[Transcriber’s note: No text has intentionally been changed from the original; no printing errors were found. There are two unbalanced quotes in the original, which are duplicated here. The first is on p. 24, in the area “When an attempt”; the second is on p. 77, in the area “exclaims Mill”. This text is based on the Internet Archive scan with the identifier “philistinegenius00sidirich”.] PHILISTINE AND GENIUS BY BORIS SIDIS, A.M., Ph.D., M.D. _Medical Director, Sidis Institute, Portsmouth, New Hampshire_ BOSTON: RICHARD G. BADGER TORONTO: THE COPP CLARK CO., LIMITED * * * * * Copyright, 1917, by Boris Sidis All Rights Reserved Made in the United States of America The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. * * * * * TO THE FATHERS AND MOTHERS OF THE UNITED STATES * * * * * PREFACE When in 1909 “Philistine and Genius” was delivered by me in the form of a Commencement address before the Harvard Summer School, my prediction of the coming European war storm was regarded by everybody as dream and fancy. My best friends and sympathisers thought my foreboding unjustified and ill-founded. I was an alarmist, a Cassandra, when I spoke of the coming catastrophe which was to shake Europe to its very foundation. When “Philistine and Genius” was published in 1911 the American and European press, dealing with the views advanced in this little volume, completely ignored the following warning given by me: “About the middle of the nineteenth century Buckle made the prediction that no war was any more to occur among civilized nations. Henceforth peace was to reign supreme. ‘The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; their young ones shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.... Nations shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up swords against nations, nor shall they learn war any more.’ This prophecy was rather hasty. We have had since the Civil war, the Franco-Prussian war, the Spanish-American war, the Boer war, the Russo-Japanese war, not counting the ceaseless wars of extermination carried on by civilized nations among the various semi-civilized and primitive tribes. Civilized nations do not as yet beat their swords into ploughshares, but keep on increasing the strength of their ‘armed peace,’ and are ready to fight bloody battles in the quest of new lands and the conquest of new markets.