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172 know no one in contemporary France who can, to the same degree, be compared with him. Diderot and Dalembert would have opened their arms to this man of science, who humanises science, who boldly limns a picture instinct with life, a brilliant synthesis of the human mind, of its evolution, of its manifold activities, and of the results it has achieved; who throws wide the doors of his laboratory to intelligent men of the world; and who deliberately wishes to make of science an instrument of struggle and emancipation in the war of the nations on behalf of liberty. Like Dalembert and Diderot, he is “in the thick of the fight.” He marches in the vanguard of modern thought, but he does not go further ahead than the due distance between a leader and his followers; he is never isolated, as were those great forerunners who remained throughout life cloistered in prophetic visions, centuries away from realisation; his ideals are no more than a day in advance of those cherished by his contemporaries.

A German republican, he looks no higher for the moment than the political ideals of Young America, the America of 1917, in which (according to Nicolai) “we can see, not merely what this new, so to speak, cosmopolitan, patriotism means, but also the limits which must still be imposed on it.… The day for the brotherhood of man has not yet come [we quote Nicolai, remember]; the time is not yet ripe. There is still too profound a cleavage between White, Yellow, and Black. It is in America that European patriotism has awakened, the sentiment which will undoubtedly be the patriotism of the near future, and whose heralds we would fain be.… The new Europe is already born, though not in Europe.”

In these lines we discern Nicolai’s limitations, which any eighteenth century cosmopolitan would have overstepped. In the practical domain, our author is essentially, uniquely, but absolutely, a European. It was to Europeans that he addressed his Manifesto of October, 1914, and his book of 1915.

“It seems to us necessary before everything else,” he