On Understanding the Mind of Germany
I
MANY psychologists are now saying that the wish is uniformly father to the thought. Above the surface of consciousness rise intellectual structures of which we fancy ourselves the lords. Some are more spacious, others less so; some rickety, some solid. But all, we imagine, have been built by the master-builder— cold reason. But these psychologists tell us of vital instincts, obscure inclinations, imperative preferences at work below the surface of consciousness and shaping the systems of belief, seemly and unseemly, which show themselves above. As unseen forms build up islands of the seas, these hidden stirrings of hope and fear create our thoughts. These psychologists may exaggerate. But the intellectual outgivings of the present war look like a demonstration of their thesis. Emotional perturbations are so deep and general in war that any one who keeps himself outside can behold the suborning of intelligence in process. The native partisanship of thought and belief becomes flagrant. These glory, naked and unashamed, in their simplicity of bias. Impartiality and detachment of mind are suspicious traits. A loyal and serious soul, so it seems, does not weigh evidence too closely or reach conclusions too scrupulously when his country’s fate hangs in the balance. A once philosophically minded Englishman now writes ‘on the peacefulness of being at war.’ For an emotion which sweeps all before it, so undivided as to leave room for but one kind of thinking and one form of belief, affords a sweetly complete sense of certainty. In it the discriminations and doubts which always accompany the efforts of a critical intelligence are submerged.
It is characteristic of emotion to develop only those ideas which support and reinforce their own operation. Their subtlest work is to produce intellectual structures which effectively mask from view whatever would trouble action were it recognized. To suggest beliefs which feed desire is a simple matter. To build up beliefs which prevent perception of what is undesirable within desire is a more complicated affair. Men are profoundly moral even in their immoralities. Especially do they in their collective and persistent activities require the support of a justifying conscience. Nothing is so paralyzing to action as prolonged doubt as to the justice of one’s cause. The notion that men can act enduringly and deliberately at the expense of others, in behalf of their own advantage, just because they perceive it to be their own advantage, is a myth — in spite of its currency. Ideal ends and moral responsibilities are always invoked. And only uninstructed cynicism will assign conscious hypocrisy in explanation. Men must be stayed in their serious enterprises by moral justifications — this is a necessity which knows no law but itself. We may learn a lesson from the prevalence of the doctrine of the divine rights of kings. As long as absolute monarchies had the sanction of contemporary events, they did not appeal for justification to supernatural sanctions. Only when their rights became humanly questionable was recourse had to superhuman buttressing.
In times of peace it is possible to idealize war. Imagination, left to its own devices, forgets the disagreeable and dwells upon glory. In times of war, suffering, misery, the agonies of destruction, are too immediate and urgent to permit this course save to the hopelessly callous or the hopelessly romantic. Hence idealization is transferred to the cause for which the war is fought. Even the most righteous of wars involves many illusions of this sort; the less justifiable the war, the more surely do the emotions develop ideas and beliefs which may disguise the lack of justification. The vehement conviction of each warring nation of the absolute righteousness of its own cause is the whistling of children in the awful unexpectedness of a graveyard. But it is this only superficially. In its depths it represents the labor of desire to procure a moral justification which will arm action. Only the most placid or the most trivial of existences is endurable without some belief in its own moral necessity. How can the horrors of war be borne without conviction of moral justification?
Each nation naturally expresses its own moral grounds in the terms which its history has made familiar and congenial. The formulæ chosen are appealing and convincing to other nations — say neutral nations — in the degree in which they are uttered in a familiar and understandable tongue. The average American understands the moral defense of Great Britain readily. It is couched in the terms which we should naturally employ in our own justification. So far as distance permits us to judge, France has been the least clamorous of all the nations at war; but her justifications, also, are uttered in a language which we understand, even if it be not so naturalized among us as the moral speech of England. But it is noteworthy that Americans — except German-Americans — who sympathize with Germany do not explain and justify her cause in the language which the Germans by preference employ. The former assign reasons of expediency and practical political necessity, — not the broad sweeping moral reasons which the latter put forth.
