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It is barbarism as well as the barbarian which France is fighting, and the French know it, are profoundly conscious of it, from the cool, dispassionate philosopher, like Bergson or Boutroux or Hovelaque, to the girl conductor on the tram, the dirty poilu in the trench.
Bergson's thought, although in many respects it is strikingly original and novel, is, nevertheless, the continuation, if not the culmination, of a movement in French philosophy which we can trace back through Boutroux, Guyau, Lachelier and Ravaisson to Maine de Biran, who died in 1824.
Boutroux says that a nation is a person, and has a right to live and to have its personality recognized as its own. Granting this to be true, and that we must think of country as personal and active, the question arises whether this concept of country is something that requires in any definite way educational interference.
No one could speak of Germany more authoritatively than M. Boutroux; no one, indeed, is better acquainted with the Germany of yesterday and that of today, or better equipped to draw a comparison between them, which for the Prussianized Germany of the present is a verdict and a condemnation.
*Germany's Civilized Barbarism* *By Emile Boutroux.* *From the Revue des Deux Mondes.* I sincerely thank M. Emile Boutroux for the letter he has been good enough to write to me; and the readers of the Revue will join me, for it is addressed to them also.
Boutroux says that in France, after the Dreyfus affair, although strong nationalistic feeling was stirred, there was also a new vision of the destiny of the French people as not only defenders of their own country but as champions of the rights of all nationalities.
It is also true, we should say, that the tendency to organize ideas and even the fundamental ideas by which the Germans have been guided are deeply rooted in temperament, in history and in the social order of the past. Boutroux says that the Germans themselves regard the war as the culmination of their philosophy.
M. Boutroux explains to us the detestable sophism which has perverted the entire German soul and made of a nation which our grandfathers loved and admired, a monster whose implacable egotism weighs heavily on the world. But let M. Boutroux speak. PARIS, 28 September, 1914. To the Director of the Revue des Deux Mondes: Mr.
For we can, and we must, conceive that there is an evolution of natural laws; that these laws never define anything but a momentary state of things; that they are in reality like streaks determined in the flux of becoming by the meeting of contrary currents. "Laws," says Monsieur Boutroux, "are the bed down which passes the torrent of facts; they have dug it, though they follow it."
All nations are now, as Boutroux remarks, to a greater or less extent psychological races. The factors that have produced them are the factors that have caused men to become functioning units. This gives us a clew at least to a practical principle for the education of social loyalty.
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