PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM AT THE PRESENT TIME. THE word is by way of being pedantic, but how little can one help wishing at times for a whole planet of "philosophers;" for although "philosophy can bake no bread," and although there may be much doubt whether it can "give us God, Freedom, and Immortality," yet unquestionably, without that impulse to comparing one thing with another which results in a kind of liking for the condition of detachment from each special fact known to us,a state usually reached by a widely awakened man in the world, and one which deserves to be known as philosophic, there is the risk that we all, rendered clannish by our confinement within particular geographical barriers, or limited, perchance, by kinship of race, may lose positive insights of value in regard to other respectable, even interesting, sections of our human fellows, not to speak of the loss of those superior pleasures that attend this "philosophic" detached condition, the somewhat general, the so-called cosmopolitan, or even the cosmical, way of looking at things. Thus, for instance, a number of those especially English qualities, so mixed of unlike elements as almost to demand a suicidal phrase in description of them, such a phrase, perhaps, as odious merits, - all those qualities, I mean, which have been frequently so very obtrusive in the contact of the English people with others in the recent eight hundred years, over seas as well as in the English island, become, by reason of the coagulating clannish drift in human nature, unfortunately contrasted with what, in the same general way, I may be allowed to call the amiable defects of the French; for by qualities permitting such euphemistic description the French have usually been known to the great practical, unimaginative "Saxon " world. The result of the contrast between the amiable defects and the odious merits has been a long story of mutual misunderstanding. To disinterested critics of the two peoples this misunderstanding is almost pathetic, and to the gods of whom, surely, a spirit of poetic justice still demands our pious recognitionit must be ironic. An approximately disinterested observer, for this is all that any one of us can hope to be, seeking to avoid, with equal caution, unscientific laudation and unscientific depreciation of both races, may very likely, however, detect the growth in himself of prejudices to the advantage of Frenchmen; for such a rigorously truthful observer will not hide from himself the evidences of English injustice which he is liable to discover, and sooner or later he will find himself desiring to interpret the Gallic to the Saxon mind. This aspiration is obviously insane, but it is none the less the breath of a real feeling. The critic is convinced that an Englishman can usually take care of himself, or certainly that he thinks he can; and there is a pretty widely diffused superstition, which no one will be quick to deny has some superficial evidence of being well founded, to the effect that a Frenchman cannot. People who, like the English, wish for no sympathy, impose no obligation to bestow it. But there is no doubt that sympathy is a craving, as well as an endowment, of the French. When they meet it they repay it more successfully in kind than do the English, and with the elastic reciprocity of children. England, which has positively fallen in love with hardly more than one idea, the idea of institutions (how droll the protracted exhibition of this the other day in the trial of the Bishop of Lincoln, a trial now merely famous, but in history to become notorious), perhaps should not really be expected to understand the impressible ironic race of France, upon whose members every fact brought to their knowledge |