The case of the invasion of Belgium is signally in point. American apologists sought for technical and legal justifications — the origin of the treaty in a Prussian, not an Imperial, guaranty, and so forth. They ignored the plea of the justification by a superior national mission, by the doctrine that the day of the small nationality is past since it obstructs the required organization of humanity. The true Germans ignored the legal technicalities of their American apologists. The only point upon which the two agreed was that of the right conferred by military necessity. And this proffering of the doctrine of necessity was to most Americans a sign that the intellects as well as the sympathies of their compatriots had become Germanized. In a most literal sense the mind of Germany is foreign to us; it is not to be understood without an effort.
II
Each nation, I repeat, expresses its justification through the ideas which its past history has made most intelligible to itself— in terms, that is, of its own national philosophy. The English are traditionally Protestant, evangelical, and individualistic in their consciousness. Their moral defense instinctively takes a personal, a moralistic, form. The blamelessness of their own conscience, the virtuousness of their motive — such as the defense of the sanctity of treaties and their pledged word — support them. Since their activities, as distinct from their consciousness, have been largely commercial and imperialistic, it is not surprising that the hypocrisy, the unctuous pharisaism, of the British have become proverbial among nations with another cast of thought. But since the emotion of good intent is a perfectly genuine phenomenon, the English are truly puzzled by the accusation. Nothing is more remote from their all too hearty and bluff straightforwardness than conscious double-dealing. America has been educated too largely in the English tradition to get the full force of the Continental charge of hypocrisy. But it should be possible for us to see that every nation has its peculiar self-interest, and hence its own mode of partly disguising and partly justifying the operation of that self-interest.
The devotion of the French to general ideas, to impersonal formulæ, is as marked as that of the English to rectitude of personal motive. Their justifications are congenially expressed in the ideas of reason, humanity, and civilization. The reaction of the English to these abstract notions — in the past — has been the charge of childish vanity and love of glittering rhetoric. The accusation, from the Continental side of the Channel, of perfidy was met by the counter charge, from the insular side, of incredible levity. But an intelligent outsider will find, I think, only a divergence in the manner of seeking and finding the mental sanction required for effective action.
In any event, the English and the French have long been in contact with each other. They have learned each other’s catchwords of defense and recrimination. One can hardly imagine them, so far as international intercourse is concerned, taking each other by intellectual surprise. But the selfjustifying consciousness of the German was, up to the time of the war, practically an unexplored territory to the Englishman. He noted, of course, the practical activities of the former. Up to the period of the achieving of German national unity in the early seventies, nay, up to the time of the naval developments of the nineties, these activities met mainly with his acquiescence, even his approval. At all events, the activities were quite explicable to the English on the basis of principles with which they were quite familiar. They were characteristically incurious as to whether the same principles animated the German understanding of Germany’s activities. They took no occasion to acquaint themselves with the bulwarks of moral explanation which had been erecting in Germany since the day of the Napoleonic wars. If account was made of them, they were not taken seriously. They seemed to be innocently speculative, or an evidence of the peculiar interest of Germans in introspective metaphysics.
Hence the intellectual unpreparedness of the English for the war — their unpreparedness for understanding the meaning which the Germans assigned in justification of their activities. They had no forewarned mind about the German mind. This explains the rapid growth and spread of the Nietzschean myth. Nietzsche had urged, so it was thought, that all reference to moral ideals and sanctions was a sign and a source of weakness. Well, here was an entire people which had become exemplars of that doctrine: a people which had quite consciously thrown off, in their international politics, the last vestige of need for any moral basis and aim; a people which had deliberately adopted the doctrine of force as its own justification.
The only thing which might have given a clew to the mind of Germany — the mind, I say, not the activities —was the greatest stumbling-block. I refer to the professed idealism of Germany — what I have elsewhere called its self-conscious and self-righteous idealism. To most Englishmen who thought of this idealism at all, it seemed to be a weakness — rather amiable though futile — for an introspective and sentimental philosophy. Since the sole approach to an understanding was ignored or misconceived, there was a frantic clutching for any explanation, and a unanimous cry of relief when Nietzsche was laid hold of. That anti-Prussian individualist, that rebel against any philosophy of regimentation and subordination, figured along with Treitschke and Bernhardi as a war-god of the tribes of the Huns. That Treitschke had assumed a philosophy of the state and history distilled by Hegel and Fichte from idealistic philosophy, and given it an acrid positivistic application to contemporary affairs, was unnoted. In vain were the allusions of Bernhardi to the categorical imperative and the idealistic mission of Germany spread over his pages.
