Page:The Kingdom of Man - Ralph Vary Chamberlin 1938.djvu/14

8 and murder in magnanimity. He insists on playing the game, not only with an ace up his sleeve, but with the smug conviction that God has put it there." History is filled with instances comparable with that of Japan, among whose people the argument prevails today that since Japan has the only divinely established government, and is governed by a living deity, it is her manifest right and duty to rule the world. The defenders of slavery rarely admitted that they favored the system because it was profitable; they argued rather that it was better for the slave, that they were executing the will of God, or serving the best interests of the country. Man would seem to be the only creature who through superior intelligence is able to persuade himself that things are not as they are but as he wishes them to be.

But the really great game man has had to play has not been within his own ranks, where subtle acts of intellectual deception and propaganda have often prospered; it has been an incessant one with Nature who from time to time chastens him and restores his sanity by bringing him back to earth. For Nature can be neither deceived nor wheedled. Her ways are set, her justice even and dependable but adamant. Hence the greatest effort of thinking man since the beginning of history has been to find a reasonable, set of answers to his own questions about the nature of the world and his place in it. His fundamental beliefs as to these questions have been the great moving forces behind all his activities and with them all subsidiary thought systems, inclusive of the explanations and extensions made in the interests of authority and institutions, have had to harmonize. The significant processes of human life consist in the passage from one thought system to another, and the true history of mankind is the history of ideas. Emerson once wrote: "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker upon this planet. Then all things are at risk. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned tomorrow; there is not any literary reputation that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the religion of nations, the manner and morals of mankind, are all at the mercy of a new generalization."

The basic idea that has determined our modern civilization and set it off from all others is the scientific idea. This is unquestionably the age of science; but if we have in mind the people rather than the movement, this statement must be strongly qualified. Our age stands for certain achievement, for a certain mentality which few of us exhibit. It is remarkable that so few even among scientists themselves maintain the scientific attitude outside their own limited subjects, but in such fields as religion, morals and politics reveal an extraordinary inertia of early habit. Scientific beliefs, that is, beliefs we have some reason to hold because of an evidenced relationship to reality, are all too rare among the general run of humanity. Most beliefs have come through contagion and involve reason only by way of apology or justification.