“But you say—”
“No, here I must really corroborate Herr Settembrini,” Hans Castorp mixed in the dispute, which he had been following as they went, regarding attentively each speaker in turn, with his head on one side. “My cousin and I have had the privilege of frequent conversations with him on this and kindred subjects—what it amounted to, of course, was that we listened while he explained and developed his views—so I can vouch for the fact, and my cousin here will confirm me, that Herr Settembrini spoke more than once, with great enthusiasm, of the revolutionary principle, and about rebellion and reform—which is no very peaceful principle, I should think—and of the mighty efforts still to be made before it triumphs everywhere, and the great universal world-republic can come into being. Those were his words, though of course it sounded much more plastic and literary as he said it. But the part I have the most exact memory of, and have retained quite literally, because being a thoroughgoing civilian I found it quite alarming, was that he said the day would come, if not on the wings of doves, then on the pinions of eagles—it was the eagles’ pinions I was startled at—and that Vienna must be brought low before peace and prosperity could ensue. So it is not possible to say that Herr Settembrini condemned war as such. Am I right, Herr Settembrini?”
“More or less,” said the Italian shortly, twirling his cane, with averted head.
“Too bad,” Naphta smiled maliciously. “There you are, convicted of warlike inclinations out of the mouth of your own pupil. ‘Assument pennas ut aqailae’—”
“Voltaire himself approved of a war for civilization, and advised Frederick to fight Turkey.”
“Instead of which, he allied himself with her—he he! And then the world-republic! I refrain from asking what becomes of the principle of revolt when peace and prosperity have once been brought about. For it is plain that from that moment rebellion becomes a crime—”
“You know quite well, as do these young men here, that we are dealing with a progress in human affairs conceived of as endless.”
“But all motion is in circles,” said Hans Castorp. “In space and time, as we learn from the law of periodicity and the conservation of mass. My cousin and I were talking about it lately. How then can progress be conceived of, in closed motion without constant direction? When I lie in the evening and look at the zodiac—that is, the half of it that is visible to us—and think about the wise men of antiquity—”
“You ought not to brood and dream, Engineer,” Settembrini interrupted him. “You must resolve to trust to the instincts of your youth and your blood, urging you in the direction of action. And also your training in natural science is bound to link you to progressive ideas. You see, through the space of countless ages, life developing from infusorium up to man: how can you doubt, then, that man has yet before him endless possibilities of development? And in the sphere of the higher mathematics, if you would rest your case thereon, then follow your cycle from perfection to perfection, and, from the teaching of our eighteenth century, learn that man was originally good, happy, and without sin, that social errors have corrupted and perverted him, and that he can and will once more become good, happy, and sinless, by dint of labour upon his social structure—”
“Herr Settembrini has omitted to add,” broke in Naphta, “that the Rousseauian idyll is a sophisticated transmogrification of the Church’s doctrine of man’s original free and sinless state, his primal nearness and filial relation to God; to which state he must finally return. But the reestablishment of the City of God, after the dissolution of all earthly forms, lies at the meeting-place of the earthly and the heavenly, the material and the spiritual; redemption is transcendental—and as for your capitalistic world-republic, my dear Doctor, it is odd in this connection to hear you talking about instinct. The instinctive is entirely on the side of the national. God Himself has implanted in men’s breasts the instinct which bids them separate into states. War—”
“War,” echoed Settembrini, “war, my dear sir, has been forced before now to serve the cause of progress; as you will grant if you will recall certain events in the history of your favourite epoch—I mean the period of the Crusades. These wars for civilization stimulated economic and commercial relations between peoples, and united Western humanity in the name of an idea.”
“And how tolerant you always are towards an idea! I would the more courteously remind you that the effect of the Crusades and the economic relations they stimulated was anything but favourable to internationalism. On the contrary, they taught the peoples to become conscious of themselves, and thus furthered the development of the national idea.”
“Right; that is to say, right in so far as it was a question of the relation between the peoples and the priesthood; for it was indeed at that time that the mounting consciousness of national honour began to harden itself against hieratical presumption—”
“Though what you call hieratical presumption is nothing else than the conception of human unity in the name of the Spirit!”
“We are familiar with that spirit—and we have no great love for it.”
“Your mania for nationalism obviously shrinks from the world-conquering cosmopolitanism of the Church. Still, I cannot see how you reconcile your nationalism with your horror of war. Because your obsolescent cult of the State must make you a champion of a positive conception of law, and as such—”
“Oh, if we are talking about law—the conceptions of natural law and universal human reason have survived, my dear sir, in international law.”
“Pshaw, your international law is only another Rousseauian transmogrification of the ius divinum, which has nothing in common with either nature or human reason, resting as it does upon revelation—”
“Let