There are scores of illustrations of the hiatus between the German conception of themselves and the English reading of their mental and moral temper. Kultur, the catchword of the war, is as good as any. It is readily comprehensible that the English, after what seemed to them the extreme German braggadocio about superior Kultur, should have adopted Louvain, Rheims, and the Lusitania as emblems of Kultur. As things go in war, this was a fair hit. But they also went so far as to believe that these events meant to the Germans just what they meant to themselves: deliberate assertion that might is the only right, and a claim of absolution from duty and humanity. How far this was from the German state of mind may be seen in the following words of an influential German newspaper respecting the sinking of the Lusitania:—
‘We base that deed on the claims of the higher humanity which is the foundation of every national life. What appears inhumanity to the Americans was in the higher sense humanity. . . . National self-respect demands that a state shall not lay aside its holy duties, even if their fulfillment seems to involve harshness or cruelty. Would that the Americans could grasp this conception of humanity.’
It is not easy to take in fully the meaning of such words. Presumably a German would hardly use them save in the emotional stress of war. But only if we forget for the time being what we have heard about Nietzsche et als., and put ourselves in the atmosphere of these words, can we put ourselves in the path which leads to an understanding of the German mind. For the Kultur for whose preservation the war is waged is (to this mind) a sacred necessity for all humanity. The ideal is not force; it is the systematic organization of all forces, natural and social, by means of devotion to science and to honest patient work, in behalf of the victory of the ideal of organization over the ideal of chaotic individualism; of science over blind muddling along; of thorough work over superficial display. To fail to employ force, of every kind and in every way, to defend such a possession would be treachery to the German ideal and hence to the cause of humanity. Such spiritual sloth may be left to other nations.
Even those of us who retain enough impartiality to recognize that efficient organization, detailed application of science, and patient work have been marked traits of German life, may fail to see that the present war is one waged in defense of these admirable qualities against the attacks of outside greed, envy, and desire for revenge. But if we are to achieve an understanding of the German mind about itself in general, and itself in this war in particular, we have to get a vision of Germans seriously and sincerely holding ideas which we can hardly present to ourselves without an element of irony and caricature. Just as we take it for granted that the French should conceive themselves as especial guardians of rationality and civilized intercourse, the English as filled with a sense of the virtuousness of their motives, so we must learn to think of the Germans as convinced of their superior idealism and universality of outlook. Just because their Welt-Anschauung is superior, it is a duty not so much to themselves as to humanity itself that they should have made every preparation, scientific and technical as well as personal, to defend it and win acknowledgment for it: such is their mind about themselves.
III
The English, I repeat, were conspicuous in unpreparedness to understand the mind of Germany. The French outcry, in spite of their greater suffering, has been restrained. Not only have the Latin races long conceived the Teutons as still only partially civilized, but the French were specifically instructed as to the German temper of mind. The defeat of 1870 had turned the mind of a generation to ideas and things German. Their lucid curiosity, their unequaled ability in Comptes Rendus, had borne fruit in a multitude of informing studies. A dozen, probably a score, of writings in French could be named (published mainly since 1890) for which no parallel can be found in English. In the latter tongue there are excellent political histories, admirable studies of government, administration, domestic and civic life. But it is hard to find any accounts of German ideas, of the specifically German temper of mind, which compare with a multitude of French books. If one wants to know about their national psychology, about the background and development of their beliefs in social and political philosophy, about not merely their economic activities and theories but the mental disposition which attends them, about their religious ideas, about the way in which they have conceived and written history, one goes to French studies. And one finds a record of fact, accompanied with insight into the emotional and moral temper implied in the fact. The foreigner is not well able to judge as to the military preparedness of the French; as to their intellectual preparedness there can be no doubt. The accounts are not only clear and objective; they combine with a subtle irony an equally subtle admiration for many German ways.
