Tuesday was the centenary of the birth of Ernest Renan.
Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, writing of him in the Times, had the advantage of a personal acquaintance with Renan, which to those of us who know him only through his books made the article particularly interest- ing. Even without personal acquaintance, however, Renan does not seem at all remote from us. Of all the writers of the nineteenth century, he was probably the most modern in his outlook. Very few of the ideas which we are accustomed to associate with his time fmd a place in his system. His logic taught him sixty years ago, at the time when he wrote L'Avenir de la Science, what four years of war and another four years of wrangling have failed to teach us. His ideal was " an gouvernement scientifique, of des hommes competents et speciauts traite- raient les questions gouvernementales cotnmes lee questions scientifiques, et en chercheraient rationellement la. solution." He would, for instance, have had scientists instead of moralists, and economists instead of patriots at Versailles in 1919. Nothing .is more humiliating than to be com- pelled to learn lessons from our grandfathers on their hundredth birthdays. But the sooner they are learnt the better. Otherwise they have to be learnt on the two-hundredth birthdays, which is even more humiliating.
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