THE GERMAN MIND

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 68, 14 December 1918, Page 7

THE GERMAN MIND

ARROGANT, BUT INFERIOR

NOT IDEAS, DUT ORGANISATION

[By W. \Y. Tarn.]

Every shopkeeper knows that one way to sell an inferior article is to put. a high price on it; people at once suppose that it must be firsi-rafe. X r ou may do this for ijuito a long time;,but you cannot do it all the.time. The world will take you at your own valuation, true; but only until you are. tested. Some (lay something happens to test (ho expeusivo inferior goods or the arrogant, inferior mind; ami that is the end of that particular sham. But. the bubble will bo blown afresh elsewhere;'that is inherent in human nature, for most people have neither the timo nor the knowledge to apply tests. The great illustration of this in tho world to-day is the German claim to possess a superior variety of culture to oilier peoples. Througn much repetition some had -begun to bJlieve this claim; but the war is leading people to look into it, and recognition ot Us falsity is therefore only a matter of time, .uf course it is not easy to look into it. To do this properly would mean taking every branch or human cultural activity and investigating exactly what Germans have dono in that branch. This can only bo done by specialists; a layman cannot appraise surgery" or epigraphy. Some- day it will be done. But. the general lines of tho result are not in doubt.

. The general lines ■ nro these. Taken as a whole, the German mind is not creative. It is painstaking, and sometimes massive; , but it-.-rarely originates; it collects and develops. It began by doing this with honesty and success; it has ended, it is to be feared, with a' considerable amount of dishonesty. It started with a certain pride in entering iulo other men's labours; but of lato years it has.- shown as increasing tendency to forget the other men and appropriate their labours to itself. It was a great temptation. The .best side of the. German, a sort of laborious thoroughness, had let to Germany becoming the land of collections. ]t made the indexes and catalogues of knowledge; it was the home of thd Jahrbuch; it had acquired almost a monopoly in reviewing progress. . All this was legitimate enough. Jlany countries consequently came to depend more and more.on Germany for information about tho advance of knowledge, a process favoured by tte (again , perfectly legitimate) operations of the German publishing houses, who spread their products in a way. unknown in other countries. Now if you take your reviews of human progress from one country, you become unconsciously predisposed to believe that the country which' supplies the information is in the van of progress. Here Germany fell. She saw' the tendency, and the opportunity of assuming to act as- arbiter of knowledge; and for years German work , of .the' sort had, tended in two directions: it was more and more belittling or neglecting what had been dono or was being done in other countries, at first from a kind of insularity, then deliberately, and as a consequence it was claiming for Germany Mi 2 ideas nnd discoveries of others, assisted more and more by deliberate falsification. Take one elementary instance which all can appreciate. German writers havo gone on repeating that Gutenberg invented printing till it ■ has become ' with Germans almost an article of faith. What Gutenberg in fact did was to invent movable type and 'apply this to Caxton's discovery; a great step, certainly, but a very different thing to tiie "invention of printing'." Now it is a greater thing to originate than to develop details. Both are necessary; but for one man who can do tho former many thousands can do the latter once the way has been pointed out. If there were any truth m the' German claim to a superior culture, Germany should have done more than her share of creation, of: the discovery of. those ideas which form the living skeleton of the modern world. She has in fact dono far less than her share. Of world-histori-cal ideas she can claim part of just one, her share through Luther in the .Reformation; but it cannot be said that the. substitution of an infallible Book for an infallible, Church exercises any great influence on the Germany of to-day. Those who think it does should study the published collections of Lutheran war sermons. Germany attempts, of course, to claim Socialism; but, though Socialism originated on German soil, both Marx and Lassalle were Jews; and it may bo noticed that there is no more, fruitful source of surprises than to investigate how., much of German cultural activity is really German-Jewish. The same' tiling applies to natural science. Take any, branch of science you like, and work through it, and you will find that it originated and was curried to a certain point of development in ii'lier countries before Germany even began to take it up. Only one of the great scientific doctrines of the world originated in Germany—that of the conservation of energy, due to Mayer and Helmholtz. Details cannot, of. course, be given here; but 10l me-illustrate my point from a well-known story in the history of astronomy, a science.in which Germany makes a belter showing than in most, as she canio in fairly near the beginning with Kepler, though Kepler would not have formulated his laws had not Tycho first mado the observations on which he- worked. It is the story' of Hie discovery of Neptune. Two young men, Adams in England and Leverrior in France, independently saw that the perturbations of Uranus must be due to some unknown planet, and calculated its position. Adams after long delay sent hi? calculations to Cambridge. A search was made, and.Neptune actually seen twice, but not recognised, for there was no star map available. Leverrier cent his calculations to Grille, at Berlin, for he knew that the German astronomers had completed a stal , map. Galle found and identified Neptune the same night. This story is typical of the part played by Gertnany in science and much else; the laborious star'inap had been mnde, and Berlin was ready to take up the idea once it hn<l been supplied from elsewhere. That is to say, the German contribution is not ideas but organisation. I shall rottirn to this later,

