Education -- and Its Product

M. BENDA is one of those writers who view the present state of the world with-alarm. His mildest predictions of future disaster foresee the disappearance of higher civilization from the face of the earth. His gloomier fore-boding envisage a universal war sufficiently perfect to accomplish the destruction of the human race itself. Having arrived at these conclusions he then sets out to discover the forces which make them inevitable.

In the first place we have the new passion of nationalism; a passion even stronger in its potentialities for disaster than that of class or of race. M. Benda's analysis of the nationalism which grew up in the latter half of the nineteenth century and found its highest expression in the World War is keen and comprehensive. But it is not so much with the nationalism of men of action that M. Benda is concerned in his present work as with the nationalism of the intellectuals. Artists, scientists, philosophers, and poets, men of whom a certain degree of universality and detachment from material objects has been expected from earliest times, have become violent partisans of this or that nationality and of this or that national culture. Therein lies what M. Benda terms the Treason of the Intellectuals. That many of these intellectuals have lost their broader out-look in a militant patriotism is undeniable; that this should be regarded as an act of treason is more than doubtful. M. Benda's readers will possibly prefer to regard it merely as an indication of the extraordinary degree to which national consciousness has developed.

While M. Benda's analysis of political passions is admirable and his main thesis is brilliant, many thoughtful readers will not find themselves in agreement with his main philosophical tenets nor will they be inclined to applaud some of his own political prejudices. M. Benda is still searching for eternal verities, abstract justice, and absolute good dissociated from its material embodiment. The modern philosopher who regards all values in a relative light is condemned as a renegade and a disgrace to his high profession. Mr. Benda is finally imbued with a thoroughly anti-Teutonic point of view. Dispassionate modern history can scarcely be expected to accept so categorical a statement, for instance, as: "The clergy of the allied nations are eager to throw in the faces of the German clergy their union with injustice in 1914. They abuse their own good fortune in belonging to nation's whose cause happened to be just."