ce," weds incompatibles, the carp and the
hare, "war and humanity, beauty and fashion, internationalism and
nationalism." Method alone should be objective. The conclusions
inevitably retain a subjective element, and it is well that this should
be so. "As long as we refuse to renounce the right of individuality and
the right of striving towards goals of our own choosing, so long must we
judge human deeds from the outlook of our own individuality. War is one
of the deeds of man, and as such we have to pass judgment on it
categorically. Any compromise on this point would obscure the issues;
nay, it would be almost immoral.... War, like everything else, should
have light thrown upon it from every side before we pass judgment on it;
but only to persons of second-rate intelligence can it seem that we
should actually pass our judgment on war from all sides at once, or even
from two sides only."

Such is the objectivity which we have to expect from this book. Not the
soft, flabby, indifferent, contradictory objectivity of the scientific
dilettante, of the arch-eunuch: but a mettlesome objectivity which is
appropriate in this fighting age, the objectivity of one who honestly
attempts to see everything and to know everything; but who, having done
so, endeavours to organise his data in accordance with a hypothesis, an
intuition tinged with passion.

Such a system is worth precisely what the intuition is worth, precisely
what the man who has the intuition is worth. For, in a great thinker,
the hypothesis is the man. His hypothesis is the concentrated essence of
his energy, his observation, his thought, his imaginative powers, and
even of his passions. Nicolai's hypothesis is vigorous, and it takes
risks. The central idea of his book may be summed up as follows: "There
exists a genus humanum, and there is only one such genus. The human
race, humanity as a whole, is but a single organism, and has a common
consciousness."

Whoever speaks of a living organism, speaks of transformation and of
unceasing movement. This perpetuum mobile gives its peculiar colour to
Nicolai's reflections. In general, we who are advocates or opponents of
the war tend to pass judgment on it almost exclusively in abstracto. We
conceive it as static and absolute. It may almost be said that as soon
as a thinker concentrates upon a subject in order to study it, his first
step is to kill it. To a great biologist all is movement, and movement
is the material of