Science & Tech Quote by Emily Greene Balch

Balch is trying to rescue “reason” from sounding like a cold slogan by giving it a job: not merely to think better, but to live together. Written from the vantage point of a modern world that had watched mass persuasion, nationalism, and industrialized war overwhelm moral sentiment, her claim that reason is an “eternal basis of human intercommunication” reads less like a serene Enlightenment creed and more like a practical survival strategy. If people cannot share premises, they cannot share a future.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “A third ideal” suggests an inventory of civic virtues: reason isn’t an abstract faculty, it’s a social commitment newly “made its way” into public life, still contested, still needing protection. She specifies “reason disciplined and enriched by modern science” to draw a line between mere cleverness and a method: verification, humility before evidence, willingness to revise. In that word “disciplined” sits her anxiety about reason’s counterfeit forms - ideology dressed up as logic, statistics weaponized for domination, technocracy mistaken for wisdom.

As an educator and internationalist (and, historically, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate), Balch is also arguing for a shared language across borders: science as a kind of diplomatic grammar. The subtext is pedagogical and political at once. Teach citizens how to reason, and you build the infrastructure for peace; neglect it, and “intercommunication” collapses into tribal noise. Reason becomes not the opposite of emotion, but the condition that keeps disagreement from turning into violence.