. . • ■ INVENTION. SOME STRIKING TACTS. If the Germans can claim ro Miperinrity in world-hislorical or scientific ideas, how does lie stand as regards the more practical inventions which play such n part in modern life? The iinswer is, nowhere at all. It was not Germans who invented steam engines or steamships, niotorj or submarines, aeroplanes or airships (tho very Zeppelins are only adaptations of the .lew ijchwarz's airship), telegraphs or telephone?, deep-sen cables, or wireless, telescopes, or microscopes, electric light, power loom*, or spinning machinery, anaesthetics, or antiseptic surgery. Tho best thing to their.credit is the Xrays>, but those Rontgen discovered by accident". There, is. however, a common belief that Germany has shone in steel metallurgy anil surgery. In fact, practically everything she has: done in steel metallurgy has bee.n i.opied from Britain. The crucible fluid i;eel process, precisely as used by Krupp's to-day for casting Kim ingots, was invented in ITW by Huntsman and Bessemer was a Hertford mvj Siemens, though of German descent, lived mid worked in Tliißland. An Englishman, Alushet, revolntioned cutting tools by his i.ih-cover.v in 1858 by Ihe influence of tungsten on .tool steel; the oxtrardinary effect of the addition of Vanadium wns discovered at Shellield University in 1000. Germans did recently attempt to do something for themselves by adding cobalt, and claiming that their nwv steel -wag twelve times as powerful as tho English; it, has been conclusively demonstrated in hnl.li countries .that t'h'e addition of cobalt to highspeed tnol st'-ol makes no difference whatever. Tho whole development of the fmmoriy useless plin--phiiri> - iron (res cif Germany is due |r, the Iwie steel proems invented thirty years ago by two Englishmen, Thomas and (lilchrist. In IDO9 (icrinnny produced 1- ini"ioii tons of Heel, cf which 7.500,000 were Thomas and Gilchris.t basic steel; it. would be interesting to know where tho great German, stoel industry would be to-day if it had had to rely on German briiins. An Englishman, Surby, founded tho importaut sejeiico of the microscopic! examination . of tho strnc'ture of metals; and of the 20 constituent* or subconstituente of iron and steel, all

have been discovered in England. Germany has only made ouo discovery in steal"; ICrupps did improve armour-plate, but again they had to come to Jiritam for tho shells to pierce it. Iweryone knows that the German Navy is a inero copy of tho British, except in oiifi par-ticular-the bis Rims "'■« ,nill,( ' fir ' m 8lfi " 1 bloeksand not wire-wound; nnd nvoryonc has read the exploded German l.nnsl_s ot the superiority of German steel and oi tho German big "huh. But some may not know that Krupps stuck to these extra heavy gum, because they failed to make wire-wound ones; they have been (Urged with failing deliberately, for financial i'hav'e taken this one subject in detail, because everyone- know? Krupps, and it i illustrates wry clearly the nature of German pretensions. One might e'lunlly well take medicine and surgery. A lielorian Vcsnliu.i, founded anatomy; an Englishman, Harvey, discovered the circulation of the blood; nn Italian. Morgnsm, founded pathology; an Englishman, Hunter, created modern surgery; »■ Scotchman, Simppon, discovered chloroform ; |wo Frenchmen, Latour and' Pasteur, discovered tho srerm ori-rin of disease, and guided the English: Lister to the flntlseptic method. Germany merely took up and exploited the work of ot-hora. and ha--, not even exploited it very well. ihofe who desire scientific, details will find surgery minutely treated, operation by operation, br Sir Berkeley Mnynihau, in the "British Medical Journal" of August 11. 1917: they can appraise for themselves the relation between German claims and German performance. I omit altogether a thing which bulks large in the world's eyes, the practical work of German chemists, in alliance with industry, in developing such things as,tho French discovery of aniline dyes and so forth, for it has nothing to do with culture; its place would be hi a revuo of the art of making money. The world is apt to regard four things as typncally German ; music, philosophy education, and learning. Germans, however,, do not base their claim to superior culture on music, or philosophy. Germany certainly takes first place in music, as others do in the other arts—ancient Greeks in sculpture, the three great Latin peoples in painting and architecture, Greece and England in poetry; it is merely a caee of to each his own artistic gift, though the amount of foreign blood in many German musicians is certainly a curious phenoraeron. Again, the German idealistic philosophy was <i great achievement in pure thought. But it plays no part now eithnr in modern Germany or (Kant apirt) in the world. If you could disentangle the complicated web that makes up Hie- mind of it modern educated man, you would probably find more threads reaching back oven to the Stoics than to Hegel. Even Kant—nnd who can say what Kant, owed to his Scotch blood?—has no influence on Germans to-day. That entirely materialistic. peopLi e.ro always honouring him with their lips, but, so far as living up to the categorical imperative goes, they are content to leave that to Englishmen, who perhaps have never heard of it. Even the categorical imperative, too, like 'other things, has its history of evolution; and men can do their duty without reading Kant. And if you turn from ethics to thought, the underlying principle of all thought to-day is not German idealism, but evoluliou. Many a philosopher, from Empedocles to Kant himself, has dreamt of a system of evolution; it remained for Britain to make the dream come truo. Of Germ:in education the less said in the year 1018 tho better; the w<l r has burst that particular 'bubble past any mending. Tho tree- is known by the fruit; and the fj-uits are unpleasant. For the true function of eirueation (as distinct from technical training) has been lost sight of. Instead of being directed to bringing out what is in the developing human being, German education has been directed to putting things in; and many of. the .things put in have been not even learning, but propaganda—views of history, for instance, directed to tho particular end of German dominance. There has been little attempt to form ; character on an ethical basis; and there has been a very determined attempt to form beings useful to the rulers of Germany.