wise provision of nature), the Chinese race is increasing at a greater rate than any other people in the world.
 "We could if we chose overwhelm the rest of mankind. That we do not do so is due to the perfection of our civilization, our philosophy and our morals. We number 400,000,000 human beings, and who could withstand us if we chose to assert our power? Do you think we are unconscious of it? On the contrary, we understand it only too well. Let the white races of the earth appreciate the fact that we and not they are its masters.

 WHAT HAPPENS TO INVADERS.

 There have been twenty so-called successful invasions of China. But what has happened? Have invaders dominated the Chinese? No. The conquered have absorbed their conquerors. All have become Chinese. The very Jews who have come among us have been absorbed by our race— a thing which has never happened elsewhere.
 "Let me repeat that all the forces which divide men in the West have practically no existence in China. Politics, religion, private ambitions, the necessity for expansion, land-hunger, gold-hunger—all these have no existence in China. You think that because the Chinaman is inert, careless, and simple, he is a child. There never was a greater mistake. He has learnt the secret of being happy. His life is placid, and nothing troubles him so long as his conscience is clear. There you have our character in a sentence. Let us alone, and we will let you alone."

Evening Journal (Adelaide, SA :  1900,) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article199963220

NATIONAL DECLINE

Doctors' Dilemma in Social Diagnosis.

Psychology or Economics?

("Whither Away? A study of race psychology and the factors leading to Australia's national decline," by a Psychologist and a Physician. Angus and Robertson, Limited, 4s 6d net).

By W. CURTIS ATKINSON.

THE authors of this thought-provoking book are certainly to be congratulated on the expression of opinions that are certain to prove unpopular. Whether the fact of their being medical men fits them better than other men, as they claim, for the elucidation of social problems, is open to question.
Medical men should be able to make more enlightened inferences, because they have greater opportunities for individual and therefore social observation. That is, they should approach social questions in a more scientific spirit than most men.
But it is not scientific to totally ignore part of the evidence, and the evidence they have neglected is the whole domain of economic laws, whose maladjustment is responsible for most of the ills they decry.

THE book seeks to prove that we are in for a population stalemate in the near future, and "a rising tide of inferiority which is submerging the progressive, as it appears to have done in ancient Greece and Rome."
Some of the authors' claims respecting the superiority of the "better classes" are too tall for acceptance. It is stated that "failure to reach the higher levels is usually due to lack of refined and disciplined inheritance, lack of education, as apart from mere schooling, lack of self-control, and of a highly developed brain."
On the contrary, it is frequently found in this competitive society that the higher financial levels are attained merely through superior animal cunning as distinct from real intelligence. The qualities which make for success in modern society are not those which would animate an ideal society, for too often they are epitomised in the saying "Every man for himself," the instinct of the wolf-pack.
It seems remarkable that the authors, though they try to be scrupulously fair, can be so out of touch with modern social consciousness that they can write, "Sad is the day for any community of people, when sustenance comes to be accepted as a right of citizenship." And they dilate upon the "sense of humiliation," which was once common on the receipt of public or State "charity."

The Sickness Of Society.

Many people remember the bitter opposition of the monied classes to old-age pensions, and the talk of "pauperisation" of the recipients. But seldom or never is this term applied to the generals, admirals, and scions of the aristocracy who draw, or have drawn, pensions from the nation. In many cases merely for being "born to the purple."
They run the gamut of social ills, the need for relief work, the cessation of immigration, the drift to the big cities, and so forth. But they confuse cause and effect.
They forget these things are symptoms of the sickness of an acquisitive society and that the system is breaking down under its own weight. They seem to assume these are the only blemishes in an otherwise perfect world.
Plainly our authors do not like modern tendencies towards socialisation but prefer the Established Order.

The Unity Of History.

The judgment of the reader will depend on his historical perspective. Is history a unity or not? Most historians assume that it is. They picture history in linear progression as a huge tapeworm for ever adding new sections to its length. On this conception of the movement of mankind the idea of progress has been built, a gigantic Cavalcade.
The book under review is based on Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West." Now Spengler is obviously a great scholar and something of a genius, but he took the rash risks with analogies which tempt all intellectual pioneers. His root idea is that each Culture has its own life-history, which is the working out of its own latent destiny. He thinks that Western culture has finished its creative work, that we are in the last phase of "Winter," or "Civilisation" (as distinct from culture), that some specific and peculiar outlook on the universe is the characteristic of each group of men which have developed a Culture.

New Reading Of History.

The trouble with Spengler (and our authors) is that he takes no account of environment. The book ("Whither Away?") suffers from a certain incoherence due to jumping from one aspect of history to another. A certain amount of loose writing and repetition must put down to the fact that the authors are very busy men and had to write the book in their scanty leisure.

