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[Page 79]WORLD UNITY A Monthly Magazine for those who seek the world outlook JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, Editor HORACE HOLLEY, Managing Editor

Rabindranath Tagore

Frontispiece

NOVEMBER, 1930

Postponement: The Order of the Day — Editorial

Human Nature: Perennial Excuse for War — Devere Allen

Elements of a World Culture: II. Economics — R. G. Tugwell

’Round the World Log of a Sociologist: I. Palestine — Herbert A. Miller

Apostles of World Unity: XXVI. Rabindranath Tagore — J. Vijaya Tunga

Changing Conceptions in Hinduism: I. The Idea of God — Albert J. Saunders

Leaves of the Greater Bible: II. Sikh Prayers III. Finnish Runes — William Norman Guthrie

"Too Many Farmers" — C. F. Ansley

Science and the Human Imagination — John Herman Randall, Jr.

Round Table

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE is published by WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION, 4 East 12th Street, New York City: MARY RUMSEY MOVIUS, president; HORACE HOLLEY, vice-president; FLORENCE MORTON, treasurer; JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, secretary. Published monthly, 35 cents a copy, $3.50 a year in the United States and in all other countries (postage included). THE WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION and its editors welcome correspondence on articles related to the aims and purposes of the magazine. Printed in U. S. A. Contents copyrighted 1930 by WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION. [Page 80]Photograph by Underwood & Underwood

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Apostle of World Unity [Page 81]

POSTPONEMENT-THE ORDER OF THE DAY

All thoughtful minds have been focussed during September on Geneva. Great things had been hoped from the meetings of the League of Nations this year, but few of these expectations were realized.

In decided contrast to the general optimism and confidence that characterized the Assembly meetings last September, the meetings this year were held in an atmosphere of pessimism and gloom. This was not due to any waning of faith in the need of international cooperation for which the League stands, but, rather, to recent disturbing conditions that have risen in Europe. The apparent inability of France and Italy to reach any agreement on the question of naval parity threatens to wipe out any benefits gained at the London Naval Conference, and start the nations off once again in the mad race of naval armament. The critical relations between Italy and Jugoslavia are at least alarming. The growing demand on the part of Germany and Italy for a revision of the Versailles Treaty is intensely unsettling, especially to France and the little Entente. The result of the recent elections in Germany, where both the Fascists and the Communists made unexpectedly large gains, leave Germany in political confusion and threaten the stability of all Europe. The revolutions, following one another in swift succession, in South America-Bolivia, Peru, Argentine, Brazil-with Cuba on the verge of revolt, only reveal how widespread is the spirit of revolt. It is these political conditions in the West, not to mention the continued turmoil in the Orient, together with the world-wide economic depression, that have been responsible for the pessimism at Geneva this year.

This spirit of fear was reflected in the action taken by the [Page 82]Assembly. For example, the Conference of twenty-six nations called to consider M. Briand’s proposals for a United States of Europe voted to place the whole matter on the agenda of the League Assembly, which, later, referred it to a Commission of which M. Briand is chairman, to report next year. In spite of Mr. Henderson’s strong plea for disarmament, speaking for England and backed up by Germany, Italy, and some of the smaller nations, nothing was done save to arrange for a meeting of the Preparatory Commission on Disarmament for November, and it was felt inadvisable even to fix a date for a General Conference on Disarmament, though it had been hoped it might come not later than 1931. The Committee appointed a year ago to bring the League Covenant into harmony with the Kellogg Peace Pact reported failure to reach any agreement and will continue its work for another year. In an atmosphere described as “the most stifling fog of pessimism I have ever breathed,” the statesmen of the League have found it desperately difficult to find any useful plan for dealing with the world-wide depression which is one of the chief causes of the present political unrest.

While this is not the entire record of achievements, viewed as a whole, the action of the League at this session has resulted again in the postponement of decisions that bear most directly upon the stability and the peace of the world. Is this because our problems have grown so complex and intricate as to baffle completely the available leadership? Is it due to the ignorance, the fear, the suspicion that still characterize the selfish nationalisms of today? Or is it because the time is not yet fully ripe for taking the forward steps in world organization that are increasingly demanded?

Whatever the causes for this continued postponement of decisive action, we need to remember that the League cannot move faster than the nations that compose its membership, and also, that “the very stars in their courses” are on the side of the mighty forces that are working today, through all the uncertainties and discouragements, for a saner and a better world.

J. H. R. [Page 83]

HUMAN NATURE: PERENNIAL EXCUSE FOR WAR

by DEVERE ALLEN Editor The World Tomorrow

I

There is no animal so strange as man," says the dour Carlyle in his "French Revolution." Strange indeed! for mingled with man's defiant egotism, his courage to risk his life in combat, his ceaseless conquest of natural forces, is a strain of abject self-depreciation.

Toward many of his problems man's attitude has been defeatist; but toward none so much as toward himself. He has scaled mountains, flung himself through air and burrowed for desired objects deep through layered rock; but in his own weak nature he has often seen one thing not to be conquered, too unregenerate for hope.

The doctrines of infant damnation and total depravity had their day, as pseudo-Darwinian ruthlessness and Freudian demonology have been having theirs. Far back in the primitive glories of Israel the songster twanged his lute and queried dolefully, "What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?" And men of those days did not estimate, as they do now, that the earth is no less than 300,000,000,000,000,000 miles away from the center of our universe!

There need be scant wonder that in the efforts of war-scarred peoples to discover why violence cursed the world, they should seize on the naive explanation, "human nature." No single quotation from Scripture was used in the literature of the early peace movement with such continuous reiteration as the lugubrious analysis of the Apostle James. It figures in almost every speech, [Page 84]article, tract, or book. Said he, "For whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?" Again and again the warriors on war gathered about the campfire to begin their incantations with James' stern warning of lusts, though to end on Isaiah's bright prophecy regarding pruning hooks and ploughshares.

The approach is often different today and, of course, the terminology. The oldtime inquirers did not probe man's behavior in the laboratory manner; not did they write about "neuroses of the nations." But the organized peace movement always had its eye on the cause of war in the questionable make-up of erring man.

It as easy when men sang glumly, "Oh! what a worm am I," to see an obvious cause for war in human nature. It is a little more difficult to see why so simple an explanation should continue to command respect today. The influence of those truculent high priests of the survival of the fittest-Treitschke, Bernhardi, Cramb, and Roosevelt-has been discredited in biology and social relations. Even the single-track psychologists have moved on far from the uncritical adaptations of Freud, and man, if not a subject for rhapsody, need not be cause for absolute despair.

Neither chronic dyspepsia nor the widening influence of Mr. Mencken's cynicized minority are adequate grounds why estimable people should evade the complexities of war causes and take refuge in such an easy simplification as human nature. The reason, it seems to me, is to be found perhaps in the overwhelming reluctance of these moderns to make basic social readjustments; rather than change social customs and institutions radically, they prefer to stagger along, putting the blame on the devil. In olden garb or new, the devil is always a comforting symbol.

Says General J. G. Harbord: "Permanent universal peace still remains as an ideal lost in inaccessible distance, until envy, malice, lust and avarice have disappeared from the human heart."

The late Judge Elbert H. Gary voiced a sad lament: "Human [Page 85]

HUMAN NATURE: PERENNIAL EXCUSE FOR WAR

nature is selfish and apt to forget what is really for the best interests of every country—that is, to maintain peace is the thing that encourages, maintains, and sustains prosperity."

It is obviously a great deal simpler for a general to ascribe the blame for war to the human heart than to renounce war and refuse further to take part in it. It was also simpler for Mr. Gary to lambast human nature than refuse to make munitions or to attack the use of military forces, say, for the safeguarding of foreign investments.

I find it difficult, however, on any other ground than sheer disillusionment to account for such a rash attempt as Mr. John Carter's, in "Man Is War," to share the cynical view of human nature enjoyed by the best minds of all ages among the militarists, profiteers, slave-drivers, and inventive theologians. Mr. Carter only a few years ago wrote in defense of youth. And now?

Says he: "The heart of man begot the Roman legion and the Roman law, the Christian ethic and the Spanish Inquisition, the instrument of commercial credit and the practice of commercial war. Men have fathered the theory of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the guillotine and the cheka. Man has created the frescoes of the Sistine Chapter and mustard gas. For everything begotten of man shares the nature of man and is as apt to destruction as to creation.

"The world will escape the blight of war when man has ceased to be human. The world will find peace when man is extinct. For man is war."

This last paragraph is a neat little epigram which the first paragraph proves to be all too neat and simple. The Inquisition is behind us; the church that forced Galileo to recant and denied the Copernican astronomy, whatever else may be said against it, now maintains expensive astronomical observatories and alone among religious bodies keeps abreast of new discoveries in the visible skies. The score of mankind's newer foolishness would make a large book; but not so large as the old follies long since laid aside. The golden age of man may lie far off in dim futurity; but it never existed in the pain-filled past. [Page 86]One thing is certain about the relation of human nature to war; and that is, that peace has not yet been effected by sentimentally low ideas of human capacity, that victories are not born of defeatist states of mind. Neither man as incorruptible angel nor as devil all depraved is a stimulating concept. Disillusioned humanitarians as well as cynical traditionalists have harped on the theme of fallen man for a century or more, but with little helpful effect for peace.

II

Grotius declared man "a creature most dear to God." But David Low Dodge, founder of the world's first peace society in 1815, was touched by the icy finger of Calvinism and felt less enthusiastic. "An inspired apostle," said he, "has informed us whence come wars and lightings. They come from the lusts of men that war in their members. Ever since the fall, mankind have had naturally within them a spirit of pride, avarice, and revenge." The Rev. Benjamin Bell in a fiery denunciation of the War of 1812, delivered in 1813, enumerated the causes of wars as follows: 1, Pride. 2, A covetous spirit, or an inordinate love of the world. 3, Revenge. 4, Idleness. 5, Debtors who try to overthrow governments by war talk, thus escaping their financial obligations. 6, Desire in rulers for increase of power and influence.

Rev. Noah Worcester, another pioneer peace leader, thought very differently. In 1814 he said: "That there is nothing in the nature of mankind, which renders war necessary and unavoidable -nothing which inclines them to it, which may not be overcome by the power of education, may appear from what is discoverable in the two sects already mentioned. The Quakers and Shakers are of the same nature with other people, "men of like passions" with those who uphold the custom of war. All the difference between them and others results from education and habit. The principles of their teachers are diffused through their societies, impressed on the minds of old and young; and an aversion to war and violence is excited, which becomes habitual, and has a governing influence on their hearts, their passions and lives." [Page 87]

HUMAN NATURE: PERENNIAL EXCUSE FOR WAR

Nurture versus nature; the old conflict stated in terms refreshingly alien to psychological laboratories. There were not many to agree with Worcester, even in the loyal ranks of the peace societies, still less outside.

Our famous arbitrator, John Jay, who ought to have known better, wrote to Noah Worcester from Bedford, N. Y. on November 12, 1817: "Until the Gospel shall have extensively corrected the hereditary depravity of mankind, the wickedness resulting from it, will, in my opinion, continue to produce national sins and national punishments; and by causing unjust wars and other culpable practices, to render just wars occasionally indispensable."

Judge Thomas Dawes of Massachusetts answered back, however, in his speech before the Peace Society of his native State: "Though wars and fightings arise from the passions of men, they are not therefore always inevitable. The same apostle who asks 'whence came they' answers his own questions and prescribes the remedy. He exhorts the twelve tribes then scattered abroad to cleanse their hands and purify their hearts."

William Ladd, leading promulgator of a World Court, in 1823 was writing papers for "The Christian Mirror" (as "Philanthropos"), some of which indicate a lively interest in the personal causes of war: "Warlike Ambition or a Love of Military Glory," "The Present System of Education a Cause of Warlike Ambition," "The Militia System a Cause of War," "Preparation for War often the Cause of It," "The Influence of the Female Sex Often Exerted in Favor of War." In 1828, the "Apostle of Peace focussed all these, perhaps because of his close contact with naval seamen and the militia encampments of Maine and Massachusetts, on one central cause: "The love of military glory is a cause of war, greater than all others put together."

In 1834, the Reverend C. S. Henry of Hartford told the Windham County (Conn.) Peace Society: "The causes of war exist in the corrupt passions of human nature."

On and on, thus went the argument, up to the appearance of the "Origin of Species," from which time homo sapiens seemed a constitutional roughneck, and to Prince Kropotkin's "Mutual [Page 88]"Aid a Factor of Evolution," George W. Nasmyth's "Social Progress and the Darwinian Theory," and the impact of the new science of psychology on the strait-laced biology of the non-gay nineties. Beecher, shocked at the Franco-Prussian War, turned the "artillery of words" upon a mentally squirming congregation, saying: "War is not an acute disease which can be cured by special remedies. It is a constitutional disorder. It belongs to human nature. It is the remnant in man of that old fighting animal from which Mr. Darwin says we sprang. One might find some presumption in favor of this theory from the fact that there is so much of the animal left in us yet. It has been supposed that we sprang from monkeys; and there has been an inquisition to see if there has not been a caudal appendage rubbed off. Nations have been explored to find a man who had a tail, as a monkey has, or some traces of one. You are looking in the wrong place. Look inside, and you will find resemblances to the monkey, the lion, the tiger, the bear, and the hog, all of them."

Toward the end of the last century Guy de Maupassant, remembering his ten years at clerical work in France's navy department, and touched even then perhaps by the depression which was later in accentuated form to drive him into lunacy and early death, reached the acme of despair over docile, stupid human beings: "The most surprising thing is that the whole of society does not rise up at the very mention of war.

"We shall therefore continue to live under the burden of the old, repulsive customs of criminal prejudices, of the wild conceptions of our barbarous forefathers. We are therefore animals and shall continue to be animals, who are governed by our instincts, and whom nothing can change."

