Chapter VI

WANTED: AN ARISTOTLE

"Dear! Dear! Does it sound like rubbish to you? I suppose it does. You think I am talking of a dreamland, of an unattainable Utopia? Perhaps I am! This dear, jolly old world of dirt, war, bankruptcy, murder and malice, thwarted lives, wasted lives, tormented lives, general ill-health and a social decadence that spreads and deepens toward a universal smash-how can we hope to turn it back from its course? How priggish and impracticable! How impertinent! How preposterous! I seem to hear a distant hooting.

-H. G. Wells.

TWENTY-THREE hundred years ago, a citizen of Greece undertook a very daring enterprise. He tried to bring within the compass of a single analy

sis the whole sweep of human knowledge. He tried to build up a scientific systematization of information as a basis for the control of life. He tried, by taking thought, to reduce the chaos of human affairs to a rational order. His name was Aristotle, and for twenty-three centuries the world has paid tribute to his memory.

And yet Aristotle failed in his attempt. The trouble with him was that he lived too soon. He lived in an age which was just beginning to inquire about human life and its relations. There was no store of ordered knowledge, accumulated during generations, upon which he could draw. The sciences were in their merest infancy; biology scarcely existed; chemistry and physics were limited to speculation; and astronomy was a matter of a few shrewd guesses. Of the past of mankind there was no knowledge at all. Tutankhamen had been buried in his tomb for a thousand years, and nothing was known of him or his civilization. Even as regards contemporary society there was little exact information. The Western Mediterranean and the frontiers of Persia, an area but little larger than the state of Texas, formed the outposts of the world. Beyond those barriers lay the Unknown, holding dark and unfathomed

secrets. With so many pathetic limitations, with so many gaps in the framework of human knowledge, with so many essential factors missing, even the overshadowing genius of Aristotle could make no headway toward an intelligent world order.

The question which we ought to consider is whether or not to-day we have overcome most of those limitations, whether or not we have filled in most of the gaps, whether or not there is presented to us in this generation an opportunity to begin the conscious building of a rational world with the tools of systematized knowledge. Have we reached a point in human development where we can harness the organizing intelligence of mankind to the task of making this planet a fairer home for a better race? Can we so shape the world about us as to wring from it a saner and more balanced life? Must there always be hunger? Must there always be hideous extremes in possession and opportunity? Must ours always be an acquisitive society? Must there always be war? Must this always be a blood-drenched planet in which civilizations appear as intermittent gleams between periodic convulsions of barbarism? Must the human race always drift with the tide, guided not by intelligence but by passion?

Can conscious control be substituted for chance, a definite plan of progress for impulsive trends, sustained collective thinking for fortuitous circumstance?

These are not questions which can be answered in a day. It would be presumption to attempt an answer in a chapter. All we can do is to suggest certain possibilities, certain developments in human affairs, some of them within recent years, which seem to give our generation a unique opportunity to begin the building of what may prove to be a new world order.

I said that Aristotle failed in his attempt because of the huge gaps in human knowledge. He built his world upon unknown factors which made havoc of his plans. And those factors, many of them, remained unknown for centuries after his death. There was, for example, his geographical ignorance. He had no conception, not even a dream, of what the physical world was like. To-day we know the terrestrial globe from the north pole to the south. Our airships and airplanes are ferreting out the last unvisited spots on

the earth's surface. The advance of human knowledge in this direction has been irresistible. Geographically speaking, there is nothing unknown this side of the moon. There are no hordes of barbarians waiting behind shadowy frontiers to upset the plans and calculations of statesmen and philosophers. We know the world and the people in it. We know how many men there are who inhabit the earth, and how many, under the present rate of increase, there are going to be. We know their distribution and their customs. We know how they came to be where they are and the parent stocks from which they developed. We know their relationship to the rest of the animal kingdom. Moreover, we are delving deep into human psychology and the mainsprings of human habit, and already we think we have discovered many of the answers to the question why men act as they do. When we sit down, therefore, to the task of creating a new world order, we are armed with tools of geographical and social knowledge of which Aristotle never dreamed.

But this is by no means all. In the realm of physical science, as we have already noted, the human race has registered an advance which dis