All praise must be given them for a provocative book. The truth of many of their charges irritates, but it is no comfort to feel that this occasional hitting of the mark is due rather to wild guessing than to correct diagnosis. They have accepted a new reading of world history too hastily, and have applied to it a bourgeois philosophy which calmly ignores economics and economic motives. Metaphysics are their undoing.

They have climbed those heights which command a view of the past, present and future of society, and it has made them giddy—so that they tell us their experiences one feels they are rather out of breath. They picture democracy a parasitic growth strangling the nation, when a truer picture would be of capitalism breaking down and falling to deliver the goods to the people, despite the remarkable resiliency of the system.

History's True Thread.

Enlisting the support of Sir Philip Gibbs (who, though a brilliant descriptive writer, is of little account as a political philosopher), the book quotes him as aptly expressing "the historical truth," viz., "that nation has survived the destruction of its gods." Maybe so, but this reviewer prefers to think that "when the half-gods go, the gods arrive," and these latter are the historians, philosophers and economists who, accepting a fundamental law of social development, take the thread of history in their hands, and make their way to a classless society.

Apparently bewitched by Spengler's fatal literary gift, the doctors apply his views as follows, (page 83):—

"If Australia is to survive as a white nation, she must alter her psychological outlook without delay by harnessing the herd instincts of suggestion, persuasion, imitation, and play so as to foster an intense national spirit in which every selfish consideration is subordinate to progress and the safety of the race. The aim need not be militaristic, but essentially disciplinary and defensive, and as such, worthy of every canon of religion. For the race it will spell a radiant future for a white civilisation in a land possessing outstanding advantages of climate and production; and for the individual it promises a larger and happier life of wholesome endeavor, working harmoniously with one's fellow men in the noble aim of the common good,"

Nationalism No Remedy.

If the authors are satisfied with the result of the fostering of an intense national spirit—and they are spread all over the earth's surface in this age of Imperialism (or if they like, the "Winter" of "Civilisation")—they must also approve of dictatorship and the totalitarian State. Their book seems a veiled defence of this. But which dictatorship? They may yet have to choose between plutocracy and the proletariat—there is no middle course.

Let me quote from a book which appeared about the same time as Spengler's, I refer to "The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation," by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, two plain, practical people who have given their lives to social analysis and the elucidation of modern history.

"We must face the practical certainty, that if the transition from Capitalism to Socialism is not intelligently anticipated, planned, and guided by the rulers of the people, the people, when the breaking strain is reached, will resort to sabotage to force the Government to tackle the job of reconstruction; and the danger is that the sabotage may go so far as to make the job impossible."

Die By Violence !—If.

And again:

"If trading without conscience is to be the order of the day, Capitalism need not hope to die quietly in its bed; it will die by violence and civilisation will perish with it from exhaustion."

A world movement needs a world conception, not a parochial and romantic view. What do our doctors propose to do about Socialism, which alone can save us from barbarism and the Wrath to Come?

Daily Standard (Brisbane, Qld. :  1935) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article186167202

REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTIANITY IN THE NEW AGE

By "SULLA."

 DURING the last few years we have become familiar with the word "Security" in connection with the political world of Europe. The importance of the term goes beyond mere questions of the Rhine frontier, of the Polish corridor, or of disarmament; it expresses a very deep need of the whole of our society. Our political leaders, our philosophers, and men of letters, even the very masses themselves, are penetrated more and more with a sense of the instability of the institutions on which our civilisation is founded. The world, we are told, must be "organised," to avoid suicidal conflicts of races, of classes, of economic interests—and the methods by which it is proposed to achieve this object have been the subject of violent and interminable debate since the peace of 1919.
 It is obvious, too, that matters can no longer be allowed to drift, even for a decade. While the affairs of the world remain in chaos, the sufferings and indignation of the workers rise higher, and the menace of revolution and war grows more urgent. Finally, the European culture, the European way of thought which triumphed all over the world in the last century, is no longer unchallenged. The military and economic power of Japan and Russia are daily the subject of discussion in the news, India seethes with revolt, and a whisper has gone out over all the East that the day of freedom is at hand; while on the Continent of Europe western culture already stands on the defensive, in fear of a coming siege.
 

 Decay of Values.

