AN INTERNATIONAL MIND

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 122, 25 May 1936, Page 9

AN INTERNATIONAL MIND

IT IS WORKING NOW LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND US MANIFESTATIONS LECTURE BY REV. JOHN PATERSON, M.A International co-operation is the theme chosen by the League of Nations Union (Wanganui Branch) for the current year’s programme. The following lecture was delivered by Reverend John Paterson, M.A., at the first meeting this year of the branch. Mr. L. A. B. Chapple, M.A., was in the chair.

An International Mind. All sensible thinkers realise that the League of Nations in some form or other must continue. It has come to stay, for it is an effort to express by organisation the obvious needs of the modern world. But if it is to succeed there must be developed in mankind an international mind. We read in our papers recently an appeal for the creation of such a mind from Viscount Allenby. Now actually we all live in two worlds, the one the world of our nationality; the c-ther, that large international world of movement from which flows the real progress of the human race. For the progress of mankind is a living stream, into which many tributaries flow ever drawing from new fountains or from old fountains that burst into renewed vigour. Imposed upon this real life of humanity is an artificial organisation developing intobarriers and regulations that centre in the form of the national state, see.king to win loyalty to itself by creating hates, fears and jealousies born from the depreciation of other nations. So national antagonisms are awakened by criticising the foreigner, insisting that because his ways and customs are different they arc necessarily inferior. Too often also in the teaching of national history, a myth of inferiority of other peoples is built up by ignoring or belittling the facts concerning the rest of mankind. We need a study of the wider facts of human history and a large, calm realisation c-f the worth of all peoples and their mutual interdependence. God has* filled the world with multitudinous diversities of type and capacity, that each may bring its contribution to a nobler complex unity of life and achievement. The sign of advancing culture is our growing capacity to appreciate and master these differences and to realise that we are all members of the one body. A Wider Understanding. Tn the old state the community was organised upon the tyranny and snobbery of the various classes—the soldier, the merchant, the peasant. To-day our wider economic structure demands a synthesis of social states and economic functioning To-day also it demands a wider understanding of the economic and social dependence of all the nations Wo cannot make a plum pudding without many nations and climes contributing to the desired result. We can no longer maintain an attitude of contemptuous superiority to any race, especially the dark races of Asia. We have learned to know their art, their philosophies, their economic ideals and methods. It is ridiculous to call them uncivilised. To regard the mere mechanical superiority of the white races as the only criterion of value manifests a crudity o f judgment which reveals our own intellectual and moral pettiness. ~ No Nation Isolated. No nation lives or dies unto itself. All are knit in indissoluble ties of common needs and common achievements. The culture of modern Europe is based on the achievements of the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman peoples, and these achievements investigation has now shown to be themselves built upon Egypt, Babylon, and other cultures disappearing in to that dim dawn of which history is able to tell us little. But take our modern thought and achievement. Is it not drawn from every country, and are not each and all of the European nations deep in debt one to another? We might, beginning from the Renassiances, show how each of the European peoples has made its special contributions to our common heritage. But rather let us trace the stream of progress, and see how it flows from nation to nation. The History of Philosophy. Modern philosophy, beginning in France with [Descartes, sweeps into Germany to Leibnitz and Spinoza; thence to Scotland, expressing itself through Reid, Stewart, and Hume. The scepticism of Hume awakens Kant in Germany to new thought, and from that thought flows the majestic outrush of German philosophic thought from Hegel to Netizsche. Across to the New World the living thought of the race sweeps to express itself in James of Harvard, thence to France where Bergson carries it forward, and down to Italy where it expresses itself through Croce. Thence to Vienna where Freud and the new psychologists open to us new worlds of consciousness. The Science of Education. There is nothing of which we moderns are so proud -to-day as our interest in education and the new methods by which we seek to instruct mankind. But this educational awakening has been the work of no one people. Beginning with Franc ke in Germany it was carried forward by Rousseau in Switzerland, then in Italy Prestilozzi and Montessori awakened for us the secret of the child mind, to have their discoveries and methods enriched and perfected by Froebel and Herbart in Germany, while in England the labours of Herbert Spencer and the Arnolds, father and son, continued the movement which finally flows in its broadest stream to-day in the U.S.A. Fountains of Medicine. Or take the study of medicline —the delivering of mankind from the ills of mind and body. Beginning in Egypt it found rich development amongst the Greeks down to the end of the second century of our era. When learn- r ing declined in Europe the Arabs came I to the rescue of mankind, not only I preserving past knowledge but carrying it forward. It was from Arabic treatises that men of the middle ages relearned for Europe the knowledge of

