This is indeed inevitable.  Education, as we have seen, can only be effective when it is the vehicle for strong beliefs, and is informed by the conscious expression of an attitude towards the world.  Now, in modern days, the consciousness of a common European spirit has, in fact, almost disappeared.  In its place we find the intense consciousness of the nation.  Even religion has become national, and God has once again become a tribal deity.  The new consciousness of the common interests of what is called Labour have no recognition in the approved teaching.  If the work of the school was not to be merely the dead instruction in useless knowledge, if the work was to be directed towards informing the minds of the pupils with ideals and beliefs, it was only in the idealization of the national thought that this could be attained.

Is the older union of thought to be permanently lost?  If not, you must find it again in some higher synthesis.  There are many who would do so in the pursuit of mathematics and the natural sciences; in them, at least, no divisions of country can be found.  The student in his chemical laboratory, the doctor in his hospital, the mathematician in his study, finds his colleagues in every country in the civilized world, and it matters not to him whether the next step in penetrating the secrets of nature have been made in Vienna, or in Paris, or Amsterdam, or Bologna.

There are many who believe that on this basis will be established the Union of Civilization.  If we look, however, more critically, we may find reason to doubt whether this optimistic view is justified.  I do not share this hope and this belief, I do not look forward to a spiritual and intellectual unity of the nations established on the basis of scientific education.  It is, indeed, impossible to over-estimate not only the practical but also the intellectual influence of what we may call the scientific spirit.  It is indeed true that those who are accustomed to the careful and systematic investigation of causes, who have been trained from their earliest years to recognize in the pomp and pageantry of the external world—­and even to some extent in the working of the human mind and the structure of human society—­the orderly sequence of natural law, will have a type and character of mind essentially different from those who have not passed through this discipline.  The civilization (I scarcely dare to use the word culture) of those nations who have this in common will have a unity of their own, and will differ fundamentally from their own past and from that of other races.

On the other hand there are two considerations that I should like to put before you, as leading to a less important position, the one arising from the practical nature of science, the other connected with its essential intellectual origin.