Nationalism and Culture (81 page)

So there arose critics of absolutism and social reformers like Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot and many others, who had been preceded in Holland and England by thinkers with similar ideas. The school of the physiocrats, also, which made war upon mercantilism, regarded agriculture as the real source of the wealth of the people and sought the liberation of economy in general from all state ordinances and regulations, was produced by the same causes. The famous saying of Gournay, "Laissez faire, laissez alter!" which was later to serve the Manchester school as a motto, had originally a quite different meaning. It was an outcry of the human spirit against the iron compulsion of state guardianship, which threatened to smother every demonstration of social life. It was becoming more and more impossible to breathe freely and men were beginning to yearn for sunlight and air. The ideas of Quesnay, Mirabeau, Beaudeau, de la Riviere, Turgot and others with surprising promptness, found militant supporters in Germany, Austria, Poland,

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Sweden, Spain and America. Under their influence and that of David Hume^_AdamSmith develop eB^ his ne w theory and beca"m e"the tounder oFthe classicajjianonaJIeCQnomic s whic fi~soon spread througlTaircountnes, just as diH^he critique of socialismw hich followed^ ose on its^heels^

■ HefeTtoo, we are dealing with phenomena of the time which were born of the general social conditions of a definite period and which gradually led to a reconstruction of the state and a renewal of economic life. But Saint-Simon already recognized that even this form of political life is not the last when he said: "The parliamentary and constitutional system, which seems to so many to be the last miracle of the human intellect, is merely a transitional dominion between feudalism, on whose ruins we are living, and whose fetters we have not yet completely shaken off, and a higher order of affairs." The more deeply we look into the current structure of political and economic life, the more clearly we recognize that its forms have arisen from the general course of social development, and therefore cannot be measured by national principles.

GENIUS AND THE NATION. GOETHE ON THE ORIGINALITY OF OUR THOUGHT. FORERUNNERS AND CO-WORKERS. THE COPERNICAN PICTURE OF THE UNIVERSE AND THE EVOLUTION THEORY AS EXAMPLES. THE HELIOCENTRIC SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE AMONG THE ANCIENTS. THE PTOLEMAIC SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE. THE DOCTRINE OF COPERNICUS. JOHANNES KEPLER AND GALILEO. NEWTON'S LAW OF GRAVITATION. THE FORERUNNERS OF NEWTON. LAPLACE AND KANT. THE DEVELOPMENT OF ASTRO-PHYSICS. THE PRELIMINARIES FOR RELATIVITY. THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION IN ANTIQUITY. THE SHAPING OF THE IDEA OF EVOLUTION UP TO THE EVE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. LAMARCK AND GOETHE. THE FORERUNNERS OF DARWIN. THE DOCTRINE OF DARWIN AND WALLACE. SOCIAL DARWINISM. KROPOTKIN'S THEORY OF "MUTUAL AID." THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION. THE INFLUENCE OF THE IDEA OF EVOLUTION ON ALL BRANCHES OF HUMAN THOUGHT.

JUST as the structure of economic and political social forms is not bound up with particular peoples, races or nations, so also the thought and feeling of the individual does not follow definite national lines, but is always influenced by the ideas of the time and the cultural circle to which he belongs. Great pioneer ideas in the fields of science and of philosophic thought, new forms of artistic expression, never arise from a whole people or an entire nation, but always merely from the creative power of enlightened minds, in whom genius is revealed. How a genius arises no one has yet determined. A genius may come out of any people, but what special merit the people or the nation has in this no one can say. However, there is no people, no nation, no race of geniuses, there never has been one; it is because of this that the endeavors of our modern race fatalists are so hopelessly muddled and senseless. But even genius does not owe everything to its own powers; even the greatest mind does not stand outside of time and space; he is, like all others, bound to the past and the present. This is what is significant in genius, that it lends voice and form to what lies slumbering in many, and forms a unified concept of the separate results of the intellectual development of a period. The

mind of the genius is a universal rmnd, which builds out of all that has gone before it a new world-picture and thus opens to mankind new outlooks on life. The deeper it is rooted in its social environment the more precious are the fruits which it brings to maturity. No one has felt this more deeply than did Goethe, who said:

At bottom, however, we are all collective beings, pose however we please. For how little we have, and how little we are that we can, in the strictest sense, call our own! We must all receive and learn as well from those who were before us as from those who are with us. Even the greatest genius would not get far if he wished to owe everything to what he had within him. But very many worth" men do not understand this and, with their dreams of originality, grope half their lives in the dark. I have known artists who boasted of having followed no master, rather of owing everything to their own genius. The fools! As if that happened anywhere! And as if the world were not pressing on them at every step and, in spite of their stupidity, making something out of them! . . . Perhaps I may speak of myself and tell modestly how I feel. It is true that during my long life I have undertaken and accomplished a great variety of things of which, perhaps, I might boast. But what did I have, if we want to be honest, that was really my own except the ability and the inclination, too, to see and to hear, to decide and to choose, and to animate what I had seen and heard with my own spirit and reproduce it with some skill. I owe my works in no way to my own wisdom alone, but thousands of things and persons outside me offered me the material for them. There came fools and wise men, clear heads and muddled ones, childhood and youth, as also ripe old age: all told me how they felt, what they thought, how they lived and worked, and what experiences they had gathered; and I had nothing more to do than to seize and reap what they had sown for me. At bottom it is just all nonsense, whether one gets something out of himself or whether he gets it from others; whether one works through himself or works through others: the chief thing is that one have a great will and possess skill and persistence to carry it out; all the rest does not matter.-^

We are always dependent upon our predecessors, and for this reason the notion of a "national culture" is misleading and inconsistent. We are never in a position to draw a line between what we have acquired by our own powers and what we have received from others. Every idea, whether it be of a religious, an ethical, a philosophic, a scientific or an artistic nature, had its forerunners and pioneers, without which it would be inconceivable J and it is usually quite impossible to go back to its first beginnings. Almost invariably thinkers of all countries and peoples have contributed to its development.

Let us take as examples two theories that penetrate deeply and shake

^ J. P. Eckermann, Conversations With Goethe in the Last Years of His Life. 1823-1832.

to their very foundations all previous conceptions, as do the Copernican system and the Darwinian theory of evolution. These two doctrines not only transformed fundamentally the views of men about the structure of the universe and the development of life upon earth j in doing this they worked with genuine revolutionary effect upon every other field of human thought and brought about a complete overturning of all previously known science. But here, too, the new knowledge broke its path only gradually—until in the course of time enough factual material was accumulated so that a brilliantly gifted mind could draw from it the necessary conclusion and give to the new views a clear foundation.

To what beginnings the idea that the earth turns on its own axis and, together with the other planets, moves around the sun, goes back historically, will perhaps never be ascertained. Albert Einstein, the honored founder of the theory of relativity, remarks with justice that, especially where the fundamental principles of physics are concerned, man is always stumbling on something earlier, so that it is almost impossible to follow any line of discoveries back to its first beginning. Even if we were unanimous in honoring Aristarchus of Samos as the first great forerunner of the Copernican system, we should still always entertain the suspicion that he may in turn have drawn upon Egyptian sources.^ No objection can be urged against the concept on this account, because this is shown anew in the history of every new invention and discovery. Not even from the most brilliant brain does a new idea spring full-grown, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. It is, therefore, indisputable that the idea of a heliocentric universe was grasped in a premonitory fashion by bold thinkers long before Copernicus and, by a few, was given a more or less convincing foundation. The Italian scholar, Schiaparelli, has set this forth clearly in a special monograph, / Precursor! del Copernico.

That the Greeks were deeply indebted to the Babylonians and the Egyptians for their knowledge of astronomy and physics is today quite beyond question, so it does not matter whether or not the Ionian natural philosopher, Thales of Miletus, was in fact a pupil of the Babylonian thinker, Berossus. Certainly there existed between Greece and the countries of the Orient very close connections, which must have had their intellectual effects. Thus, it was said of Pythagoras that he traveled in Egypt and the East and acquired there a great part of his knowledge of astronomy and mathematics. In fact the school of the Pythagoreans was distinguished for its bold conception of the structure of the universe. Plutarch relates of the Pythagorean, Philaos, that according to his teaching the earth and the moon move in an oblique circle about the central fire.

