Philosophers From South Africa

"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."

"At one moment he set out [...] to expound to us his favourite philosophy of holism, based, I understand, on the paradox that the whole is not the sum of, but is greater than, its component parts. It is certainly true enough of the British Empire."

"The groans of the dying and the blanched set faces of the dead ... were enough to drive away all unwholesome feelings of exultation, and to remind one of the grim reality that war is. And even though these were the faces and the sufferings of our enemy, one had ... a deeper sense of the common humanity which knows no racial distinctions."

"History writes the word 'Reconciliation' over all her quarrels."

"The war was fought throughout and ultimately won, not only by the usual military weapons in the narrower sense, but by the whole economic, industrial, and financial systems of the belligerent Powers. Food, shipping, metals and raw materials, credit, transport, industries and factories of all kinds played just as important a part as guns, rifles, aeroplanes, tanks, explosives and gas, warships and submarines."

"The grand success of the British Empire depends not on its having followed any constitutional precedent of the past but on having met a new situation in history with a creation in law; and as a matter of fact the new constitutional system grew empirically and organically out of the practical necessities of the colonial situation."

"At the vital moment there seems to be a failure of leadership, and also a failure of the general human spirit among the peoples. I hope I am wrong, but I have a sense of impending calamity, a fear that the war was only the vanguard of calamity ... I cannot look at that draft treaty without a sense of grief and shame."

"I view it as a thoroughly bad peace – impolitic and impracticable in the case of Germany, absolutely ludicrous in the case of German Austria. Indeed I have not been able to read the comments of the Austrian delegates on our draft terms without deep emotion. I have fought this Peace from the inside with all my power, and have no doubt been able in the end to secure some small openings of hope for the future."

"It was the human spirit itself that failed at Paris. It is no use passing judgments and making scapegoats of this or that individual statesman or group of statesmen. Idealists make a great mistake in not facing the real facts sincerely and resolutely. They believe in the power of the spirit, in the goodness which is at the heart of things, in the triumph which is in store for the great moral ideals of the race. But this faith only too often leads to an optimism which is sadly and fatally at variance with actual results. It is the realist and not the idealist who is generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and that the struggle with darkness is as yet mostly an unequal struggle…. Paris proved this terrible truth once more. It was not Wilson who failed there, but humanity itself. It was not the statesmen that failed, so much as the spirit of the peoples behind them."

"If there was to be equal manhood suffrage the whites would be swamped all over South Africa by the blacks and the whole position for which whites have striven for 200 years or more would be given up."

"The Mountain is not merely something eternally sublime. It has a great historical and spiritual meaning for us ... From it came the Law, from it came the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount. We may truly say that the highest religion is the Religion of the Mountain."

"You cannot defeat Russia. Napoleon learned this to his cost and so will the rest of the world. I do not know whether Bolshevism is advancing or subsiding. There comes a time when the fiercest fires die down. But the best way to revive or rally all Russia to the Soviet Government is to invade the country and to annex large slices of it."

"The free creativeness of mind is possible because, [...] the world ultimately exists, not of material stuff, but of patterns, of organization, the evolution of which involves no absolute creation of an alien world of material from nothing. The purely structural character of reality thus helps to render possible and intelligible the free creativeness of life and mind, ... The energy which is being dissipated by the decay of physical structure is being partly taken up and organized into life structures ... Life and mind thus appear as products of the cosmic decline, ... Our origin is thus accidental, our position is exceptional and our fate is sealed, with the inevitable running down of the solar system. Life and mind, [...] are thus reduced to a very casual and inferior status in the cosmic order [...] – a transient and embarrassed phantom in an alien, if not hostile universe. [...] The human spirit is not a pathetic, wandering phantom of the universe, [...] but meets with spiritual hospitality and response everywhere. Our deepest thoughts and emotions are but responses to stimuli which come to us not from an alien, but from an essentially friendly and kindred universe."

"The international horizon is seriously overcast by what has happened in Berlin. I noted your wise remarks in the House of Commons, and only hope that the panic which seems to have taken hold of France and Italy does not spread to the smaller fry in Europe. There seems to me to be a serious danger that with all the inflammable material about, we may be precipitated into a crisis before we know where we are. Much depends upon the attitude of the British Government. If they will keep out of the whirlpool, and remain in a detached position as the peace-makers in Europe, I think their prestige is still great enough to save the situation. We have been far too complacent hitherto, and much of the evil drift in Europe has been due to this complacency. If we resolutely back peace, and a peaceful settlement in Europe, I think we can succeed. The clumsiness of Germany is unspeakable. But even so, she has received very great provocation in all the delays of the last years. And in any case, the peace of Europe must be our predominant consideration, whatever the mistakes of others."

"The House, which was free to have decided otherwise, takes a stand for the defence of freedom and the destruction of Hitlerism and all that it implies. … The interests of South Africa, however, are our primary concern. … It was for the interests of South Africa that Parliament freely decided to sever our relations with Germany. We pledge our moral support for a common cause. … The Union has no quarrel with the German people as such. Its aim is to assist in the destruction of a system which is seeking to impose on the world a domination of violence and force in international affairs – a system which, as the facts of the past two years have proved, knows no respect for good faith between nations, which does not hesitate to dishonour its plighted word, if convenient to do so, and which threatens the liberty of every state throughout the world."

"We did so, and I think not without some success. Gradually we have seen emerging out of these discordant elements the lineaments of a new South Africa. We have not yet the whole, we have not yet a really unified South Africa, we have not yet attained to the unity which is our ideal. There is still too much of the old division and separation in our national elements, but still the effort has been made, and you see today in South Africa the biggest problem facing us being solved along holistic lines."

"While these things were going on in South Africa – one of the greatest dramas in the recent history of the world – the same conditions were reproducing themselves in the greater world outside. From the Boer War onwards a new spirit seemed to have permeated the nations of Europe. The nineteenth century had been called the century of nationality, but the early years of the twentieth century were years of intense nationalism, morbid nationalism. Nations lost their heads in efforts at self aggrandisement, and this had become so intense and so selfish that a clash became inevitable. Again you see a problem in holism. Where there should have been a united family of nations we saw the elements drifting apart, we saw disunity and disruption, and we saw in the end the greatest crash in the history of the world. When the Great War ended there was the same problem in holism. I think the League of Nations is a genuine effort in reconstructing the broken front of European civilisation, of once more reforming unity out of division and discord."

"Some of you will not come back. Some of you will come back maimed. Those of you who do come back will come back changed men. That is war!"

"Whatever shall we do in future? The nation that does not arm continuously is lost – as France has been lost, as Britain will be lost but for the Grace of God. In this mechanistic age where bravery and improvised organization at the last moment will not help. The only alternative is a League of the Nations or of some nations strong enough to withstand aggression ..."

"Nazism ... destroys the very soul of our civilization ... I have not taken the same grave view of Bolshevism, for it never was clear to me that Bolshevism, in spite of its brutalities and cruelties, really threatened the essentials of our ethical civilization. And after all it was a revolution of a semi-barbarous people against a rotten government and an effete church. Nazi-ism in highly cultured Germany is a very different affair."

"I don't suppose any first-class work in science is done now outside of the war work ... Of course ... science has fallen into discredit. It has brought no solution to our human problems, and has added greatly to our engines of destruction in this war. Not that science is to blame for this misuse, but people judge by results, and by that standard science has a heavy account to liquidate. Science so far has had far too much to do with the things of sense and of matter, and the things of the spirit have been by-passed."

"It is the cleanest, neatest, most sudden and spectacular victory of the war, and in size is quite comparable to the German defeat before Stalingrad."