But there are reasons why it is better that we should develop into internationalism rather than cosmopolitanism. The latter contains fundamental dangers. It makes too much for detachment, aloofness, and selfishness. The Stoics were an example of how cosmopolitanism passed into those things. The eighteenth century was an “age of Reason” which tended towards cosmopolitanism, and it was a cosmopolitanism which though enlightened was chill and abstract. Cosmopolitanism tends to reduce all life to a mediocre type. This danger is well pointed out in the following words: “I believe largely in the comparative permanence of what we call racial characteristics; I sincerely hope they will not be merged into a common humanity.... Nearly every group of peoples has developed its own mentality, its own psychology, ideas and ideals. We need to preserve the difference between those ideas and ideals. If you merge them, you get a common--a very common--humanity. All progress takes place in the reaction between extremes. All philosophy has arisen from a mixture of races which brought to one another different ideas and ideals.”[195] The condition of progress is the preservation of national characteristics. But, what is even more important, there are in cosmopolitanism grave moral dangers involved. G. F. Barbour says: “The great meeting-places where the currents of Oriental and Occidental life have come together have indeed produced a vivid and brilliant type of life, but hardly one that has been morally stable and sound.”[196] Each side finds it easy to adopt the vices of the other, but not the virtues, and both sides are liable to become superficial. The brilliant but shallow and immoral life of Corinth in the days of Paul offers an example. The problem at the present time is to federate groups. Individuals have already become unified. But what sets the problem gives rise also to a hope. The existence of groups will prove an aid in the accomplishment of world unification. And the wise humanitarian will work through the groups that already exist, that is, countries.