30 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
to note the way in which the press of our country got to work 
to define “Kultur.” The obvious equivalent was, of course, 
culture. We all knew something of what that meant, by repu- 
tation at least. It meant ease and enjoyment and discernment 
and appreciation and all that. But as an equivalent for 
Kultur, culture was always a failure: for Kultur has a boom in 
it—a Krupp boom, perhaps—that culture lacked. 
You will pardon yet another attempt to describe, if not to 
define “Kultur.” There was once a little girl who was studying 
Geometry and had a great deal of difficulty in understanding 
the definition of a line. She was told that it was something 
without breadth or thickness, having only the quality of length. 
She finally got another conception of a line: the kinetic concep- 
tion; that is, that a line is a point in motion. In the same way 
the mathematician thinks of a solid as formed by a plane in 
motion. Now the American idea of culture has been, not a 
kinetic, but a static conception of a plane, or a stratum, if you 
please, of society. Like a plane, it is very, very thin; it can be 
used for a veneer; it can be slipped in anywhere without taking 
up any room; two such cultures can easily occupy the same 
space without seriously interfering with one another. But 
with Kultur it is different; for Kultur is a culture in motion. 
It has length and breadth and thickness and its sides are on the 
move; it generates a material solid; and two such solids cannot 
occupy the same space at the same time. The question we have 
been asking ourselves since August of 1914 is whether there is 
enough force behind the planes of German culture to expand 
the solid until it fills the earth. 
There is not the slightest doubt that the kinetic idea of 
culture is the one put forth by our great enemy overseas. She 
felt for decades that her civilization was superior to all others; 
hadn’t all the world said so? Why then shouldn’t all the world 
be eager to embrace its beneficent, all-inclusive, all-pervasive 
sway? The vision of what this powerful Kultur may mean, 
how it may obliterate all man’s other efforts at civilization, 
how it may engulf the aspiration of mankind for life and 
liberty and individual culture, these things we have seen with 
our eyes until we have grown sick at heart. Louvain, the 
Lusitania, Scarborough; these are but points—incidents—in 
