PART 1: IMPERIUM: THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

Much has been said already about this unique and disturbing book, but this much is reasonably certain: A thousand times more is yet to be said. 

Imperium is the first sequel the literary world knows to Spengler’s monumental The Decline of the West. 

In fact, the author of Imperium does more than even Spengler attempted— he defines and creates the pathology of Culture in all of its infinitely urgent importance, including the discipline of Cultural Vitalism. 

Imperium rejects the Nineteenth Century: the parched fossils of its thought— Marx, Freud and the scientific-technical world outlook; its exhausted political nostrums— the pluralistic state, liberalism, democracy, communism, internationalism; all of which fail to satisfy the organically vital realities of politics. 

Imperium presents unique and almost esoteric political, social and historical definitions and explanations which shall become more widely known— indeed, commonly understood— if our West survives. 

Imperium is probably the first book to advocate European unification— to dogmatically predict it— in terms other than the crassly materialistic. 

Imperium is the first comprehensive and profoundly constructive alternative to the Marxist-liberal degeneracy surrounding us. 

Imperium is the creation of a man who believed in his Destiny— and in this book— so thoroughly that he became a martyr to it. 

Imperium is written with a dramatic style and flair for expression seldom encountered even in novels. 

Yet rising above all else is the simple fact that in Imperium a creative genius has given the world something new: A fourth dimension of intellect and a new concept of spirituality. Imperium heralds the dawn of a new day of Faith. 

Among all books, therefore, Imperium has a distinct status. Hardly a man alive will agree with all it contains, yet will not find his personal horizons extended by the reading of it.The original two volumes are here combined, unabridged, into one.

THE 20TH CENTURY 

HISTORICAL OUTLOOK 

“Thus, as we do nothing but enact history, we say little but recite it: nay, rather, in that widest sense, our whole spiritual life is built thereon. For, strictly considered, what is all knowledge too but recorded experience, and a product of history; of which, therefore, reasoning and belief, no less than action and passion are essential materials?” 

— CARLYLE 

“The individual’s life is of importance to none besides himself: the point is whether he wishes to escape from history or give his life for it. History recks nothing of human logic.” 

— SPENGLER 

Perspective 

FAR OUT in exterior darkness where no breath stirs, no light shines, and no sound is heard, one can glance toward this spinning earth-ball. In the astral regions, illumination is of the soul, hence all is dark but this certain star, and only a part of it is aglow. From such a distance, one can obtain an utterly untrammeled view of what is transpiring on this earth-ball. Drawing somewhat closer, continents are visible; closer yet, population-streams. One focal point exists whence the light goes forth in all directions. It is the crooked peninsula of Europe. On this tiny pendant of the great land-mass of the earth-ball, the greatest intensity of movement exists. One can see— for out here the soul and its emanations are visible— a concentration of ideas, energy, ambition, purpose, expansiveness, will-to-form. Hovering above Europe we can see what never before was so clearly visible— the presence of a purely spiritual organism. A close look reveals that the light stream is not flowing from the surface of Europe upward into the night sky, but downward from the hitherto invisible organism. This is a discovery of profound and revolutionary importance, which was only vouchsafed to us by reason of our complete detachment from terrestrial events in the outer void, where spirit is visible and matter visible, only by reason of the light from the spirit. 

More discoveries follow: on the other side are two islands, small in comparison with the land-mass. The pale glow diffused over isolated parts of these two islands is seen at once to be a reflection from the other side. 

What is this supra-terrestrial phenomenon? Why does it hover over Europe in particular? What is the relationship between it and the human material under it? The latter is shaped up into intricately formed pyramidal structures. Ranks are formed. Movements proceed along channels of labyrinthine complexity. Persons stand to one another in defined relationships of command and obedience. Apart from this tiny peninsula, the human currents are horizontal, swirling, eddying like the water in the streams, the currents in the ocean, the herds on the vast plains. It is, then, the spirit-organism which forms and impresses the population of the peninsula into their intricate organic shapes. 

With what can we compare this being, which could not be seen by us while we were earth-bound? It is alone at present. 

But out here we have the freedom of time as well as the freedom of space. We are allowed to look upon a hundred generations as the earth-bound look upon the life-span of a fruit-fly. In our search for something similar to the spirit-organism we have seen, we go back two hundred generations. The ball is the same, but is in almost complete darkness. Things are almost indistinguishable; matter has not passed through the alembic of spirit, and is not apprehensive. A glance backward reveals a continuation of the void. We let a few generations pass in a moment, and spirit begins to make itself felt. A feeble, but promising, glow appears in northeast Africa. Then another, a thousand miles to the northeast, in Mesopotamia. They take names, Egypt, Babylonia. The time is around 3000 B.C. They increase in intensity and the first thing clear in each case is armies marching against the outer populations, who are felt as the barbarian. These spiritual organisms do not mix— their higher frontiers are sharp and clear; each being has its own hue, which adheres to it. Each organism seizes the human material in its landscape and impresses them into its service. First it gives them a common World-Idea, then it refines this into nations, each nation embodying a separate idea of the higher organism. A nobility and priesthood arise to embody different aspects of the idea. The populations are stratified and specialized, and the human beings live out their lives and destinies in a way entirely subordinate to the higher organism. The latter compels these humans with ideas. Only a small spiritual stratum of each human population is adapted to this kind of compulsion, but those who belong to it remain in the service of the idea, once it is felt. They will live and die for it, and in the process they determine the destinies of the population whence they spring. These ideas— not mere abstractions, strings of concepts, but living, pulsating, wordless necessities of being and thinking— are the technic by which these higher beings utilize human beings for their purposes. Religions of high complexity of feeling and rationale, forms of architecture, conceived in the spirit of that religion and put into its service, lyric poetry, pictorial art, sculpture, music, orders of nobility, orders of priesthood, stylized dwellings, stylized manners and dress, rigid training of the young up to these developments to perpetuate them, systems of philosophy, of mathematics, of knowledge, of nature, prodigious technical methods, giant battles, huge armies, prolonged wars, energetic economics to support this whole multifarious structure, intricately organized governments to infuse order into the nations created by the higher being acting on the different types of human material— these are some of the floraison of forms which appear in these two areas. Each form is different in Egypt from the corresponding form in Babylonia. If an idea is taken over, it is only apparently adopted; actually it is misunderstood, re-formed, and adapted to the proper soul. 

But the higher being approaches a crisis. It has expended itself in this earth-transforming process. It shudders, it apparently weakens, it palpitates— chaos and anarchy threaten its terrestrial actualizations— forces outside gather to strike it down and wipe out its grand creations. But it rouses itself, it puts forward its greatest effort of all— no longer in the creation of inward things, arts, philosophy, theories of life, but in the formation of the purely external apparatus of power: strict governments, giant armies, industry to support them, fleets of ships for war, legal systems to organize and order the conquests. It expands across areas never before investigated or even known, it unifies all of its proper nations into one, which gives its name to the rest and leads them on to the last great expansive effort. 

The same great rhythm is observable in each of them. As one watches, the two lights die down from their splendid hues to an ever-paler earth-light. They go out slowly, leaving a glow of memory and legend in the minds of men, and with their last great creations lying in the widened landscape— Imperium. 

Outside these two areas, the rest of the earth has remained unchanged. The human bands are distinguishable from the herding-animals only by a primitive culture, and a more intricate economy. Otherwise their existence-forms are devoid of significance. The primitive cultures are the sole thing existing above the plane of economics, in that they attribute symbolic significance to natural occurrences and human conduct. But there is nothing in these movements resembling the High Cultures which transformed the entire appearance of the Egyptian and Babylonian landscapes for almost forty generations from their first beginning until the last sinking. 

