Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/70

 56 FERDINAND TONNIES : have iu them something of a dead and mechanical nature, as a modern world-town is from the rigid princely towns of the eighteenth century. The latter were products of monarchical absolutism and of the military spirit ; the former is regarded as the creation of democratic relativism (which we are free to define as communism) and of the spirit of peaceful work. Its idea is based upon the ideal practical interests of the educators of men, and of the citizens of the world, an interest which aims at elevating Psychology and Sociology to the rank of the leading organs in a moral body of which civilised nations will voluntarily become members and sub- ordinates. Now this idea lies, as hardly any one of note among the sociologists can doubt, as it were in the air of our age. It is the overvoice to all the instruments which are played upon in the economic, the political, and spiritual life of our century. On the threshold of a new century it may perhaps give the note to this concert. 93. Such an academy must be first of all a place for scientific investigation and mental work. Just by this means it must be in the second place a place of teaching. Only not of teaching as a means of educating officials or for providing well-to-do men and women with the apparatus of instructed chatter but of a teaching which proceeds im- mediately from the co-operation of investigation and thought, which therefore has its living sources in personal intercourse, in the influence and example of masters, which is accessible only to the true thirsters after knowledge, but will also make these intellectually and morally fruitful. The academy is not conceivable without a common language. Is it possible that in this language we should celebrate the resurrection of neo-Latin? Many reasons may be adduced to make it probable and not less desirable. It has never perished entirely ; it is still indispensable in every technical and scientific terminology, from its unlimited capacity to adopt Greek forms of words which have their origin partly in the history of science, partly in later needs. It has, in general, passed through a long period in which it has been shaped for the ends of a manifold and refined thought ; it has thus gained a certain coolness and sobriety, which is most appropriate to reason. It is only through the antiquarian work of philology, hence not really as itself, that it has been made serviceable to rhetoric ; and even this application, being conscious, is not so dangerous to thought as the unconscious rhetoric which is concealed in every "living" language. Finally we may say that even tradition has its rights, and that this dead language would certainly occupy a neutral