THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

No. 443.-APRIL, 1915.

Art. 1.-GERMANKULTUR.'

I.-AS ILLUSTRATED BY GERMAN SCIENCE.

THE present war has directed the attention of thinking men to the mental and moral outlook of the German nation. What kind of men must they be, who have deliberately involved practically the whole of Europe in a terrible strife? What are their ideals? What are their objects?

So far as one can learn, they think that they have a mission to disseminate what they term 'Kultur' among the human race by force of arms. This leads to the enquiry-what is Kultur'? Now, the word 'Kultur' has the same origin as our culture,' yet the conceptions conveyed by these two words must obviously be very different. There is a German equivalent, too, for 'culture'; it is approximately Bildung': formation of character, and of a correct taste, by education. It will be attempted, in the following pages, to define German Kultur,' as illustrated by German scientific achievements in the realm of pure and applied science.

Everyone is agreed that it is desirable that the human race should progress-that is, everyone of the western nations, for the natives of India have not this ideal; that people is, as a whole, content to live as of old. There are two absolutely different views as to how progress may best be made. One is individualism; it postulates that, left to himself, man will gain by the struggle for existence; that his best qualities will be strengthened by personal effort. The other view is that progress is more rapidly and satisfactorily made by Vol. 223.-No. 443.

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collectivism; that by combining together, men can achieve more than by separate effort. One form of collectivism is Socialism. The Socialist sees that effort is not always equally rewarded-that some possess much, while others are poor; and he looks forward to a day when equality of effort will always gain equality of wealth, when there shall be universal brotherhood, and strife will cease. Most of us believe that he seeks an unattainable Utopia; and we doubt whether this Utopia can be reached without leaders so unselfish that they will subdue all claim to special reward for their special powers. Such leaders will be hard to find.

The other form of collectivism is Kultur.' The leaders of the German nation, having learned that much can be done by organisation, have made it a fetish. Theirs is a kind of socialism, inculcated from above by self-elected rulers. They have spent more than a century in gaining experience in organising their army and their education; they have more recently organised their trade; and they now believe that the world is to be reformed only by having this system thrust upon it, by German methods, and by German bayonets.

The general opinion as to the origin of this war held in Germany, and by nearly all Germans, is that it is due to envy, and to jealousy of their superior powers. That the nation as a whole is and has long been disliked, cannot be denied; but no other nation has wished to adopt their system. It has tended towards what is generally held to be dishonesty, immorality, and suppression of individual initiative. And in no branch of affairs is this so clearly illustrated as by their doings in pure and in applied science, during the last half-century, since the prepossession of their infallibility began to gain credence among themselves. For the Germans of fifty years ago were a kindly, plodding, somewhat dull race, among whom there were a few very remarkable men, as indeed there were also remarkable men in every other European country. The race has now lost its kindly feelings; it still remains plodding, dull, and bourgeois.

This national catastrophe (for it is a catastrophe when a nation suddenly throws civilisation to the winds, and engages in an immoral attack upon peaceful neighbours) has excited our horror, and has amazed us. The

writer spent some years of his early life as a student in a South German university; he looks back with the utmost pleasure on his student days. He made many friends, most, alas, now gone; and with those who remain he has kept up friendly intimacy. He has visited Germany frequently, and has always been welcomed with the kindliest hospitality. He has had several interviews with the Emperor, who always evinced cordiality, and interest in scientific subjects, on which he was remarkably well informed for a layman. The Emperor gave the impression of great vitality and extraordinary alertness. The view which the writer held for many years was that, whatever his successor might do, the Kaiser, at least, would do his best to keep peace. This was probably the almost universal opinion of Englishmen who knew Germany well. But we must confess ourselves mistaken. We knew of the cry for Kultur'; we knew of the admirable organisation which had been introduced into various spheres of human endeavour; and we thought it worthy of imitation. But we did not realise that it had become a fetish; that Germans believed that by organisation the world would be reformed; and that it was the mission of Germans to compel the world to accept this doctrine as necessary for civilisation.

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It may be interesting to enquire what share Germans. have had in scientific discovery and invention; and there is a work, termed 400 Jahre Pionier-Arbeit in den exacten Wissenschaften' ('400 years of pioneer work in the exact sciences') by L. Darmstaedter and R. du Bois-Reymond, one a Jew, the other of French extraction, from which the following data are taken. The book was published in 1904.

Beginning with the 16th century, 39 German names are mentioned between the years 1500 and 1600, out of a total of 176, or 22 per cent. Among these, are to be found the first operator who employed the Cæsarian operation, Jacob Nufer; Albrecht Dürer; Paracelsus; Michael Stifel, who gave to algebra its modern notation; Agricola, the great metallurgist; and Simon Stevinus, who introduced decimal fractions. These were all Germans. Among non-Germans, we are struck by the names of Amerigo Vespucci, Columbus, Leonardo da Vinci, Fernando Cortez, Bernard Palissy, Copernicus,

Tycho Brahe, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Davis (of Davis' Straits), Galilei and Gilbert (who wrote the first treatise on the magnet), to mention only those of world-wide fame.

