fore a hundred years were out the world had moved on to the conquest
of new vantage points and the establishment of a wider unity on a firmer
base.
Both previous occasions are therefore full of hope. The European system
is, as we shall see throughout these essays, the necessary nucleus of
any civilized order embracing the whole world; and the great convulsions
which have hitherto continued to occur in it from time to time are
moments of especial value for the study of the conditions under which it
exists. They are the pathological experiences which reveal the strength
and the weaknesses of the normal functions. We strive and hope for a
more lasting state of general health, and do not despair of the patient
even in this grave attack. He has survived even more serious illness.
For though the present war is the most gigantic that the world has ever
seen, its very greatness is the result of some of those modern
developments--scientific skill, improved communications, national
cohesion--on which ultimately the better organization of the whole
commonwealth of nations will be built. _Passi graviora_; we have
weathered the storms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when
the old Roman order and its sequel in the Catholic Church were at their
weakest and the recuperative power of science and social reform and
nationalism had hardly begun its work. We shall not fail with our
greater forces of the present to regain and create a Europe freer,
stronger, and more united than that which now seems to be shaken to the
depths.
The process of gaining a greater unity among the leading nations of the
world, like all the aspects of human evolution, must be regarded from
two points of view, distinct in theory, inextricable in life. What does
the nature of man itself demand? How has this nature expressed itself,
and been affected in history by the external conditions, the geography,
climate, conflict and commingling of races, which the theatre of its
appearance has imposed?
Looked at in itself, so far as we can isolate it from its surroundings,
man's nature is distinguished from that of lower animals by two
features, both of them essentially social and tending to unity. He is
more deeply and permanently attached to members of his own species, by
affection, sympathy, veneration, tradition, than any other creature. And
he is a reasoning being, reason itself requiring the contact and
agreement of various minds. The incomparably great
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