Show description

There are men who express the age and the milieu in which they were educated, but who, by the intensity of their imagination, the sweep of their knowledge, and their astounding versatility, rise high above their era and their neighbors, so that they inhabit both time and eternity at once. When we analyze their minds we can identify nearly all the component elements, tracing this to family and that to school and the other to social climate, and yet the compound is far more than the sum of all these elements: richer, intenser, different in quality as a diamond is different from carbon.

There are a few international digests of learning, and a few international periodicals like Erasmus (published in Switzerland and edited by a board of savants from two continents) ; but not enough. There is a fine opening here for one of the wealthy foundations to establish a series of quarterly reviews covering all the most important fields of learning, drawing contributions from all over the world, and written in the three or four principal culture-languages; or perhaps to grant UNESCO sufficient capital to start such reviews, in the expectation that library subscriptions would be sufficient to support them thenceforward.

These two changes show that the intention of the Communist government is to sever the links between these people and their Islamic past and to cut them off from their 28 THE POWERS OF KNOWLEDGE racial kinsmen in Turkey, transforming them into dependents of Moscow. The Tsars left them alone. The Communists are trying to make them not only Communists but M uscovite Russians. If they succeed, they will have done so through a compulsory process of teaching and learning. In fact, the history of much of the twentieth century, with its struggles against communism and fascism and national socialism and so on, will be best written as the record of a war for the command of men's minds.