European intellectual history

“ The forces of regionalism, nationalism, and separatism still dominate European life. But the ideology and techniques of Europeanization are widely recognized, accepted and put into practice. The development of worldism seems to be following a parallel course. ”

“ And now let us consider the political consequences of this vast release and expansion of European ideas in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the new development of science, the exploration of the world, the great dissemination of knowledge through paper and printing, and the spread of a new craving for freedom and equality. ”

“ Among all the inestimable advantages which have raised the inhabitants of England and of France and of Germany, above those of Turkey or of China, very few can be named that have not—directly or indirectly—sprung from a knowledge of the civilisation, the arts, and the literature of ancient nations. What is it that would be left to the people of Europe, if all this knowledge, and all its remote consequences, could at once be subtracted from their religious, their political, and their intellectual condition? ”

“ In the examination of the progress of Europe on which we now enter, it is, of course, to intellectual phenomena that we must, for the most part, refer; material aggrandisement and political power offering us less important though still valuable indications, and serving our purpose rather in a corroborative way. There are five intellectual manifestations to which we may resort—philosophy, science, literature, religion, government. ”

“ To make Europe a centre of culture, national stupidities should not make us blind to the fact that in the higher regions there is already a continuous reciprocal dependence. France and German philosophy. Richard Wagner and Paris (1830-50) . Goethe and Greece. All things are impelled towards a synthesis of the European past in the highest types of mind. ”

“ One religion and one philosophy did for the fluctuant states what the Reformation, democracy, and “enlightenment” could only undo, and in this vanishing art, which, after all, is the truest history man can record, we find the dynamic force, the creative power, of a culture and a civilisation that took little count of artificial barriers between perfectly artificial nations, but included all in the greatest and most beneficent syntheses Europe has ever known. ”

“ Such was the condition of Europe's free-for-all in the closing years of the seventeenth century and the opening decades of the eighteenth century, while three developing forces pushed into the forefront of European life: the enlightenment and science, representative government, and the industrial revolution.
Enlightenment broadened the social basis of knowledge and learning. During the Dark Ages, knowledge and learning were a monopoly of a tiny privileged minority composed of priests, scholars and a segment of the aristocracy. ”

“ She has willingly sacrificed the culture of a few leading individuals to the Kultur of the empire as a whole. Thus it is not surprising that Germany, as measured by the production of cultured individuals, takes a very low place today. Not only France and England, Italy and Spain, but also Russia and America, may fairly claim a higher degree of culture. Here the fetich of German scholarship should not deceive us. Culture—a balanced and humanized state of mind—is only remotely connected with scholarship or even with education. ”

“ They recoiled, at last, before the reviving might of the superior race, and the last and grandest era of Indo-European supremacy began, the era in the midst of which we now live. For the past few centuries, the European nations have stood foremost, without a rival, in the world's history. They are the enlightened and the enlighteners of mankind. They alone are extending the sphere of human knowledge, investigating the nature of matter and of mind, and tracing out their exhibition in the past history and present condition of the earth and its inhabitants. ”

“ In coming to understand a mood which so fully reflects an unknown world, the European mind will discover principles which will make it rise superior to itself. May this broad comprehension of human thought lead Europe to estimate with greater justice a civilization numbering its years by thousands, and to refrain from thwarting the fulfillment of its destiny. ”

“ These diverse elements, for all their conflict, cannot any one of them extinguish any other; each has to dwell with the rest, make a compromise with the rest. The outcome, then, of this diversity and struggle is liberty; and here is the grand and true superiority of the European over the other civilisations. European civilisation, if I may say so, has entered into eternal truth; it advances in the ways of God. ”

“ But it must not be forgotten, in this connection, that the German people had been the pupils of their neighbors during a greater length of time and with greater assiduity than any other European nation. Thus, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Germany imported the culture of Humanism from Italy. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries she introduced the modern courtly culture and language of the French people, besides giving admission, since the middle of the eighteenth century, to the philosophy, science, and literature of English middle-class society. ”

“ If in 1878, when the European nations suddenly awoke to the importance of the non-European world, they had been able to agree upon some simple principle which would have secured equal treatment to all, how different would have been the fate of Europe and the world! ”

“ They built, planted, cultivated Europe; all the while saving the treasures of learning, knowledge, human justice, politics, and art. We shall ever recognize in Europe the places where those radiant centres once were. ”

“ The Latin, followed at an interval by the Greek, Renaissance laid the foundations of comparative reflection in the mind of modern Europe. Meanwhile the rise of European nationalities was creating new standpoints, new materials, for comparison in modern institutions and modes of thought or sentiment. The discovery of the New World brought this new European civilisation face to face with primitive life, and awakened men to contrasts with their own associations more striking than Byzantine or even Saracen could offer. ”

“ Modern Europe owes a principal share of its enlightened and moral state to the restoration of learning: the advantages which have accrued to history, religion, the philosophy of the mind, and the progress of society ”

“ The people of various countries are swayed by identical interests, they are absorbed in the same problems, and thrill with the same emotions; their classics are interchangeable, authorities in science are nearly alike for all, and they readily combine to make experiments and researches in common. Towards 1500, European nations, having been fashioned and composed out of simple elements during the thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire and that of its successor is the East, had reached full measure of differentiation. ”

