The Psychology of Nations A Contribution to the Philosophy of History by G.E. Partridge

Author:G.E. Partridge [Partridge, G.E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2007-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

I. The Essential World Idea

Our present situation has plainly made it necessary for us to understand the world in which we live far better than we have in the past, and to be willing to make more dispassionate judgments about it. For better or for worse we have entered upon a new stage of history, in which heavy responsibilities fall upon all peoples, and upon none more than upon ourselves. Enlightenment beyond all our present understanding is a necessity. We have been peculiarly isolated and separated from the world's affairs; now we are peculiarly involved. We have, however, one great and unusual advantage. In our case it is ignorance rather than prejudice that we must overcome in ourselves. The world feels this and recognizes the unusual place this gives us. We have no thousand years of continuous strife to distort our historical perspective. We out to be able to be just interpreters of the history of the world. Our universities ought to be the greatest centers of historical learning, and as a people we should feel ourselves called upon above all other people to know the world.

As a nation we pass out of a local into a broader political field. We become citizens of a world, but this world is no mere habitation of individuals who are to be affiliated with one another. It is a world of national wills. Internationalism is first of all a recognition of the legitimate desires of nations. But such a recognition of the legitimate desires of nations cannot be effected merely by spreading abroad good will. A widespread education in the meaning of history must first be made the foundation of international justice in the minds of the people. Current history and future events seen in the light of all history, of history as the science and story of all human experience, become our chief intellectual interest to-day. The war has taught us how little the people in the world know bout the world as a whole. All history thus far has been local history. Everywhere there tends to be the prejudice in some degree that comes from the private need of using history for political ends. Unless we can now put history, real history, at the head of our sciences, the war will have failed of a great result, whatever in particular, in a political way, it may have accomplished.

With such an understanding of what is to be meant by history we say, if that seems an adequate way of expressing it, that the teaching of history becomes one of the fundamental problems of the educational work of the day. It might be better to say that living in the historical spirit is demanded as a way of salvation of the world. However, adding geography and economics to history we have a content that must somehow be taught in the schools. History, as the most concrete science of the actual world in which we live, now seems to have become a new center for the curriculum.

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