No one can prudently fail to admit that if peace depends upon this interpretation of human nature, and if human nature cannot be changed, we are in for scientific violence forevermore. Nor can one rationally deny that there is something in human nature that isn't as good as it might be.

Even human nature can see that. And because it observes the folly of the race, it proves itself not purely foolish. [Page 89]

HUMAN NATURE: PERENNIAL EXCUSE FOR WAR

Anyone can see that Ladd was right, for example, in ascribing war in part to a love for military glory, even though he gave it overemphasis. As familiar a student of war as Brevet Major General Emory Upton, whose work on "The Military Policy of the United States," written almost half a century ago, has been reprinted four times and still serves as a sort of Old Testament to army gospel, commented thus on the rewards of military success, which serve, of course, as a constant example to the ambitious: "Our own people, no less than the Romans, are fond of rewarding our military heroes. The Revolution made Washington President for two terms; the War of 1812 elevated Jackson and Harrison to the same office, the first for two terms, the latter for one; the Mexican War raised Taylor and Pierce to the Presidency, each for one term; the Rebellion has already made Grant President for two terms, Hayes for one term, while the present Chief Magistrate, Garfield, owes his high office as much to his fame as a soldier as to his reputation as a statesman.

"Long wars do not reward the highest commanders only. After the Revolution Knox, Dearborn and Armstrong rose to the office of Secretary of War; Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury; while Monroe, first secretary of State, was finally elected President for two terms. During the Rebellion nearly 150 regular officers rose to the grade of brigadier and major general who, but for the four years' struggle, would have been unknown outside the military profession.

"Since the war, distinguished officers of volunteers have filled nearly every office in the gift of the people. They have been elected chief magistrates of their States, and today on both floors of Congress they are conspicuous alike for their numbers and influence."

The Spanish-American War raised up its Roosevelt and the World War delivered itself of Dawes. Shall we ascribe this to human nature? Every last one of these beneficiaries, in all probability, sincerely considered himself as a Moses for his people; nor have the leaders of peace movements always been teetotally ambitionless. No greater mistake could be made by peace [Page 90]proponents, even if it were not sublimely pharisaical, to assume that the soldiery, from the humblest private down to swashbuckling admirals, are ruled on the whole by any other than laudable motives. Most of the hideous deeds perpetrated by human beings for that matter, from the Inquisition to the lynchings of our Southern states, have been inspired by the schrecklichkeit of righteous but miseducated impulse.

Human beings do not wage or foster war because they are depraved. Increasingly, men will not fight except for causes that can be made to appeal to their ideals, however misdirected those ideals may be. No longer do armies of mercenary troops pillage alien lands for the whim of an equally alien employer; it takes conscription to drive men into war, and the passionate appeal of nationalism or the lure of a world ideal to reconcile them to their slavery.

III

The term "human nature," as generally used, means all sorts of things. It may mean original nature, that is, man's inherited psychological equipment; or it may mean his cultural, standardized, group ways of acting—which many people thoughtlessly confuse with so-called original nature.

In reality human nature consists of both elements. The cynics find little justification in such a view as that of Professor Charles H. Cooley, a respected student of human nature: "By human nature we may understand those sentiments and impulses that are human in being superior to those of lower animals, and also in the sense that they belong to mankind at large, and not to any particular race or time. It means, particularly, sympathy and the innumerable sentiments into which sympathy enters, such as love, resentment, ambition, vanity, hero-worship, and the feeling of social right and wrong.

"Human nature is not something existing separately in the individual, but a group nature or primary phase of society, a relatively simple and general condition of the social mind. It is something more, on the one hand, than the mere instinct that is born in us [Page 91]

HUMAN NATURE: PERENNIAL EXCUSE FOR WAR

—though that enters into it—and something less, on the other, than the more elaborate development of ideas and sentiments that makes up institutions. . . . Man does not have it at birth; he cannot acquire it except through fellowship and it decays in isolation."

Professor John Dewey crisply declares: "Those who argue that social and moral reform is impossible on the ground that the old Adam of human nature remains forever the same, attribute however to native activities the permanence and inertia that in truth belong only to acquired customs." And going still further, Professor Hocking states that "To any one who asserts as a dogma that 'human nature never changes,' it is fair to reply, 'It is human nature to change itself.'"

Human nature can be changed. Farther and farther away from the idea of immutable instincts grows psychology; if behaviorism errs in wiping instinct altogether away, the trend of other schools is uniformly in the same direction even if they do not go so far. In biology, environmental factors receive increasing emphasis, even the older, orthodox eugenics having acquired in recent years an attitude of sullen resignation.

Not all at once can we change human nature; we need have no illusions on that point either. It was a bold, but somewhat unanchored speech made in 1926 by Don Manuel Lorenzo Vidaurre, Minister from Peru to the American Congress at Panama, in which he said, soaringly (the italics are his): "Human passions will always operate and can never be extinguished; nor, indeed, should we wish to stifle them. Man is always aspiring, and never content with present possessions; he has always been iniquitous, and can we at once inspire him with a love of justice? I trust we can."

No; not at once. Only by painfully slow degrees, and not perhaps, in time to prevent the next war or the next half hundred. Those wars, however, are not inevitable. They are not inevitable simply because war can be eliminated without changing human nature much, if any. Human nature, as Montaigne long ago concluded, consists of so general and constant a variety that any [Page 92]individual and even the entire kingdom he might chance to live in could seem only as a pin's point in comparison.

As a matter of concrete experience it is no easy thing in these days to whip up a population to a state of war. The people have to be lied to, and lied to so persistently that huge machinery must be put into operation; machinery of censorship and suppression on the one hand and of lying propaganda on the other. And finally, relentless conscription must be resorted to in order to bring out the necessary troops and regiment the human war-units behind the lines. Observation does not support what Noah Worcester called "the unfounded and bewildering opinion that wars are inevitable from the nature of man."

Even during the Revolution many men of fighting age had to be dragooned by force and more by short enlistment policies. In Maine, for example, when Colonel Jonathan Mitchell was preparing for his Expedition of 1779 (so it was brought out by a subsequent investigation), Adjutant General Jeremiah Hill reported that "the troops were collected with the greatest reluctance so that I commanded martial law. Some were taken and brought by force, some were frightened and joined voluntarily, and some skulked and kept themselves concealed." General Thompson had chortled: "If they will not go, I will make the country too hot for them."

Brigade Major William Todd narrated how he marched to Casco Bay, July 14, with one hundred and thirty York County men, "several of which were brought with force of arms."

Says Professor Van Tyne, in his book on "England and America": ". in a country containing something like 700,000 men of fighting age, there was never, even on paper, over one-eighth their number in state militia and Continental army together, and Washington was never able to gather for any one battle over 20,000 men." In England, according to the same writer: "So great was the dislike of serving abroad, the horror of the brutal practices in the army, and the aversion to the war on America, that not twenty thousand soldiers of the English breed were available in 1776. [Page 93]

HUMAN NATURE: PERENNIAL EXCUSE FOR WAR

"In securing the soldiers of British nativity every device was tried between 1775 and 1781. Having exhausted the expedient of voluntary enlistment with the lure of bounties, North did not scruple to offer pardon to malefactors on condition of joining the army. From that his ministry resorted to impressment and inducing justices of the peace to give over to the recruiting officers idle or indigent men."

In the War of 1812, it was no easier to sweep up all the available lads from the farms into the military hopper grinding out its cannon-fodder. The War with Mexico, our worst-motivated conflict, brought forward more volunteers than could be used, but even then largely because of the brief enlistments permitted. Though volunteers were numerous in the Civil War, they were utterly inadequate for the task, and conscription was employed on a considerable scale. The War with Spain was less a war than a preliminary skirmish of imperialism with a good deal of opera bouffe about it: as General Funston called it, "a sharp and short little war, with its sequel in the form of a more protracted and far bloodier struggle in the Philippine Islands." The Philippine campaign was waged principally by regular army troops.

In the World War, from the severance of diplomatic relations with Germany up to the start of the draft, enlistments were astonishingly few in view of the strenuous efforts exerted by the President, the army, and organizations of zealous war patriots. The War Department's figures give for army enlistments for April, May and June, 301,693; furthermore there is no reason to confine ourselves to army figures. For army, navy and marine corps the grand total for those revealing three months comes only up to 410,750. At that rate it would have required nearly 33 months to raise the 4,412,553 men who were inducted by November 11, 1918. But even that rate was entirely artificial. Says the "Second Report of the Provost Marshal General" (1919): ". . . the selective draft, at certain stages, stimulated voluntary enlistment... Enlistments ran high in April, May, and June, 1917, and then gradually but emphatically dropped to 25 per cent of the highest figure, in the Navy in July and in the Army in September. In the [Page 94]Army this change was apparently influenced by the announcement of the order numbers of the draft in late July: for thereafter the certainty, implied by high order numbers, of not being liable to early call in the draft, removed... the motive to enlist. . . .

"In short, the selective draft, in the varying stages of its indirect compulsory influence, was an effective stimulant of enlistment. In spite of the general popularity of the selective service system as such, there persisted always-for many, at least the desire to enter military service (if needs must) by enlistment rather than by draft-that is, to enter voluntarily in appearance at least. Thus, whenever the prospect of the draft call seemed near, enlistments received the benefit of the dilemma thus created. This indirect effect of a selective draft in stimulating enlistment must be reckoned as one of its powerful advantages." The draft was proof positive that in 1917 there existed no overpowering popular desire to fight.

When war is on and battle is suspended, one of the worst foes of military ardor is that terrible danger to morale, stigmatized as "fraternization." Brotherhood, after all, bites deeper than bullets. Soldiers at numerous points on both the Western and Eastern fronts, especially the latter which had suffered most heavily early in the war, had to be shifted about. Germany had to ship troops, on occasion, all the way from one front to the other, because they had grown altogether too kindly disposed to their enemies-with whom, of course, they had more in common than with their own commanders.

The constructive elements in human nature have conquered over the destructive elements sufficiently for society in general to rid itself of such "habits" as marriage by capture, human religious sacrifice, infanticide, chattel slavery, the duel, prolonged religious wars. Blunder though it may, the race moves on to the new customs and institutions essential to survival. It may not move away from war; but that it can so move, what student of societal evolution ventures to doubt? [Page 95]

II. Economics

by R. G. TUGWELL Department of Economics, Columbia University

I

THE economist is at liberty to choose, just as others are, what shall be his attitude toward the world: how he shall understand it; what his activities shall be. He may choose to understand it, if he likes, as a congeries of relationships which are explained in the books of his particular literary tradition. If he does this he becomes aware of himself as the responsible inheritor of a logically articulated system, motivated by certain principles intuitively held by the individuals and groups who are active in it. His task is the task of understanding doctrine and, possibly, of adding something to it. His conception of affairs is colored by received criteria; he is critical, of course, because affairs are recalcitrant, but his reforms consist in a return to states of grace from which we have somehow fallen.

The world may be understood and his activities defined, by the economist, however, in quite another way. He may be a neglectful student of books, but possess, rather, an awareness of experience—raw, unclassified experience. Men going about their work and the using of its products may just possibly seem to him—perhaps for temperamental reasons—more satisfying as material for understanding than any logic of behavior, any principles of organization, can ever be.

Some important consequences may be determined by these essentially temperamental beginnings. How, for instance, is human nature to be understood? Are there serialized elements [Page 96]which, for working purposes, are roughly analogous to the elements in physical science, so that human behavior can be treated as defined relationships among them? The psychologists who support this theory lend aid and comfort to the more orthodox of the economists. The petulance with which these theories have been received is merely the impatience of a settled organism at any disturbance of its comfort. Elemental psychology will soon be assimilated to orthodox economics. But there are economists who also regret this view of human nature in favor of one which accepts the disarray and vagary of individual action; consents to define only by the observation of behavior, recognizing generously the conditioning influence of environment; and regards the human body as a mechanism which is quick to accommodate itself to circumstance rather than rigidly patterned with instincts.

The world, to these two views, presents the sharpest of possible intellectual contrasts. No holder of either, probably, can hope to understand the other, much less to convict him of error or injustice. And not only will such differences extend themselves to related fields of study; they will affect every problem, every intellectual effort, which either may attempt to solve or make. Opposition will always be turning up; and convictions of personal rightness will remain inversely proportional to whatever pressures of persuasion may be brought to bear.

This is not so purely academic a distinction as may at first appear. For as a matter of fact, just as all economists are, whether they know it or not, psychologists, so all the rest of us, whether we know it or not, are economists. In the same sense we are all metaphysicians, art critics, and engineers; we may be amateurs, but we practice, in our own way and to our own degree, the profession. This is perhaps more true of economics than for instance, of metaphysics or of literature. We may deny competence in these; but it is a rare individual who disclaims expertness in the field of economics. He may not accept the label with any grace when accused outright; but he is more than ready with opinion or vote when either is required. As in other fields, how- [Page 97]

ECONOMICS

ever, some superior competence is frequently ascribed to the academic person who accepts the title; his opinions have at least some weight. It is therefore important that the source of conviction should be studied; that we should know whether his appeal is to the authority of experience or whether it is not, since evidently his view of the world and of human nature is determined in this way, and since a view of the nature of things and of man enlarges quickly to a theory of institutions and the purposes they serve.

Whether from following the one or the other school of professed economists, or from possessing the same temperaments themselves, there can be distinguished these same contrasting attitudes toward economic affairs among the public. The one looks to rule and precept, quoting authority, seeking to establish a premised order, the other searches experience, accepts the world, works in small ways through instruments defined as useful toward ideals defined as temporarily good. It is not difficult to decide in these United States, where the weight of prestige rests, which is accepted and established, which is rebellious and challenging. It might be difficult to classify our actual behavior; but it is easy to distinguish our theory of it. That most of our profession is a lip-service from which we frequently depart is probably true. But this in itself renders our philosophy useless in the dilemmas of action.