“ The world is not a classroom in which docile nations are distributed according to the arbitrary standards of German pedagogues. Europe has admired the patriotic resistance of the Spanish, Tyrolese, and Russian peasants to the enlightened tyranny of Napoleon. There are other standards of culture besides proficiency in research and aptitude for systematic work. ”

“ Amongst the rival nations that may be considered as forming the republic of modern Europe, you will see one pre-eminent for her maritime strength and colonial and commercial enterprise, and you will find she retains her superiority only because it is favourable to the liberty of mankind. But you must not yet suffer the vision of modern Europe to pass from your eyes without viewing some other results of the efforts of men of genius, which, like those of gunpowder and the press, illustrate the times to which they belong, and form brilliant epochs in the history of the world. ”

“ The environment of a modern European will add to the physical surroundings an enormously enlarged mass of social traditions and customs, an extensive literature, contact with numerous other societies in various stages of culture, and relations, more or less obscure, to a vast literary and social past. The environment thus includes not merely the living, but also the dead. Roman law, Greek philosophy, Eastern religious ideas, etc., all affect the twentieth century European. ”

“ In the European civilisations man is the more prominent, and the understanding is more stimulated than the imagination. Hence the advance of European civilisation is characterised by a diminishing influence of physical laws and an increasing influence of mental laws. Clearly, then, of the two classes of laws which regulate the progress of mankind the mental class is more important than the physical. The laws of the human mind will prove to be the ultimate basis of the history of Europe. ”

“ Classical philosophy, history, poetry, and art, nourished the European mind, and were almost the sole foundation of its culture, through all the period during which the Latin and Teutonic races of Western Europe were slowly elaborating languages and literatures of their own. They were thus of necessity the main instrument of culture of the schools during the period when, save the obsolete scholastic philosophy, no other instrument was forthcoming ”

“ There are, in our shared intellectual heritage, upon which we could draw, and let us remember that in the energetic pursuit of new thought that – for example, characterised the European Enlightenment, itself formed from the thought of other ancient enlightenments – there are some powerful examples of dissident and radical thought. ”

“ Early in the twelfth century that movement already shows in its gathering force the promise of the development which was to render Europe the home of art and science, of learning, culture, and civilization. ”

“ During that period the intellectual life of western Europe was stimulated by the influx of hitherto unknown works of that philosopher, and weighty additions were made to the list of available studies. ”

“ It is thus [13] that Europe shows in its different parts societies in very different states—here the restless civilization of France and England, there the contentment and inferiority of Lapland. This commingling might seem to render it difficult to ascertain the true movement of the whole continent, and still more so for distant and successive periods of time. In each nation, moreover, the contemporaneously different classes, the educated and illiterate, the idle and industrious, the rich and poor, the intelligent and superstitious, represent different contemporaneous stages of advancement. ”

“ No one can study the history of European politics during the great constructive thirteenth century without being impressed by the fact of the revival of this conception in men's minds, not only in England, but on the Continent, where it manifested itself in varying forms and in different connections. ”

“ But which, under the influence of European genius, have reached a degree of excellence, that has wrought an important change in the constitution of society.
Far from looking back, and forming itself slavishly on the past, it is characteristic of the European intellect to be ever on the advance. Old discoveries become the basis of new ones. ”

“ Aristocracy.—This is pre-eminently a democratic age, and Western Europe with one voice approves of the increasing claims of the people as against the dominant sections of the European society. The lords have lost much of their ancient powers and privileges, but the spirit of the time shews that they have some more yet to lose. ”

“ Is it to be wondered at that when great new areas of knowledge were opened up in the later fifteenth century by suddenly expanded travel, by the printing press, and by an unexpected advance in physical science, the emancipation of the European mind should have brought this pure and barbaric stock to its own again? ”

“ What would they not have given for a modern novel, or to what unlimited extent would the imagination have poured forth its fantastic creations, had the art of printing been at hand to keep pace with the productive powers of the mind, and the cravings of a morbid intellect? On every score, therefore, the numerical difference between the intellectual wealth of ancient and of modern Europe must have been decidedly in favor of the latter. ”

“ But the art and literature expressed by the genius of the masters, reflected in the tastes of society, and to be taken by Europe as a model throughout a whole century, are no criterion of the social and political order of the day. ”

“ Europe is to us the land of history, of mellow tradition, of the arts and graces of life, of the best that has been said and thought in the world. To Europe we are the land of crude racial chaos, of skyscrapers and bluff, of millionaires and “bosses.” A French philosopher visits us, and we are all eagerness to get from him an orientation in all that is moving in the world of thought across the seas. But does he ask about our philosophy, does he seek an orientation in the American thought of the day? ”

“ The political history of Europe in the nineteenth century is chiefly the history of the national actions that have sprung from increase of national self-consciousness resulting from the spread of education, from the improvement of means of communication within each people and from increase of intercourse between nations. The opening pages were the wars in which the French people, suddenly aroused to an intense national consciousness, successfully resisted and drove back all the other European powers. ”

“ But, aside from the fact that in Europe this political and social evolution had taken centuries, there was also the working of the law of the survival of the fittest. In European nations it had been the element, always composite, which deserved to live, that formed the nucleus of a nationality. ”