Physical time flows on and centuries pass in darkness. Then, precisely as in Egypt and Babylonia, but again of a different hue, and to different music, a light appears over the Punjab. It becomes bright and firm. The same wealth of forms and significant happenings work themselves out as in the earlier two organisms. Its creations are all in the highest degree individual, as different from its two predecessors as they were vis-à-vis one another, but they follow the same grand rhythms. The same multi-colored pageant of nobles and priests, temples and schools, nations and cities, arts and philosophies, armies and sciences, letters and wars, passes before the eye. 

II 

Before this high culture was well on its way, another had started to actualize itself in the Hwang-Ho valley in China. And then a few centuries later, about 1100 B.C in our way of reckoning, the Classical Culture begins on the shores of the Aegean. Both of these cultures have the stamp of individuality, their own way of coloring and influencing their terrestrial creations, but both are subject to the same morphology as the others observed. 

As this Classical Culture draws to its close, around the time of Christ, another one appears in a landscape subjugated by the Classical in its last expansive phase— Arabia. The fact of its appearance precisely here makes its course an unusual one. Its forms are inwardly as pure as those of all the other Cultures, inwardly it borrows nothing any more than they did— but it was inevitable that the material contiguity of landscape, temporal succession, and contact with the civilized populations of the older organism would influence the new soul to take over the wealth of classical creations. It was subjugated to them only in a superficial way however, for into these old bottles it poured its new wine. Through selection, reinterpretation, or ignoring, it expressed its own soul despite the alien forms. In its later, expansive phase, this culture embraced European Spain as the Western Caliphate. Its life span, its end form, its last great crisis— all followed the same organic regularity as the others.

Some five centuries later the now familiar manifestations of another High Culture begin in the remote landscapes of Mexico and Peru. It is to have the most tragic destiny of any we have yet seen. Around 1000 A.D. the European Culture is meanwhile born, and at its very birth shows itself to be distinguished from the others by the extraordinary intensity of its self-expression, by its pushing into every distance both in the spiritual realm, and in the physical. Its original landscape was even of an extent many times the size of its predecessors, and from this base, in its middle life, it enters upon an Age of Discovery, in which it finds for itself the very frontiers of the earth-ball, and converts the world into the object of its politics. Its Spanish representatives in the two warrior bands of Cortez and Pizarro discovered the Civilization of Mexico and Peru, then in its very last stage of refinement of the material life. The two grand Empires of Mexico and Peru, with social forms, economico-political organization, transportation, communication, city life, all developed to the utmost limits for this particular soul made the invading Spaniards seem like mere naive barbarians. But the technical disinterestedness of these empires left them helpless before the few cannon and horses of the invaders. The last act of this Culture-drama is its obliteration in a few years by the invaders from another world. This consummation is instructive as to the attention that the World-Spirit pays to human values and feelings. What soothsayer would have dared to tell the last Aztec Emperor, surrounded with the pomp of world-historical significance, clothed with the power of the world, that in a short time the jungle would reconquer his cities and palaces, that his armies and systems of control of his world-Empire would vanish before the onslaught of a few hundred barbarians? 

Each Culture-soul is stamped with individuality; from the others it takes nothing, and to them it gives nothing. Whatever is on its frontiers is the enemy, whether primitive or Culture-populations. They all are barbarians, heathens, to the proper culture, and no understanding passes between them. We saw the Western peoples prove the lifeworthiness of the European culture by their crusades against the highly civilized Saracens, Moors, and Turks. We saw the Germanic populations in the East and their Visigothic brothers in the South push the barbarian Slavs and the civilized Moors continually back during the centuries. We saw Western ships and Western armies make the whole world into the object of booty for the West. These were the relations of the West to that and those outside. 

Within the Culture arose Gothic Christianity, the transcendent symbols of Empire and Papacy, the Gothic cathedrals, the unlocking of the secrets of the world of the soul and the world of nature in monastery cells. The Culture-soul shaped for its own expression the nations of the West. To each it gave individuality, and at the last, each thought it was a Culture in itself, instead of being a mere organ of a Culture. Cities grew out of the hamlets of Gothic times, and from the cities grew intellect. The old problem of the relation of Reason and Faith, the central problem of early Scholastic, is apparently being slowly decided in these cities in favor of the Supremacy of Reason. The nobility of Gothic times, the masters of the earth who had no superior unless they voluntarily recognized him, become subject to an idea— the State. Life slowly externalizes: political problems move into the center; new economic resources are developed to support the political contests; the old agricultural economy metamorphoses into an industrial economy. At the end of this path stands a ghostly and terrifying Idea: Money. 

Other Cultures also had seen this phenomenon appear at the same stage and grow to similar dimensions. Its slow growth in importance proceeds pari passe with the gradual self-assertion of Reason against Faith. It reaches its highest point with the Age of Nationalism, when the parts of the Culture tear one another to bits, even as outer dangers loom threateningly. At its highest point, Money, allied with Rationalism,contests for the supremacy over the life of the Culture with the forces of State and Tradition, Society and Religion. In our brief visit to interstellar space, we found the position of detachment whence we could see this grand life-drama unfold itself seven times in seven High Cultures, and we saw each of the seven surmount the last great crisis of two centuries’ duration. The Mexican-Peruvian Civilization overcame the inner crisis only to fall before marauders appearing out of the blue sea. 

The great crisis of the West set in forcefully with the French Revolution and its consequent phenomena. Napoleon was the symbol of the transition of Culture into Civilization— Civilization, the life of the material, the external, of power, giant economies, armies, and fleets, of great numbers and colossal technics, over Culture, the inner life of religion, philosophy, arts, domination of the external life of politics and economics by strict form and symbolism, strict restraint of the beast-of-prey in man, feeling of cultural unity. It is the victory of Rationalism, Money and the great city over the traditions of religion and authority, of Intellect over Instinct. 

We had seen all this in the previous high cultures as they approached their final life-phase. In each case the crisis had been resolved by the resurgence of the old forces of Religion and Authority, their victory over Rationalism and Money, and the final union of the nations into an Imperium. The two-century-long crisis in the life of the great organism expressed itself in gigantic wars and revolutions. All the Cultural energy that had previously gone into inner creations of thought, religion, philosophy, science, art-forms, great literature, now goes into the outer life of economics, war, technics, politics. The symbolism of power succeeds to the highest place in this last phase. 

But at this point, we are suddenly back on the surface of the earth. No longer detached, we must participate in the great Culture-drama, whether we will or no. Our only choice is to participate as subject or as object. The wisdom that comes from the knowledge of the organic nature of a High Culture gives us the key to the events transpiring before our eyes. It can be applied by us, and our action can thereby become significant, as distinguished from the opportunistic and old-fashioned policy of stupidity which would try to turn the Western Civilization back in its course because stupid heads are incapable of adjusting themselves to new prevailing ideas. 