The question becomes one of really broad dimension and significance: shall economics be apologetic or pioneering? Shall it understand and explain the world in a simple imaginary formula or by and through the acceptance of rough and intractable experience? The one, it must be seen, excludes experiment, except in the limited sense of adapting forms and methods of procedure to the getting of orthodox results. Anything may be tried, for instance, which promises to restore competition. Competition, itself, however, is beyond the test of consequence. Its beneficence is assumed. The other proceeds only by experiment, excluding nothing from consequential criteria. As little is assumed as may be; and the close definition of ultimates is abhorrent. [Page 98]It surely is not exaggerated to insist that the reign of orthodoxy in America has made a wide and deep cleavage between our philosophy and our practice. This may well be as true of other fields of knowledge and affairs as it is of industry. Our conceptual view of the sexual ethic is probably at wide variance with any family relationship which actually exists. There seems to be a healthy revolt in the making there. And rumors can be heard, also, of the breaking out afresh among litterateurs of an always incipient quarrel as to the proper materials and methods of that craft. To be a "humanist" or not to be one seems just now an important distinction in literature. Not to be one is to be cast out of the comfortable world of professors, traditions, and cultivation. To be one is to accept a lonely responsibility for facing reality and interpreting experience. The artist who regrets the humanist pretension to a monopoly of truth is at one, not only with the reformer who insists on facing sexual facts, but also with the economist who defines his task as the discovery of meaning in industrial reality, of producing useful results through the guidance of continuing processes.

Mr. Justice Holmes, with characteristic lucidity has described the evolution of social rule: "The customs, beliefs, or needs of a primitive time establish a rule or formula. In the course of centuries the custom, belief or necessity disappears, but the rule remains. The reason which gave rise to the rule has been forgotten, and ingenious minds set themselves to inquire how it is to be accounted for." This rule is what we call convention, and the apologetic which elaborates the reason for its existence is what I have called orthodoxy. Mr. Justice Holmes was thinking mostly of the common law; I am thinking of economics; but the process is similar. Institutions perfect themselves and come to have whatever theoretical foundation ingenious minds can supply. It is forgotten that the device was required only so long as it served the purposes of policy; and the supporting network of theory which has been woven about it tends to hold it in place long after the need for it has disappeared. The institutions of competition: free markets, unprotected individual [Page 99]bargaining, personal responsibility for security of self and family, speculation, careful guarding of property rights—all these have come to be believed in for themselves. The doctrine of the hidden hand which presides over economic arrangements, forcing from each of us a contribution to social welfare even as we pursue, as we are led to do by self-interest, our own private benefits, is an illustration of the rôle of doctrine. It supports and decorates, as ivy does a ruined wall, the edifice of competition. It dignifies conflict and hides its ugliness.

And look to what a pass we have been brought: a whole world organized for conflict: among individuals, among groups, among nations. And made so by and with the advice and consent of an elaborate economic apologetic. This conflict basis of social organization is not a mere name; it dictates, it is the principle of organization which is written into our texts, our laws and our programs. We enforce it with all the sanctions of society. And when we, some of us, protest against the consequences it involves, it seems never to occur to us that what is required is a new examination of our modes of organization and control: we need a new theory, but we are content with meliorative schemes. We are stirred by a sentiment for international peace, for the improvement of the poor! An economist, who likes to think of himself as experimental—as anything you like to think of except a humanist—may perhaps be forgiven for impatience with the easy acceptance of orthodoxy which creates such escapes as these, and which drains the best of human impulses and energies into these futile gestures of conciliation. The disciplines we accept and the work we do are made sterile and ineffective by the dignifying of old rule; by the constant attempt to re-establish fictitious norms of behavior. Mr. Justice Holmes explains, again, what we need to do: "When we find that in large and important branches of the law the various grounds of policy on which the various rules have been justified are later inventions for what are in fact survivals from more primitive times, we have a right to reconsider the popular reasons, and, taking a broader view... to decide anew whether those reasons are satisfactory." [Page 100]

II

It is time, high time, for exploration among the sources of social motive and of common value. Is there, for instance, a society thinkable which organizes itself cooperatively, and which needs no resort to force because it does not depend on conflict? No discovery of solution is possible here except by the reexamination of individual behavior and the functioning of social groups. It is not easy to recognize, in the individuals we know or can hear about wherever on the face of the earth they may be, the fears, the cruelties, and the passions which we build so confidently on, except where the use of these impulses has been made deliberately a necessary condition of existence. If we are forced to behave conflictingly, we will: but it is a cooperative, not a competitive task, to make and use things. We are, of course, as mechanisms, extremely flexible; we respond to many motives. There are evidently cruel and exclusive impulses to be evoked. They are indeed the sole resort of a competitive order. But there are also generous and inclusive ones which may be used to support a cooperative régime. The world of affairs seems so arranged as to make calculated use of all our unlovely traits and to smother all the others. One is queer to the point of insanity who exhibits the ethic of decency in business or, even, it might be said, in international conference. Why should this be so? Why should our leaders—statesmen, priests, businessmen—concentrate their efforts on whipping up an artificial miasma of conflict wherever it threatens to disappear in the sun of understanding? Perhaps because it is their trade to do so. This suggestion might bear some exploration. There may have been, in our racial past, a definite survival value in certain lusts and struggles among men. Perhaps we might have disappeared long since if our priests had allowed us to give way to philanthropic impulses. Indiscriminate affection has evidently been hard to suppress; it requires a constant and devoted effort. The tradition of leadership carries as one of its deepest characteristics, certainly, the stimulation of competition among subordinates. But we no longer live in the jungles [Page 101]and caves. That kind of struggle is long since past. It is a curious illustration of our docility that we still respond to the stimulation of those same traits which, for the sake of argument, we may grant a survival value in the past.

It is not required that we have faith in any regenerative scheme for social betterment which depends on a change in human nature; on the other hand, an utter dissent from the contemporary view of it which is implied by the organization of our institutions may be justified. This may even run to a belief that those institutions have had a life far longer than can have been required by usefulness. I, for instance, think it time they were revised to fit that other set of impulses which has always resided in the race, and which are, unless I am mistaken, far stronger than those upon which we depend. For, if they are not, why such elaborate organization and such a bitter defense when the question of their justification is posed? There is involved in this a serious departure from the elemental theory of human nature. That would have us believe that these elements were formed during the course of a long pre-history, and that they are shaped to the problems and the rhythms of a savage and nomadic life. The view suggested here is based on no theory of origins or ultimates. It accepts merely the obvious concurrence in the men we know, going about their own humble affairs, of two possible sources of motive. We can be persuaded to do things because of simple needs: to be active, to manipulate materials in a creative way, to love and to become parents, to achieve prestige in the eyes of those whose opinions we value. There is no conflict involved in all this unless we go out of our way to organize it into existence. If it is preferred to persuade by stimulating the madness of cruelty and hate, or the steady pressures of fear—and these have a long history, from the frank brutality of slavery to the compulsions of yellow-dog labor contracts—that can be done. Even if we only limit the sources of good activities and things, and add to this a vigorous propagandizing of their values, startling monsters can be raised from the abyss of human nature. If we use these pressures with pertinacity we can make [Page 102]the resulting conflicts sufficiently continuous to appear inevitable. And this, I am privileged to reason, is exactly what we do. Conflicts, in any simple order which we can imagine, would be casual, temporary, and unimportant. We have succeeded by long and difficult efforts of organization in creating a civilization which recently could devote itself almost solely, for years at a time, to a war which involved most of the world and most of the people in it. This is an achievement.

It is an achievement; but it is also suicide. And it happens, as I believe, because we consent to an orthodox and priestly view of the nature of man and of the necessity for conflict, long after these views and institutions have ceased to function beneficially—granting, of course, that they ever did.

III

You may ask and you have a right to ask, what dissentients from contemporary orthodoxy have to offer in the way of a program. You will say that we have here a closely articulated world, built, for better or worse, on these institutional foundations. It is obvious that political revolutions and similar social purgatives have consequences which we like but little better—and which, indeed, differ but little—from other resorts to force. The excuse that this is merely temporary is apt to leave a dissenter cold. One who denies the privilege of force in support of capitalism or imperialism, need not profess a faith in it, either, to support communism, or a projected future peace. He may risk being set down as one of those visionaries who believes that a moral revolution is possible, even probable. And lest it be thought a courageous risk, may I confess the faith at once, and go on to say that such a moral change seems to me to follow prosperity and universal education almost inevitably—not quite inevitably. A moral emancipation would be created by an economic emancipation, but it does not seem quite clear as yet that we are to have the kind of prosperity which shall make us free. We can have it, of course. But frustration can be perpetuated, indeed it [Page 103]

ECONOMICS

will be, unless there is some active will to change. If this will, this source of reconstruction, were more lively, hope would be more certain. The difficulty is that business feeds on intelligence—gives it tasks and pleasures—which substitute themselves for social impulses. They occupy, even if with residues of discontent, the brain and the hand of youth. He has no time for moral surveys. But this is a task for youth. We elders are too sunk in sloth and comfort.

This, however, is one of those challenges to sentiment and to intelligence which ought, in time, to enlist its own workers. There need be no real fear that the gauge will not be accepted. Our generation may, perhaps, take credit for this if nothing else: we have left to the coming generation the settlement of most of the problems we should have faced. They may blame us for not bequeathing them a better world; they cannot charge us with having left them no work to do. Besides this, however, there is something we can do: we can drop the mask of conventional pretense which hides our problems: and we can free their years of education from the incubus of orthodoxy.

Assuming that they come to maturity more clear-eyed than we were able to do, what will be the nature of their tasks? What will be the objectives of their effort? It is perhaps presumptuous to anticipate; yet there are such obvious necessities that some of them, at least, can be pointed to with a degree of certainty. If the weight of outworn institutions can be lifted, the possible effectiveness of idealism in social affairs may be seen. We can point to ideals, but not to activities; that would be presumption indeed. Institutions are an inheritance of the past which can be got rid of; ideals point to a far future. But that future will be made, really, in the affairs of the moment, the creative activities of the then contemporary life, which, you may be sure, will concern itself with realities and not with any fictions we might now invent. S. N. Patten, the social philosopher, taught these things all his life.

"Do you believe that progress comes through genius and heroes or through many slight improvements in the lot of the [Page 104]multitude? If you believe in genius, then progress and culture are your goal, and you should strive for them by direct means. But if you acknowledge kinship with the masses, have faith in humanity, and would strive for its elevation, regeneration should be your watchword, and you should promote the interests of the weak rather than give nurture to the strong... regeneration is prevented not by defects in personality but by defects in the environment (institutions). . . We need not work for regeneration; it will of itself flow from sources we neither create nor control. But we do need to work for the removal of external conditions, which by suppressing and distorting human nature give to vice the powers that virtue should possess."

There is among our generation, and spreading sluggishly to youth, a rather widespread, if somewhat dilute, Nietzschean view of humanity. We are by way of overemphasizing the rôle of nativity in intelligence. It is important that intellectual resources should be fully exploited; but a social program devoted to that end is likely to result in a severe restriction of opportunity. I, for one, am not convinced that most of the greatness with which I have come in contact, could have been predicted by any tests we have yet devised. The selection of candidates for an intellectual aristocracy to be developed at the expense of their fellows seems to me a risky business. Devotion to the succor of the weak is not quite yet an ideal which can be thrown into the discard. Besides, there is no other promise of achievement which possesses a comparable power to stir the creative passions of youth once the challenge is clearly presented. In throwing this away we not only risk a violent retrogression, but we sacrifice an impelling motive toward that moral revolution of which I spoke. Shall we say to youth: you are all that counts; our duty toward you is to provide your intelligence and your creative powers with the whole world’s materials, at any sacrifice, so that your life may become a finished artistic achievement? Or shall we say to youth: you count very little; it is the inarticulate and burdened masses who must be worked for; your duty is toward them; in no other way can you serve your country or [Page 105]your race so well as by understanding your duty and giving yourself wholly to it?

To what source do you suppose the disaffection, the ennui, the continual questioning, of modern youth can be traced? In the first place his clear perception of the contrast between reality and our conception of it has generated a profound disgust. In the second place the teaching that he is the end and aim of things has gradually developed an elephantiasis of the ego with no relief in extraversion. And in the third place the conjunction of these, which is that essentially there is no great work to be done with satisfying realities, outside the categories of our convention, has left him palsied and witless in the field of social action. We give him no job to do which tries his powers, which satisfies his judgment, which enlists his sentiment. Modern youth needs and wants nothing so much as a great task, outside himself and careless of his own career, to recreate a lost enthusiasm.

Yet prosperity and education are the enemies of these stiff conventions of ours. And in each of these fields some progress is being made. We may not have intended at all the results which will eventuate. They will be just as salutary. In freeing education from the shackles of orthodoxy, and in providing the materials for a higher standard of living, we may have thought that we were serving merely the personal careers of our children or enhancing the profitableness of our businesses. But what seems likely to be a far more important result is that we shall allow freer definitions of what constitutes a good life and shall provide readier means for the achievement. This is not the best of all possible worlds; but it might conceivably be worse. We might have kept the old routinized education and have confined it to the few: we might, most of us, have remained in the sink of poverty and misery which preceded the industrial revolution. As it is, we are coming to that level of life and of thinking at which we can talk in non-utopian terms of an economic discipline which will give us also moral freedom. This in itself is a victory.