Between the years 1600 and 1700, out of a total number of 312 entries, 48 are German, or 15 per cent.; among the names mentioned are those of Bacon, Briggs and Napier (of logarithm fame); Dudley, who introduced coal for iron-smelting; Harvey, famous for his discovery of the circulation of the blood; Descartes and Pascal; Torricelli, Hooke and Huygens; Boyle, the 'father of modern chemistry'; Malpighi, who confirmed Harvey's discovery; Thomas Willis and John Mayow, the precursors of Lavoisier; Papin of digestor' fame; Halley, the astronomer; and Savoy, the precursor of Watt. distinguished Teutons on this list are Kepler, Glauber, Kunckel, Leibnitz and Bernoulli.

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The

During the next century, the entries are 517, of which 72, or 14 per cent., refer to German discoveries. We note the names of Newton, Newcomen, Boerhaave, Flamsteed, Maclaurin, Réaumur, Stephen Hales, Swedenborg, Linnæus; Darby, who first introduced coke in iron-smelting; Roebuck, the first to use lead chambers in the manufacture of oil of vitriol; Benjamin Franklin, Smeaton and Watt, the engineers; Black, Cavendish, Lavoisier, the chemists; Arkwright of the spinning-jenny; Coulomb, the physicist ; Buffon, the naturalist; the anatomist Hunter; Priestley and Schele, the discoverers of oxygen; Count Rumford; the Montgolfiers of balloon fame; Josiah Wedgwood; de Saussure, the geologist; Hauy, the crystallographer; Berthollet and Laplace; Hutton, the founder of geological science; Lagrange and Euler, the mathematicians; Galvani and Volta, the early pioneers of electricity; Jenner, the inventor of vaccination; Charles Tennant, the manufacturer of bleaching-powder, besides others omitted for economy of space. The German entries of notables are Böttger, the manufacturer of Meissen porcelain; Immanuel Kant, the philosopher; Niebuhr, the traveller; Peter Woulfe, the first to make picric acid; Wenzel and Richter, who discovered chemical equivalence; Herschel, the astronomer, the discoverer of Uranus; Werner, the geologist; Gauss, the mathematician; and Alexander von Humboldt.

The period from 1800 to 1850 comprises 901 entries; of these Germans and Austrians form 234, or nearly 26 per cent. We note Thomas Young, the physicist ; Robert Fulton, the engineer; Proust, Humphry Davy, Gay-Lussac, and Dulong and Petit, Wollaston, Henry and Dalton, illustrious chemists; Arago and Biot, the French physicists; Berzelius and Oersted, the Swedish savants; Lamarck, the precursor of Darwin; Avogadro and Ampère, Italian and French savants; Thenard, the French physicist, and Cuvier, the naturalist; David Brewster and Decandolle; George Stephenson; Prout, the chemist, and William Smith, the geologist; Chevreul, the discoverer of the nature of fatty bodies; Cauchy, the mathematician, and Fresnel, the discoverer in optics; Babbage, of the calculating machine; Niepce and Daguerre, the pioneers of photography; and Fourier, whose name is known in connexion with the propagation of heat; Michael Faraday; Macintosh, the inventor of waterproof materials; Sadi Carnot, famous for Carnot's cycle'; Brown, the botanist; Becquerel, the physicist, and Balard, the discoverer of bromine; Telford, the engineer; Graham and Dumas, the chemists; Wheatstone, the electrician, and Airey, the astronomer; Charles Darwin and Louis Agassiz; Schönbein, the Swiss inventor of high explosives; Regnault, the chemist; Armstrong and Whitworth, the engineers; Joule, the discoverer of the equivalence of heat and work, and Bain, the American inventor of telegraphy. Among Germans, we meet with Hahn, the founder of homoeopathy; Fraunhofer, the investigator of the solar spectrum; Mitcherlich, Liebig and Wöhler, the chemists; von Baër, the anatomist; von Mohl, the botanist; Weber, the colleague of Gauss and Bessel, mathematician; Müller, the comparative anatomist; von Buch and Bischoff, the geologists; Doppler, the discoverer of a valuable astronomical principle; Siemens, the electrician; and Kirchhof, the inventor of the spectroscope in its modern form.

It would be invidious to name the discoverers and inventors between 1850 and 1900; suffice it to say that the records comprise 1021 entries, of which 477, or 46 per cent., can be ascribed to Teutonic sources.* But here

* It should be remembered, in connexion with the large percentages of German names in this list, that it was compiled by two German savants.