  The external menace, however, and the material disorganisation are not the sole or even principal causes of the trouble. The weakness of the programmes of reorganisation is not the sole or even the principal cause of the trouble. The weakness of the programmes of reorganisation is the neglect of a factor which is fundamental, in which lies the root of our whole disease: the decay of the values for which European civilisation stands, and the failure to recognise the true nature of the European Commonwealth. Until we are able to dig deep down into this foundation for our reconstruction, the work can be, at best, nothing but temporary and feeble.
 We speak of the "Continent of Europe" and of European civilisation without closely attending to the meaning of these terms. Europe is not a geographical unity like Australia—nor is it a racial unity. The break-up of the Roman Empire destroyed the unitary State organisation which it once possessed; but European unity survived as a spiritual, an intellectual bond, strong enough to transcend all differences of race and language in the peoples belonging to it; and other continents were made partakers of this spirit with the opening up of the new world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
 The growing strength and consistency of Nationalism makes it easy for us to forget the common soil of the life of the Western nations; but to treat "Anglo-Saxon" or "German" culture as springing in a soil of its own, as spiritually independent of the life of its neighbours, is to misconstrue the whole meaning of our history and our civilisation. On the other hand, the "Cosmopolitan" notion expressed in the League of Nations, the last child of the Liberalism of the nineteenth century, is equally false. The world has no cultural unity which all civilised nations share, except such as Europe herself has imposed upon it. If she herself has lost her spiritual grip, her sense of values, how can she hope to exert authority over the spirit of Asia? The East, free from our hegemony, will possess the weapons, the science which we have given to her; but she will use them in her own way. This fact is already becoming apparent in the case of Japan, which, while making use of Western organisation, reacts against any kind of inner transformation by Christianity or Western idealism.
 The defence of the West, then, is an urgent matter, and it is one which is the especial task of Catholics. The Western culture was—one may say almost by a miracle—preserved, at the fall of the Roman Empire, by the Catholic Church. The moral decay which had passed from the Hellenistic East to Rome, and which had sapped the whole life of the Imperial culture, was arrested by the universal acceptance of a strong spiritual discipline which re-knit the ties of social and family life, and slowly dissolved the cancerous growth of slavery which had dehumanised that world. The barbarian was tamed; his passion for war, though not destroyed, was disciplined, and even— as in the Crusades—turned to valuable ends. The world grew young again.
 The Church had done more than preserve civilisation. The new culture of the Middle Ages, if less developed materially than that of the great classical ages, was capable of expressing in its life a view of human nature which was deeper and more subtle than anything to be found even in the greatest of the Greeks. The immense importance and mystery of every personal life, the full tragedy and splendour of human destiny, the spiritual importance of freedom, the elevation of human love, of human beauty by the sacramental view of life and the world—all these values have descended from the Christendom of those ages to our modern world, and their fragments still live in the thought, even, of the enemies of Christianity.

 The Renaissance.

  The Renaissance, which tried to return to the thought and art of the classical ages, was unable to do so; the light of the ancients, permeating the prism of the Christian mediaeval mind, produced not the old but new and unexpected beauties of colour and expression. But if the world had profited from its contact with the spiritual force represented by Christianity, that force had been weakened by its very triumph. The vast wealth of the Church absorbed its leaders in material interests, and made them reluctant to face the need of reform or change in their world; spiritual deadness and corruption, a growing rigidity in intellectual and social life, began to threaten the system after the Black Death; and the slowly growing power of the princes, the changed situation produced by the opening up of the New World and the revival of ancient learning, found the old bottles incapable of containing the new wine. Europe was torn asunder; and the systematic web of thought into which the Christian values had been woven was unravelled, as the result of the erection of individual human judgment at the centre of all knowledge.
 Luther separated Religion from Reason and Church Authority; Descartes made a gap between Thought and Reality; Kant divided the Intellect from the Will, and European thought became a chaos. The Church was first subjected to the State, after being robbed of almost all her property— finally, she was excluded entirely from public life. Religion became a "private sphere" apart from the practical world, and so it has remained.
 The result has been a gradual transformation of European life, which is now complete. The decay of Christian doctrine under the dissolvent of private judgment led to efforts to find a basis for moral values in the social instinct of man, or the dictates of a "moral sense"—but these were mere quicksands, and, for the more penetrating and daring thinkers, Christian moralism, by the nineteenth century, was already questionable, and a "transvaluation of values" was called for by Nietzsche—not alone.
 New social theories, new views of marriage and sexual relations threaten to destroy family life; the dehumanisation of the industrial relations of men—the result of the separation of "Economic law" from Christian ethics —diminishes a sense of moral responsibility as between hostile "classes", while the National State has usurped the place of God and Church in its claims over the minds of men.
 

 Art and Life.