III 

With the knowledge of the organic nature of a High Culture, we have achieved an unparalleled liberation from the dross of materialism which hindered hitherto the glimpse into History’s riddle. This knowledge is simple, but profound, and is therefore shut off from the inward appreciation of all but the few. In its train flow all the consequences of the necessary historical outlook of the coming times. Since a Culture is organic, it has an individuality, and a soul. Thus it cannot be influenced in its depths from any outside force whatever. It has a destiny, like all organisms. It has a period of gestation, and a birthtime. It has a growth, a maturity, fulfillment, a down-going, a death. Because it has a soul, all of its manifestations will be impressed by the same spiritual stamp, just as each man’s life is the creation of his own individuality. Because it has a soul, this particular culture can never come again after it has passed. Like the nations it creates to express phases of its own life, it exists only once. There will never be another Indian culture, Aztec-Mayan Culture, Classical Culture, or Western Culture, any more than there will be a second Spartan nation, Roman nation, French or English nation. Since a Culture is organic, it has a life-span. We observed this life span: it is about thirty-five generations at highest potential, or about forty-five generations from its first stirrings in the landscape until its final subsiding. Like the life span of organisms, it is no rigid thing. Man has a life span of seventy years, but this term is not rigid. 

The High Cultures belong at the peak of the organic hierarchy: plant, animal, man. They differ from the other organisms in that they are invisible, or in other words, they have no light-quality. In this they resemble the human soul. The body of a High Culture is made up of the population streams in its landscape. They furnish it with the material through which it actualizes its possibilities. The spirit which animates these populations shows the life-phase of the Culture, whether youthful, mature, or at the last fulfillment. Like each man, a Culture has ages, which succeed one another with rhythmic inevitability. They are laid down for it by its own organic law, just as the senility of a man is laid down at his conception. This quality of direction we call Destiny. Destiny is the hallmark of everything living. Destiny-thinking is the type of thought which understands the living, and it is the only kind which does. The other method of human thought is that of Causality. This method is inwardly compulsory in dealing with inorganic problems of technics, mechanics, engineering, systematic natural philosophy. It finds the limits of its efficacy there, however, and is grotesque when applied to Life. It would tell us that youth is the cause of maturity, maturity of old age, that the bud is the cause of the full-blown flower, the caterpillar the cause of the butterfly. 

The Destiny-Idea is the central motive of organic thinking. If anyone thinks it is merely an invisible causality, he understands it not. The idea of Causality is the central motive of systematic, or inorganic thinking. The latter is scientific thinking. It aims at subjugation of things to understanding; it wishes to name everything, to make outlines distinct, and then to link phenomena together by classification and causal linkage. Kant is the height of this type of thinking, and to this side of Western philosophy belong also Hume, Bacon, Schopenhauer, Hamilton, Spencer, Mill, Bentham, Locke, Holbach, Descartes. To the organic side belong Macchiavelli, Vico, Montaigne, Leibnitz, Lichtenberg, Pascal, Hobbes, Goethe, Hegel, Carlyle, Nietzsche and Spengler, the philosopher of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 

Scientific thinking is at the height of its power in the realm of matter, that which possesses extension, but no direction. Material happenings can be controlled, are reversible, produce identical results under identical conditions, are recurrent, can be classified, can be successfully comprehended as though they are subject to an a priori, mechanical, necessity, in other words, to Causality. 

Scientific thinking is powerless in the domain of Life, for its happenings are uncontrollable, irreversible, never-recurring, unique, cannot be classified, are unamenable to rational treatment, and possessed of no external, mechanical necessity. Every organism is something never seen before, that follows an inner necessity, that passes away, never to reappear. Every organism is a set of possibilities within a certain framework, and its life is the process of actualization of these possibilities. The technique of Destiny thinking is simply living into other organisms to understand their life-conditions and necessities. One can then apprehend what must happen. 

The word Fate is an inorganic word. It is an attempt to subjugate Life to an external necessity; it is of religious provenance, and religion comes from the causal type of thinking. There is no science without a precedent religion. Science merely makes the sacred causality of religion into a profane, mechanical necessity. 

Fate is not synonymous with destiny, but the opposite to it. Fate attributes necessity to the incidents of a life, but Destiny is the inner necessity of the organism. An incident can wipe out a life, and thus terminate its destiny, but this event came from outside the organism, and was thus apart from its destiny. 

Every fact is an incident, unforeseeable and incalculable, but the inner progression of a life is destined, and works itself out through the facts, is helped or hindered by them, overcomes them, or succumbs to them. It is the destiny of every child that is born ultimately to become senile; incident may intervene in the form of disease or accident, and this destiny may be frustrated. These outer incidents— that may elevate a man to the heights despite his blunders, or cast him into defeat despite his efficiency and mastery of the idea of his time are without meaning for Destiny-thinking. 

Destiny inheres in the organism, forces it to express its possibilities. Incident is outside the organism, is blind, uninformed by necessity, but may nevertheless play a great role in the actualization of an organism, by smoothing its way, or imposing great obstacles to it. What is called Luck, Doom, Fate, Providence, express the bafflement and awe of men in the presence of this mystery, forever unknowable.

Destiny-thinking and Causality-thinking are related to one another, however, through their common provenance: both are products of Life. Even the most inorganic thinker or scientifico, the crassest materialist or mechanist, is subject to his own destiny, his own soul, his own character, his own life span, and outside this framework of destiny his free, unbound flight of causal fancy cannot deliver him. Destiny is Life, but Causality is merely a thought-method by which a certain form of Life, namely Culture-man, attempts to subjugate all around him to his understanding. Thus there is an order of rank between them: Destiny-thinking is unconditionally prior, for all Life is subject to it, while Causality thinking is only an expression of a part of Life’s possibilities. 

Their differences may also be expressed in this way: Causality-thought is able to understand because its non-living material opposes no resistance, but submits to any conditions imposed upon it, having no inner compulsion of its own. When, however, Causality attempts to subjugate Life, the material itself is active, moving independently, will not stand still and be classified or systematized. Destiny-thinking can understand because each one of us is himself moved by Destiny, has an inner compulsion to be himself, and can thus, by transference of inwardly-experienced feelings, live himself into other forms of life, other individuation's. Destiny-thinking moves along with its subject-matter; Causality stands still, and can only reach satisfactory conclusions with subject-matter that is also standing still. 

Just as even the most highly developed systematizes are subject to Destiny, so do they— all unwittingly— apply Destiny thinking in their daily lives and relationships with other human beings. The most rabid reflexologist unconsciously applies some of the psychological wisdom of the Abbe Galiani or Rochefoucauld, even though he has never heard of these seers of the soul.

The Two Aspects of History 

THE TOTAL DIFFERENCE between the methods of human thinking represented by the central-ideas of Destiny on the one hand, and Causality on the other, was sharply accented for the reason that only one of them is adapted to the understanding of History. History is the record of fulfilled destinies— of Cultures, nations, religions, philosophies, sciences, mathematics, art-forms, great men. Only the feeling of empathy can understand these once-living souls from the bare records left. Causality is helpless here, for at every second a new fact is cast into the pool of Life, and from its point of impact, ever-widening circles of changes spread out. The subterranean facts are never written down, but every fact changes the course of the history of facts. The true understanding of any organism, whether a High Culture, a nation, or a man, is to see behind and underneath the facts of that existence the soul which is expressing itself by means of, and often in opposition to, the external happenings. Only so can one separate what is significant from what is unimportant. 

Significant thus is seen to mean: having a Destiny-quality. Incidental means: without relationship to Destiny. It was Destiny for Napoleon that Carnot was Minister of War, for another man would probably not have seen Napoleon’s project for an invasion of Italy through the Ligurian Hills, buried as it was in the files of the Ministry. It was a Destiny for France that the author of the plan was a man of action as well as a theoretician. It is thus obvious that the feeling for what is Destiny and what is Incident have a high subjective content, and that a deeper insight can make out Destiny where the more superficial sees only Incident. 

