Arbitration treaties, international judicial councils, schemes of international disarmament, peace funds and peace movements, are all well in their way. But the situation calls for more radical thinking than that which terminates in such proposals. We have to recognize that furtherance of the depth and width of human intercourse is the measure of civilization; and we have to apply this fact without as well as within our national life. We must make the accident of our internal composition into an idea, an idea upon which we may conduct our foreign as well as our domestic policy. An international judicial tribunal will break in the end upon the principle of national sovereignty.
We have no right to cast stones at any warring nation till we have asked ourselves whether we are willing to forego this principle and to submit affairs which limited imagination and sense have led us to consider strictly national to an international legislature. In and of itself, the idea of peace is a negative idea; it is a police idea. There are things more important than keeping one's body whole and one's property intact. Disturbing the peace is bad, not because peace is disturbed, but because the fruitful processes of coöperation in the great experiment of living together are disturbed. It is futile to work for the negative end of peace unless we are committed to the positive ideal which it cloaks: Promoting the efficacy of human intercourse irrespective of class, racial, geographical and national limits. Any philosophy which should penetrate and particulate our present social practice would find at work the forces which unify human intercourse. An intelligent and courageous philosophy of practice would devise means by which the operation of these forces would be extended and assured in the future. An American philosophy of history must perforce be a philosophy for its future, a future in which freedom and fullness of human companionship is the aim, and intelligent coöperative experimentation the method.
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
1. Bernhardi, "Germany and the Next War," pp. 73-74. Italics not in the original text.
2. Bernhardi, "Germany and the Next War," pp. 63-64.
3. Eucken, "The Meaning and Value of Life," translated by Gibson, p. 104.
4. He refers to the followers of Schelling, who as matter of fact had little vogue. But his words may not unjustly be transferred to the naturalistic schools, which have since affected German thought.
5. Chamberlain, for example, holds that Jesus must have been of Teutonic birth—a perfect logical conclusion from the received philosophy of the State and religion. Quite aware that there is much Slav blood in northern Germany and Romance blood in southern Germany, he explains that while with other peoples crossing produces a mongrel race, the potency of the German blood is such that cross-breeding strengthens it. While at one time he explains the historic strength of the Jew on the ground that he has kept his race pure, another place he allows his indignation at the Jews to lead him to include them among the most mongrel of all peoples. To one thing he remains consistent: By the very essence of race, the Semites represent a metaphysical principle inherently hostile to the grand Germanic principle. It perhaps seems absurd to dignify the vagaries of this garrulous writer, but according to all report the volumes in which such expressions occur, "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century," has had august approval and much vogue.
6. Marx said of the historic schools of politics, law and economics that to them, as Jehovah to Moses on Mt. Sinai, the divine showed but its posterior side.
Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding:
A Critical Exposition
Chapter II. The Sources of His Philosophy.
Chapter III. The Problem, and its Solution.
Chapter IV. Locke and Leibniz.—Innate Ideas.
Chapter V. Sensation and Experience.
Chapter VI. The Impulses and the Will.
Chapter VII. Matter and its Relation to Spirit.
Chapter VIII. Material Phenomena and Their Reality.
Chapter IX. Some Fundamental Conceptions.
Chapter X. The Nature and Extent of Knowledge.
Chapter XI. The Theology of Leibniz.
Chapter XII. Criticism and Conclusion.
Preface
The purpose of the series of which the present volume is one, is not, as will be seen by reference to the statement in the initial volume, to sum up in toto the system of any philosopher, but to give a “critical exposition” of some one masterpiece. In treating the “Nouveaux Essais” of Leibniz, I have found myself obliged, at times, to violate the letter of this expressed intention, in order to fulfil its spirit. The “Nouveaux Essais,” in spite of its being one of the two most extended philosophical writings of Leibniz, is a compendium of comments, rather than a connected argument or exposition. It has all the suggestiveness and richness of a note-book, but with much also of its fragmentariness. I have therefore been obliged to supplement my account of it by constant references to the other writings of Leibniz, and occasionally to take considerable liberty with the order of the treatment of topics. Upon the whole, this book will be found, I hope, to be a faithful reflex not only of Leibniz’s thought, but also of his discussions in the “Nouveaux Essais.”
In the main, the course of philosophic thought since the time of Leibniz has been such as to render almost self-evident his limitations, and to suggest
