Cosmopolitan

“ If you would enlarge the scope of your actions, you would grumble less—and perhaps, if I may say so, allow that other nations share some of your best boasted qualities. Now I am truly cosmopolitan; I regard no city as my home ”

“ It is obvious that there is a great deal of difference between being international and being cosmopolitan. All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national. ”

“ PROFESSOR MUENSTERBERG once defined the three stages of a nation's development as provincial, cosmopolitan, and national, and placed America—if we remember rightly—in a phase of transition between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. ”

“ Cosmopolitan finance is one example of such a tendency. Another, more morally sympathetic but not much less dangerous to nationalism in such a country as America, is cosmopolitan revolutionary idealism. ”

“ After twenty-nine years of daily developing cosmopolitanism—years that have witnessed the rising of a new star in the East and an uninterrupted growth of interchange of ideas between the nations of the earth, whether in politics, literature, or science, without a single check to the ever-rising tide of internationalism—are we again to let the favourable moment pass unused, just for want of making up our minds? At present one language holds the field. ”

“ Thought has been made virtually cosmopolitan: a new and helpful idea or discovery becomes immediately the common possession of the world. Facilities for travel, by bringing men together, and familiarizing them with new scenes and different forms of society and belief, have made them more liberal and tolerant. ”

“ Hardly less cosmopolitan are the men of science and letters who are actually in those regions, and only less so those tens of thousands, who, like migrants of the earlier days, are going forward, many to the farthest, lonesomest frontiers of knowledge, but all to something beyond their immediate ancestral lot or field. ”

“ Gradually, with the growth of national feeling and the more definite demarcation of nations and the ever-increasing{173} sense of patriotism, that higher form of selfishness, cosmopolitanism went out of fashion. ”

“ But this is as it were to compound environments—a process that ends by making the environment coextensive with the world. Intelligent assimilation of the new by means of the old breaks down the provincial barriers one by one, until man, the cosmopolitan animal by reason of his hereditary constitution, develops a cosmopolitan culture ”

“ Yet during this same century, cosmopolitanism appeared as a characteristic trend in almost every nation, whether large or small. It was especially easy for the French to become cosmopolitans since their language and literature were universally known. ”

“ I would assure your most gracious majesty that your reception here as an authoress will in no way suffer because you are an unnaturalized foreigner. Any alien who feels a fraternal interest in the international advancement of thought and the universal encouragement of the good, the true and the beautiful in literature, will be welcome on these shores.
This is a broad land, and we aim to be a broad and cosmopolitan people. Literature and free, willing genius are not hemmed in by State or national lines. ”

“ A cosmopolitan population is addressed in a cosmopolitan epistle. (3) We have seen that the gaiety and sunshine of Ephesus was sometimes darkened by the shadows of a world of magic, that for some natures Ionia was a land haunted by spiritual terrors. ”

“ On the continent, perhaps, you can keep better terms with them; they are usually, like yourself, foreigners in the country, and this gives them a cosmopolitan, independent air which tempers their subjection to the housekeeper or the beadle. ”

“ The peculiarity of the cosmopolitan world, the trait that gives it its psychological picturesqueness, in spite of the banal character inevitable to a society composed of the rich and the idle, is the constant surprises of connections like this. ”

“ Such manifestations of heroism and of a zealous ardour, unexampled in its extent and its intensity, offer assuredly, I repeat, some augury, some earnest of that which is to come, some pledge to the new century rising like a planet tremulous on the horizon's verge.
But a widespread error still confounds this imperial patriotism with Cosmopolitanism, this resolution of a great people with Jingoism. Now what is Cosmopolitanism? It is an attitude of mind purely negative; it is a characteristic of protected nationalities, and of decayed races. ”

“ The national spirit seems to be making a last effort to assert itself in literature and to overcome cosmopolitan influences and the art of writers who express a purely personal feeling. It is true that nationality may express itself in many ways: it may not be at all evident in the subject matter, but it may be very evident in the sentiment. ”

“ And the American, by the same token, will be mistaken for an Oriental in the Orient, for a European in Europe, though not for any other but an American at home. For his national traditions, guided by a superior international purpose, will represent the wholesome and vital traditions of all the civilized people of the world. And a nation with a thick layer of traditions, is, as a rule, richer in customs and more refined in manners. Hence the cosmopolitanism of the American of the future. Hence too his culture, which will harmonize with, nay, re-inforce, the culture of every race. ”

“ And in the light of this—for I think we may not unjustly attribute the host’s sentiments to the host’s author—he regarded the “political community as only an elementary stage”; nationality was at best preparatory for the “universal union” of men; while “the feeling of nationality is a onesidedness to be merged in a genuine and ardent cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitanism is the political correlative to a belief in culture. In the end there is a very general agreement among the visitors at Cordova Lodge. ”

“ The "state" was substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism. ”

“ What is to be desired is not cosmopolitanism, not the absence of all national characteristics that one associates with couriers, wagon-lit attendants, and others, who have had everything distinctive obliterated by multiple and trivial contacts with men of every civilized country. ”

“ The great cosmopolitan idea of the human race and its unity of interests is born of geography, and even the smattering of it which the poorly taught pupil gets enwraps this great general idea, which is fertile and productive, a veritable knowledge of power from the start. ”