Men are thus differentiated also with regard to their capacity for understanding History. There is an historical sense, which can see behind the surface of history to the soul that is the determinant of this history. History, seen through the historical sense of a human being, has thus a subjective aspect. This is the first aspect of History. 

The other, the objective, aspect of History, is equally incapable of rigid establishment, even though at first glance it might seem to be. The writing of purely objective history is the aim of the so-called reference, or narrative, method of presenting history. Nevertheless, it inevitably selects and orders the facts, and in this process the poetic intuition, historical sense, and flair of the author come into play. If these are totally excluded, the product is not history-writing, but a book of dates, and this, again, cannot be free from selection. 

Nor is it history. The genetic method of writing history attempts to set forth the developments with complete impartiality. It is the narrative method with some type of causal, evolutionary, or organic philosophy superimposed to trace the growth of the subsequent out of the precedent. This fails to attain objectivity because the facts that survive may be either too few or too numerous, and in either case artistry must be employed in filling gaps or selecting. Nor is impartiality possible. It is the historical sense which decides importance of past developments, past ideas, past great men. For centuries, Brutus and Pompey were held to be greater than Caesar. Around 1800, Vulpius was considered a greater poet than Goethe. Mengs, whom we have forgotten, was ranked in his day as one of the great painters of the world. Shakespeare, until more than a century after his death, was considered inferior as a playwright to more than one of his contemporaries. El Greco was unnoticed 75 years ago. Cicero and Cato were both held, until after the First World War, to be great men, rather than Culture-retarding weaklings. Joan of Arc was not included in Chastellain’s list, drawn up on the death of Charles VII, of all the army commanders who fought against England. Lastly, for the benefit of readers of 2050, I may say that the Hero and the Philosopher of the period 1900-1950 were both invisible to their contemporaries in the historical dimensions in which you see them. 

The Classical Culture looked one way to Wincklemann’s time, another way to Nietzsche’s time, yet another way to the 20th and 21st centuries. Similarly, Elizabethan England was satisfied with Shakespeare’s dramatization of Plutarch’s Caesar, whereas fin-de-siécle England required Shaw to dramatize Mommsen’s Caesar. Wilhelm Tell, Maria Stuart, Götz von Berlichingen, Florian Geyer, all would have to be written differently today, for we see these historical periods from a different angle. 

What then, is History? History is the relationship between the Past and the Present. Because the Present is constantly changing, so is History. Each Age has its own History, which the Spirit of the Age creates to fit its own soul. With the passing of that Age, never to return, that particular History picture has passed. Seen from this standpoint, any attempt to write History “as it really happened” is historical immaturity, and the belief in objective standards of history-presentation is self-deception, for what will come forth will be the Spirit of the Age. The general agreement of contemporaries with a certain outlook on History does not make that outlook objective, but only gives it rank— the highest possible rank it can have as an accurate expression of the Spirit of the Age, true for this time and this soul. A higher degree of truth cannot be attained, this side of divinity. Anyone who prates of being “modern” must remember that he would have felt just as modern in the Europe of Charles V, and that he is doomed to become just as “old-fashioned” to the men of 2050 as are the men of 1850 to him. A journalistic view of History stamps its possessor as lacking in the historical sense. He should therefore refrain from talking of historical matters, whether past or in the process of becoming.

The Relativity of History 

HISTORY must always have its subjective aspect, and its objective aspect. But the determining thing is always neither the one, nor the other, but simply the relationship between the two. Each of the first two aspects can be arbitrary, but the relationship is not arbitrary, but is the expression of the Spirit of the Age, and is therefore true, historically speaking. 

Each of the eight Cultures which passed in brilliant review before us had its own relationship to History generally, and this relationship developed in a certain direction through the life-course of the Culture. It is only necessary to mention the Classical in this connection. Tacitus, Plutarch, Livy, Suetonius were regarded as historical thinkers by the Romans. To us they are simply story-tellers, totally lacking in the historical sense. This could not be a reflection on them, but only tells us something about ourselves. Our view of History is as intense, fierce, probing and extensive, as the whole cast of our Western soul generally. If there were ten millennia of history instead of five, we would find it necessary to orient ourselves to the whole ten instead of to the mere five. 

Not only are the Cultures differentiated from one another also in their historical sense, but the various Ages within the Culture’s development are so distinguished. Although all tendencies exist in all the Ages, it is nevertheless correct to say that one certain Life-tendency dominates any one Age. Thus in all Cultures, the religious feeling is uppermost in the first great Life-phase, lasting some five centuries, and is then superseded by the critical spirituality, lasting somewhat less long, to be succeeded by the historical outlook, which gradually merges again into the final rebirth of religion. The three Life-tendencies are, successively, sacred, profane, and skeptical. 

They parallel the political phases of Feudalism, corresponding to religion; Absolute State, and Democracy, corresponding to early and late Critical philosophy; and Resurgence of Authority and Caesarism, the counterparts of skeptics and rebirth of religion. 

The intra-Cultural development of the idea of Science, or Natural Philosophy, is from Theology through, in succession, physical sciences and biology, to pure, untheoretical, Nature-manipulation, the scientific counterpart of skepsis and resurgent authority. 

The Age which succeeds to the Age of Democracy can only see its predecessors under their purely historical aspect. This is the only way it can feel itself as related to them. This too, however, as will be apparent, has its imperative side. Culture-man is always a unity, and the mere fact that one Life-tendency is uppermost cannot destroy this organic unity. 

In all Ages, the individuals therein are separated from one another also by their varying development of the historical sense. Think of the different historical horizon of Frederick II and one of his Sicilian courtiers, of Cesare Borgia and one of his captains, of Napoleon and Nelson, of Mussolini and his assassin. A political unit in the custody of a man with no historical horizon, an opportunist, must pay with its wasted blood for his lack. 

Just as the Western Culture has the most intensely historic soul, so does it develop men with the greatest historical sense. It is a Culture which has always been conscious of its own history. At each turning point there were many who knew the significance of the moment. Both sides, in any Western opposition, have felt themselves as clothed with and determining the Future. 

Therefore Western men have been under the necessity of having a History-picture in which to think and act. The fact that the Culture was continually changing meant that History was continually changing. History is the continuous reinterpretation of the Past. History is thus continually “true,” because, in each Age, the ruling historical outlook and values are the expression of the proper soul. The alternatives for History are not true or false, but effective or ineffective. Truth in the religio-philosophical-mathematical sense, meaning timelessly, eternally valid, dissociated from the conditions of Life, does not pertain to History. History that is true is History that is effective in the minds of significant men.

The highly refined historical sense is the characteristic of two groups: history-writers and history makers. Between these two groups also there is an order of rank. History-writing has the task of setting forth for the Age its necessary picture of the Past. This picture, clear and articulate, then becomes effective in the thoughts and actions of the leading history-makers of the Age. 

This age, like others, has its own appropriate History-picture, and it cannot choose one of a number of pictures. The determining thing in our outlook on History is the Spirit of our Age. Ours is an external, factual, skeptical, historical, Age. It is not moved by great religious or critical feelings. That which to our Cultural forebears was the object of joy, sorrow, passion, necessity, is to us the object of respect and knowledge. The center of gravity of our Age is in Politics. Pure historical thinking is the close relative of political thinking. Historical thinking always seeks to know what was, and not to prove something. Political thinking has the first task of ascertaining the facts and the possibilities, and then of changing them through action. Both are undissociated realism. Neither begins with a program, which it desires to prove. 