(To be concluded) [Page 106]

PALESTINE

'Round the World Log of a Sociologist-I

by

HERBERT A. MILLER

Department of Sociology, Ohio State University

RELIGIOUSLY, I confess, I am unable to get a single thrill out of Jerusalem. This is partly because I am familiar with so many other places where religion has originated, and partly because it is so much overworked here by devotees. When there is doubt as to whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem or Nazareth, ardent prayer at the alleged spot loses its significance. When three churches claim to be on the exact site of an historical event, one knows that the exact spot is uncertain. If it were not for the meticulous certainty which is claimed I could have a little more sympathy for the emotions which many feel, and if it were not for the fanatical conflicts that prevail one might have more reverence. As it is, I came away almost wishing that the Russians could get it and clean out the whole business so that it could grow up again in purer form.

Sociologically and politically, however, Palestine is an absolutely unique country—a fact which, if not fully recognized, makes many of its problems insoluble. I felt as though in the presence of a Greek tragedy from which under the given conditions there is no escape.

The uniqueness of Palestine arises from the fact that so long as sentiment remains what it is, it can never belong merely to the people who live in it. The urge which made the Crusades is the same as that which now is felt by Jew and Muslim, and the Christian feeling has not died.

In length of residence, historical experiences, and especially [Page 107]

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in the association of geography with religious and national origins, the Jews are the most involved. Their actual personal possession, however, has been lost for thirteen hundred years; which anywhere else in the world would be long enough to constitute complete sequestration.

The Christian claim comes next and is more absolute than that of the Jews if possible because they inherit all the Jewish tradition, and have the added associations with Jesus, but there is little personal interest in the land. The Christian interest, however, inheres in the dominant peoples of the world though the Gregorians, Greek Orthodox, Abyssinians, and some lesser sects are more local.

Then come the Muslims whose religious claim is less since Jerusalem comes after Mecca and Medina as a sacred place, but they complicate the problem by having been in continuous possession of the land for thirteen hundred years. Out of an estimated population of 898,000, the Muslims number 660,000 and the Jews 150,000; of whom 100,000 have come in the last ten years.

The dilemma of the situation has come from the spread of the idea of nationalism which has infected both Arabs and Jews. Both of these groups who are resident feel that they have sovereign rights. In neither case, however, can this feeling be separated from the vastly greater numbers outside the country who identify their interests with what happens in Palestine.

All the fifteen or more million Jews in the world are backing the hundred and fifty thousand in Palestine more or less unanimously with moral, financial, and political support. In the same way the Arabs everywhere feel that Palestine is their problem. This feeling also extends more widely into the Muslim consciousness. I saw a good deal of reference to the Palestinian question in the Indian papers, and I understand that one of the Muslims there who has opposed the Gandhi movement has said that if affairs were not settled in Palestine satisfactorily to the Muslims, he should urge those in India to join Gandhi. On account of the greater efficiency of the Jews their power is [Page 108]comparable to the greater numbers of the Arabs, and unless there is some modification of policy and purpose, tragedy is inevitable.

In the process of time the varieties of religions had succeeded in evolving a fairly successful living arrangement in Palestine. The Muslim police at the sacred Christian places have long kept the Christian sects from killing each other. The Crusades in their final failure settled the fact that the Muslims were not to be eliminated. The Muslims, in spite of their reputation for intolerance, have been tolerant to an unusual degree. The few Jews who have always lived there have pursued their faith with unconquerable zeal and maintained themselves relatively unmolested because fortunately the Arabs do not yet know anything about that Christian sporting emotion called anti-Semitism. There is no more possibility of a peaceful existence of an absolute sovereignty in Palestine than there has been of an absolute religion. To both Arab and Jew this modern nationalism is a new concept, and even yet both are more conscious of their religious and traditional unity than of national separateness within that unity. The Jews living in the midst of the western idea of nationalism have caught a spirit which, like a new toy, is an absorbing plaything that has for the time being completely diverted their attention from their main work in life. It is more and more my conviction that the inescapable contribution which the Jew can make to world thought is internationalism or non-nationalism. Political nationalism for them would mean, if it should succeed, an early loss of their cultural significance. The peculiar Jewish values given to the world have come from their handicaps. American Jews have been the most important backers of Zionism in Palestine, and yet, out of the hundred thousand recent immigrants, only fourteen hundred have come from America.

It cannot be denied, however, that the Jews have a strong cultural claim in Palestine and some methods must be devised so that these may be realized, but they cannot be along the lines which many Jews have hoped.

The Jews put strong emphasis on the fact that they have brought a good deal of economic advantage to Palestine, but [Page 109]

PALESTINE

they have not learned that everywhere that good comes from a competing group the good is appropriated and animosity increases. As Gandhi said of the English, undoubtedly they had done good things for India but since it was unintentional they deserve no credit.

I have read the long report of the Royal Commission which investigated the conflict of summer, 1929. Among the Jews some think that it was very fair and some that it was unspeakably bad. The trouble was occasioned by a controversy over the use of the Wailing Wall which is an ancient accepted right of the Jews, though the wall supports the Temple area which is the sacred place of the Muslims in Jerusalem. It is unfortunate that with all the hills in the vicinity, Solomon and Muhammad should have selected the same one. Many Jews who would never think of going to the wall to pray went as a nationalistic demonstration, and on the other side the Muslims had activities about the wall for exactly the same reason.

Palestine seems to me to be the one place in the world where sovereignty as ordinarily applied must be modified because of the large number of those living outside who have an interest in it. In the meantime the impossible situation which now prevails, in which the citizens have no self-government, must be changed. No mandate can have the same feeling of responsibility for its subjects as they feel themselves, and it is no wonder that the bitterest complaints are made against the British government by both Jews and Arabs.

The prosperity and modernity that appears both in the Jewish communities and all over Palestine shows a great advance over four years ago. Most of the Jews live outside of Jerusalem on land that historically was never Jewish. The Jaffa plain where a large number live belonged to the Philistines who were enemies of the Jews. It makes no difference to the affection for the land which the Jews feel, indicating the flexibility of sentiment based on tradition.

We visited a number of communistic villages. The most outstanding characteristic that they show is joyousness. Their [Page 110]communism is entirely in an economic and social sense, not at all political. They can be compared to the religious communism of monasteries except that in many cases the Jews are atheistic. They are the best proof I know of the transfer of religion to nationalism.

One of the objectives of many of the communes is to raise up a generation of Jews that knows nothing about trade, and thus counteract a prevailing reputation which they have. In some cases there is a definite antagonism to the kind of an education that would lead to the university, even though there are doctors of philosophy in the colony.

The clash in 1929 was probably inevitable. On the Jews, in my opinion, because they have had more experience and may have wiser council, rests the responsibility for the self-restraint necessary to keep the peace. If the number of immigrants is restricted to the number that can be easily absorbed, and if the hateful idea of political nationalism is given up, there is no reason why Jewish nationalists may not live harmoniously with the Arabs in Palestine. If it is not given up, I fear that the day of trials which Zionism was organized to bring to an end will get a new extension. [Page 111]

XXVI. RABINDRANATH TAGORE

by J. VIJAYA TUNGA Formerly member of the Staff, School Department, Tagore's Institute

TAGORE first loomed on the literary horizon as a singer of verses breathing an exotic charm, coupled to a plaintive tone characteristic of the Orient. It took many years for the discerning to find out that his poetry was the message of a prophet and that his prophecy was at once the echo of an older, and the presaging of a newer, philosophy.

Today the West is standing before the East like a bold bridegroom before a bashful bride. The bride has cast off her veils, and hesitant though she is by habit both are happy that each has seen the other's face in broad daylight with no superstition-ridden faces of the past keeping ominous watch on their meeting.

But many journeyings had to be made, much distrust and more difficulties had to be overcome before they met thus. First the East beheld the West from behind her veil as one who had come panting up a mountain slope and, arrived at the top, looked on the farther valleys below with bewilderment, if not apprehension.

The East had been brought up on a philosophy of security, of the sense of a cosmos, with the assurance of numerous lives to follow the present. In the face of the West it read chaos, uncertainty and desire. True, emerging out of this chaos, the eyes of the West strained for a sight of the farther shore. But these eyes lacked friendliness and self-assurance. The discoveries of the West are the result mostly of mistakes; those of the East, of method. It was symbolic that Columbus should have gone West for the East and yet make his mistake useful. [Page 112]In "Ulysses," Tennyson typified the West: "Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world. How dull it is to pause, . . . How dull! It is from that ennui that the enterprise of the West has arisen. According to Tagore:

"The reason which made Alexander express his desire to find other worlds to conquer when his conquest in this world was completed makes these enormously vital people desire, when they have some respite in their sublime mission of fighting against objects that are noxious, to go out of their way to spread their coat-tails in other people's thoroughfares and to claim indemnity when these are trodden upon. In order to take the thrilling risk of hurting themselves they are ready to welcome endless trouble to hurt others who are inoffensive—the beautiful birds who happen to know how to fly away, the timid beasts which have the advantage of inhabiting inaccessible regions and—but I would avoid the discourtesy of mentioning higher races in this connection."

At first therefore the East withdrew to her harem, and those who remained outside stifled their laughter and silenced their hearts. Sadly she watched the priest and scholar becoming rarer and the soldier and shopkeeper multiply. Where she expected to see the school or even the church she saw barracks and warehouses and the "earning of dividends" become the chief concern of her Western visitor.

"In our traffic with her we have learnt this as the biggest fact, that she is efficient, terribly efficient; efficiency in fact is the most potent factor in a material civilization. We may feel astounded by this efficiency; but if through fear, we bring to its feet our homage of respect, we should know that we are fast going down to the very bottom of misfortune, for it is as the barbarity of bringing sacrificial offerings to some god thirsting for blood. It is on account of this fact, and to retain her self-respect, that the whole of Asia denies today the moral superiority of Europe, while on the other hand, to withstand the ravaging inroads of Europe, she is imitating that aspect of Europe which slays, which" [Page 113]

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

eats raw flesh, and which by putting the blame on the victim tries to make the process of swallowing easier."

But whereas younger civilizations have rebelled against this newer civilization or are emulating in dead earnest the grosser aspects of it, the wisdom of India has once more risen victorious and it has recognized the scholar standing behind the shopkeeper, and the doctor behind the soldier and cannon. The East has looked over the tops of towering shops and warehouses and discerned the library and laboratory and the unselfish men who work therein. And she waits hopefully and wisely, knowing that within this fever is the germination of a new life. In Tagore, the wiser East speaks:

"But there is a lack of truth in realizing Europe in this fashion. I personally do not believe that Europe is wholly and entirely materialistic. She has lost her faith in religion but not in humanity.... In Europe the ideals of human activity are truly spiritual, for these ideals are not paralyzed by shackles of spiritual injunctions or, to put it in other words, their sanction lies in the heart of man, and not in something external to him."

In truth this new life was urgently needed. For to the East her sleep had become a sickness, her passivity had congealed into death. And Tagore like a watchman of the night looking out for the stars of hope has seen in the West the Star:

"The fetters that we forge in the name of religion enchain the spiritual man more securely than even ties of worldly affairs. . . When the airplane goes up in the sky we may wonder at it as the perfection of material power, but behind this lies the human spirit strong and alive. It is this spirit of man which refused to recognize boundaries of nature as final. Nature had put the fear of death in man's mind to moderate his power within the limit of safety, but man in Europe snapped his fingers at it and tore asunder the bonds; it is only then that he earned the right to fly, a right of the Gods."

In its beginning, religion in India was fluid. It flowed into vibrating, dancing stones. But time dimmed the eyes of India and she began to worship the stone instead of the life that danced through it. It is against the shibboleths, fetishes, and religious [Page 114]sectarianism which has deadened the East for so long and which now threaten to invade and thrive in America that Tagore warns:

"It breeds in the minds of its members a jealous sense of separateness that gives rise to conflicts more deadly than conflicts of worldly interests. It is a worse enemy of the truth of religion than atheism, for sectarianism proudly appropriates as its own share the best portion of the homage that we bring to God."

Even the new creeds must be aware that by their very desire to a separate existence they have created exclusiveness. And one has only to experience the bigotry of some new faiths to fear how they might be the pestilential fanaticisms of the future.

"Today science has offered facilities that bring the human races outwardly close to one another, yet curiously enough it is our religions that impiously maintain the inner barriers that separate and often antagonize nations and peoples—their respective votaries not even hesitating blasphemously to take God's own name to humiliate or mortally injure their fellow-beings who happen to belong to a different community. And it is high time for us to know how much more important it is in the present age, to be able to understand the fundamental truth of all religions and realize their essential unity, thus clearing the way for a wide-world spiritual comradeship, than to preach some special religion of our own, with all its historical limitations."

India will certainly listen in due time, for India has always listened to wisdom, but Europe and America must give particular attention to this vital message of Asia coming through Tagore. For at this stage in human progress it is for Asia once aga n to prophesy but it is for Europe and America to fulfill that prophecy.

There are many signs—in Europe in the form of a democratic despotism, and in America as despotic democracy—that th world is going to repeat the errors of the past. The mob dethrones the tyrant only to seat itself on the throne; the lion is dispossessed by an army of rats. The change has not chased away tyranny and death. Especially therefore at this stage do we need a healthy message like that of Tagore: [Page 115]

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"There are those who have the imperialistic tendency of mind which leads them to believe that their own religion has the sole right to bring the whole human world under its undisputed dominance. They dream of a unity which is the unity of utter solitude, of absolute bareness, the unity of a desert. But the unity which is at the root of creation comprehends the countless many and gives them the rhythm of kinship. Monotony is of death. Life is a harmony of varied notes."

That an appeal like the following should be needed for humanity which is today in its adolescence is in itself a verdict:

"The truth which is impersonal is science. The path to approach it is the same for all of us—the sole path of reason that has universal variedness. The truth which is universal and at the same time supremely personal is God and the paths that lead to Him are not one but manifold according to the differences in our personality. The knowledge about this personal truth can never be acquired solely through reason but mostly through sympathy; to know it perfectly is the same as to be intimately related to it."

