338. Scientific Knowledge must precede Invention

(Editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle, October, 1919)

The following selection, which appeared as an editorial in a Sunday edition of the above-mentioned newspaper, offers so good an explanation as to why the human inventive faculty waited so long, and then within a century has borne such abundant fruit, that it is reproduced here in its entirety as furnishing good collateral reading for the subject-matter of the corresponding chapter in the text.

When one casts a backward look over the multitude of inventions that have been given to the world in the last hundred years, and then a farther look back over the long barren centuries that went before, there rises a natural feeling of amazement that the world should have lived so long without the simple devices that now are part of our lives and that invention, so long delayed, should have come in such a flood.

Though the time when man first learned to use fire was so far back that we have no account of it except in myth, it was not until our grandmothers' days that man had safety matches; though the arrow goes so far back that we cannot find on the face of the earth a savage so isolated that he has it not, we had no airplanes until the present decade; though history does not take us back far enough to find a time when geometry and arithmetic were not fairly well understood, it was not until comparatively modern times that the discovery of the zero made arithmetic a supple servant and made possible the great modern development of mathematics; though the cart is found on the earliest monuments, it was only within the last twenty years that we produced the first practical automobile.

We are quite apt to conclude that the human race has been without mechanical ideas for the greater part of its life, and acquired them only a hundred or so years ago. Such a conclusion, though natural enough, must be dismissed as erroneous. A more correct conclusion is that the mechanical faculties of the race lay dormant for long centuries. They must have existed from the very beginning of intelligence, for the fundamental inventions and discoveries from which civilization has arisen were made so far back that we cannot give them date. Fire, the cooking pot, the bow, the wheel, the lever, the knife, all came before the dawn of civilization. These are simple inventions, you say; but they are no more simple than the lamp chimney, the cotton gin, or even the phonograph.

There are other reasons for the thousands of years barren of invention, followed by a sudden flowering. Undoubtedly the fact that in the ancient civilizations labor was almost exclusively slave labor stifled the

inventive faculty. The slave had no incentive to better the devices he worked with, or to work out new ones. Then, too, mankind did not have the constantly widening circle of needs that began to expand only with the development of ocean commerce and the discovery of the new world. There was another thing; there were no patent laws, and no organization of industry to ensure a reward for the man who worked overtime to devise a better clock or some new convenience.

But the chief reason is that the vast majority of modern inventions had to wait for the invention of the steam power-plant and the development of modern science. The steam engine brought in its train a host of inventions that would have been either impossible or useless before. The locomotive, the steam-hammer, are examples of those impossible; the screw propeller is an example of one that would have been useless. The discoveries of modern science have been responsible for a huge number of inventions. Without a knowledge of electricity, the telegraph and telephone, simple as they are, were impossible. The old alchemy gave us gunpowder, but only modern chemistry could give us the aniline dye, dynamite, high-speed steel, aluminum, the Bessemer process, gasoline, usable rubber, and oleomargarine.

The bicycle had to wait for the discovery of rubber gum, and then for the invention of the vulcanizing process. The automobile had to wait not only for that, but for the development of the gasoline engine. The airplane was impracticable before the internal combustion engine had reached a high stage of perfection.

Once started by the invention of the steam engine and the development of science, modern invention has proceeded in geometrical progression, each new invention or discovery making possible a dozen, or a hundred, more. Though example and the increase of possibilities has spurred the inventive faculty, it is perhaps no greater now than it ever was.

339. Lack of Intercommunication illustrated by Ticknor (Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, vol. 1, pp. 11-12. Boston, 1825) George Ticknor (1791-1871) was the fourth American who went to a German university for the purpose of study, and the first who left an account of his journey and residence there. He studied at the University of Göttingen, 1815-17. Two other American students preceded him by a few years; one having gone there from Philadelphia to study medicine as early as 1789. Germany, though, before the days of railways, telegraphs, and fast steamships, was almost as unknown to Americans as was China. In 1813 Madame de Staël's book on Germany (De l'Allemagne) was published in England. This opened up a new world to Ticknor, a

Boston boy who had been graduated from Dartmouth and had opened a law office in Boston, as it did to many other English and American readers. Of his efforts to learn something about the German universities, then the most celebrated in Europe (R. 359), and to study the German language, he wrote:

The first intimation I ever had on the subject was from Mme. de Staël's work on Germany, then just published. My next came from a pamphlet, published by Villers, to defend the University of Göttingen from the ill intentions of Jerome Bonaparte, the King of Westphalia, in which he gave a sketch of the university and its courses of study. My astonishment at these revelations was increased by an account of its library, given by an Englishman who had been at Göttingen, to my friend, the Rev. Samuel C. Thacher. I was sure that I should like to study at such a university, but it was in vain that I endeavored to get further knowledge upon the subject. I would gladly have prepared for it by learning the language I should have to use there, but there was no one in Boston who could teach me.

