Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/125



THE ROUMANIAN SYNTHESIS

There is no subject under the sun entirely devoid of interest to human society. All that concerns mankind forms a unity, and the duty of the scholar is to discern and to present it in some form or other. The difference between great and small nations, between large and small territories is of no value to the seeker after novelty, nor for the creator of new syntheses. All that is characteristic, all that can supply impulse and determine a movement, is in itself of interest. In the great problems of the more important human groups the relation is often to be found in an isolated corner, where a small nation, or such a one as has lost most of its components conserves the predominant features of its particular being. Without knowing to a certain extent the life of all men, there is no possibility of comprehending one single individual.

This is true not only of all human problems, but also of all branches of science as well.

The celebrated Roumanian bacteriologist, Babeș, in his maiden spech as a newly-elected Fellow of the Roumanian Academy, said, with true insight and a deep sense of human nature: «There are no small subjects; by digging yet deeper under them one reaches, willy-nilly, the great fundamental truths of science ». Because, may I add, we see different sciences, but all are the expression of the same mind seeking the secrets of a Nature which is strongly unitary, notwithstanding the deceptions of our great mistress of error and delight, the Goddess Illusion.

I say all this as an apology for bringing before an American public the problems — already solved — of the Roumanian synthesis, at a time when the question of future synthesis preoccupies the minds of all thinkers in this immense country, which has become a new fatherland for human beings drawn from nearly all the races of the globe. This question was recently defined by a clever French sociologist, Monsieur Siegfried, as the new and arduous struggle between the old Puritanism of the first settlers combined with that of their later associates who were rapidly fused into the same religious and linguistic community, and the over-numerous newcomer, holding other points of view, other variations of feeling and other habits of