The Popular Science Monthly, July, 1900: Vol. 57, May, 1900 to October, 1900Various
Science
The Popular Science Monthly, July, 1900: Vol. 57, May, 1900 to October, 1900
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
From this point of view
it is possible to understand why international ethics is so far behind
individual ethics. Personal disputes were once settled by brute force
as international disputes are now settled. There is no reason to doubt
that the latter will, somewhat later in the history of civilization, be
settled by courts of arbitration and enforced by a system of police as
the former now are.
The considerations now before us show the futility of peace congresses
in that part of their work which contemplates the enforced substitution
of arbitration for war. Peace congresses are not social movements. They
spring from the efforts of individual men, leaders in social reform.
They belong to the upward ethical movements led by individuals, the
slow, painful climbing towards higher moral and intellectual standards.
These congresses may meet and discuss arbitration and perfect an
international program, but they labor in vain, for they forget that
social man has a double personality and that the personality that meets
and deliberates in the peace congress is not the personality that,
under the influence of the war craze, thrills with emotion and acts
from ancient and deep rooted impulses and motives. When the war spirit
sweeps over a country the social personality passes into a condition
not unlike that of hypnosis and is ruled by a different set of moral
principles. It should not be understood from this that peace congresses
are useless. They are a part of an educative system whose influence
in the end will be strong enough to react upon the secondary social
personality and determine its behavior.
Among crazes of a different kind, we may notice financial crazes as
an interesting type, falling under the same laws as those mentioned.
Both in panics and in speculative manias we observe again a species
of hypnotization. In the case of the latter the ordinary business
shrewdness which characterizes the dealings of the individual in a
normal state and which depends upon the activity of late developed
association tracts in the brain, is to a large extent lost. The memory
is impaired and what in general we may call prudence is lacking.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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