PREFACE
This book contains two closely related studies of the consciousness
of nations. It has been written during the closing months of the
war and in the days that have followed, and is completed while
the Peace Conference is still in session, holding in the balance,
as many believe, the fate of many hopes, and perhaps the whole
future of the world. We see focussed there in Paris all the motives
that have ever entered into human history and all the ideals that
have influenced human affairs. The question must have arisen in
all minds in, some form as to what the place of these motives
and ideals and dramatic moments is in the progress of the world.
Is the world governed after all by the laws of nature in all its
progress? Do ideals and motives govern the world, but only as
these ideals and motives are themselves produced according to
biological or psychological principles? Or, again, does progress
depend upon historical moments, upon conscious purposes which
may divert the course of nature and in a real sense create the
future? It is with the whole problem of history that we are confronted
in these practical hours. At heart our problem is that of the
place of man in nature as a conscious factor of
progress. This is a problem, finally, of the philosophy of history,
but it is rather in a more concrete way and upon a different level
that it is to be considered here,--and somewhat incidentally to
other more specific questions. But this is the problem that is
always before us, and the one to which this study aims to make
some contribution, however small.
The first
part of the book is a study of the motives of war. It is an analysis
of the motives of war in the light of the general principles of
the development of society. We wish to see what the causes of
past wars have been, but we wish also to know what these motives
are as they may exist as forces in the present state of society.
In such a study, practical questions can never be far away. We
can no longer study war as an abstract
psychological problem, since war has brought us to a horrifying
and humiliating situation. We have discovered that our modern
world, with all its boasted morality and civilization, is actuated,
at least in its relations among nations, by very unsocial motives.
We live in a world in which nations thus far have been for the
most part dominated by a theory of States as absolutely sovereign
and independent of one another. Now it becomes evident that a
logical consequence of that theory of States is absolute war.
A prospect of a future of absolute war in a world in which industrial
advances have placed in the hands of men such terrible forces
of destruction, an absolute warfare that can now be carried into
the air and under the sea is what makes any investigation of the
motives of war now a very practical problem.
..............
The
second part of the book is a study of our present situation as
an educational problem, in which we have for the first time a
problem of educating national consciousness as a whole, or the
individuals of a nation with reference to a world-consciousness.
The study has reference especially to the conditions in our own
country, but it also has general significance. The war has brought
many changes, and in every phase of life we see new problems.
These may seem at the moment to be separate and detached conditions
which must be dealt with, each by itself, but this is not so;
they are all aspects of fundamental changes and new conditions,
the main
feature of which is the new world-consciousness of which we speak.
Whatever one's occupation, one cannot remain unaffected by these
changes, or escape entirely the stress that the need of adjustment
to new ideas and new conditions compels. What we may think about
the future--about what can be done and what ought to be done,
is in part, and perhaps largely, a matter of temperament. At least
we see men, presumably having access to the same facts, drawing
from them very different conclusions. Some are keyed to high expectations;
they look for revolutions, mutations, a new era in politics and
everywhere in the social life. For them, after the war, the world
is to be a new world. Fate will make a new deal. Others appear
to believe that after the flurry is over we shall settle down
to something very much like the old order. These are conservative
people, who neither desire nor expect great changes. Others take
a more moderate course. While improvement is their great word,
they are inclined to believe that the new order will grow step
by step out of the old, and that good will come out of the evil
only in so far as we strive to make it. We shall advance along
the old lines of progress, but faster, perhaps, and with life
attuned to a higher note.
Continua
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