leaders of scientific thought, the dominant tendency of the age, and possibly the affinity of one unlicked-cub civilization for another, sent the American to Germany instead of to England. And for much the same reasons he chose the exuberant and aggressive specialized learning of Germany in preference to the more sedate but harmonious culture of France.

The good effects of German scholarship upon America are too well known for present comment; they are the benefits of the scientific temper and of scientific achievement; and they have doubtless done much to strengthen America as a champion of democracy and a foe to German imperialistic aggression; but the subject of this paper is rather the bad than the good effects of Germany upon America. And the bad effects were the natural outcome of the influence of a partly civilized people suddenly acquiring scientific efficiency and leadership without the basis of a permeative traditional culture and the humanistic perspective that could adjust natural science to a well-ordered and harmonious system. In fine, Germany is and has been suffering from precocity in civilization. She has tried to cram within a much foreshortened period a ration that France has heen masticating, digesting, and absorbing for centuries. Germany has not had time or all the conditions for assimilating civilization. Her people still exhibit the characteristics of our theoretical barbarian. We have well-authenticated evidence of their irritable self-esteem, sentimentality, and violence, and of their capacity for self-deception. They are characteristically deficient in the power of making sane generalizations; in a word, they lack judgment, a common trait of the precocious.

The effect of this unbalanced temper upon learning and scholarship has shown itself in the emphasis on the material over the ideal, on the practical over the theoretical, on the detailed fact over the general principle. Specialism is pushed so far that hypotheses and laws are lost to view in the welter of details and laboratory experiments. All subjects are approached by the scientific method, even where that method is least applicable. Literature is subordinated to philology. Analysis of character and ideas, the tracing of larger relations, is ignored; and poetry is often regarded merely as so much material for grammatical investigations. Source-studies and problems of authorship are undertaken of literature that is not read by the public or studied in the classroom. Historical investigations end in the discov

ery of the isolated fact, without suggesting any principle or correlation or applicability to the present or future. As one observer has phrased it, "The assimilation of fact, however important, sinks into insignificance beside the discovery of fact, however trivial." The greatest aggregation of American scholars, the Modern Language Association of America, assembles annually either to tell or to hear some new thing; but the specialism of the articles that are subsequently published is so narrow that but few, one is informed, are read even by the members, who support the publications. Indeed, under this extreme specialization and quest of the forgotten or the novel fact, American scholarship has entered upon a period of diminishing return. Intellectual coöperation, at least in the field of cultural studies, is well-nigh out of the question: so that our modern university has been aptly defined as "an aggregation of infinitely repellent particles." In fine, learning, the prime function of which, in our view, is to civilize, has degenerated into pedantry; it is a sort of conventual diversion or emulation in some secluded cloister of the intellect; and in many of the works of its most prominent exemplars has scarcely more vital relation to life and society than have billiards and chess. In view of these facts, one would not, I believe, make an unwarranted inference if he traced much of this confusion of intellectual values in America to the one-sided and inharmonious scholarship and civilization of Germany.

That this inference is justifiable may be argued, also, from recent events in world politics. The emphasis placed by the Germans on detailed facts to the exclusion of generalizations and the cultivation of judgment, or perhaps their devotion to philological science to the exclusion of imaginative literature has contributed toward their inability to know either themselves or others. They have exhibited an egotism that borders on egomania. They have shown such an incapacity for understanding other peoples that they have recently suffered a number of decisive diplomatic defeats. This may be due singly or collectively to immaturity of judgment, excess of egocentric sentiment, or a lack of the imaginative sympathy that is requisite for psychological insight and just estimate of others. At any rate, it is probably due to some phase of immaturity of German civilization, to their subordination of humanism and culture to a worship of the materialized fact.