Ours is the first age in Western history in which an absolute submission to facts has triumphed over all other spiritual attitudes. It is the natural corollary of an historical Age, when critical methods have exhausted their possibilities. In the realm of Thought, historical thinking triumphs; in the realm of action, Politics occupies the center of the stage. We follow the facts no matter where they lead, even though we must give up dearly cherished schemes, ideologies, soul-fancies, prejudices. Previous ages in Western history formed their History to fit their souls; we do the same, but our view has no precedent ethical or critical equipment in it. On the contrary— our ethical imperative is derived from our historical outlook and not vice versa. 

Our outlook on History is no more arbitrary than that of any other age of the West. It is compulsory for us; each man will have this outlook, and his level of significance will depend on the focus in these matters which he can attain and hold. Insofar as a man is an effective representative of this time, he has this particular History-picture and no other. It is not a question of whether he should have it; so to read is completely to misunderstand. He will have it, in his feelings and unconscious valuation of events, even if not in his articulate, verbal, ideas.

The Meaning of Facts 

WHETHER OR NOT a man’s History-outlook is also intellectually formulated as well as effective in his unconscious doing, thinking, and valuing is merely a function of his general personality. Some men have a greater inner need to think abstractly than others. 

It must not be supposed that the sense for facts, the historical sense, dispenses with creative thinking. The development of fact-sense is primarily the seeing what is there without ethical or critical preconceptions of what should or should not be there, might or might not. 

Life-facts are the data of History. A Life-fact is something which has happened. It does not matter to its status as a fact that no one may know of it, that it has vanished without trace. Obviously creative thinking enters into the process of interpreting the data of History, and a moment’s reflection shows also that the process of assessing the data of History is a creative one. 

Physical facts, like resistance, sourness, redness, are accessible to everyone. Life-facts are not accessible to a man who has a rigid view of History, and who knows that the purpose of all previous happening was to make this age possible, who knows that History has the sole meaning of “Progress.” Remnants of social ethics, preconceived historical notions, utility dogmas— all shut out their victims from inner participation in the life of the 20th and 21st centuries. 

To this century the new vista now opens of assembling the lost facts in previous ages and previous Cultures. Not tiny incidental data, but the broad outline of necessary organic developments that must have taken place. From our knowledge of past Cultures and their structures, we can kill in missing developments in some from what has survived in others. Most important to us now alive we can fill in what remains to the fulfillment of our own Culture. This can be done in the way that a palaeontologist can reconstruct in broad outlines an entire organism from a single skull-fragment. The process is legitimate and trustworthy in both cases, for Life has patterns in which it actualizes its unique individuals. From an anonymous work of literature remaining, a creative thinker can reconstruct a general picture of the unknown author. Can one not draw quite accurately the soul-portrait of the unknown author of Das Büchlein vom vollkommenen Leben? So also can the “Crusades” period of a Culture be reconstructed if one has knowledge of its “Reformation” stage, or its “Enlightenment” phase. 

The realm of Thought is interested in the missing stages of past Cultures, and the future of our own, but Action is interested in the Past only as the key to effective performance. Thus the higher importance of history-writing and history-thinking is that they serve effective action. 

The fact-sense is only operative when dogma, socio-ethical ideas, and critical trappings are put aside. To the fact-sense, it is important that hundreds of millions of people in a certain area believe in the truth of Confucian doctrines. To the fact-sense, it is meaningless whether or not these doctrines are true–even though to religion, Progress-ideologies, and journalism, the truth or falsehood of Confucianism is important. 

To a 21st century history-writer, the most important thing about the cells, ether-waves, bacillae, electrons, and cosmic rays of our times will be that we believed in them. All of these notions, which the age considers facts, will vanish into the one fact for the 21st century that once upon a time this was a world-picture of a certain kind of Culture-man. So do we look upon the nature-theories of Aristarchus and Democritus in the Classical Culture. 

And thus facts too have their subjective and objective content. And again, it is the relationship between the man and the phenomenon that determines the form of the fact. Each Culture has in this way its own facts, which arise out of its own problems. What the fact is, depends on what man is experiencing the phenomenon: whether he belongs to a High Culture, to which Culture, to which age thereof, to which nation, to which spiritual stratum, to which social stratum.

The facts of the Second World War are one thing in this year 1948, in the brains of the Culture-bearing stratum of Europe, and something totally different in the minds of the newspaper-reading herds. By 2000 the view of the present Culture-bearing stratum will have become also the view of the many, and by that time, more facts will be known to the independent thinkers about the same War than are now known to the few. For one of the characteristics of Life-facts is that distance–particularly temporal distance–shows up their lineaments more clearly. We know more of Imperial history than Tacitus knew, more of Napoleonic history than Napoleon knew, vastly more of the First World War than its creators and participants knew, and Western men in 2050 will know our times in a way that we can never know them. To Brutus his mythological ancestry was a fact, but to us a more important fact is that he believed it. 

Thus the fact-sense, the prerequisite of the historical outlook of the 20th century, emerges as a form of the poetry of Life. It is the very opposite of the prosaic, drab insistence of the materialistic outlook that facts had to submit to a “progress” ideology in order to be cognized as significant. This view absolutely excluded its victims from any insight into the beauty and power of the facts of history, as well as from any understanding of their significance. The 21st century— whose men will be born into a time when this historical outlook is self-evident— will find it fantastic, if it ever takes notice of it, that in an earlier time men believed that all previous history was merely tending toward them. And yet that was the outlook of the 19th century: whole Cultures, equal by birth and spirituality to our own in every way, lived and died merely that the philistinism of the “progress”-ideologists could chalk up their “achievements” on the wall, meaning a few notions or technical devices.

The Demise of the 

Linear View of History 

LIFE is a continuous battle between Young and Old, Old and New, Innovation and Tradition. Ask Galileo, Bruno, Servetus, Copernicus, Gauss. All of them represented the Future, yet all were overcome, in one way or another, during their own lives, by the enthroned Past. Copernicus was afraid to publish during his lifetime, lest he be burned as heretic. Gauss only revealed his liberating discovery of non-Euclidean geometries after his death, for fear of the clamor of the Boeotians. It is therefore not surprising when the materialists persecute, by maligning, by conspiracy of silence, cutting off from access to publicity, or by driving to suicide, as in the case of Haushofer, those who think in 20th century terms and specifically reject the methods and conclusions of 19th century materialism. 

The 20th century view of History has to make its way over the ruins of the linear scheme which insisted on seeing History as a progression from an “Ancient” through a “Medieval” to a “Modern.” I say ruins, for the scheme collapsed decades ago, but they are heavily defended ruins. Hidden in them are the materialists, the posthumous inhabitants of the 19th century, the “Progress” philistines, the social ethicians, the superannuated devotees of critical philosophy, the ideologists of every description whatever. 

Common to them all is Rationalism. They assume as a tenet of faith that History is reasonable, that they themselves are reasonable, and that therefore History has done, and will do, what they think it should. The origin of the three-stage view of History is found in St. Joachim of Floris, a Gothic religionist who put forward the three stages as a mystical progression. It was left for the increasing coarseness of intellect devoid of soul to make the progression a materialistic-utilitarian one. For two centuries now, each generation has regarded itself as the peak of all the previous striving of the world. This shows that Materialism is also a Faith, a crude caricature of the precedent religion. It is supplanted now, not because it is wrong— for a Faith can never be injured by refutation— but because the Spirit of the Age is devoid of materialism. 

