Both emotional nationalism and emotional internationalism go
back to Rousseau, but in his final emphasis he is an emotional
nationalist;[287] and that is because he saw that patriotic “virtue” is
a more potent intoxicant than the love of humanity. The demonstration
came in the French Revolution which began as a great international
movement on emotional lines and ended in imperialism and Napoleon
Bonaparte. It is here that the terrible peril of a science that is
pursued as an end in itself becomes manifest. It disciplines man and
makes him efficient on the naturalistic level, but leaves him ethically
undisciplined. Now in the absence of ethical discipline the lust
for knowledge and the lust for feeling count very little, at least
practically, compared with the third main lust of human nature--the
lust for power. Hence the emergence of that most sinister of all types,
the efficient megalomaniac. The final use of a science that has thus
become a tool of the lust for power is in Burke’s phrase to “improve
the mystery of murder.”
This union of material efficiency and ethical unrestraint, though
in a way the upshot of the whole movement we have been studying, is
especially marked in the modern German. Goethe as I have pointed
out is ready to pardon Faust for grave violations of the moral law
because of work which, so far from being ethical, is, in view of the
ruin in which it involves the rustic pair, Baucis and Philemon, under
suspicion of being positively unethical. Yet Goethe was far from being
a pure utilitarian and he had reacted more than most Germans of his
time from Rousseauism. Rousseau is glorified by Germans as a chief
source of their _Kultur_, as I have already pointed out. Now _Kultur_
when analyzed breaks up into two very different things--scientific
efficiency and emotionalism or what the Germans (and unfortunately not
the Germans alone) term “idealism.” There is no question about the
relation of this idealism to the stream of tendency of which Rousseau
is the chief representative. By his corruption of conscience Rousseau
made it possible to identify character with temperament. It was easy
for Fichte and others to take the next step and identify national
character with national temperament. The Germans according to Fichte
are all beautiful souls, the elect of nature. If they have no special
word for character it is because to be a German and have character are
synonymous. Character is something that gushes up from the primordial
depths of the German’s being without any conscious effort on his
part.[288] The members of a whole national group may thus flatter one
another and inbreed their national “genius” in the romantic sense, and
feel all the while that they are ecstatic “idealists”; yet as a result
of the failure to refer their genius back to some ethical centre, to
work, in other words, according to the human law, they may, so far as
the members of other national groups are concerned, remain in a state
of moral solitude.
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