Only a mental unreadiness on the part of the English would have made possible the rise of the Nietzsche myth. Strange to say this unreadiness was increased, not diminished, by the immense interest taken in professional German philosophy in the generation after 1870 — the generation of revolt against the empiricism that reigned in Great Britain from Locke onwards. It is even true that to all appearances the classic idealism of Germany flourished more in England than in Germany during the decade of the nineties. Admirable books were produced about Fichte and Hegel as well as Kant. But the interest in German philosophy was of a kind to close the eyes to the characteristically German temper which gave edge to it.
In part, this was merely a result of the unfortunate way in which the history of philosophical thought is too usually written. It is only too customary to discuss systems of thought apart from their social context; it is only too customary to write gravely about them as if they were like unto mathematical systems, and the only question was of their absolute truth or falsity. This habit, of course, leads to expositions which may be scholarly and technically accurate, but which ignore everything which is symptomatic of the national mind. It is a matter of indifference whether the system arose and flourished in Greece, Turkey, the moon, or Mars. But this general cause was reinforced at this juncture by a special need of English thought. To all appearances the traditional philosophy of Great Britain had more than served its time. Its empirical character was allied with a somewhat narrow individualism. In the later nineteenth century extreme individualism was a source of danger.
German philosophy was seized upon as a weapon with which to attack the former official philosophy of England. It is more than a coincidence that the reign of German idealism in Great Britain coincided with the revolt against laissez-faire liberalism in economics and politics, and with the growth of collectivism. In religious matters it coincided with an increasing failure of dogmatic Protestantism, combined with a desire to preserve the moral and emotional content of a faith which was no longer accepted literally. In religion the older liberalism had proved rather thin; German idealism added substance. Consequently the English attitude was not concerned with what German idealism meant at home, but with what it could do in Great Britain. Everything which did not contribute to this end was ignored, or else treated as a mere technical blemish without serious import.
German philosophy was taken not only innocently, trustingly, but eulogistically. It supplied ‘organic’ constructive principles with which to contend against the manifest defects of historic English particularism. The ‘categorical imperative’ appeared in a halo of glory, due to its contrast with a mechanical profit-and-loss theory. The Hegelian conception of the state was transfigured in its contrast with a police conception of government. The German notion of history as an immanent evolution of an Absolute Idea shone in contrast with that absence of a sense of the moral value of historic continuity which John Stuart Mill noted as the weakness of his own spiritual forbears.
No atmosphere could be less conducive to an appreciation of the standing of German idealism as an instrument of national apologetics. A too critical attitude toward German thought would have weakened its fighting value in England. The obvious course was followed. German thought was abstracted wholly from its own social setting and bias. It was conceived as it would have been if it had been an indigenous product adapted to the especial needs of contemporary England, It was a balm for social wounds; a medicine for religious ills; a tool of educational and political reconstruction. No point of view could have been more unfavorable to understanding what Germany itself found in its a priori and absolutistic idealism and in its own philosophy of history. The continuity of the German mind of 1914 with that forming in 1814 in the struggle for national existence was lost from sight. The thinkers who should have been the ones to interpret the German mind to England were just the ones most taken by surprise. That a philosophy so obviously desirable and needed in England could suddenly appear as a weapon of offense aimed at the peace of Europe and the well-being of England was impossible. A spiritual revolution, symbolized by the Nietzschean will to power, must have overtaken the Germany of idealistic philosophy. Mr. J. H. Muirhead, one of the English disciples of the classic idealism of Germany, has no recourse save to consider its present philosophy as ‘the great apostasy.’
IV
It is interesting to speculate whether England has not suffered grievously because, at a turn of its social and political tide, it could find no alternatives between persisting in an outworn native philosophy and entirely abandoning it for a foreign importation. In spite of the professional vogue of the latter, it never made its way into the popular mind. Since the eclipse of John Stuart Mill, England has had no native philosophy. Is this fact possibly connected with its muddling along? The speculation is interesting, but it belongs to another story save as it is connected with the difficulty of the English (and of Americans who have followed the English clew) in understanding the mind of Germany. In contrast with the fiction of a complete rupture between the older and the present thought, Professor Francke speaks the words of soberness and truth in his article in the Atlantic Monthly for October, when he argues for the essential continuity of German mind in the imperial Germany of the present and the cosmopolitan Germany of Kant, Schiller, and Goethe, and makes his appeal to Fichte and Hegel instead of to Nietzsche.
