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Scientific Conceptions And Social Potency

Scientific Conceptions And Social Potency image
Parent Issue
Day
25
Month
June
Year
1884
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

The first Napoleon's hatrod of and eontempt for "idealogues" expressed in part the practical man's scorn for mere dreamers, but expressed far more the antagonism of brute force to that subtle deal forco with which it had to struggle in vain. For ideas have their own laws of growth, and as the tender shoot of some vegetable organism will upheave the heavy sod or split the hard rock, so will the development of some new conception often defy the constraints of material couipression. The minute egg of the coral animal may grow into in oceanic islet, or into a reef besides which ships may sail for days, or even into a denscly peopled land, with its railways, sities aud busy commerce. Similiarlj, n idea from the brain of some Descartes or llobbes, some solitary sage of Konigsberg, or a Oenevan skull, f uil of iraaginalion, but empty of moráis, may, in the courae of a few centuries, transforni the aspect of the civilized world. Tha present i a time when scientitic conceptions have a quite exceptional social poteney, and we venture to think that some of those iwho have attained currency merit more attenlion from non-scientiüc readers than they have received on account of the relations they bear to temporary politids. We beiieve that many of the errors of even the most extremo school of Nihilists are the outcome of one recondite and mistaken philosophic idea, apparently quite remote from the spuere of politics. This idea may bc shortly expressed as the mechanical conception of the universe. But if we are right in believing that this conception is at the root of such political errors, they have also a common origin from a source much less remote. They may be considered, in the first place, as developments of tho main political error of Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose dreams have had resulta which now threaten so much of Europe with revolution and auarchy. Th3 main political error is the conception that the art of politics is a mere matter of counting heads, one man being absurdly represented to be "as good as another." Henee arises the profound error of regarding a nation 11$ a mere loóse aggregate of similar units, instead of as au organic whole composcd of a system of mutually related parts (having very different values and very diverse functions) from the family upward. 15ut this imaginary reduction of one national, organic whole into a mass of separate, similar atoms is really but one of many examples of that modern tendency to regard all act ion as merely mechanical Vbich has increasingly invaded every ranch of knowledge, to the profound tíetriment of moráis and religión. -

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Ann Arbor Courier
Old News