The linear scheme was more or less satisfactory to Western man as long as he knew nothing of history outside the Bible, Classic authors, and Western chronicles. Even then, it would not have held up if the philosophy of history had not been a neglected field of endeavor. However, a little over a century ago began a spate of archaeological investigation, including excavations and deciphering of original inscriptions in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, Crete, China and India. It continues today and now includes also Mexico and Peru. The result of these investigations was to show the historically-minded Western Civilization that it was by no means unique in its historical grandeur, but that it belonged to a group of High Cultures, of similar structure, and of equal elaboration and splendor. The Western Culture is the first to have had both the intense historical impetus as well as the geographic situation to develop a thorough archaeology, which includes now within its purview the whole historical world, just as Western politics at one time embraced the whole surface of the earth. 

The results of this profound archaeological science broke down the old-fashioned linear scheme of regarding History. It was utterly unable to fit in the new wealth of facts. Since there was some geographic, even though no historical, community between the Egyptian, Babylonian, Classical, and Western Cultures, it had been able to distort them somehow into a picture that could convince those who already believed. But with the opening up of the history of the Cultures that were fulfilled in India, China, Arabia, Mexico, Peru— this view could no longer convince even believers. 

Furthermore, the materialistic spirit, which had posited the “influence” of preceding Cultures on subsequent ones, meanwhile died out, and the new, psychological outlook on Life recognized the primacy of the soul, the inner purity of the soul, and the superficiality of the process of borrowing of externalia. 

The new feeling about History was actually coeval with the tremendous outburst of archaeological activity which broke down the old linear scheme. The new outlook became a soul-necessity of Western Civilization at the same time that the history-seeking activity did, even though it was to remain half-articulate until the First World War. This intense outburst of probing of the Past was an expression of a superpersonal feeling that the riddle of History was not touched with the old linear device, that it had to be unlocked, that the totality of facts must be surveyed. As the new facts accumulated, the higher-ranking historians took a wider view, but not until the latter part of the 19th century did any historian or philosopher actually treat Cultures as separate organisms, with parallel existence, independence, and spiritual equality. The idea of “cultural history” itself was a forerunner of this view, and was a prerequisite to the development of the 20th century outlook on History. The rejection of the idea that History was merely the record of reigns and battles, treaties and dates, marked an epoch. The feeling spread that “universal history” was wanted, the combination of the history of politics, law, religion, manners, society, commerce, art, philosophy, warfare, erotic, literature, into one great synthesis. Schiller was one of the first to articulate this general need, although both Voltaire and Winckelmann had written specific histories along these lines. 

Hegel, on a spiritual basis, and Comte and Buckle, materialistically, developed further the idea of total history, i.e., cultural history. Burckhardt not only produced a quite perfect example of a cultural history in his Italian Renaissance book, but developed a philosophy of history-writing pointing toward the 20th century outlook. Taine, Lamprecht, Breysig, Nietzsche, Meray, all are milestones in the development away from the linear view of history. In their times, only Nietzsche, and to a lesser extent, Burckhardt and Bachofen, understood the 20th century idea of the unity of a Culture. But two generations later the idea of the unity of a High Culture is general in the highest spiritual stratum of Europe, and has become a prerequisite to both historical and political thinking. 

What was this linear view of History? It was either a mere arbitrary breaking-up of historical materials for handling and reference, without any claim to philosophical significance, or else it was an attempt at a philosophy of history. Its pretensions to the latter could not very well hold up in view of the fact that for generations the starting-point of the “Modern” age has been shifted around from century to century with complete freedom. Each writer has formulated the significance and dates of the three stages differently and the various formulations exclude one another. But if they are not the same view, why the same terminology? 

Thus it was no philosophy of history, but a mere set of three names which were retained because of a sort of magic which was supposed to inhere in them. Nor was it a satisfactory method of breaking up the historical facts for reference purposes, since it left no place for China and India, and since it treated the Babylonian and Egyptian, in every way the historical equals of the Classical and our own, as though they were mere episodes, together constituting a prelude to the Classical. For this grotesque History-outlook, a millennium in Egypt was a footnote, while ten years in our own century were a volume. 

II 

The basis of the linear view was Cultural egocentricity, or in other words the unconscious assumption that the Western Culture was the focus of the whole meaning of all human history, that previous Cultures had importance only insofar as they “contributed” something to us, but that in themselves they had no importance whatever. This is why the Cultures which lived in areas remote from Western Europe are hardly even mentioned. These famous “contributions”— what was meant was a few technical devices from the Egyptian and Babylonian Cultures, and the Cultural remains generally of the Classical. The Arabian, again, was almost totally ignored, for geographic reasons. And yet Western architecture, religion, philosophy, science, music, lyric, manners, erotic, politics, finance, economics all are totally independent of the corresponding Classical forms. It is the archaeological cast of the Western soul, its intensely historical nature, that prompt it to reverence what mere geography might indicate is a spiritual ancestor.

And yet— who believes, or ever did actually believe, that the Rome of Hildebrand, of Alexander VI, of Charles V, or of Mussolini, had any continuity whatever with the Rome of Flaminius, Sulla, Caesar? This whole Classicistic yearning of the West, with its two high points in the Italian Renaissance and above all, in Winckelmann’s movement, was actually nothing but a literary-Romantic pose. If we had known less of Rome and more of Mecca, Napoleon’s title might have been Caliph instead of First Consul, but nothing would have inwardly altered. The endowing of words and names with magic significance is quite necessary and legitimate in religion, philosophy, science, and criticism, but is out of place in an outlook on History. Even in the Italian Renaissance, Francesco Pico wrote against the mania for the Classical: “Who will be afraid to confront Plato with Augustine, or Aristotle with Thomas, Albert, and Scotus?” Savonarola’s movement also had cultural, as well as religious, significance: into the bonfires went the Classical works. The whole Classicist tendency of the Italian Renaissance has been too heavily drawn: it was literary, academic, the possession of a few small circles, and those not the leading ones in thought or action. 

And yet this movement has been put forward as the “link” between two Cultures that have nothing in common in order to create a picture of History as a straight line instead of as the spiritually parallel, pure, independent, development of High Cultures. 

To the religious outlook, with its branches, philosophy and criticism, “Progress-philistinism,” and social ethics, facts figure only as proof, and lack any other interest. To the historical outlook, facts are the material sought after, and even doctrines, dogmas, and truths, are treated as simply facts. Previous Western ages were thus satisfied by the linear scheme, despite its complete independence of the facts of history. To the 20th century, however, with its center of gravity in politics, History is not a mere instrument of proving or illustrating any dogma, or socio-ethical “Progress” theory, but the source of our effective world-outlook. 

And so, in implicit obedience to the Spirit of the Age, the leading minds of the 20th century reject the old-fashioned, anti-factual, linear theory of History. In its place the Spirit of the Age has shown the actual structure of human history, the history of eight High Cultures, each an organism with its own individuality and destiny. The older type of philosophy of history forced the facts to prove some religious, ethical, or critical theory; the 20th century outlook takes its philosophy of history from the facts. 

The 20th century outlook is none the less subjective because it starts from facts; it is merely obeying the inner imperative of its own historical soul in seeing its History-picture thus. Our view is none the less peculiarly ours because it gives priority to facts; other types of men, outside the Western Culture, or beneath it, will never be able to understand it, any more than they can understand higher Western mathematics, Western technics, physics, or chemistry, Gothic architecture or the art of the fugue. This picture of History, absolutely compulsory as it is for the leading men of thought of action in the Western Civilization, is no compulsion for the masses that throng in the streets of the Western capitals. Historical relativity is, like physical relativity, the possession of a few leading minds. History is not experienced, nor made, in the streets, but on the heights. The number of men in the Western Civilization who were aware of the actual meaning of the Second World War is countable in thousands. Western philosophy, from the days of Anselm, has always been esoteric. No less so is the 20th century outlook, and correspondingly small is the number of those for whom it is a soul-necessity. But the number for whom the decisions of these few will be decisive is not numbered in hundreds, but in hundreds of millions. 