Continuity, observe; not identity. Continuity permits of development, even of transformation. Continuity may be understood from either end. We may employ the earlier stage to interpret the later; we may employ the later to appreciate and understand the earlier. Thus it is that the fact of continuity may seem to some the condemnation of the classic philosophy; to others the justification of the present mind of Germany. We are on safer ground when we ask after the ideas which have conferred continuity upon the German moral consciousness, and ask what changes of color they have undergone in the century between Jena and Liége.
I find nothing to subtract from the formulæ of Professor Francke. Unconditional submission to duty, salvation through ceaseless striving of will, the moral mission of æsthetic culture — so far as they go, these seem to me the ideas which have formed the continuing mind of Germany. If anything is to be added, it is an idea which in no way conflicts with the three ideas cited. It is the idea of historicism — to employ an expressive if barbarous locution. And for present purposes it makes no difference whether one connects the idea with Herder, or Lessing, or with Fichte (in his later period) and Hegel. By historicism I mean the notion of an Ideal, a Mission, a Destiny which can be found continuously unfolding in the life of a people (at least of the German people), in whose light the events which happen are to be understood, and by faithfulness to which a people stands condemned or justified.
This fourth conception is not, however, so much an addition to the other three factors as it is an expression of the way in which they are to be understood. For during the nineteenth century the ideas which were first applied to individuals were transferred to the state as itself an individual, and so gained a new meaning. The transfer is obvious in the case of the Kantian idea of duty. With Kant duty marked a connecting link between the individual and humanity; it expressed what was truly human and thus universal in man. But ‘humanity’ is not yet organized. There are no social institutions in which humanity, as distinct from local or national citizenship, is embodied. It expresses a mere rational ideal; something which is not realized, though it ought to be. Consequently Kant himself proclaimed that while men are to act from the motive of duty, duty is an empty notion. It has to get its filling, its specific subject-matter, from empirical circumstance.
This may sound like a mere philosophical technicality. But it turned out otherwise. Kant thought of duty as a command; as, in his own words, an imperative. The essence of morality is obedience. That Kant thought of it as obedience to an abstract law of reason representing an ideal of an unrealized humanity, is evidence of his own noble aspirations. But human beings at large can hardly guide themselves by such remote abstractions. An identification of the essence of morality with obedience to law lends itself to an implicit acquiescence in whatever laws happen to impinge upon the individual. The modern age inherited from mediæval thought the notion of morality as obedience to a sovereign command. As late as the seventeenth century, the central question of all political moral theory, even in England, was the legitimacy of resistance to constituted authority. In the eighteenth century thought in England and France moved away from the mediæval notion of obedience as central in morals. Kant was a means to fastening the idea upon German thought. The fact that he gave the idea a singularly elevated tone was just what enabled the idea to survive against the forces which everywhere else had undermined the identification of morality with obedience to the command of authority.
The merging of the idea of moral obligation into that of political obedience was furthered by the Germanic exaltation of the state. When the authority which demands acquiescent obedience is thought of as ‘the manifestation of the divine on earth’; when, as in Professor Francke’s words, the state is thought of as ‘an organism uniting in itself all spiritual and moral aspirations,’ it is only too easy to identify moral duty with political subservience. The ideal of a collective nation embodying a divine purpose in its historic development took captive the Kantian idea of duty; it replaced the endeavor of the isolated individual to realize in his own humble sphere the ideal of a law as broad as humanity. A cosmopolitan ideal, evolved in an agricultural, quasi-feudal, weak, and divided Germany, became an intensely nationalistic reality in a united, imperialistic, industrial, and prosperous Germany. Thus I think that Professor Francke is entirely right in saying that in the Germanic exaltation of the state as a supreme ethical entity, the line of moral regeneration which took its start from Kant reached its climax. But there are also opportunities for degeneration when moral obligation is found in political subordination and subservience.