Not only for artistic reasons but for the general purposes of progress must there always be diversity. But can we not retain this diversity and yet have one common outlook for the whole world, namely peace for the sake of progress, and life, and more abundantly of it?

Today when liberty lives only in stone, Tagore, prophet of freedom and unity, prays for a more perfect day:

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depths of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its hands toward perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action— Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake." [Page 116]

I-The Idea of God

by ALBERT J. SAUNDERS American College, Madura, India

HB old epithet-"the unchanging East" is no longer applicable to India. India is changing rapidly, not only in material advancement, in economic and social life, but also in her thought-forms, her philosophy, and her religious attitudes. These changes can be plainly seen by one who is a resident of the country and who is moving in close association with the thought and life of the people. The writer during the last three years has become greatly interested in the changing conceptions in Hinduism; he will deal in this article with The Idea of God, and follow it up by another study later on The Approach to God. The reasons for these changes are not far to seek; they may be summarised along three lines: Contact with the West in which the British connection stands out prominently; Education, which has opened the portals to a vast field of literature into which young India is entering, a field in which discoveries are being made which are revolutionizing the old thought-forms and ancient loyalties of the people; and the study of science which is playing havoc with the old superstitions and former beliefs in magic.

"The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."

There is no mistaking the fact that perhaps the greatest and most persistent idea in human thought is the idea of God. It is everywhere and it will not die. And one of the most remarkable [Page 117]things about this idea is that among primitive peoples their view of God is often most like that which Christianity preaches, consisting of the Fatherhood of God, the belief that the human family are His children, and that God is all-loving and desiring only the good of His children. It is only when man begins to speculate and evolve a system that he loses God. The Indian philosophical speculators in the Upanishadic age almost lost God; it has taken centuries to rediscover Him, but the growth of the modern Hindu idea of God, as I shall try to show, is one of the most hopeful signs of religion in India.

Ancient Ideas

In the Vedas we find gods many; some are animistic, personifying the forces of nature, as Surya-the Sun-god; Indra and his Maruts the storm-god and the winds. Usas was the beautiful goddess of the dawn. Others were personified persons, as Yama, the first to die, and who became the lord of the dead. Others again were personified goodness and virtue, as the saintly Varuna, the ethical deity. These Vedic gods were personifications of natural phenomena, "the friendly forces became gods, and the hostile forces demons." But the belief was that these gods were persons with characteristics; they were approachable and companionable; these early gods were loved and worshipped. Some of the finest hymns of the Rig-Veda are passionate outbursts of devotion to the gods. Those were idyllic days when the gods were real, when men believed in their gods as personal and moral, and when the contacts and attachments between gods and men were close and personal. "And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day."

Then there came a time when these early animistic ideas of God could no longer satisfy the growing and deepening thought of the Aryans. The quest for truth and a knowledge of the nature of God led serious men to meditation and prayer in the "forest universities," "if haply ey might find Him." These earnest searchers after God recorded their findings in the truly profound Upanishad writings. They attempted a synthesis of the Vedic [Page 118]gods; one universal God, having a nature that would satisfy the enlarging intellectual conceptions of man. The result was that wonderful creation of the human mind—BRAHMAN, the World-Soul. This World-Soul was thought to be an impersonal spiritual essence permeating everything animate and inanimate throughout the whole world. The soul of the individual was called atman, so there were two souls: the World-Soul and the soul of the individual—Brahman and atman. Some unknown thinker in a moment of inspiration came to the conclusion that the two must be one, and proclaimed the great Vedanta philosophy in its earliest form. In some such way as that "The great affirmation 'was made. 'My self is the infinite Self'; 'the soul of the universe, whole and undivided, dwells in me.' Thus self-knowledge is knowledge of God; and as knowledge of God leads to Release, the man who realizes the identity of his soul with the World-Soul is thereby set free from the cycle of births and deaths; he I will not be born again. The great phrases used are, 'Thou art That,' 'I am He,' 'I am Brahman.'"'i

Here we find a subtle and profoundly intellectual conception of God. He was viewed as pure spirit, or the Eternal Mind; He now becomes the essence of all things, and to be absorbed into the Eternal Essence was conceived to be the end of all things. The phenomenal world with all that pertains to the physical and material is unreal (maya); the only reality is God, but He is impersonal, incomprehensible, unapproachable, pure spirit. This is the pantheistic (All-God) idea of the Upanishads, which was developed later by Gautama, the Buddha, into the Nirvana doctrine of nothingness as the ultimate end of all things. These ideas are highly intellectual, fit only for scholars and philosophers, divorced from life, and having nothing or very little for the ordinary man of the street. It shows a wonderful and creative period in the mental development of man, but the natural, ever-present, kindly disposed and helpful personal God has been lost in the maze of philosophical speculations. It was a great loss, and Hinduism has been the poorer ever since. The logical con-

See Dr. Farquhar’s Primer of Hinduism, p. 48. [Page 119]clusion of such reasoning was a period of negation, when the idea of a god was given up entirely. The two movements of Jainism and Buddhism tried to get along without a god. They succeeded for a time; in fact Buddhism in the days of Asoka enjoyed a period of astonishing success, but today the movement is practically dead in the land of its birth, while Jainism is ex- ceedingly small for its long history and is making scarcely any headway. The simple fact is Indians are a God-conscious people; atheism cannot flourish in their land, and there is also a revolt from a purely intellectual conception of God which takes Him away from the needs of men, and gives Him a detached and dis- interested character far removed from the "maddening crowd."

Theistic Reforms

It is not to be wondered at that such dry and calculated intellectualism in reference to God should at length prove un- satisfactory to the ordinary Hindu devotee, and should call forth reform movements which have had a remarkable influence in modifying the Hindu idea of God. This revolt from the non- personal and non-moral character of God first found expression in the Bhagavad-Gita. The Vedanta of the Upanishads had taught one great truth-the unity of God, but He had become so detached and distant from man as to be unknowable and unserviceable. The Gita brought God back again from the high altitudes of pure intellect where the Upanishad philosophers had placed Him, from the mere negation to which Mahavira and Gautama had consigned Him, to actual personality and communion with men. This is the distinctive accomplishment of the Bha- gavad-Gita, and that work has been continued ever since by the various Bhakti sects in the North, and the Saiva Siddhanta move- ment in Southern India. They all may be called-"Lovers of God, Sabhas or associations; and the God they worship is know- able, personal, and accessible, very different from the barren god of the speculative philosophy.

The Gita is still permeated with the Vedanta philosophy, but we can clearly see the beginning of an emancipation from an [Page 120]unknowable and impersonal god. A personal Ishvara had to be found and taught instead of the absolute Essence or Spirit of the Upanishads, and the Gita performed that inestimable service for India. Krishna becomes a living personality; personal trust in Krishna, and fervent devotion (Bhakti) to him are strongly emphasised, as these well-known passages indicate:

"If one of earnest spirit set before me with devotion a leaf, a flower, fruit, or water, I enjoy this offering of devotion."

"Have thy mind on me, thy devotion toward me, thy sacrifice to me, do homage to me. Thus guiding thyself, given over to me, so shalt thou assuredly abide afterward in me."

"In Him seek refuge with thy whole soul, O thou of Bharata’s race, by His grace thou shalt win supreme peace, the everlasting realm."

This idea of a personal God was brought out most clearly in the work of Manikkavasagar in Southern India. As Dr. Pope, his translator, says: "South India needed a personal God, an assurance of immortality, and a call to prayer. These it found in Manikkavasagar’s compositions." His own account of his conversion shows that he regarded his acceptance as due, not to any merit on his part, but to Siva’s grace alone:

"To me, a dog, all things not shown before, he showed; All things not heard before, he caused to hear; And guiding me from future birth he made me his; Such is the wondrous work our Lord hath wrought for me."

This is very fine, but as in the earlier Vedanta teaching, even here the doctrine of karma comes in to arrest the full development of belief in and devotion to a personal God. Brahman is still believed to be actionless, for the purpose of escaping the sway and power of karma. "Brahman is beyond thought and speech" is a phrase that is used repeatedly. Ramanuja writes that Vishnu after having created the universe from Brahma down to stocks and stones, withdrew into his own nature, and thus became impervious to the worship of the gods and of mankind. Manikkavasagar says that Siva dwells where human thought goes not.¹

¹See Dr. Farquhar’s Crown of Hinduism, pp. 393, 403. [Page 121]

THE IDEA OF GOD

There you have the great conflict in Hinduism; the main body of theology coming down from the Vedanta philosophy, emphasised again in the commentaries of Sankara, teaches that Brahman is impersonal and non-moral; that the Supreme receives no sacrifice and hears no prayer; and that he can only be worshipped through his representatives-Vishnu and Siva. But in the course of time and under the influence of the theistic movements both these sects have come to regard Brahman as personal. That is a great advance, but much time will still be required for that idea to come to full maturity in Hinduism. The late Justice Ranade of Bombay once said: "This contrast between the monotheistic spirit and the polytheistic observances strikes every student of our religious life as a puzzle which baffles the understanding....I offer no solution of it; because, though I have been thinking about it for a long time, I have not yet been able to find a rational and consistent solution of the difficulty."

Modern Hinduism

It is fair to say that in the long history of Hindu religious thought many changes have taken place in the idea of God. We have seen the animistic and polytheistic beliefs of the Vedic period. In an effort to unify their thought of God-the wonderful conception of Brahman-the World-Soul was evolved, and the greatest possible achievement of the human soul is to become identified with or absorbed into the All-Soul. But in so doing God became detached, impersonal, a mere intellectual hypothesis, which in course of time became entirely unsatisfactory to the mass of Indian religious men. The theistic movement brought God back again into the experience of man, gave Him personality, able to be worshipped, and the pious Hindu ever since has rejoiced in the sense of communion and fellowship with God. These are significant changes in the God-thought of Hinduism, and these changes are still going on. One can realize the truth in India of the distinguished London Editor, Mr. J. A. Spender's recent statement: "Looking back on the course of religious belief in my time, I should say that the greatest change has been a [Page 122]"change in the idea of God." Modern India has accepted and is working on the basis of the idea of a personal God; that is, that God has personality, has attributes and characteristics of the highest qualities, is knowable and approachable, receives worship and hears prayers, that He is a friend to man. The new idea which I wish to emphasise, and which is beginning to permeate Hindu thought, is the social and moral character of God. This is an extension of the personal idea of the Supreme God. Among the qualities of God which Hindus have long recognised, such as wisdom and greatness and power, there is now being accepted the idea that God is social and moral, and consequently His people must also be socially minded and moral in their daily lives. This is the latest advance in Hindu religious thought with respect to the character of God, and its possibilities for good are tremendous.

Perhaps the greatest exponent of Modern Hinduism is S. Radhakrishnan, King George V Professor of Philosophy in Calcutta University; his lectures on Indian philosophy in England and America in 1926 made a deep impression on those who heard them, and he was recognised as a new voice interpretating the latest and highest thought of India. One naturally turns to his books "Indian Philosophy" and "The Hindu View of Life"—for indications as to the latest trend of Indian thought, nor does he turn in vain. As to the nature of Hinduism Professor Radhakrishnan holds the commonly accepted position that Hinduism is not a closed creed. "Hinduism is therefore not a definite dogmatic creed, but a vast, complex, but subtly unified mass of spiritual thought and realization. Its tradition of the God-ward endeavor of the human spirit has been continuously enlarging through the ages." "Hindu thought believes in the evolution of our knowledge of God." Our foregoing study has shown this to be correct. As to the idea of a personal God our Indian author says: "Hinduism affirms that some of the highest and richest manifestations which religion has produced require a personal God. There is a rational compulsion to postulate the personality of the divine." He defines what he means by saying that the highest category we can use is that of self-conscious personality. [Page 123]

THE IDEA OF GOD

Now, I believe that these statements indicate another advance in the Hindu idea of God. They are most significant; look at them: self-conscious, perfect, and moral personality attributed to the character of God. In the literature of the theistic movements some of these ideas are vaguely expressed, but not so clear-cut and certain as Radhakrishnan expresses them, and as they sink down and begin to permeate Hindu thought we shall see in time their expression in the religious life of the people. India has long recognised God as personal, but is it not a new note sounding in the varied orchestra of India's religions, this note of the moral and perfect personality of God? That is what India needs today, and we all need; not a God the reflection of our own imperfect characters, but a God high and lifted up in moral perfection who will reflect His character in and through us. When Indian thought recognises this aspect of the character of God in all its fulness religion in India will then interpret the great basic truth of Hinduism "I am He" in terms of life and service and character, and not in a lifeless, abstract, intellectual metaphysic.

Professor Radhakrishnan's last paragraph in that little book containing his Upton Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, is truly indicative of what is going on, and I have tried to show one line of advance taking place in the idea of God: "After a long winter of some centuries, we are today in one of the creative periods of Hinduism. We are beginning to look upon our ancient faith with fresh eyes. We feel that our society is in a condition of unstable equilibrium. There is much wood that is dead and diseased that has to be cleared away. Leaders of Hindu thought and practice are convinced that the times require, not a surrender of the basic principles of Hinduism, but a restatement of them with special reference to the need of a more complex and mobile social order. Such an attempt will only be the repetition of a process which has occurred a number of times in the history of Hinduism. The work of readjustment is in process. Growth is slow when roots are deep. But those who light a little candle in the darkness will help to make the whole sky aflame."

