firm the Koran, they need not be preserved; if they oppose the Koran, they should not be preserved.” The Greeks called Egyptians, Latins, Hebrews, Hindus, alike barbarians, and disclosed their own barbarism in so doing. The Jews were to Jews the chosen people of God. To the Chinese the Chinese alone are Celestials. To us of the United States our own land alone is God’s country. The possession of these lofty and complex ideals but emphasizes the inability of their possessors to transcend them.
Barbarism may be either naїve or conscious. Incapacity to share in the desires of others may be betrayed either by ignoring them or by aiming to thwart them. We associate the attitude of indifference with the lower animals, and call it brutal; the attitude of frowardness with evil spirits, and call it devilish. The one betokens vacuity of mind, the other perversity of heart.
Beyond both indifference and frowardness, but barbaric like both, stands the spirit of empire; the impulse to impose my will, irrespective of what I will, upon others, irrespective of what they will. This attitude of mind is barbaric, for it reveals my inability to take to heart what others have at heart; but it is more than brutal barbarism, for it takes the wills of others into account; and it is more also than devilish barbarism, for it builds my own will as well as destroys theirs. It is neither dumb, like animal selfishness, nor is it outspoken in the words of Mephistopheles: “I am the spirit that denies;” but in the words of Napoleon: “I was born to bend the wills of other men to mine.” The instinct of empire is a social attitude in its external recognition of others; it is unsocial, in failing to make that recognition an inward fact.
Such an external recognition of another’s purposes is compatible, be it said, with unlimited instruction concerning them. For all intellectual apprehension of taste is knowledge about it; we must feel in order to know taste itself. The external attitude is even fostered by instruction; since knowing so much we may easily fancy we know all. We become pedants of culture, mistaking its cognitive shell for its sensitive kernel. However rich our information concerning the ideals of another, unless in some degree we share them, our culture as far as he is concerned is nil. Looking on without taking part, perceiving without experiencing, we remain essentially barbarian.
Culture, the actual assimilation of the ideals of other people, replaces the spirit of empire by a spirit which may be called that of union. The spirit of empire is a simple intention, namely, the establishment of my will, because mine, in place of other wills, because other than mine. The spirit of union proves to contain a triple intention. The penetration of another mind has three effects upon mine: the awakening of certain desires of the other in me, the missing of
