Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Page 276

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LE NORD
conveyed to St. Petersburg by an international delegation led
by the French Senator Trarieux and the Swedish Baron Norden-
skiöld, discoverer of the North-East Passage. The refusal of the
Tsar to grant an audience to the delegation by no means meant
that the action was without effect. Later, in the movement for
Finnish independence which saw in the so-called “Jaeger Move-
ment” a preparation for the achievement of Finnish liberty,
Westermarck acted as adviser to Finnish youth. In spite of his
position as a professor in England he saw more clearly than many
others of his generation in Finland the significant part Russia’s
opponent might play in the liberation of Finland.
It was, however, by his works on moral philosophy and
sociology that Westermarck was and is most widely known and
valued. His interest in moral philosophy early led him to Eng-
land, his sociological and ethnological interests to Morocco. Al-
together Westermarck spent at least a third part of his life abroad.
In London the Reading Room of the British Museum was one
of the chief centres of his intellectual life, the asylum where he
as a research worker felt thoroughly at home. “The British Mu-
seum is a very temple,” he writes in his Memories of My Life,
adding that he had visited many cathedrals in different lands,
but never experienced such a feeling of devotion as under the
Reading Room’s cupola, greater than that of St. Peter’s in Rome.
“This is the storehouse of all knowledge garnered through the
centuries, and by a stroke of the pen one can share in any of
its treasures. The reader, however, not only feels himself the
humble recipient of a means of grace, but is filled with creative
pride; he has a sense of being a part of the whole, and enjoys
something of the bliss of the god-inspired pantheist.”
It was with a fine intuition that Westermarck had chosen
the field for his scientific work, sociology, a term he used in
approximately the sense Herbert Spencer had given it. In the
1880’s and 1890’s Spencer was still working in England; Sir John
Lubbock (Lord Avebury) and Sir Edward B. Tylor were older
contemporaries of Westermarck. Sociology was in fashion and
great hopes were set on it; its pronouncements were accepted
without argument because of the concrete results it promised.
Sociology even purported to give as exact results as the natural
sciences in regard to organised nature. Doubtless many mistakes
were made at the outset; the leading sociologists were too con-
fident of their subject and attempted by their own efforts to