detailed investigations of others, so in conduct, morals and politics,
it is more and more imperative to recall men's minds, and, in the first
place, our own, to the large governing ideas by which after all our
lesser rules and objects must stand or fall. For who will dispute that
all our alliances and international action and the war itself can only
be ultimately justified if they are seen to serve the highest interests
of mankind as a whole?
A volume, and a very valuable one, might be written on the evolution of
this idea of Humanity in history. We should need in the first place to
analyse, with some care, in what sense it is in each case used. There is
the simple sense of brotherhood such as we know to be deeply felt among
our allies in Russia. Of this there must have been germs from the
earliest appearance of mankind upon earth. It is one of those most
precious things which the development of wealth and class and
distinctive culture has tended to blunt in more elaborate civilizations.
But when we consider that the full conception of Humanity involves a
knowledge of man's evolution, his growth in power, and organization
throughout history, as well as the simple but indispensable sense of
man's brotherhood, we shall see how long a road the Russian moujik--as
well as multitudes of his fellows in all other lands--must travel before
he comes in view of the goal. In the fuller sense of a self-conscious
and developing being, the idea of Humanity first appears with the
Stoics, after the Greeks had put their leaven of abstract thought into
the world. The whole inhabited world as the City of Man was the Stoic
ideal, and it embraced both the idea of the [Greek: polis] which
Platonic and Aristotelian thought had reached in the fourth century
B.C., and the extension to the rest of mankind which was in the air just
before the Christian era. Christianity affected the conception in a
twofold manner. On the one hand it limited it, for the Stoic City of Man
became the City of God, who was to be sought and worshipped in one
prescribed order. On the other hand it deepened it, for the springs of a
common humanity were found to go beneath the superficial facts of a
citizen life into the depths of souls which have identical relations
with eternal things, with sin and suffering and hopes of the future.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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