Of recent years, however, the American academic world has been gradually passing out of the dispensation of German Kultur. The traditions of British culture, which belonged to America almost as much as to England, and the intellectual intercourse between Great Britain and America, especially such as exists between the generally cultivated public of the two countries, have tended to loosen the intellectual bonds between Germany and America. The same process has gone on somewhat tentatively and cautiously in our colleges and universities, where German scholarship had intrenched itself firmly on the commanding heights of academic authority. But the war has at last opened the eyes of our university administrators and senior professors to the crudeness and inharmoniousness of the spirit of the present German civilization. Our Germanized universities are entering upon a transition, and there are signs of dissatisfaction within our Germanized graduate schools. At least, the process is under way, and apparently the direction of progress is along the line of its further growth. Already it has been proposed that we discontinue our system of exchange professorships with Germany and establish closer academic relations with Britain and France. To anyone who has followed the conduct of the British people in the war, who is in touch with recent British politics and literature, and who has noted the lucid and impersonal pronouncements of their publicists and writers upon contemporary world politics, it is evident that the civilizing process has of late years been unusually rapid in England. A nation that has voluntarily abandoned an achieved imperialism, that has listened with æsthetic approval, yet undisturbed moral equilibrium, to the spontaneous overflowings of the junker spirit of Kipling, and that has won a reputation all over the world for justice and fair dealing, is a more worthy subject of emulation than the Germany of yesterday or to-day. France, who has always been in the van of civilization, may now assume her rightful place as a guide toward the more organic world society of the future. And possibly, after the war, if America wishes to show her magnanimity and the liberality of her resources, she might make an academic investment of world-wide import by establishing scholarships for teachable Teutonic youths at the universities of France.

The University of Texas.

HARVEY WHITEFIELD PECK.

dead. . . . . Society exists for the sake of the Superhuman that is to be. Let war go on until the real aristocracy rules. The Will to Power is the only real force in the Universe."

We hear such accents as these, and unbidden rise to our lips the words, "Poor, mad Nietzsche!" But what do we say when we hear expressions like the following: "Whoso hateth not his father and mother cannot be my disciple. Let the dead bury their own dead. . . . . Sinners and harlots shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the righteous. . . Violent men take the Kingdom of Heaven by force. . . . . The stronger man bindeth the strong man and spoileth his goods. . . . . Many are called, but few chosen. Whatsoever sins ye re

mit, they are remitted. . . . . Whatsoever ye bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. . . . . Ye shall sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. . . . . There be some standing here that shall not taste of death until the Kingdom of God shall come with power. Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect. I came to cast fire upon earth, and

.

I would that it were already kindled. . . . . I came to bring not peace, but a sword. . .. Sell your cloak and buy a

sword. .

If my kingdom were of this world, then would

*The Will to Freedom; or, The Gospel of Nietzsche and the Gospel of Christ; being the Bross Lectures delivered in Lake Forest College, Illinois. By John Neville Figgis, D.D., Litt.D., of the Community of the Resurrection, Honorary Fellow of S. Catherine's College, Cambridge. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1917. Pp. xiii+320. $1.25 net.

Nietzsche the Thinker: a Study. By William Mackintire Salter, author of First Steps in Philosophy, and Anarchy or Government? An inquiry in Fundamental Politics. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1917. $3.50 net.

find the faith on the earth? ... Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers, how can ye escape the judgment of hell!"

We judge the words of Jesus in their context and in connection with His character: even so, after nineteen centuries of interpretation we cannot surely claim to understand His cryptic utterances, His gnomic sayings, His puzzling parables, His baffling allegories, His violent paradoxes. Now Jesus was well and strong, and untold multitudes have had the will to believe in Him. Nietzsche was sick and weak, and lived and died in loneliness. Jesus does not need our tolerant charity: Nietzsche receives scorn and contempt; or worse still, the praise of those he would have despised. Dare we compare these two figures, the Son of Man and a son of man that died an imbecile? The answer comes quickly: "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me." Nietzsche would have scorned the thought of being one of the least. Yet it was Nietzsche who discovered the so-called Superman, the Son of Man to be, and it was the same Nietzsche who in a private letter to his sister likened himself to a child lost in a howling wilderness and needing a master to lead him out. He was ready to serve the Übermensch in every way possible. His chief mistake was that of the Jews: he did not know the Messiah when he saw Him. Rather he saw only a distorted image of Him.

Dr. Figgis is right in his contention that Nietzsche was criticising a false Christianity: the latter reacted against the smug pietism of his family, the pessimism of Schopenhauer and the pacifism of Tolstoy, and mistook these stunted forms of Christianity for the real Christian faith. Although we can hardly accuse Dr. Figgis of a depth of insight that he would probably disclaim, his lectures to the Lake Forest students seem very suitable to his purpose, cordially appreciative of Nietzsche, and as free from ecclesiastical pedantry as could be expected. We cannot agree with him, in spite of his notorious informant, General "They Say," that Nietzsche had anything to do with bringing on the war. In this matter Mr. Salter exhibits the more independent judgment, as we shall show further on. That an ecclesiastic of the Church of England could show generous appreciation of