 In art, it is noticeable that the rejection of the "Sacramental" view of life, as veiling a greater reality beyond, has led to a complete distortion of the reality even of purely human beauty. Art and life are artificially separated, so that the modern city is a meaningless chaos of "pure practicality" or sheer bad taste, and its people neither care nor understand.
 Meanwhile, the poets and artists seek refuge in a dead past, or in fairyland, or throw themselves into the worship of the nation, or the machine. Others, again, express the new "transvaluation of values," breaking through all laws of form and expression, and pursuing ugliness with a passion which finds in the Congo more vital standards than in Athens.
 

 Communism.

 Finally, in Communism all the ideas which have tended to the subversion of European values have found their fullest and most systematic expression; and through the crusading fervour of its apostles these ideas are spreading among a mass unconscious of the European tradition, and deprived of all but a vague remnant of Christian knowledge and social instinct.
 This is the situation which we are called upon to face. It is no longer possible to hope that the Church will be able to live in a world which tolerates, while not accepting, her system. As the new social doctrines and standards dethrone the old, Europe as we know it will no longer be able to exist. The artificial isolation of "private patches" of individual freedom is already breaking down before the urgency of life. A religion, like ours, which imposes a rigid code of moral values backed by sanctions, which insists upon certain great truths as the most important facts in life, overflows at every point the boundaries allowed to it by the modern political and social organisation. We cannot fit into the new Empire of the machine and the massman; we cannot accept the rigid exterior control which has resulted from an interior chaos which makes freedom impossible.
 What does this mean? It means that Catholicism, with the forces allied to it, which stand for the traditional culture of Europe, must regain their control of the world of thought, upon which that of action depends. If we fail to do this, we perish—not entirely, for Christ's promise holds—but so far as our power with the Western nations is concerned. "Antiquam exquirite matrem." It is useless to say "You can't put back the clock." In detail, it is no doubt impossible to restore the past; but, for the reconstruction of the world the revival of sane traditional thought and values is indispensable. This we can do—and we must.

Advocate (Melbourne, Vic. : 1868 - 1954), Thursday 10 August 1933, page 18

THE MENACE

Not Arms Nor Policies

Profound Forces

Issue of East Against West

(Special, to "The Mercury," by Sisley Huddleston, Paris.)

(All rights reserved.)

"Oh, East is East, and West is West,
 And never the twain shall meet.
Till Earth and Sky stand presently
 At God's great judgment seat."

Between East and West there is a great gulf. One likes to dream of the solidarity of mankind, and to look forward to a time when human divisions will be erased. Yet it is hard to conceive the rapprochement of the Occident and the Orient. Never the twain shall meet, wrote Kipling. It may be that in one sense Kipling was right— that is to say that West and East will never understand each other. But it may be that in another sense, and in a more terrible sense, he was wrong, and that West and East will meet each other in the same manner as colliding trains.
 There is another sense in which the meeting of West and East can be considered—namely, in the sense of an interpenetration of ideas which may have disintegrating effects on what we are accustomed to call the Western world.
 The Chinese conflict and the Russian upheaval have turned men's attention to the great cleavage between the Occident and the Orient, for the events of China and of Russia interest us all vitally. Russia for all practical purposes must be regarded as essentially Eastern; and the great ferment which spreads from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean has lately alarmed not only the pure politician but the philosophical thinker.
 Paul Valery, a distinguished French writer, a member of the Academy, who expresses himself in somewhat obscure style and therefore is listened to only by the elite, once said that Europe, by which he meant Western Europe, that part of Europe which has been built on Latin-Greek traditions — is merely a little outjutting headland of Asia, and may be reabsorbed into the immense Asiatic world. One need not accept the pessimistic implication of such an epigrammatic statement, but that Western institutions are being attacked more seriously than they have ever been attacked before is apparent. And although the huge American continent and vast Australia, seem in some respects to stand aloof and afar from Western Europe, yet they are, as it were, the offspring, and the outposts of Western Europe, and must necessarily be affected by the strange phenomena we are now witnessing.
 Chateaubriand a century ago declared that the new danger was not the danger of an invasion of barbarians, but of an invasion of ideas. This is a profound saying. Innumerable hordes may not overrun the Western lands, putting them to fire and to sword, as in the dark ages of history. But a swarm of ideas may come out of the East and sap the bases of Western culture. So-called Communism, as it has manifested itself in Russia, is by no means the socialism of the German, Karl Marx. Bolshevism may have adopted some of his teachings, but in its essence, Bolshevism is peculiarly Oriental, and has affinities with the vague mystic doctrines of Asia.

POLITICS SHORT-SIGHTED.