At all events, the fact that German thought still entertains a type of moral conception which has well-nigh evaporated in the cultures of other modern nationalities, throws light on the difficulties the non-German world has in understanding the language in which intellectual Germans formulate their ideas and justify their practical policies. The Germans are always saying that the American lack of sympathy with the German cause is due to the fact that we get our information from British sources, and hence do not understand the Germans. Well, it is not a matter of the source of our information, but of the source of our ideas. And it is not a matter of the past year or the past twenty years. For over two hundred years our minds have been educated in English political ideas to which German thought is foreign; for over a hundred years, our ideas have been fed upon an even more disparate social philosophy, that of the French struggle for liberté. There can be no disguising the fact that our American conception of freedom is incompatible with the idea of duty as that has developed in Germany. I make no attempt to decide which is right. I only say that they are so incompatible that minds nourished on one ideal cannot readily understand the type of mind nurtured by the other.
V
The second element in the continuous tradition of Germany is said to be the ideal of ceaseless, restless striving. The gospel of the strenuous life, of the value of energy of will for its own sake, has sometimes been thought to be peculiarly American. I think Professor Francke is right in believing it to be distinctively German, An American must after all have an end to call out and centre his activities. Results are needed to justify an activity. Otherwise his restless striving, his taut energy, becomes neurasthenic. I fear we are not sufficiently particular as to the character of the end or the quality of the results. Almost anything will do, from winning a ball game, or forming the biggest business corporation in the world, to converting a community to Billy Sundayism. But some end there must be to account for the expenditure of energy. Otherwise the cult of will never lays hold of us. Consequently when we find the example of Emperor William cited as a ‘particularly conspicuous evidence of this spirit of striving,’ as an example of ‘universal and impassioned impulse of achievement,’ our reaction is cynical rather than admiring. That, we say to ourselves, is just about the sort of example we should expect to find. We have difficulty in understanding it as other than a semi-pathological love of the limelight. We may be wrong, but we cannot, it must be admitted, understand how and why we are wrong. For it is ingrained in us that some end there must be for which energy is exercised. Towards activity merely as ceaseless striving we react in what is perhaps our most characteristic national slang: Give us a rest.
To the German, on the other hand, this inability of ours is another evidence of our utilitarianism, our Philistine culture. But even Germans recognize, I think, that this idea of universal striving as an end in itself is a child of Romanticism. Similarity of words is often a bar to mutual understanding. The Germans say Wille ; we say will. Hence the easy assumption of a community of meaning. But our word is affected (or infected, if you please) with the spirit of a Puritanic morality, and of struggle for political liberties and economic savings. The word suggests personal resolution and endurance in the face of disagreeable odds. But Wille suggests an impersonal, an absolute energy striving through personal channels for manifestation. It is affected by the Romantic movement. The conception is calculated to impart a tinge of enthusiasm to deeds otherwise prosaic; it colors with emotional universality (or mysticism) the specific jobs which have to be done. But it also is admirably calculated to serve as a protective moral device. Activities which are ‘all too human,’ activities which have a definite practical goal of advantage in view, seem to lose all taint of self-seeking and to gain a sacred character when they are felt to be manifestations of a universal Over-will. Materialistic things look quite different when they are viewed as the necessary consequences of an idealistic devotion to the gospel of ceaseless striving; when they are looked upon as the conquest of spiritual will over matter. The doctrine lends itself, assuredly, to intellectual confusion and to self-deception.
Moreover, this conception has also been invaded by the nationalistic idea
— by the conception of the German state as a peculiar incarnation of a spiritual force unfolding in history. The older Romanticism was at least confined to superior personalities striving for wide cultural achievements in their own private spheres. Transfer the habitat of spiritual energy from the strivings of the private person for the enrichment of his own life to the organized public state striving for the expansion of its own powers, and you get something like the current Teutonic apologia for the present war. I have no doubt that there are some German statesmen who know precisely what the present war is about; what particular concrete gains are at stake. But to the ‘intellectuals’ of Germany — vide the manifestos they have showered upon us — the object is that utterly Romantic thing: the expansion of Kultur, the spread of distinctively German ways of thinking and feeling. In short, the war is a part of the ceaseless striving for realization on the part of the Wille embodied in the German people. That the French and the English should have specific objects in view, particular advantages to gain and disadvantages to avoid, seems to many highly instructed Germans (if we may trust their language) something peculiarly base. It is no wonder that German rulers frequently speak with contempt of the political capacity of German subjects. But one must question whether there is anything but a diversion of what might have been political capacity into the channels of Romanticism.