To the 20th century, the regarding of all previous human happening as merely introductory to, and preparatory to our own Western history, is simply immense naïvete. Evolution's that required just as long as our millennium of Western history are contracted into mere casual events; the men in these other Cultures are treated as though they were children, dimly trying to attain to one or another of our specifically Western ideas. But in each of these previous Cultures, the stage was reached and passed that we attained to in the 19th and 20th centuries: free science, social ethics, democracy, materialism, atheism, rationalism, class war, money, nationalism, annihilation-wars. Highly artificial living conditions,megalopolitan sophistication, social disintegration, divorce, degeneration of the old arts to mere formlessness— they exhibited all these familiar symptoms. 

The vast amount of historical knowledge of which the 20th century must take account— knowledge unearthed by the historical age which succeeded to the age of Criticism— can tolerate no arbitrary forcing of the facts of history into a preconceived scheme with three magical stages, which must remain three even though no one can agree where one begins and the other leaves off, and of which the third stage has been prolonged indefinitely since Professor Horn of Leyden announced in 1667 his discovery of “the Middle Ages.” 

The first formulation of the 20th century outlook on History only came with the First World War. Previously, only Breysig had definitely broken with the linear scheme, but his earlier work covered only a part of human history. It was left to Spengler, the philosopher of the age, to set forth the full outline of the structure of History. He himself was the first to recognize the superpersonal nature of his work, when he said that an historically essential idea is only in a limited sense the property of him to whose lot it falls to parent it. It was for him to articulate that at which everyone was groping. The view of others was limited by one or another specialist horizon, and their projects were consequently incomplete, one-sided, top-heavy. Like all products of genius, Spengler’s work seems perfectly obvious to those who come afterwards, and again, it was directed to those to come and not to contemporaries. Genius is always directed toward the Future; this is in its nature, and this is the explanation of the usual fate of all works of genius, political and economic, as well as artistic and philosophical, that they are understood in their grandeur and simplicity only by the after-world of their creators.

The Structure of History 

ONE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS ASSUMPTIONS of the linear scheme was the idea of the singularity of civilization. The concept “civilization” was used as though all highly symbolic Life, wherever and whenever it appeared, was really a manifestation of the same thing— “civilization.” “Civilization” outside of the West was imperfect, striving to be Western, stammering and fumbling. This “civilization” was something that previous ages had stupidly allowed to slip away, but somehow it was always found again, hidden in a book somewhere, and “passed on” to the Future. 

Again this was Rationalism: it assumed that men made their own history, and whatever happened was traceable to human excellence or to human mistakes. 

But, to the pinnacle of historical insight and self-conscious grand historical creativeness of deeds that is the 20th century, History is the record of the lives of eight High Cultures, each an organism, impressed with the principle of individuality, each thus a member of a Life-form. The type High Culture is a Life form at the peak of the organic hierarchy of which plants, animals, and man are the lower members. Each of the Cultures that we have seen is a member of this higher genus, an individual. Belonging as they do to one genus, they have common characteristics in their general habitue, their life-necessities, their technic of self-expression, their relation to landscape and population-streams, and their life span. 

The differences among the Cultures are in their souls, their individualities, and thus, despite their similar structure, their creations are in the highest degree dissimilar. In the organic hierarchy, the principle of individuality is manifested at an increasing level of concentration from plants, through animals, to man. Cultures are even more highly individual than men, and their creations are correspondingly less capable of any inward assimilation by other Cultures. 

With the passing of the Age of Materialism, the West knows once more that the development of an organism is the unfolding of a soul. The matter is the mere envelope, the vehicle of the expression of the spirit. It is this ancient and universal wisdom that is the primary source of the liberation of our History outlook from the darkness and oppressiveness of Mechanism. The events of a human life are the expressions of the soul of that human at its successive stages of unfolding. The identical outward occurrence is a different experience for each human being: an experience is a relationship between a soul and an outer event. Thus no two persons can have the same experience, because the identical event is quite different to each different soul. 

Similarly the reactions of each Culture-soul to externals of landscape, population-streams, and events and movements outside the Culture-area, are individual to each Culture. The religious experiences of each Culture are unique: each Culture has its own non-transferable way of experiencing and depicting the Godhead, and this religious style continues right through the life span of the Culture, and determines completely the philosophy, science, and also the anti-religious phenomena of the Culture. Each Culture has its own kind of atheism, as unique as its religion. The philosophy and science of each Culture never become independent of the religious style of the Culture; even Materialism is only a profane caricature of the basic religious feeling of the Culture. 

The choice of art-forms, and the content of the art-forms, are individual to each Culture. Thus the Western is the first to invent oil-painting, and the first to give primacy to music. The number-feeling of the Culture develops in each its own mathematics, which describes its own number-world, which again is inwardly non-transferable, even though external developments may be partially taken over, and then inwardly transformed by other Cultures. The State-idea is likewise individual, as are the Nation-idea, and the style of the final Imperium, the last political creation of the Culture. 

Each Culture has its own style in technics— weak and crude in the Classical and Mexican-Peruvian, colossal and earth-shaking in our own— its own war-style, its own relation to economics, its own history style, or organic tempo.

Each Culture has a different basic Morale, which influences its social structure, feelings, and manners, its intensity of inner imperative, and thus the ethical style of its great men. This basic morale determines the style of public life during the last great phase of the life of the Culture the Civilization. 

Not only are the Cultures differentiated from one another by their highly developed representation of the principle of individuality, but each age of each Culture has its own stamp, which sets it off from its preceding age, and from the succeeding. These differences loom larger to the humans within a Culture than the difference between one Culture and another. This is the optical illusion of greater size produced by nearness. To us the difference between 1850 and 1950 seems vast— to the history of 2150 it will be much less so. We have the feeling before we study history that 1300 and 1400 were spiritually much the same, but in fact, in that century there were spiritual developments as far-reaching as those between 1850 and 1950. 

Here again, the linear scheme distorted History utterly: it said “Ancient” and thought that thereby it was describing one thing, one general spirituality. But Egypt and Babylonia both had their own corresponding phenomena to our Crusades, Gothic religion, Holy Roman Empire, Papacy, Feudalism, Scholasticism, Reformation, Absolute State, Enlightenment, Democracy, Materialism, Class War, Nationalism, and annihilation wars. So did the others— the Chinese, Indian, Arabian, Classical, and Mexican. The extent of information available is quite different with regard to the various Cultures, but enough remains to show the structure of History. Between one age of Egyptian history and the next, there was as much difference as between 1700, the period of our Spanish Succession Wars, and 1800, our Napoleonic Wars. This illusion about distance finds an analogy in the spatial world; a distant mountain range looks smooth; nearer, it is rocky. 

The idea that “civilization” was one certain thing, rather than an organic life-phase of a Culture, was a part of the “Progress” ideology. This profane religion, its own peculiar mixture of Reason and Faith, satisfied a certain inner demand of the 19th century. Further research will probably discover it in other Cultures. It seems to be an organic necessity of Rationalism to feel that “things are getting better all the time.” Thus “progress” was a continuous moral improvement of “humanity,” a movement toward more and better “civilization.” The ideology was formulated slightly differently by each materialist, but it was not allowed to dispute that “Progress” occurred. To do so marked one as a “pessimist.” The ideal toward which there was continual “progress” was necessarily unattainable, for if it could be attained, “progress” would cease, and this was unthinkable. 