Politicians must concern themselves with political consequences of the more immediate and perceptible kind, but behind these political consequences, which may be in themselves relatively insignificant, there are intellectual divergences which are beginning to affect the whole body of our social, our religious, our moral, and our mental life.
 It is this truth which Henri Massis endeavours to expound in a remarkable work which is entitled in its French form, "Defence de l'Occident." He tries to prove, with considerable success, that the Western world has been flooded, of recent years, with Eastern notions, which, whether bad or good, in themselves, must tend to shatter the foundations of European civilisation. It would be foolish to accept this thesis in its entirety, because Western though has for many centuries been impregnated with precisely the views which it is now pretended are being exported from the East.
 Nevertheless, one can go a long way with the author. One disagrees with him when he suggests that Kant and Luther are in contradiction with the Latin-Greek tradition; and one particularly disagrees with him when he argues that Protestantism, as such, has been borrowed from the East, and because it is opposed to Roman Catholicism is, therefore, a dissolving force. He overlooks the fact that the greatest of Western lands, including England and the United States, are predominantly Protestant, and are the leaders in the silent warfare that is being waged with Asiatism in all its shapes.
 Certainly, it is not my purpose to discuss Western religions, but it may be taken that Protestantism and Roman Catholicism are equally part of the tradition of the West, and equally erect that tradition as a barrier against the conceptions of the East. It is a pity that the author spoils his reasoning by taking up a narrow Romanist standpoint.
 Let us set aside this erroneous view. The case, then, becomes the stronger for a distinction to be drawn between the general conception of personality, and of order which prevails in the West, and the conception of mystic impersonality and vague confusion which prevails in Eastern philosophy and religion. One stimulates energy and enterprise. That is why the Western world has gone ahead. The other leads to nothingness, whether it be called Nirvana or Nihilism.
 One insists on the individual, sharply defined, but taking his place in the human hierarchy of a progressive society. The other washes out individuality to vanishing point, and is without a proper appreciation of social action and progress. Indeed, human action is in nearly all Oriental thought regarded as an evil in itself, and the striving which produces steady advance is taboo. The greatest good for the East is to revert to what is presumed to be the original condition of sheer oblivion. While the East yearns for extinction, the West struggles toward self-expression.

THE MATERIAL AND THE IDEAL.

Generalities are always in part false, but nobody who has studied the temperaments and teachings of representative Easterners and Westerners, can fail to see that these generalities have much validity. There may be exaggerations in Western civilisation. It may be criticised as having laid too much stress on mere mechanism, while Eastern civilisation can be criticised for rejecting the advantages of physical science. On the other side, you have a discouraging occultism with an acceptance of Pantheism, which necessarily destroys personal consciousness. On the other side, you may have a too complete separation of spiritual and material things.
 Nevertheless, the normal Westerner will not have a moment's hesitation in choosing. But the Russians have hesitated. Their tendency has always been to turn Eastwards rather than Westwards, but such mighty monarchs as Peter the Great, did their best to bring Russia into the Western world. They succeeded so far as the more educated classes were concerned, and those who came under the influence of the Court were definitely Europeanised. Yet the the number of Europeanised persons was always small, and they constituted a tiny European island in the midst of an immense Asiatic sea of uneducated and primitive peoples, who were given to superstition and pessimism. The Bolsheviks may have made sporadic efforts towards Europe, but on the whole, they have only succeeded in becoming less passive Orientals, and a spear-head directed towards the heart of Europe.
 But what of Germany. Such men as Keyserling indicate a similar destructive movement in Germany. Keyserling represents the negation of intellect, the triumph of occultism.
 Personally, I do not think Germany will succumb to Orientalism. The best observers believe that this country, which had the choice of becoming a bulwark against the East, or of becoming a ridge over which Asia might pass into Western Europe, has clearly thrown in its lot with the Occident.
 Germany has been whole-heartedly readmitted into the community of the Western nations—a wise step, having regard to the circumstances, which are not always sufficiently realised. But in Germany and in France, and in England, and indeed in most European countries, Bolshevism is at work as it is in China.
 The problem, it will be seen, is not a military problem, or even, in the common meaning, a political problem. It enters into the domain of the thinker, the philosopher, the artist, and the literary man, who has imbibed something of historical lore, and whose vision extends over large perspectives.
 Asiatism means a disaggregation of the human personality, a confused loss of being in non-being, an obliteration of social landmarks, a destruction of the hierachy of values, a decomposition and a drowning in the great evolutionary ocean of which the Karma regulates the tides which wash on the shores of the vast All of the Universe. Never was there a more formidable menace to the deep-rooted traditional Western civilisation.

Mercury (Hobart, Tas. : 1860 - 1954), Friday 26 August 1927, page 6