Jan Smuts

"Smuts, with his uncanny sense of prophecy, foretold the economic consequences of the peace. Looking ahead he visualized a surly and unrepentant Germany, unwilling to pay the price of folly; a bitter and disappointed Austria gasping for economic breath; an aroused and indignant Italy raging with revolt—all the chaos that spells "peace" today. He saw the Treaty as a new declaration of war instead of an antidote for discord. ... Smuts signed the Treaty but, as most people know, he filed a memorandum of protest and explanation. He believed the terms uneconomic and therefore unsound, but it was worth taking a chance on interpretation, a desperate venture perhaps, but anything to stop the blare and bicker of the council table and start the work of reconstruction."

"Smuts neither drinks liquor of any kind nor smokes, and he eats sparingly. He admits that his one dissipation is farming. ... Without carrying his religious convictions on his coat-sleeve, he has nevertheless a fine spiritual strain in his make-up. He is an all-round dependable person, with an adaptability to environment that is little short of amazing."

"... I hope that you are now on good way to recovery and that in years to come you will still be able to offer the world such wisdom and leadership in world affairs as you have given in the past. I need not say how much your encouragement and sympathy in the difficult war years meant to me."

"We had two masters of the spoken word in South Africa, General Smuts and his lieutenant J. H. Hofmeyr, whose life I wrote. Smuts spoke in a high-pitched voice, not the kind of voice that one would expect from a famous soldier, but he too could hold an audience in the hollow of his hand, partly because he was Smuts, partly because he could say nothing trite or shallow, partly because he knew how to speak to ordinary men and women."

"This old military building, originally an officer's mess in the South African War, perfectly illustrates Smuts's indifference to luxury and ease of living. He was above such things. It never occurred to him to build a mansion though he could well have afforded to do so. He wanted a house "where the veld came right up to the front door.""

"I cared more that he had helped the foundation of the League of Nations, promoting freedom throughout the world, than the fact that he had repressed freedom at home."

"Holism is the theory which makes the existence of “wholes” a fundamental feature of the world. It regards natural objects, both animate and inanimate, as wholes and not merely as assemblages of elements or parts. It looks upon nature as consisting of discrete, concrete bodies and things and not as a diffusive homogeneous continuum. And these bodies or things are not entirely resolvable into parts; in one degree or another they are wholes which are more than the sum of their parts, and the mechanical putting together of their parts will not produce them or account for their characters and behaviour. The so-called parts are in fact not real but largely abstract analytical distinctions, and do not properly or adequately express what has gone to the making the thing as a whole."

"Holism is therefore a viewpoint additional and complementary to that of science, whose keywords are continuity and mechanism. The ideal of science is continuity, and its method is based on the analysis of things into more or less constant elements or parts, the sum of whose actions account for the behaviour of these things. Things, thus become mechanisms of their parts; and the interactions of their invariable parts in a homogeneous time and space according to the rules of mechanics are sufficient to account for all their properties. This mechanistic scheme applies even to living bodies, as their material structures determine the functions which constitute life characters. Mind is similarly, though much more doubtfully, based on physical mechanisms and functions. Life and mind are thus considered as derivative and epiphenomenal to matter."