It is known with certainty that Aristarchus of Samos developed the theory of a heliocentric universe. It is true that his essay on the subject

2 A. Moszkowski, Einstein, Einblick in seine Gedankenwelt. Berlin, 1921.

has been lost, but we find in Plutarch and in the "calculation of the sands" of Archimedes short sketches of the theory of Aristarchus, from which we learn that he maintained that the earth turns on its own axis and also moves about the sun as center, while the stars and the sun remain motionless in space. We do not know how widespread such teachings were, but it is easily conceivable that the adherents of the geocentric system, which places the earth at the center of the universe, were in the majority, since direct observation seemed to speak for them. Even the famous system of the Alexandrian, Ptolemy, as he had developed it in his Almagest, which held captive the minds of men for a millennium and a half, had its forerunners and was merely the completion of the great work which Hipparchus of Nicaea had begun three hundred years before. Hipparchus, moreover, owed much of his doctrine to the Chaldean astrologers.

That the Ptolemaic system could endure so long without contradiction was owing chiefly to the influence of the Church. Religion had set up the earth as the center of creation, had elevated man to the position of crown of creation, the image of God himself. It, therefore, did not suit the church that the earth should lose its point of vantage as the center of all things, and circle about the sun like all the other planets. Such an idea was incomprehensible to the religious temperament and might give rise to serious consequences. This v/as the reason why the church fought the doctrine of Copernicus so long and so bitterly. In Rome, until the resolution of the Cardinals of the Inquisition which Pius VII sanctioned in September, 1823, no book could be printed or publicly circulated in which the theory of a heliocentric universe was advocated. How many secret opponents of the Ptolemaic system there were during the long period of its unlimited dominion can, of course, not be determined. Only under the influence of the rediscovered writings of the ancients, which were first transmitted to the European peoples in any large measure by the Arabs, did there develop, especially in the Italian cities, a new spirit which set itself against the authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy. Bold thinkers like Domencio Maria Novara (1454-1504) revealed to their pupils the "Pythagorean doctrines" and evolved the idea of a new picture of the universe. Copernicus, who in those years was pursuing his studies at Bologna and Padua, fell completely under the sway of this new intellectual movement, which doubtless gave him the first impulse toward the development of his theory. Actually he was in the years 1506-1512 laying the foundations of his theory, which he enlarged later in his principal work, Concerning the Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies^ which appeared in 1543. This work had been preceded by an essay, long since lost, entitled A Short Sketch of the Probable Movements of the Heavens, which was rediscovered by the Copernican scholar, Curtze, and published

in the seventies. Even if Copernicus did not hit upon the idea of the heliocentric system quite of himself, still his is the indisputable merit of having developed and established the new conception on scientific principles.

In his famous seven theses Copernicus defended the notion that there is only one center for the stars and their orbits; that the center of the earth is not the center of the universe, but merely the center of the moon's orbit and its own mass; that all the planets revolve about the sun, which stands at the center of their orbits; that the distance from earth to sun is, in relation to the width of the firmament, smaller than the semi-diameter of the earth in relation to the distance from earth to sun, and hence vanishes when compared with the size of the firmament; that what seems to us a movement of the heavens is not such, but is due to a motion of the earth, in which the earth and its immediate environment rotates daily, while its two poles retain constantly the same direction; that the heavens, on the other hand, remain immovable quite to their uttermost limit; that what seems to us a movement of the sun is not due to that star, but to the earth and its orbit, in which we move about the sun like all the other planets, the earth having, therefore, a twofold movement; that the advance and retrogression of the planets is not a consequence of their movement, but of that of the earth—that the multiplicity of heavenly phenomena finds, therefore, its complete explanation in the movement of the earth.