“ The 'cosmopolitan' movement, in one sense, needs no exposition. That Europe is becoming a unit for scientific purposes, or that the great changes, which we generally sum up as democratic, affect all civilised countries, is too obvious to be insisted upon. But does this imply a corresponding unity of art and literature; a fusion of different types, and an influence of Northern, for example, upon Southern races? That is where I hesitate. Critics trace the growth of 'sentimentalism,' 'romanticism,' 'love of nature,' and so forth ”

“ The deeper interest in the expression of national qualities and in the representation of provincial peculiarities is to-day accompanied by an increasing cosmopolitanism which seems to be casting down the barriers of race and of language. ”

“ For the best things do not travel. As I appear here as a traveller, I may say with all modesty that the best people do not travel either. Both in England and America the normal people are the national people; and I repeat that I think they are growing more and more national. I do not think the abyss is being bridged by cosmopolitan theories; and I am sure I do not want it bridged by all this slang journalism and blatant advertisement. ”

“ Its place was taken by the modern but narrower ideal of separate polities, each pursuing its own course, independent of, and often in conflict with, other societies. Unity gave way to diversity of tongues, of churches, of states; and the cosmopolitan became nationalist, patriot, separatist. ”

“ And, finally, it is for us to take account also of the growth of what must be called "cosmopolitanism," that breaking down of the hostile barriers keeping one people apart from the others, ignorant of them, and often contemptuous.
Here, then, are four legacies from the nineteenth century to the twentieth:—first, the scientific spirit; second, the spread of democracy; third, the assertion of nationality; and, fourth, that stepping across the confines of language and race, for which we have no more accurate name than "cosmopolitanism." ”

“ While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of the existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is the will that this end be first realized in the particular nation to which we ourselves belong, and that this achievement thence spread over the entire race. ”

“ But nothing foreign ought to be alien to a race as universal in character and mentality as the English; and in the end, the perfection of the English genius is only possible in a spiritual synthesis of all the cultures of the world. Two tendencies equal and opposite are at work in this direction, and have always been in English history. On the one side, we find an ever-present tendency towards cosmopolitanism, an excess of which would certainly result in the complete loss of essential national characteristics. ”

“ Such high-sounding and professedly disinterested cosmopolitanism appeals to a certain class of sentimental believers in democracy. It does not appeal, however, to any one who fully understands present-day industrial and political conditions. ”

“ In a certain community, for example, patriotism, morality, and piety, long identified with specific forms and customs and doctrines, have come at last to seem quite unsubstantial. A rising cosmopolitanism perhaps has undone the first, sensationalism [p.260] or naturalism the second, and mingled ritualism and secularism the third. ”

“ The world-city means cosmopolitanism in place of “home,” [26] cold matter-of-fact in place of reverence for tradition and age, scientific irreligion as a fossil representative of the older religion of the heart, “society” in place of the state, natural instead of hard-earned rights. ”

“ There is a certain sort of cosmopolitanism without which no nation's life can be complete—nay, without which it cannot go on at all.
It is the cosmopolitanism of recognizing greatness outside our own borders. The cosmopolitanism of owning that there are as good fish in foreign seas as ever there were in the English Channel. The cosmopolitanism of a human brotherhood, whether it hails from the Sandwich Islands, from France, from Finland, or from Hungary ”

“ Certain advocates of cosmopolitanism in their agitation against patriotism often take advantage of the importance [Pg 5] of home in the relation of a man to his country when they appeal to the "proletarians": "Do you own anything? Do you have even a home in this country? ”

“ Men turned doubters perforce, and in the fact that with their scepticism rose also a movement at once of individualism and cosmopolitanism, we cannot fail to see how the course of history illustrates the conclusions of a previous chapter. The time was one in which through its humanism, or its cosmopolitan individualism, civilization was to reap the harvest from the medieval organization of society. ”

“ Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history. ”

“ This change was effected by Christianity in Judaism, and must be effected in any merely national58 religion before it can be purged of evil.
In practice, patriotism has many other enemies to contend with. Cosmopolitanism cannot fail to grow as men acquire more knowledge of foreign countries by education and travel. ”

“ And mingling, but not blended, with this world of Asiatic thought and sentiment and manner, is a European world, partly native, partly foreign, with ideas of freedom, science, education, bustle, various languages, railroads, tramways, ladies in the latest Parisian fashions, church bells, the banner of the Cross, newspapers and periodicals from every European and American capital, knitting scattered children to the life of their fatherland. ”

“ This has rather a shocking sound; it makes the cosmopolite appear invidious and narrow-minded. But I hasten to add that there seems no real reason why even the most delicate conscience should take alarm. The consequence of the cosmopolite spirit is to initiate you into the merits of all peoples; to convince you that national virtues are numerous, though they may be very different, and to make downright preference really very hard. ”

“ It is an interesting task to travel through a continent filled with such people, whose minds are just beginning, here and there, to emerge from the vilest heathenism, and to glimmer with a faith that bears wrapped in its unfolded leaves, the seeds of a modified civilization. ”

“ And he tells you that the earth south of the Equator makes the inferior man. That the oceanic climate makes the inferior man in the Pacific Islands. That South America makes the inferior man. That the solid, unindented Southern Africa makes the inferior man. That the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent Asia makes the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent man. That Europe, indented by the sea on every side, with its varied scenery, and climate, and Northern influences, makes the varied intellect, the versatile power and life and action, of the master-man of the world. ”

“ In every continent her standard is raised. Her nerves of sensibility and self-interest run to the uttermost parts of the earth. They are rooted in the hearts of her bravest and best, as well as of the lowliest and most unworthy, and all join in common patriotism reaching from pole to pole, not only of the material world but of the social fabric. ”