VI
The extraordinary revival of interest in the Middle Ages associated with Romanticism is a familiar fact. To it we owe most of our modern appreciation of the real life of that period. One may ask, however, whether we are dealing with a revival or a reversion. The affection of the Romantic spirit for the Middle Ages seems to be an expression of its own mediæval quality. I am not ambitious to characterize the spirit of Romanticism as that has shown itself in Germany. But certainly one of its marked features is an exuberance of unchastened imagination, and an introspective reveling in the emotional accompaniments of such an imagination. How largely German philosophy has sought refuge in an inner world, a world of consciousness; how largely it has made traits of this inner life a measure of reality! From the standpoint of one who is not a subject of Romanticism this means but one thing. The Romantic spirit has deliberately evaded the testing and sifting of emotions and ideas; it has declined to submit them for valuation to the tests of hard and sober fact. It has avoided the test of attempted execution in action. To those who believe that human consciousness is a wild riot of imagination until human beings act upon it and thus bring it to the test of reality, Romanticism can mean only undisciplined imagination, immaturity of mind.
It sounds silly to say that Germans, with their devotion to science and their habits of subordination to authority, have brought into the modern world of politics the untried and unchastened fancies and feelings of mediævalism. But I mean only what the Germans themselves say when they tell us that they combine with supreme discipline in the outer world of action supreme freedom in the inner world of thought. I mean what they mean when they themselves say that the German people as a people lack the political sense, the political capacity of the self-governing nations of our day. For this is in effect an admission of unripeness, of immaturity of thought with respect to the supreme concerns of human action. We live in a period of political disillusionment. The tree of political liberty, watered with blood and tears, has brought forth many bitter fruits. In our disappointments we overlook what the struggle for self-government has done for those who have participated in it. At least it has chastened the unbridled imagination of man; it has developed a sense of realities; it has brought a certain maturity of mind as its outcome.
Now, when not only the Bernhardis but the Bismarcks and the Von Bülows tell us that the Germans are marked by absence of political sense and capacity, that they have not the gift of self-government, that they accomplish great things only under the leadings of authority from above, what are they saying except that the Germans, with all their achievements, have missed the one great experience in which the national minds of Great Britain, France, and America have been educated and ripened? With all our defects, is any measure of technical efficiency, of comfortable ease, in a ‘socialized Germany,’ a compensation for the absence, I do not say of political democracy, but of the experience which comes to men only in a struggle to be free and responsible in their moral and social action? Compared with such freedom, the irresponsible freedom of inner consciousness seems, I repeat, an extension into a modern world of the undisciplined mind of the Middle Ages.
If there be truth in this conception, — and unless there be truth in it, the struggle for democracy lacks intellectual significance, — we have probably the root of the difficulty of mutual understanding as between the German mind and that of other peoples. Politically we do not speak the same language because we do not think the same thoughts. My final word would not be one, however, upon this discouraging note. It is rather a word of hopefulness regarding what has given Americans so much cause for perplexity — the ‘hyphen’ problem. It is natural in a time of emotional stress, and in a time when those of German ancestry find hard things said on all sides about their ancestral land, that GermanAmericans should indulge in idealization of their older country, should bring forth with emphatic fervor the numerous fine things which current criticism is ignoring, and should in their irritation seek out the weak things in their adopted land and speak with harshness of its institutions. But I cannot believe that any large number of them have remained here without being profoundly influenced by the struggle for responsible and self-respecting common management of common affairs.
War brings with it a recrudescence of the spirit of Romanticism, a reversion to the undisciplined mind, among all peoples. To be in an unsympathetic land, a land which does not understand, is a stimulus to the most tense kind of Romantic fancy. But when the emotional strain passes, there will be an equal reversion to the light of common day, with its usual tasks and the illumination of these tasks by the thought that we are all engaged together in the greatest enterprise which has ever enlisted human thought and emotion: the attainment of a common control of the common interests of beings who live together. Whether German-Americans will then attempt to educate their countrymen at home to a perception of the inherent lack in any Kultur of a modern state not based upon the principle of self-government, I do not know. ’T is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But I am confident that all, except a few incurable aliens who merely happen to be physically among us, will respond with eagerness to any call which Americans who are longer acclimated may issue, to make our own experiment in responsible freedom more of a reality. And this response is, after all, the final test of loyalty to American institutions.