At Jamaica Plain there was a Dr. Brosius, a native of Strasburg, who gave me instruction in mathematics. He was willing to do what he could for me in German, but he warned me that his pronunciation was very bad, as was that of all Alsace, which had become a part of France. Nor was it possible to get books. I borrowed Meidinger's Grammar, French and German, from my friend Mr. Everett, and sent to New Hampshire, where I knew there was a German dictionary, and procured it. I also obtained a copy of Goethe's Werther in German (through Mr. William S. Shaw's connivance) from among Mr. J. Q. Adams's books, deposited by him on going to Europe in the Athenæum, under Mr. Shaw's care, but without giving him permission to lend them. I got so far as to write a translation of Werther, but no further.

340. The Struggle for National Realization

(Monroe, Paul, Introduction to "Teachers College Syllabi, No. 9," on Democracy and Nationalism in Education. New York, 1919. Reproduced by permission)

In an Introduction to a brief syllabus of lectures by Professor Reisner, as given above, Professor Monroe has given such an excellent statement of the struggle for nationality which has characterized modern history, and the use by nations of education as a tool to that end, that permission has been secured to reproduce the Introduction in full, which is done in the following Reading.

The growth of nations has been the conspicuous political feature of modern times, and the problems of the relation of education to this development have become obvious during the nineteenth century.

The earliest stage of political development occurred with the fixing of tribal groups in a definite habitat. The earliest form of this was the city state with its environing dependencies. These early states looked upon all other groups as hostile and unworthy of existence, except as they became subordinated. This incorporation was usually accomplished by force, which process tended to destroy the distinctive cultural features of the minor groups. In other words, the groups expanding by military power led by dynastic ability and ambition looked upon political organization as all-inclusive. With the Roman Empire this tendency became substantially a reality. With the Christianization of the Roman Empire the ecclesiastical ideal and pretension paralleled the political one and both became coterminous with civilization. This belief in the universal scope of political organization constituted in form the world's political theory long after the actual conditions were changed. The Holy Roman Empire which expressed this theory in the early modern period was only destroyed by Napoleon in 1804. The chief force in rendering this organization a mere form was that of growing nationalism.

From very early days certain groups, especially the English, had grown up in isolation. Over these the Holy Roman Empire had possessed only the most nebulous authority. From the twelfth to the sixteenth century both the English and the French groups, and to a less extent the German and Italian, through internal conflict, developed a local consciousness which more and more gave a distinctive character to each group. The original tribal groups which had entered into the composition of these dawning national groups were marked by distinct racial characteristics. Through internal conflicts, through migration, through conquest and the merging of conqueror and conquered, in time these developing national groups came to represent the accomplished amalgamation of many tribal or racial strains. In fact, the strongest of these early nationalities, the English and French, represented the fusion of most diverse elements.

Thus early became distinct the three great factors determining modern nationalities, namely, blood relationship or race, habitat or geographical environment, and culture. Culture in this sense means common ideals, common traditions, habits and aspirations. A number of other specific characteristics are often urged as essential to nationality, such as common language, common religion, common laws, but there is no one characteristic except that of a common culture which may be posited but what exceptions may be found. The one most commonly given, that of race, cannot be accepted, for every European nation represents a great mixture, and the United States has become the greatest mixture of all. Nor, on the other hand, can such great admixture of racial groups be made an essential, for there are illustrations of the opposite as in the case of Japan. A compact habitat is a usual

characteristic, but there are exceptions as in the case of Greece, now struggling for national realization, or that of the British Empire. It cannot be maintained that common language is an essential, for there is the case of Switzerland with its three languages. Common religion, for a period believed to be essential, was responsible for the many wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but strong national states have developed in spite of internal differences of religious belief. Common laws cannot be held as essential, for federal states are based on the recognition of a diversity of laws.

Modern history since the fifteenth century has been essentially the story of the struggle for national realization. This long struggle has brought a growing recognition that a common culture, that composite of common habits, ideals and purposes, is the one essential characteristic of nationality. Most modern wars, especially of Europe, have been caused by the violation of this principle. This was particularly true during the nineteenth century, because most international settlements, particularly those made by the Congress of Vienna in 1816 and by the Congress of Berlin in 1878, resulted in gross violations of that principle, in favor of other principles usually based on arbitrary force. In a very true sense, then, the great war is but a readjustment of the evils produced by the imperfect and unjust settlements made at the close of the Napoleonic struggle.

From the late eighteenth century the element of common culture has become the dominating one in the conception of nationality. This has resulted in the recognition of two fundamental and correlated truths: First, common culture is a trait which transcends social, religious, and economic distinctions, and its recognition transfers the seat of national existence from dynasties or bureaucratic legal institutions supported by military force to the masses of the people. Second, the discovery was made that common culture was an artificial product and could be manufactured. The process of this manufacture is by education. From one point of view then the nineteenth century is the period of national development, working towards the democratic interpretation of the problem of nationality and using education as a means.

The first people consciously to apply this method of education to the determination of nationality was the German. Beginning near the middle of the eighteenth century, or even earlier, with special groups, and after 1809 very definitely for the whole group, this people before the Napoleonic wars organized into more than one hundred independent nations has gradually amalgamated into one. The limitation to this development of a German nation as we see it now is that the Germans retained along with this democratic conception of nationality the old dynastic and predatory one. The latter has now been eliminated, in part at least, and it remains to be seen what the former may accomplish.