ABSTRACT
In order that the historian may write, some principle of selection is obviously necessary. The nervous system itself seeks to discover what facts it may safely leave to subconscious registration and discard from consciousness. The attempt to note every fact would be a monstrous nightmare were it not a ludicrous impossibility. As country after country contributes its record (and perhaps an Oriental Renaissance equal in significance to the Classical one of the Fifteenth Century, for which China will be the new Byzantium, is yet to come), it may indeed be hoped that the ‘mind of the group’ is edified by the result, but the mind of the individual is certainly incompetent to comprehend it. The co-ordination and social organization of science, the linking up of the ganglia of learning, is a most pressing need; and it would seem as if, in some very real way, individual knowledge must give place to a systematized and group knowledge with some central sensorium. Only thus can the unity and efficient employment of knowledge be reconciled with human finitude. The days of the polymath have gone. The days of the encyclopaedia, of international institutes of intellectual co-operation, of international statistics, of international translation bureaux, of thinking recognized as a ‘social act,’ are coming. But, whereas in the physical sciences the data have long been arranged with a view to the yielding of practical and theoretical results, into the chaos of political history no such cosmic spirit has as yet been breathed.
