The phrase, “science and freedom,” as it is used nowadays, is aimed at an enemy position.* The enemy not only denies science's freedom in theory, but also jeopardizes, confines, destroys it in practice.

If this enemy position is to be approached in an attempt at an intellectual confrontation, rather than assailed with a mere “demonstration” (the remarkable change of meaning that this word has undergone is a matter closely related to the theme of this paper) it is necessary for the enemy position to be understood, not just in its present form, but also in its basic foundations. Only then can a clear notion be reached of what sort of an argument is needed by way of an answer, and how strong it must be, if it is to meet the enemy position squarely, at the most telling point.

The age of nationalism offers us many examples which prove that affinities in descent or language have no influence on the formation of modern nations or on their political ideas. Switzerland is only one of several Germanic lands which developed a nationalism resembling much more closely that of England rather than that of Germany. The case of the Low Countries is similar. Both were until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries politically and historically a part of the German Empire. Both grew into separate nations in border regions where Germanic and Latin civilizations have met since the beginning of European history. Both gained their national character by a process of intellectual and political emancipation from Germany. The Dutch historian, Jan Huizinga, affirmed in Berlin at the beginning of 1933 in a lecture on the Netherlands as mediator between Western and Central Europe that “Our whole history as a people and a state is, with a few exceptions, Western European history. Our relations with the West have conditioned our independence as a people and as a state. Be it as friends, be it as enemies, France and England were our teachers. The Netherlands have significance and a meaningful place only as a territory oriented toward the West.”

The tide of events is increasingly pushing away those stereotypes which depict Africa as a continent of passive, ignorant men and of primitive socio-political organization. “Host to a variety of social, economic, and intellectual stimuli, Africa finds its destiny directed into new and uneasy patterns,” one student has observed. “Such a process is a challenge to Western political practice and belief. Can the content and structures of democratic popular government serve as a medium of reintegration for the many peoples of Africa as they seek to modify their activities and their aspirations in the light of modern practice?”

Up to this writing, the late John Dewey remains by all odds our most influential American philosopher of education, and it is a long time since any other individual of any nation has had so much influence on educational theory and practice at home and abroad. He is also one of our most influential philosophers in general, and this in spite of the fact that young men are not now espousing his philosophy. An obvious fact about him is that he is characteristically American: he is a meliorist and reformer, an experimentalist, energetic and resourceful, and, as it were, a born pioneer and frontiersman. He is impatient, always in a hurry, wanting to get a lot of things done, sure that to change things is to better them, and committed to change as integral to being if not its very core. “To be,” he said, “is to be in process, in change.” In all these matters central to Dewey, his thought is remarkably conventional. We are like Dewey in many of these things, or Dewey is like us.

The Leveller movement of the Puritan Revolution was composed chiefly of people who represented economically the lower middle classes and religiously the Independents and the Sects. Thus, they had a respectable basis, though their enemies claimed otherwise, and while. they were interested in certain political reforms which appeared sweepingly radical for their times, they did recognize the value of a visible church organization (not a state supported church) and the necessity of such fundamentals of English life as the sanctity of property and the existence of government.