Post-Prandial Philosophy

Post-Prandial Philosophy, by Grant Allen

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Title: Post-Prandial Philosophy
Author: Grant Allen
Release Date: July 8, 2006 [EBook #18788]
Language: English
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POST-PRANDIAL PHILOSOPHY
By GRANT ALLEN
AUTHOR OF "THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE," ETC.
LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS 1894

PREFACE
These Essays appeared originally in The Westminster Gazette, and have only been so far modified here as is necessary for purposes of volume publication. They aim at being suggestive rather than exhaustive: I shall be satisfied if I have provoked thought without following out each train to a logical conclusion. Most of the Essays are just what they pretend to be--crystallisations into writing of ideas suggested in familiar conversation.
G. A.
Hind Head, March 1894.

CONTENTS

PAGE
I. THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AMONG LANGUAGES 1
II. IN THE MATTER OF ARISTOCRACY 9
III. SCIENCE IN EDUCATION 18
IV. THE THEORY OF SCAPEGOATS 27
V. AMERICAN DUCHESSES 35
VI. IS ENGLAND PLAYED OUT? 44
VII. THE GAME AND THE RULES 53
VIII. THE R?LE OF PROPHET 61
IX. THE ROMANCE OF THE CLASH OF RACES 70
X. THE MONOPOLIST INSTINCTS 79
XI. "MERE AMATEURS" 87
XII. A SQUALID VILLAGE 95
XIII. CONCERNING ZEITGEIST 104
XIV. THE DECLINE OF MARRIAGE 112
XV. EYE versus EAR 122
XVI. THE POLITICAL PUPA 130
XVII. ON THE CASINO TERRACE 138
XVIII. THE CELTIC FRINGE 147
XIX. IMAGINATION AND RADICALS 156
XX. ABOUT ABROAD 165
XXI. WHY ENGLAND IS BEAUTIFUL 173
XXII. ANENT ART PRODUCTION 182
XXIII. A GLIMPSE INTO UTOPIA 190
XXIV. OF SECOND CHAMBERS 199
XXV. A POINT OF CRITICISM 207

POST-PRANDIAL PHILOSOPHY

I.
THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AMONG LANGUAGES.
A distinguished Positivist friend of mine, who is in most matters a practical man of the world, astonished me greatly the other day at Venice, by the grave remark that Italian was destined to be the language of the future. I found on inquiry he had inherited the notion direct from Auguste Comte, who justified it on the purely sentimental and unpractical ground that the tongue of Dante had never yet been associated with any great national defeat or disgrace. The idea surprised me not a little; because it displays such a profound misconception of what language is, and why people use it. The speech of the world will not be decided on mere grounds of sentiment: the tongue that survives will not survive because it is so admirably adapted for the manufacture of rhymes or epigrams. Stern need compels. Frenchmen and Germans, in congress assembled, and looking about them for a means of intercommunication, might indeed agree to accept Italian then and there as an international compromise. But congresses don't make or unmake the habits of everyday life; and the growth or spread of a language is a thing as much beyond our deliberate human control as the rise or fall of the barometer.
My friend's remark, however, set me thinking and watching what are really the languages now gaining and spreading over the civilised world; it set me speculating what will be the outcome of this gain and spread in another half century. And the results are these: Vastly the most growing and absorbing of all languages at the present moment is the English, which is almost everywhere swallowing up the overflow of German, Scandinavian, Dutch, and Russian. Next to it, probably, in point of vitality, comes Spanish, which is swallowing up the overflow of French, Italian, and the other Latin races. Third, perhaps, ranks Russian, destined to become in time the spoken tongue of a vast tract in Northern and Central Asia. Among non-European languages, three seem to be gaining fast: Chinese, Malay, Arabic. Of the doomed tongues, on the other hand, the most hopeless is French, which is losing all round; while Italian, German, and Dutch are either quite at a standstill or slightly retrograding. The world is now round. By the middle of the twentieth century, in all probability, English will be its dominant speech; and the English-speaking peoples, a heterogeneous conglomerate of all nationalities, will control between them the destinies of mankind. Spanish will be the language of half the populous southern hemisphere. Russian will spread over a moiety of Asia. Chinese, Malay, Arabic, will divide among themselves the less civilised parts of Africa and the East. But French, German, and Italian will be insignificant and dwindling European dialects, as numerically unimportant as Flemish or Danish in our own day.
And why? Not because Shakespeare wrote in English, but because the English language has already got a firm hold of all those portions of the earth's surface which are most absorbing the overflow of European populations. Germans