Science, when it oversteps its limits and occupies the whole region of
life, has its fascination. It looks so powerful because of its
superficiality,--as does a hippopotamus which is very little else but
physical. Science speaks of the struggle for existence, but forgets that
man's existence is not merely of the surface. Man truly exists in the
ideal of perfection, whose depth and height are not yet measured. Life
based upon science is attractive to some men, because it has all the
characteristics of sport; it feigns seriousness, but is not profound.
When you go a-hunting, the less pity you have the better; for your one
object is to chase the game and kill it, to feel that you are the
greater animal, that your method of destruction is thorough and
scientific. Because, therefore, a sportsman is only a superficial
man,--his fullness of humanity not being there to hamper him,--he is
successful in killing innocent life and is happy. And the life of
science is that superficial life. It pursues success with skill and
thoroughness, and takes no account of the higher nature of man. But even
science cannot tow humanity against truth and be successful; and those
whose minds are crude enough to plan their lives upon the supposition,
that man is merely a hunter and his paradise the paradise of sportsman,
will be rudely awakened in the midst of their trophies of skeletons and
skulls. For man's struggle for existence is to exist in the fullness of
his nature,--not by curtailing all that is best in him and dwarfing his
existence itself, but by accepting all the responsibilities of his
spiritual life, even through death and defeat.
I do not for a moment suggest, that Japan should be unmindful of
acquiring modern weapons of self-protection. But this should never be
allowed to go beyond her instinct of self-preservation. She must know
that the real power is not in the weapons themselves, but in the man
who wields those weapons; and when he, in his eagerness for power,
multiplies his weapons at the cost of his own soul, then it is he who is
in even greater danger than his enemies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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