The Intellectualist

NOTES AND NEWS

It is not often that one finds on the editorial page of the daily newspaper a thoroly well-drawn portrait of an obnoxious type of human being, but the following paragraphs which appeared on the editorial page of the issue of the New York Tribune for March 31 last are a gem:

Intellectualism in time of peace is an attitude of fine and pleasing texture, an art for the few, a luxury for the non-acquisitive, a substitute for faith, a remote and snobbish futility. Intellectualism in time of war is a liability.

In all countries, even Germany, it is morally and emotionally bankrupt. It tends also to be alien and Bolshevist. In Germany it is often suspected of being pro-Ally. In England, France and the United States it is much suspected of being pro-German. Everywhere it is anti-capitalistic and anemically revolutionary. It has nothing in common with its beloved masses except an incurable dissatisfaction with everything in the world that is. The sources of that emotion, however, are not in both cases the

same.

The children of unrestraint are openly envious. They want more of life's tangible goods, including play time; and they shall have more, as fast as they can assimilate it. This no power on earth can prevent.

But the intellectualist is contemptuous of life's goods, or pretends to be. He demands them not for himself but for these others, in order that the sum of human happiness may be increased. Yet he is not interested in happiness. He would be almost as scornful of happiness as of wealth.

It is probable that the dissatisfaction of the intellectualist with the state of the world has its root in a sense of his own emptiness, and that his solicitude for the masses is owing more to his contempt for the banalities of material success than to any deep feeling of altruism.

You never know for sure, any more than you know where the intellectualist really stands on the irrational calamity of war, or the commonplace virtue of patriotism.

We doubt if he is ever sure of himself.

His mind with increasing intensity vibrates between the two poles of a thought until at length it is by any working test static. We are moved to these reflections by reading in The New Republic an article entitled Seeing the War Through. We read it first from the end to the beginning, which is the way to read an intellectual article, and then from beginning to end, and we can not believe The New Republic knows what kind of war it wants. A few weeks ago it was for obtaining a victory by diplomacy. Since then there has been the peace of diplomacy at BrestLitovsk, and now on the West front there is only a taut thin line of bodies between "the intolerable German thing" and the precious, if imperfect, democracy we are fighting for.

We supposed from the caption that The New Republic had come to the idea of a military victory as something now inevitable. But we read that

The Americans who are insisting on the militarizing of their country now by the subordination of political to military victory and by the adoption of the European scale of armament are the most flagrant and dangerous quitters. It is they who under the pretence of fighting to the bitter end are abandoning the belief in the political objects and the hope for beneficent political results which can alone make prolonged fighting worth while.

Still it is for seeing the war thru, by force if need be, for in another place it says that to see it thru "means, of course, primarily a volume and a rate of military preparation which, when it comes to a head, will make German success hopeless."

Intellectualism, impotent and static.

In these troubled times when so many careers full of promise are being cut short by the war, we are more than ever dependent upon those men of maturer years Émile Durkheim whom we regard as tried and trusted leaders. It was, therefore, with special regret that students of all nations heard of the recent death of Émile Durkheim, pro

fessor of Sociology at the Sorbonne, and a philosopher of marked distinction.

Durkheim combined in a rare degree the qualities of a scholar and of a teacher. He never allowed his researches to interfere with his teaching, and he found time and strength both to make important and original contributions to sociology and to social philosophy, and to instruct and inspire many eager students who, under the influence of his personality, became veritable disciples. He was fundamentally an idealist, and the strength of his belief restored faith to many doubting hearts.

His entire philosophy is based upon the hypothesis that man has a dual personality, that his inner life is a perpetual conflict between his will and his desires, between the individualistic and the social instinct. Society, Durkheim believed, is a collective conscience, and he traced in detail the development of this conscience, its psychology, and the laws by which it is governed.

The development of his philosophy may be followed in his four principal books: La Division du travail social, La Méthode en sociologie, Le Suicide, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. In his early work we find traces of Spencerism, but in later life he drifted farther and farther away from this influence. He has often been described as a worthy successor of Comte, but he was superior to his master in the extent of his information and in his good sense.

The death in action of his son, who had left his studies at the outbreak of the war in order to become an aviator, stimulated Durkheim to renewed vigor in the defense of his country's cause. As a writer, as an editor, and as the initiator of patriotic movements, he was untiring in his work for France.

M. Durkheim was less than sixty years of age, and he was still at the height of his intellectual power. His death deprives the world not only of a great scholar, but of a splendid and an inspiring personality.

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