I the healing of the body. It was in Italy where the study of medicine was revived and carried forward to a truly scientfic understanding of the body and the means of curing its disorders. Time renders impossible a full study of the wonderful development of medical knowledge. But it is amazingly interesting to see not only how various nations have contributed to our knowledge but how at particular times and for particular achievements one special nation became the central fountain of medical study for the whole of Europe. After the great work in Italy of the medical school of Padua led by Vesalius, it was Paris that for several generations assumed leadership in medical research. Again the leadership swung to Italy to be seized in the seventeenth century by Holland where at the University of Leyden all Europe had to come to learn the healing art from Silvius and Hermann Moerhaave. Then in the home of an ordinary medical practitioner of London Thomas Sydenham, the place of importance is found. This now sweeps to Vienna where a real medical hospital is first founded and developed, this effort to deal with sickness being itself perfected in the methods of hygiene and sanitation worked out in Germany by Johann Peter Frank. Napoleon and the Clinics. At the end of the eighteenth century every doctor who wanted to learn his business hastened to Paris to be instructed in the new methods of clynical examination and to learn the latest facts of pathological anatomy and this amidst the storm of revolution and Napoleonic war, a clear proof that the artificial life of the States has little or no effect upon the real organic life of the thought and activity of mankind. By the middle of the century Vienna had become the centre of medical advance which in the next generation had been again gained by Germany where in Berlin Helmholtz was teaching mankind new knowledge and offering new methods of healing disease. Nor was he alone, for Wunderlich was teaching doctors to use the medical chart and Virchow was revealing the mysteries of the cell ami the effect on it of abnormal stimuli. Nothing has advanced medical service more than the discoveries of Pasteur in France regarding bacteria, but these discoveries had to reach their fulfilment through the work of a German, Robert Koch, followed by his fellow countrymen, Belroth and Ehrlich. All this new knowledge in surgery and bacteriology would have been of little avail in practice without the discovery of the use of anesthetics by Well and Morton in the United States and Simpson in Scotland. Nor would their knowledge have been of much effect without the development of anti-sceptic sergery through the experiments of Lister in Edinburgh. So international is the stream of development of medical knowledge and practice! Whence Came Our Sports? A similar investigation reveals the same characteristics of internationalism in every department of human knowledge and achievement. It is so even in our sports. When we dance we dance internationally. A waltz from Germany, a two-step from U.S.A., a tango from the Argentine! We play our games as members of the human race, not as citizens of any one nation. We take our bowls and golf in Scotland, our cricket from England, our croquet from Ireland, hockey from Denmark, lacrosse from the North American Indians. Polo comes from Persia through India, football from the Greeks through the Romans, whereas basketball was invented in a night by John Naismith of U.S.A. Skiing we learn from Norway, billiards from France. The playing of cards was brought by the Crusaders from the East and can be traced back through India and China to Egypt at the time of Joseph. Chess came from India through Persia brought by the Arabs into Spain and thence taught to Europe. The Inventors of Wireless. Or consider one object of almost universal use, the wireless! It is preeminently a gift of internationalism in scientific investigation and application. Its possibility begins in Denmark when Aenstedt discovered that an electric current flowing through a wire builds up a magnetic field surrounding the wire. Then Faraday in’ England and Henry in U.S.A, carried our knowledge of electric currents forward, this advance to be continued in Scotland by Lord Kelvin and in England by James Clerke-Maxwcll. The scientific knowledge thus accumulated in various countries is gathered up in the laboratories of Heinrich Hertz in Germany who invents a detector of electro-magnetic waves. Sir Oliver Lodge in Birmingham continues the advance, Marconi in Italy takes up the torch and wireless telegraphy is achieved. But much wonc still remains to be done. Brown in Germany, Stone in the United States, Arco in Germany, and Edison in U.S.A, contribute needed discoveries which yet together would have availed only to transmit Morse signals without thd work of Paulsen of Denmark and Reginald Fessenden who made possible the transmission of the human voice. Finally, through the added labours of Epstein in German)', Vallouri in Italy, and Joly in France, we have to-day the highly perfected instrument which brings so much instruction and pleasure to the whole of the human ra.ee. No National Limits. So wherever we turn, in whatever side of human achievement we may be interested, we find we are members of a human family that knows no limits I of nationality, no boundaries of State. 1 More and more enriching culture, ever widening scientific knowledge, ever advancing mastery of the forces of nature, compel us to regard, ourselves-