(To be Concluded) [Page 124]

GURU NANAK'S HYMN OF PRAISE

Who can sing His power? Who hath power to sing it? Who can sing His gifts or know His signs? Who can sing His attributes, His greatness, and His deeds? Who can sing His knowledge, whose study is too hard for us? Who can sing Him, who fashioneth the body and again destroyeth it? Who can sing Him, who taketh away life and again restoreth it? Who can sing Him, who appeareth to be far, yet is known to be most near? Who can sing Him, who is all-seeing and in every place? In describing Him who could ever make an end? Millions of men give millions upon millions of accounts of Him, Yet they altogether fail to describe Him aright. The Giver giveth; the receiver groweth weary of receiving. In every age man subsisteth by His bounty. The Commander hath laid out the way of the world by His order, Nanak is at peace in God and blessed.

PRAYER OF GURU ARJAN

O Lord, King of men—Friend of the poor—Purifier of sinners, Dispeller of fear and terror—Abode of mercy—Treasury of excellencies; Profitable is Thy service (O God, Gopal, great Gobind), [Page 125]I have taken sanctuary at Thy feet-Thou merciful God; Cause me to cross the terrible ocean of the world!

Dispeller of lust and wrath-Burner of pride and worldly love- Honey of the soul; Sustainer of the earth, set aside my need of transmigration-and preserve mine honor-Thou first and only Joy.

O Compassionate to the poor-forevermore blessed, who fillest all space-I crave the very dust at the feet of Thy saints.

From the evils of worldly and carnal love-and from the sins of too eager hope and worldly desire-do thou save us.

Preserve the faith-and remove from our hearts all doubt; Yea, save us, O thou who abidest prisoned in no Form.

PRAYER OF GURU GOBIND SINGH

Thou art in the tree, Thou art in its leaves, Thou art in the earth, Thou art in the firmament. Thy name is repeated again and again; Thy name is fixed in man's heart. Thou art space, Thou art time, Thou art He that standeth, Thou art the place where He standeth. Thou art unborn, Thou art fearless, Thou art impalpable, Thou art indestructible, Thou art purity, Thou art fasting, Thou art deliverance, Thou art wisdom: Thou alone art, Thou alone art, Thou alone art, O God!

A MODERN SIKH RITUAL PRAYER

O Deathless, O illimitable Creator, This creature that I am, forgetting Thy name, Is bound so closely unto worldly goods, That he hath forgotten the one thing that is Real. [Page 126]Without Thy supreme mercy, how shall we cross the ocean. of this world?

Lust, wrath, greed, worldly love, jealousy and other evil passions, Sorely grieve, O great King, and trouble our minds: But on turning toward Thee, Worldly ills and afflictions are healed and brought to nought. Show us so great favor, That we may by word and deed be wholly Thine: And that in all our doings, We may obtain Thy ready help and stay!

FINNISH PRAYER TO UKKO

Guard me, O Thou great Creator, Shield me, Heavenly One, most gracious, With Thy arms of grace protect me, Aid me with the strength of wisdom. Guide the minds of all Thy heroes, Steadfast keep the thoughts of women, Guard the old from curse and slander, Save the young from sin and folly! Be to all a help forever, Thou, our guardian and our Father, That our children stray not from us, From the path Thy Heaven hath ordered, From the ways of their Creator.

CHANT OF HEALING

I, unaided, could not save thee, Could not give the least assistance, God alone, all-knowing Ukko, [Page 127]

LEAVES OF THE GREATER BIBLE

First and last, the sole Creator, Can revive the dead and dying. Do not walk in thine own virtue, Do not walk with thine own power, Walk in strength of thy Creator, Do not speak in thine own wisdom, Speak with tongue of mighty Ukko. In my mouth if there be sweetness It hath come from the Creator. If my hands are filled with beauty All the beauty comes from Ukko. Look upon us, God of mercy, Come and guide us, kind Creator, And protect us from all evil, God alone can work perfection, Ukko is the only master. [Page 128]

"TOO MANY FARMERS"

And Other Books on Rural Life Reviewed by C. F. ANSLEY

THROUGH the years since the final deflation of business farming in 1920, another kind of farming has notably gained in who can make going wages in some occupation other than farming has chosen to live far enough from urban congestion to permit ownership of a home with a parcel of land attached. With such labor as the members of the family volunteer, the land goes far toward provision for family needs. The wages are relieved of paying rent and of buying what the land produces; more, then, is available for luxuries and savings.

This acceptable kind of farming is interpreted by Ralph Borsodi as a way of escape from the urban conditions described in his book "This Ugly Civilization." Mr. Borsodi secures an income by work in the city; this income is helped out materially by what his farm home produces. He is content with his way of life and he recommends it to others, but without much hope of influencing them. No doubt he will influence some to their advantage, and his book will be one of a few to give help to our bewildered time.

If his experiment is less novel than he thinks, at least he has written well enough about it to make clear to his readers that farming may be successful without being a business. It has never been a business except locally and temporarily, with disaster at the end. Mr. Borsodi sells nothing produced on his farm or in his home. Marketing would be an unprofitable use of time; but what the household produces brings in effect the full retail price if con-

Simon and Schuster, $3.00. [Page 129]

"TOO MANY FARMERS"

sumed in the home, and surplus products permit the traditional rural luxuries of hospitality and neighborliness.

Investigation of any old American community will show that its ways were until recently such as Mr. Borsodi now follows and describes. The farmers of the time of the Revolution or the Civil War were business farmers rarely if at all. In a rural neighborhood, one of the farmers had a grist mill; his business was grinding his neighbors' grain; he "took toll"—a part of the grain. Another of the farmer neighbors had a woolen mill; another, a tannery; another was a blacksmith; another, a wagon-maker; another, a carpenter; another, a physician or a minister. The exchanges made through the neighborhood store, kept by a farmer, were of products of the neighborhood almost exclusively: furs or nails, for example, were exchanged for maple sugar. As far as it was successful the southern plantation, like the medieval manor, was self sufficient.

The farmers who now combine a paying occupation with subsistence farming, as Mr. Borsodi does, usually live near enough to their city work to reach it daily as commuters or in automobiles. Small farms situated where this arrangement is possible are in demand. If their soil is not good, it is improved. The farms that are not marketable, regardless of the quality of their soil, are those so far from any city as to preclude city work for the farmer.

Mr. Borsodi advises business farmers to do more in the way of producing what is consumed in their homes. The counsel is good, and many are doing what they can to better their lot as he recommends. To keep a business farm from being a deficit business, however, commonly requires of the farm family so much work as to leave little time or strength for other things. Directly or in what is traditionally called "rent," the taxes and upkeep must be met by cash, and the amount has to be secured by long hours of hard work. The farmer's land has become a liability. He is carrying too much land to permit him to give time to subsistence farming. His first step toward freedom must be to leave to the state the burden of ownership of his farm. This is a step now taken by many thousands of American farm owners every year. [Page 130]Rural communities beyond commuting distance from the city regularly decay unless they have industries. Many industries still do not require large factories. Some examples of industries in which one man or a very few men may still work with little capital are probably known to everybody. Many of them are listed in Peter Kropotkin's book "Fields, Factories, and Workshops."

A business farmer without leaving his neighborhood can live much as Mr. Borsodi lives if he can establish such an industry and can in some way exchange his many unprofitable acres for the acre or the two or three acres that he can use in growing farm products for his home. Before deciding that nothing of this kind can be done, one would do well to learn from "Fields, Factories, and Workshops" how many of the manufactured articles that America imports are made in workshops manned by one farmer or a very few.

As Mr. Borsodi explains, small machines are now available to farm homes and give them advantages to be had recently only in factories. Gasoline engines are in common use on farms, and electric power is available increasingly. Mr. Borsodi uses many small machines to make articles for his home. Small machines give new opportunities to workshops in rural neighborhoods. Rural life need not share the lot of business farming if the people have not become less resourceful than they were.

On the whole, Mr. Borsodi's book is more likely to help rural America than any other book written since the date of "Fields, Factories, and Workshops." He has the distinction of not urging farmers to control their market, which they do not expect and are not expected to do.

Wheeler McMillen, the author of the book "Too Many Farmers, is a leading agricultural journalist. It contains a foreword by W. M. Jardine, formerly United States Secretary of Agriculture. One may assume that the book says in the current journalistic way what the public likes to read about farming and what is held by some, at least, of the officials chosen directly or indirectly by the people to deal with farming.

William Morrow and Company, $1.00. [Page 131]

TOO MANY FARMERS

Mr. Jardine states that "Rising standards of rural living, increased use of power and mechanical equipment, and vastly more abundant contact with urban affairs, all tend to require that farmers place more emphasis than ever before upon cash income." About two million persons are foregoing these rising standards of rural living every year in order to secure a better cash income and the more abundant contact with urban affairs. Mr. McMillen holds that what is needed is to speed up this rural exodus. He says that "The decline in rural population relative to urban population has been too slow. The farms are full of farmers who are unnecessary."

The preface to the book is dated July, 1929. At that time it was not conventional politics or journalism to recognize the existence of unemployment in the cities. Since then some details of the situation have made their way to the light. Obviously there are too many people in the cities as well as on the farms, and speeding up the rural exodus seems a project not now to be undertaken light-heartedly, without pausing for reflection. When Mr. McMillen wrote his book he could say: "America itself, through wise statesmanship, through the energy and bold buildership of its business, through the growth of its new industries, the expansion of its old ones, through the creation of wealth and leisure and the demand that follows for more workers and more services, is making places for all." A large number of citizens, rural and urban, are seeking to learn where their places are.

Corporation farming, Mr. McMillen holds, is what will require speeding up the rural exodus. This idea, like the idea that there are "too many farmers," has been popular, in print. It has not been popular in the sense of leading to a ready market for securities of farming corporations. As Mr. McMillen says, "Strenuous effort will be necessary to attract capital into farming, corporate or otherwise. But the eventual exhibition of a few handsome balance sheets will result in as great eagerness to invest in farming as is now displayed to keep out of it." At present, corporation farming is at this point, awaiting the handsome balance sheets. [Page 132]Walter Burr, the author of the book "Small Towns," is Professor of Rural Sociology in the University of Missouri. His preface states that he has spent fifteen years "in the study of the rural community in the United States." Among the periodicals that published parts of the material before the publication of the book, the author mentions the "Nation's Business," the "Rotarian," and the "Kiwanis Magazine."

The author gives much of his attention to the "agricultural problem." He says that "we have come upon the time, and we should just as well face it, where 'the land' is no place for a man without capital." "The poor man (meaning the man without capital) has no right to go into business of any kind today, and expect to succeed." "Giving government relief to people who are in any kind of business" is "socialistic." "Let us go forward with fair competition under a capitalistic system, or abandon that system and try the experiment of a socialistic system—and see whether we go backward or forward. Russia has been trying the experiment for us." Professor Burr uses stern words about the "agitator" or "charlatan" who, as has often been said, "prescribes a panacea."

Farming should be left, Professor Burr holds, to men with capital; he portrays his ideal: "The successful farmer is likely to be a stock holder and a member of the board of directors of The First National Bank in his county seat town. He has some investments in stocks and bonds. He is a conservative. He is likely to be chairman of the school board, elder in the church and superintendent of the Sunday School. He is a regular fellow."

With the farm and the small town in the hands of the regular fellow, all should be well with the countryside. As the author realizes, the situation was different a short time ago; poor men then made their way on the land. "Professional leaders of agrarian uprisings," it seems, sometimes represent entrusting the countryside wholly to the regular fellow as not less experimental than the Russian way. They have even been known to call attention to comparable experiments in the past.

The Macmillan Company, $2.50. [Page 133]

SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN IMAGINATION

by JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, JR. Department of Philosophy, Columbia University

JOHN LANGDON-DAVIES is a young Englishman with a habit of writing provocative books upon such novel and interesting themes that, though they often irritate and never quite come off, they suggest more stimulating ideas than many a work of more secure scholarship. In Man and his Universe* he has attempted a task at once extraordinarily difficult and extraordinarily fruitful. His lively book "suggests in a fragmentary way the effect of science upon those beliefs the holding of which makes life worth living for each of us. It is not therefore exactly a history of science but a history of the human imagination as science has affected it and allowed it to grow."

The human imagination is one of man's activities which pays little respect to the laws of logic. How a man shall feel about an idea, how he shall embroider it with other ideas to make a congenial habitation for his spirit, has almost nothing to do with the strict implications of that idea as a purely rational intelligence would develop them. Notoriously the same picture of the horrors of the next war sets one man aflame with the vision of perpetual peace and another with plans for further military preparedness. Does the name of Darwin and the idea of cosmic evolution imply the death knell for all religion, or does it suggest a genuine and valid religion at last? Does it mean Carlyle's "gospel of dirt," or Clifford's "ocean of new life and boundless possibilities?" Which ought it to mean? Is C. E. Ayres right in his insistence that the size of Betelgeuse and the paradoxes of modern physics have no human significance or relevance at all, or is Langdon-

• John Langdon-Davies, Man and bis Universe. Harpers. xxi, 341 pp. $5.00

[Page 134]Davies right when he says, "Thus it comes about, fantastic though it may sound, that men lie with their neighbors' wives denuded of the last shred of guilty conscience because observations of Mercury's perihelion enabled Einstein to alter our ideas about space time?"

It is questions like these that Langdon-Davies sets out to answer. How do scientific beliefs actually enter into the imaginations of men? How does a new idea actually feel when it comes into the ken of minds resting in traditional notions? What have the great scientific ideas that have revolutionized men's intellectual world really meant, not in themselves, for no idea comes to men in isolation, but as newcomers at a board already crowded?

"The great scientific genius," the author remarks, "makes his discovery, gives it to the world, and the world shapes it anew into the picture which best serves its purpose. Scientific truth has really little to do with it, compared with human emotion. I. is human emotion that pays the piper and therefore calls the tune. Moreover, this is as it should be for science was made for man, not man for science."

Such an account of what scientific ideas have come to mean, not in their own terms, or as answers to the specific problems they were designed to serve, but in terms of the whole human situation into which they have been thrust, is obviously an indispensable prerequisite to any understanding of the human meaning and significance of science, and its concrete relations to the other great enterprises of man. For any one who works with ideas, who seeks to modify the ideas of others and introduce into the minds of his fellows novel ideas, a knowledge of the technic of changing beliefs is of fundamental importance. It is of little avail for him to try rational argument and logical persuasion, without realizing how largely his task is a matter of securing a favorable reception in feeling and emotion. It is the traditional failure of liberals to appeal to the imagination as well as the intellect that has led to the present eclipse of liberalism throughout the world. The elaboration of such a technic demands the most careful study of intellectual history, of the way in which new ideas have af- [Page 135]

Science and the Human Imagination

fected the human imagination. Since for the past few centuries the new beliefs that have most influenced the minds of Westerners have come from science, such a study must emphasize the reception accorded the revolutionary concepts of science.

Little has been done in this field, and Mr. Langdon-Davies is making a pioneer attempt. He tries first to convey the feeling of the medieval picture of the world. He then concentrates on several of the great revolutionary notions: the "first renaissance" of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo; the machine-world of Newton; the atomic theory of Dalton; Darwin and evolution; and the "new renaissance" of the present generation in physics and biology. In each case he tries to make clear how men felt about the old ideas, how the new ones struck their imaginations, and what their emotional reactions were. Obviously, success in such an endeavor demands a detailed knowledge, not only of the history of scientific discovery and popularization, but also of the entire world-view of past ages, their philosophies, their actual religious life, their ideals and aspirations. Probably no living scholar can command such wide knowledge; certainly Mr. Langdon-Davies cannot. He knows very little even of the history of science. He is most successful when he relies on good books, like Burtt's account of the development of science from Copernicus to Newton. He is at his worst when he falls back on bad books and popular historical mythology. His chapter on the middle ages, for example, though inevitable in the present disgraceful state of English-speaking scholarship, provokes a weary smile from those really familiar with the materials. His account of the imaginative world produced by the "new renaissance," though it avoids some of the pitfalls into which modern English writers on science have fallen, is a little too obviously the universe of Mr. Langdon-Davies to seem very significant. At times he gives way to downright silliness, as in his whole-hearted acceptance of Samuel Butler's biology, which drives him to such gems as, "We believe in breathing because breathing is a custom which has to be observed in order that we may live!"

Yet when all the obvious shortcomings of the volume have [Page 136]been recognized, there remains a solid achievement. Something of the sense of what great ideas meant, not to us in our textbooks, but to the men and the ages that stumbled upon them, the author has managed to seize and express. And something of the feeling of a revolutionary notion slowly making its way into well-furnished imaginations has been brilliantly conveyed. The reader able to check up upon the author's facts, which after all can be discovered elsewhere, can find here more suggestive insights into the actual processes of intellectual change than in books published for many a long day.

Mr. Langdon-Davies employs a theological language bound to irritate many of his readers. He is a religious modernist; not a muddle-headed and mushy modernist, such as occupy so many of our pulpits and chairs of physics, but a modernist nonetheless, who finds no friction whatsoever between "true" science and "true" religion. "What then," he asks, "of the so-called conflict between science and religion? There is no such thing: there is only a conflict between two religious outlooks and two ideas of God. From Copernicus to the present day the whole of this conflict has been due to the irritation of orthodox religions with the new and better conceptions of the eternal truths revealed by science. The so-called conflict between science and religion as generally understood by fundamentalists and village atheists is a mere street brawl. Science is not entirely built out of pure reason but has its 'metaphysics' just as much as any other use of the human imagination. Science has all along only been worth while for purely unscientific reasons, behind all the measurement has been hidden a search for greater knowledge of God, and therefore nobody has a right to bully (the reader) or his emotions by throwing at him the stones of science." Mr. Langdon-Davies' modernism, however, insists that science is supreme in its own sphere, and that natural religion, the finding of God as the answer to the unanswered problems of science, is a snare and a delusion.

This harmony of science and religion is possible for the author because of his highly selective definitions of both enterprises. "The urge which makes a man give himself to science is precisely [Page 137]

SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN IMAGINATION

the same as that which produces the poet or the composer-a passion for beauty and a desire to enjoy esthetic pleasure. Both science and art are children of the imagination, both of them ways of discovering and enjoying beauty, both a search for the poetry lurking round the corner throughout the universe. Human thought eats the raw materials of the universe, digests them and turns them into something new, something organized, something rhythmic and beautiful. This new, organized and beautiful thing is what we mean by a scientific explanation of the universe. The whole history of science has been a direct search for God; deliberate and conscious, until well into the eighteenth century, and since then unconscious, for the most part, because so much had been discovered about God by then that scientists began to think fit to change the name of the subject of their search. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz and the rest did not merely believe in God in an orthodox sort of way, they believed that their work told humanity more about God than had been known before. Their incentive in working at all was a desire to know God, and they regarded their discoveries as not only proving his existence, but as revealing more and more of his nature. If men had not wanted to know about God, it is highly doubtful if they would have worried to know about nature. When we come to read about these men we will see that the key to their lives and labors was their inevitable thirst for religious truth."

Science, then, is the quest for knowledge of God; religion, for Mr. Langdon-Davies, is "a picture of the universe and an attitude to life." "Man sees in the scientific picture of the universe which happens to be painted in his age the most perfect foundation for his beliefs; and to what is known he adds an overbelief, something which cannot be proved, but which, on the other hand, cannot be disproved by the body of natural, knowledge on which it is built. This overbelief is a man's religion; any overbelief that can be disproved by what science can show to be true is his superstition. Man's outlook on the universe as a whole is his religion." [Page 138]With such an intellectual conception of religion, and such an emotional conception of science, it is easy for the identify the two enterprises. "Science has been an a to f the human spirit in its search for God; that is for a meaning to the universe, which, if possible, can be loved; for that after all is what this eternal search after God really amounts to—the search for a meaning to the universe, which however infinite on its far side, on its near side is capable of arousing and accepting human emotions." But science is a better religion than what usually passes under that name. "For science almost from its start was able to give mankind a loftier concept to put in the place of the fundamentalist God, the concept of a great artificer, a first-rate mathematician, an artist to the 'finger tips,' instead of an irritable old gentleman believing in coporal punishment." Yet, sadly remarks Mr. Langdon-Davies, though science has been a long search for God, it has been harder and harder to find him.

Now all this talk about the identity of science and religion is a curious mixture of truth and nonsense. Mr Langdon-Davies has allowed the popular overbeliefs of the present to run away with him. It is of course an historical fact that the craving for beauty of form has played and still plays an important part in the urge to scientific inquiry, that the great seventeenth century pioneers were seeking a knowledge of God, and found him in the order of nature. But it is also true that from Kepler down the advance of science has meant the reluctant abandonment of order and beauty in the face of impertinent facts. And it is equally true that while the system of nature has possessed supreme beauty for the scientific mind, the kind of system that is science, as distinguished from the kind that is Dante's universe, for example, has been determined by quite different factors, by mathematical intelligibility, by measurability, by the power to furnish prediction and practical control. An automobile is as much a work of art as a Greek temple, but it is the nature of an automobile to be a vehicle of rapid transportation, not a shrine for the gods. Likewise, a system of natural science is as much a product of the imagination working with natural materials as the plays of [Page 139]Shakespeare; but such a system of organized beliefs has a distinctive function of its own, which is not dramatic but technological, and is to be understood only in the light of this specific function. Mr. Langdon-Davies’ conception of religion is even more one-sided and inadequate, and peculiarly Protestant. If anything can be said to be known about religion at all, it is that it is not a picture of the universe, or overbeliefs about anything; nor are the gods of men rational explanations or metaphysical truths. Religion is a way of living, a primarily emotional organization of human life, a way of feeling and acting, and only at long remove a way of believing. And the gods men actually worship and live by are not the ultimate terms of some system of philosophy, they are the imaginative embodiment of human emotions and needs, human ideals and aspirations. Natural science started its modern career as a search for one particular ideal, that of mathematical intelligibility. But the rational order of nature, though deserving of respect and even of Spinoza’s intellectual love, has never been as satisfying a god of human religious life and experience as even Mr. Langdon-Davies’ irritable old gentleman of the Pentateuch who ought to have studied mathematics. And in his own pages stands the record of how science has gradually subordinated this very ideal of intelligibility and order to that of prediction and control. The organization of man’s beliefs need not, to be sure, conflict with the organization of his feelings and actions: science and religion can be in harmony once more as they have been in the past. But to identify them is sheer ignorance of the part both science and religion play in human life, an ignorance all the more regrettable in Mr. Langdon-Davies in that he has so admirably captured, with great historical insight and imagination, the part that specific scientific ideas have fulfilled in the past. It is to be hoped that he will cast aside the vestments of the modernist clergyman, and continue his excellent studies of the processes of intellectual change. [Page 140]

ROUND TABLE

The article by Devere Allen this month is a chapter from his book, "The Fight for Peace," on the Macmillan list of autumn publications. Mr. Allen's point of view, and his spirit, makes him one of the outstanding moral forces in the world's peace movement.

Under the direction of Archie M. Palmer, of the "Association of American Colleges," a notable symposium on "The Coming World Order" will commence in World Unity next month. It has been the view of this magazine that the time for mere analysis of pre-war conditions has gone by, and that the only useful focal point of creative thought today is an exploration of the principles of world order. The symposium, which incidentally will continue for at least twelve months, represents the contribution of well known authors to this theme. The symposium is still developing, but a preliminary list of authors will be published in the December issue.

The special attention of World Unity readers is called to our "Reading List of Books on World Unity and International Cooperation," compiled by John Herman Randall, now available in pamphlet form. From inquiries already received it is clear that this reading list meets a very real need on the part of general readers as well as teachers, students and workers in the international field.

Friends of the magazine who desire to bring it to the attention of those likely to be interested may send names and addresses for the circulation department to use in mailing a new booklet describing its general aims and plans for 1931. [Page 141]

REPRINTS AND BOUND VOLUMES

FOR teachers, students, librarians, bookdealers, reading clubs and executives of organizations in the international field, the "Classified Reading List of Current Books on World Unity and International Co-operation," including titles of works published to July 1, 1930, is an invaluable guide and reference. More than 400 separate titles. Per single copy, 25 cents; eight copies, $1.00; rate for larger quantities quoted on request.

"Building Up the International Mind," by H. A. Overstreet, 16-page pamphlet, is a famous psychologist's summary of principles needed to inculcate the instinctive outlook of peace and cooperation. Limited number of copies available. Per single copy, 10 cents. Rate for larger quantities quoted on request.

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE, Volume One, October, 1927-March, 1928. 436 pages. Serials by Kirtley F. Mather and William R. Shepherd.

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE, Volume Two, April, 1928-September, 1928. 432 pages. Serials by Mary Hull, Alfred W. Martin and Dexter Perkins.

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE, Volume Three, October, 1928-March, 1929. 444 pages. Serials by Frank H. Hankins, E. A. Burtt and Alfred W. Martin (continued).

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE, Volume Four, April, 1929-September, 1929. 452 pages. Serials by Hankins and Burtt (continued).

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE, Volume Five, October, 1929-March, 1930. 432 pages. Serials by John Herman Randall, Herbert Adams Gibbons, J. Tyssul Davis and Dexter Perkins.

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE, Volume Six, April, 1930-September, 1930. 440 pages. Serials by A. J. Muste, Perkins, Randall and Gibbons (continued).

Bound Volumes of WORLD UNITY are a cultural index to and interpretation of the international movements of the day. Each volume bound in blue buckram, gold stamped. Per volume, $4.25.

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE EAST 12TH STREET NEW YORK [Page 142]

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A World Community

By JOHN HERMAN RANDALL

THIS work is a sine qua non for every person attempting at all seriously to understand the problems and also opportunities of the new era. It has great usefulness as a text for college classes, or as reading for courses in modern history, sociology, religion or international relations.

Editorial writers, teachers, lecturers and ministers, as well as men and women identified with offices of public trust or responsible movements of a progressive character, will find "A World Community" absolutely invaluable. The scope of the book is clearly indicated in the following Summary of Contents:-

The New Means of Communication The New Economic Organization The New Knowledge The Emerging Ideal of World Unity Nationalism Economic Imperialism War and Competitive Armaments Ignorance and Old Habits of Thinking The Movement toward Internationalism The Movement toward World Economic Cooperation A Religion for a World Community

Since its publication in February, 1930, "A World Community" has received powerful endorsement.

"Dr. Randall writes with the knowledge of the scientist and the vision of the prophet."-Frank H. Hankins, Smith College. "It discusses one of the great problems of our time, and does so in a most illuminating fashion."-Manley O. Hudson, Harvard University. "A real contribution to international understanding and amity."-Harry Levi, Temple Israel, Boston. "His work has the possibility of greater educational influence than anything of the kind that has been written."-A. C. Senske, St. Paul News.

"A World Community" is published in the World Unity Library sponsored by this magazine. A copy will be sent postpaid for $2.00. The book and annual subscription to WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE, $5.00.

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE 4 EAST 12TH STREET NEW YORK [Page 144]Publishers: G. E. STECHERT CO., New York-DAVID NUTT, London-FELIX ALCAN, Paris-AKAD. VERLAGSGESELLSCHAFT, Leipzig-NICOLA ZANICHELLI, Bologna-RUIZ HERMANOS, Madrid-LIVRARIA MACHADO, Porto-THE MARUZEN COMPANY, Tokyo.

"SCIENTIA" INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SCIENTIFIC SYNTHESIS

Published every month (each number containing 100 to 120 pages)

EDITORS F. Bottazzi G. Bruni F. Enriques

IS THE ONLY REVIEW the contributors to which are really international.

IS THE ONLY REVIEW that has a really world-wide circulation.

IS THE ONLY REVIEW of scientific synthesis and unification that deals with the fundamental questions of all sciences: the history of the sciences, mathematics, astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and sociology.

IS THE ONLY REVIEW that by means of enquiries among the most eminent scientists and authors of all countries (On the philosophical principles of the various sciences; On the most fundamental astronomical and physical questions of current interest, On the contribution that the different countries have given to the developmen: of various branches of knowledge; On the more important biological questions; On the great economical and sociological international questions), studies!! the main problems discussed in intellectual circles all over the world, and represents at the same time the first attempt at an inter-national organization of philosophical and scientific progress.

IS THE ONLY REVIEW that among its contributors can boast of the most illustrious men of science in the whole wrold.

The articles are published in the language of their authors, and every number has a supplement containing the French translation of all the articles that are not French. The review is thus completely accessible to those who know only French. (Write for a free copy to the General Secretary of "Scientia," Milan, sending 12 cents in stamps of your country, merely to cover packing and postage.)

SUBSCRIPTION: $10.00, Post free. Office: Via A. De Togni 12, Milan (116) General Secretary: PAOLO BONETTI. [Page 145]

NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

By HERBERT ADAMS GIBBONS

IN THIS book, Dr. Gibbons has infused his historical scholarship with a lifetime of personal experience and participation in international affairs. The result is a study accurate enough for the classroom and interesting enough for the average reader.

"Nationalism and Internationalism" traces the evolution of political force from its first expression in the movement toward modern nationalism, through the nineteenth century, to its present expression in internationalisma as the true outcome of national ideals.

In the course of this balanced survey we see emerging a more human and dramatic conception of the influences making for war and peace. The final analysis includes consideration of the Young Plan. The Summary of Contents follows:-

Nationalism Before 1789 Nationalism Versus Internationalism from 1789 to 1815 Nationalism and Internationalism from 1815 to 1870 Nationalist Movements from 1870 to 1914 Nationalism During the World War and the Peace Conference International Cooperation Since the World War

With the knowledge and insight gained from this book, the meaning of international events reported in the daily press can be thoroughly appreciated. A Professor of Sociology writes: "He manages to link the various movements together so as to make not only a very interesting story but a very illuminating one." From a scholarly Rabbi: "Nationalism and Internationalism tells most interestingly a story with which all of us concerned with world well-being should be familiar."

"Nationalism and Internationalism" is published in the World Unity Library sponsored by this magazine. A copy of the book will be sent postpaid for $1.50. The book and annual subscription to WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE, $4.75.

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE 4 EAST 12TH STREET NEW YORK [Page 146]

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

A liberal, humanitarian magazine for the modern educator and parent, reflecting the new tendencies in education and life.

CONTENTS FOR NOVEMBER

WHAT SHOULD COLLEGE STUDENTS LEARN? Dr. Goodwin Watson

VI. EMERSON, A PROPHET IN EDUCATION J. Milnor Dorey

EARTH SCIENCES AND CHILDREN Bertha Stevens

THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE, A LOWER SCHOOL PROBLEM Helen Ethen Cuttler

A CRITIQUE OF PRIVATE SCHOOLS George A. Boyce

FLAMME EMPOR Marion B. Burling

RHYTHM IN TERMS OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION Jacques Dalcroze

Editorial News and Comments News of the Association Recent BookS In the Magazines Among the New Books for Girls and Boys

Published eight times monthly during the school year by The Progressive Education Association, 10 Jackson Place, Washington, D. C. Ann Shumaker, Editor: Dr. W. Carson Ryan, Advisory Editor.

Each subscription includes membership in the Association, with its professional services for school and home problems, aid in securing positions and locating schools.

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SPECIAL OFFER: With each subscription entered this month, two reprints will be included free. Send for checking list. Send for clubbing rates with other magazines and books on education. [Page 147]"The International Journal of Ethics Seeks To Clarify Theory and Improve Practice." -T. V. SMITH, EDITOR

Social problems will be separately analyzed in special issues of The International Journal of Ethics during 1930.

Within the province of this publication lie both the central field of ethical knowledge and the bordering fields of law, politics, economics, literature, and religion.

For forty years The International Journal of Ethics has been the leading quarterly in its field. It numbers among its contributors the leading writers in America and Great Britain.

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SEVEN GREAT BIBLES

By ALFRED W. MARTIN

publication of this important work places in the hands of the general reader the vital facts about the great historical religions hitherto limited to a few scholars and theologians, or hastily "popularized" in forms lacking scientific method as well as the spirit of reverence and insight.

Here, at last, are the essential truths about Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Taoism, Muhammadanism, Judaism and Christianity that demonstrate the underlying unity and harmony in the texts from which these religions derive a very history of the soul of man illumined from age to age by inspired teachers pointing the path to brotherhood and peace.

There can be no soundness of culture nor depth of personality in this new age without a firm grasp of religion from the world-view—no useful scheme of social progress which fails to consider the elements of spiritual vision and enduring faith common to the entire race.

Mr. Martin's book is therefore at once a challenge and an opportunity, dealing with a subject of supreme concern at a time when formalized religion threatens to collapse, the old conventions and inhibitions fail, lawlessness threatens and responsible leaders seek a new means of social regeneration.

You need no special preparation to read and enjoy "Seven Great Bibles," because it presents each religion as nearly as possible in the actual words and lives of the Founder himself. Proceeding from chapter to chapter you seem to stand among those who discoursed with the wise Confucias, questioned the illumined Buddha, drew inspiration from Muhammad, resisted the principle of evil with Zoroaster, suffered in the wilderness with Moses and received the Sermon on the Mount from the lips of Jesus.

"Seven Great Bibles" is published in the World Unity Library sponsored by this magazine. A copy will be sent postpaid for $2.00. The book and annual subscription to WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE, $5.00.

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE 4 EAST 12TH STREET NEW YORK [Page 149]

1. Politics and Economics

AMERICAN DIPLOMACY, THE LOST STAKE OF, by Brent Dow Allinson, June, 1930

BRIAND-KELLOGG PACT, AFTER THE, by Ida Muller, Baron Baudran, Herbert Adams Gibbons, Lucia Ames Mead, David G. Stead, Marja Grundmann-Koscienska, September, 1919

CZECHOSLOVAKIA, by Joseph S. Roucek, April, 1930

DEMOCRACY IN HISTORY, by John Herman Randall, January, 1929

EUROPE, THE UNITED STATES OF, by Richard Lee, Rustum Vambery, Marja Grundmann-Koscienska, R. H. Markham, Charles Richet, Th. Ruyssen, March, 1930

FELLOWSHIP AND CLASS STRUGGLE, by A. J. Muste, April and May, 1930

INTERNATIONAL ACTION, NEXT STEPS IN, by Lucia Ames Mead, August, 1930

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, UNITY AND DISUNITY IN, by Dexter Perkins, April, May, June, August, September, November and December, 1928, January to July, 1929

LATIN-AMERICA, CULTURAL RELATIONS WITH, by Hubert C. Herring, August, 1929

MEXICO AND ITS PROMISE, by Hubert C. Herring, May, 1930

NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM, by Herbert Adams Gibbons, October, 1919, to July, 1930

NAVAL TREATY, THE HIDDEN MEANING OF THE, by Brent Dow Allinson, July, 1930

TREATIES, THE PROBLEM OF OBSOLETE AND UNJUST, by Ernest Ludwig, February, 1930

UNITED STATES, NATURALIZATION LAW OF THE, By S. G. Pandit, March, 1929

WAR DEBTS, TREASURY REPORTS ON THE, by Revisionist, February, 1919

WASTE PLACES, by C. F. Ansley, December, 1928

2. Philosophy and Education

CHARACTER, SCHOOLS AND THE BUILDING OF, by William Lowe Bryant, June, 1918

EDUCATION AND INTERNATIONALISM, by Edward L. Troxell, November, 1927

EDUCATION, AN OBJECTIVE FOR CIVIC, by Arnold H. Kamiat, June, 1928

EDUCATION, THE NEED OF A SPIRITUAL ELEMENT IN, by Rufus M. Jones, Pierre Bovet, Hugh Moran, Charles Parker Connolly, October, 1928

ETHICS, UNIVERSAL, by Alois Richard Nykl, July, 1918

INTERNATIONAL MIND, BUILDING UP THE, by Harry A. Overstreet, June, 1918

SCIENCE AND THE FOUCATED MAN, by John Herman Randall, jr., November, 1929

SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION, by Edwin Arthur Burtt, March to July, 1929

UNITY THROUGH SCIENCE, by F. S. Marvin, June, 1930

3. East and West

FAST, BY WAY OF THE, by Alice A. Bailey, August, 1930

EASTERN CIVILIZATIONS, THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT POR, by John J. Coss, April, 1928

EUROPE AND ASIA, THE INTERACTION Or, by William R. Shepherd, December, 1927, to May, 1918

INDIA, A SON OF MOTHER I. ANSWERS, by Dhan Gopal Mukerji, July, 1928

INDIAN UNITY, THE VEXED PROBLEM OF, by Kenneth J. Saunders, January, 1918

MATERIALISM AND SPIRITUALITY, by Stanley Rice, August, 1930

PACIFIC, UNITY IN THE, by Kenneth Scott Latourette, November, 1929

SHAMBHALA, by Nicholas Roerich, January, 1930

WEST, THE SPIRITUAL CRISIS OF THE, by Paul Richard, August, 1929 [Page 150]

4. Religion

BUDDHISM, SACRED SCRIPTURES OF, by Alfred W. Martin, July to October, 1928

CONFUCIANISM, SACRED SCRIPTURES Or, by Alfred W. Martin, January to March, 1919

HINDUISM, SACRED SCRIPTURES OF, by Alfred W. Martin, November, December, 1917, February to June, 1928

MUHAMMEDANISM, SACRED SCRIPTURES Or, by Alfred W. Martin, June to August, 1929

MUSLIM'S, THE MODERN M.'s PROBLEM, by John Wright Buckham, September, 1930

QURAN, THE, by Moulana Yakub Hasan, September, 1930

RELIGION AND THE NATURALISTIC OUTLOOK, by Y. H. Krikorian, June, 1930

RELIGION, THE PRACTICAL PROGRAM OF, by A. Eustace Haydon, December, 1919

RELIGION, ONE R.-MANY FAITES, by J. Tyssul Davis, October, 1919, to January, 1930

RELIGION, INDIA'S CONTRIBUTION TO, by S. Pandit, February, 1930

RELIGION, THE COLLEGE STUDENT AND H by Harry Walker Hepner, June, 1918

RELIGIOUS UNITY, by Charles Parker C nolly, G. George Fox, Albert W. Palm Fred Merrifield, May, 1928

SCIENCE AND RELIGION, by Nathaniel Schmi June, 1919

SCIENCE AND RELIGION, THE RELATIONS by Kirtley F. Mather, October, 1927, March, 1918

TAOISM, SACRED SCRIPTURES OF, by Alfred Martin, May, 1929

YOUTH AND THE CHURCH, by Alfred Ben Jacob, September, 1930

ZOROASTRIANISM, SACRED SCRIPTURES OF, Alfred W. Martin, November, Decemb 1918

5. Universal Peace

ARBITRATION, INTERNATIONAL, by Ernest Lud- wig, September, 1930

DISARMAMENT, by Ernest Judet, February, 1930

DISARMAMENT THE YET UNSOLVED PROB- LEM OF UNIVERSAL PEACE, by F. B. Clark, April, 1929

INTERNATIONALISM AND THE COMMON PEOPLE, by Richard Lee, October, 1919

LEVINSON, SALMON O., by John Dewey, May, 1919

NATURE AND THE LAW OF Love, by Vladimir Karapetoff, February, 1918

ONE AND THE MANT, THE, by Abba Hillel Silver, November, 1928

ONENESS, THE BASIS FOR HUMAN, by John Herman Randall, April, 1929

PEACE, THE QUEST OF WORLD, by Dexter Per- kins, October, December, 1929, January, February, April, May, June, 1930

PEACE, WORLD, AND THE PACT AGAINST WAR, by R. H. Markham, May, 1929

PRACE, THE PRICE FOR, by Dexter Perkins, March, 1918

PEACE MAINTENANCE BY ECONOMIC ISOLATION, by William H. Blymyer, April, 1929

PEACE, CAN BUSINESS UNDERWRITE, by F. Emerson Andrews, July, 1930

PROGRESS BY TELIC GUIDANCE, by Mary Hull, July, 1928, January, 1929

RACE RELATIONS, CAN R. R. BE TAUGHT THE CLASSROOM, by Verdine Peck Hu June, 1919

RACIAL RELATIONSHIPS AND INTERNATION HARMONY, by Frank H. Hankins, Februa to June, 1919

SOCIETY, THE TRANSFORMATION OF, by F. Marvin, February, 1929

UNDERSTANDING INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS, Norman Angell. June, 1929

UNITY, THE SCIENTIFIC AND RELIGIOUS DRI TOWARD, by Herbert A. Miller, Octobe 1927

WAR AND REVOLUTION, WHY, by Herbert / Miller, December, 1928

WORLD COMMUNITY, A, by John Herma Randall, October, 1929, to Septembe 1930

WORLD CITIZENSHIP, by Carl A. Ross, Apri 1919

WORLD OUTLOOK, Tax, by Horace Holle October, 1917

WORLD UNITY, THE IDEAL OF, by John Herma Randall, October, November, 1917

WORLD UNITY, THE BIOLOGICAL SANCTIONS O by Ernest M. Best, November, Decembe 1917

WORLD UNITY, A SPIRITUAL BASIS POR, b Dhan Gopal Mukerji, December, 1917