Such a picture fitted the Age of Criticism, but in an historical Age this picture becomes just one more object of interest, as being the expression of one certain life-stage of a certain Culture. It is on a par with the world-picture of imminent catastrophe of mid-14th century, the witch obsession of the 16th century, the Reason-worship of the 18th century. All these outlooks possess now only historical significance. What interests us is that once they were believed. But as for trying to force the old-fashioned “progress” ideology on the 20th century, such an attempt is ludicrous; whoever would try stamps himself as an anachronistic mediocrity. 

II 

The word history has been employed to cover all human events, those manifesting the development of a Culture, and those outside of any Culture. But the two classes of events have nothing in common. Man as a species is one Life-form, Culture-man is another. The word history therefore designates separate things in the two cases. 

In what is man as a species distinct from other Life-forms, such as plants and animals? Simply in his possession of a human soul. This soul shapes for man a different world from the world of other forms of life. Man’s world is a world of symbols. Things that for animals contain no meaning, and no mystery, have for man a symbolic significance. Outside of a High Culture, this symbolizing-necessity shows itself in the formation of primitive culture. Such cultures have an animistic religion, an ethic of tabu and totem, and social-political forms on the same level. Such cultures are not a unity, i.e., no single prime symbol is actualized in all the forms of the culture. These cultures are mere sums, collections of motives and tendencies. Nowhere is primitive man without some primitive culture of this type. Man as a pure animal does not exist. All animals have a purely economic-reproductive existence: their whole individual lives consist in the process of nourishing and reproducing themselves, their lives have no spiritual superstructure above this plane. 

Nevertheless, man’s life in primitivity, and in an area where a High Culture is fulfilling itself, are two incommensurable things. The difference is so vast as to constitute one of kind, and not of mere degree. Vis-à-vis the history of Culture-man, primitive man seems merely zoological. The history that Stanley found in progress on his African explorations was of the one kind, and Stanley himself represented the other kind. Similarly zoological is the history of the lake-dwellers in Switzerland, the Chinese today, the Arabs, Bushmen, Indians, Amerindians, Lapps, Mongols, and the countless other tribes, races, and peoples outside our Western Civilization. 

The animal is solely concerned with economics, primitive man sees hidden meanings in the world— but Culture-man regards his high symbols as the content of Life. A High Culture reshapes entirely the economic practice of the populations upon whom it sets its grip; it reduces economics to the bottom of the pyramid of life. To a High Culture, economics has the same significance that the function of eating has to an individual. Above economics are all the manifestations of the High Culture’s life: architecture, religion, philosophy, art, science, technics, education, politics, erotic, city-building, imperialism, society. The significance an individual has is the reflex of his personal connection with the symbols of the Culture. This valuation itself is produced by the Culture to an anti-cultural outlook such as the curious “materialistic interpretation of history,” any proletaire is worth more than Calderon, for Calderon was not a manual laborer, and therefore accomplished nothing in a world whose entire significance is economic. 

The difference between the history of man as a species and the history of man in the service of High Culture is that the first is devoid of grand meaning, and that only the second is the vessel of high significance. In high history, men risk all and die for an Idea; in primitivity there are no superpersonal ideas of this force, but only personal strivings, crude lust for booty or formless power. Consequently it would be an error to regard the difference as merely quantitative. The example of Genghis Khan shows this: the events he let loose were considerable in size, but in the cultural sense they have no significance whatever. There was no Idea in this sweeping descent of the followers of an adventurer. His conquests were fatal to hundreds of thousands, the empire he erected lasted generations beyond him, but it was simply there— it stood for nothing, represented nothing beyond itself. Napoleon’s empire on the other hand, brief though it was, was laden with symbolic meaning that is still at work in the minds of Western men, and that is, as we shall see, pregnant with the Future of the West. High Cultures create the greatest wars, but their significance is not merely that they open rivers of blood, but that these men fall in a struggle of ideas. 

After a High Culture has fulfilled itself, the populations in its former area return to the condition of primitivity, as the examples of India, China, Islam, and Egypt tell us. The world-cities empty themselves, the outer barbarians plunder them bare, and the men that are left are once more clans, tribes, nomads. When outer events do not destroy the remains utterly, the caste system of the last stage remains indefinitely, as in India and China, but it is the mere skeletal remains of the former Culture, which, like everything living, passes away, never to return. The memory of the Culture remains, but the attitude of the remaining populations toward its products is once more entirely primitive, unchanging, purely personal. 

The abandoned world-cities return once more to the landscapes which they once dominated. World cities that were once as proud as Berlin, London, and New York disappeared under jungle vegetation or the sands of the plain. This was the fate of Luxor, Thebes, Babylon, Pataliputra, Samarra, Uxmal, Tezcuco, Tenochtitlan. In the latter cases, even the names of the great cities have perished, and we call them after nearby villages. But it is an unimportant detail whether the city lies dead upon the surface, inhabited by a few clans who farm in the open spaces, fight in the streets, and shelter in the abandoned structures, or whether the sands shift over the crumbling remains.

Pessimism 

IT WAS a remarkably curious phenomenon that when the organically necessary historical outlook on History, replacing the religious and critical-philosophical outlooks of previous Western ages, appeared early in the 20th century, it was greeted by the day-before-yesterday thinkers with a cry of “Pessimism.” By this word it was apparently thought possible to conjure away the spirit of the coming age, and summon to new life the dead spirit of an age that had passed away. To abstract inorganic thought this feat did not seem considerable, since it regarded History as the field wherein one could do whatever he wanted to make the Past dance to his own tune. 

The word pessimism was a polemical word— it described an attitude of general despair, which was supposed to color opinions and assessments of facts. Any person who seriously used this word showed thereby that he was willing to treat a world-historical philosophy in an electioneering fashion. Obviously an asserted fact should be examined entirely independently of the attitude of him asserting it. The whole pessimism cry is thus an ad hominem argument, and worthless. Facts are not pessimistic or optimistic, sane or insane— an optimist may assert a fact, a madman may, a pessimist may. Describing the man who uttered the fact still leaves entirely open the correctness or incorrectness of the fact. Its purely ad hominem nature was the first weakness in the “Pessimism” view of the 20th century outlook on History. 

Pessimism only describes an attitude, and not facts, and hence is entirely subjective. The attitude toward life that Nietzsche continually belabored as “Pessimism” in its turn described Nietzsche as a pessimist, and both were undoubtedly correct. If someone else thinks my plans are doomed, I consider him a pessimist, from my standpoint. Similarly, if I think his aspirations will come to naught, he thinks me a pessimist. We are both correct. 

The “Progress” ideologists, smug in their secure mental armor, insulated from all contact with Reality, naturally felt it to be insulting in the extreme when it was suggested that their particular Faith also had a life span, was also, like all previous world-pictures, merely a description of a particular soul of a certain age, and thus was destined to pass away. To say that the “Progress” religion would come to an end with the Age whose inner demands it satisfied was to deny the truth of this religion, since it claimed to be a universal description of all human history. What was worse was that the 20th century outlook on History was formulated in such a strict factual way as to be compelling to the 20th century mind. This meant that catchwords had to be employed against it, since no other form of disputation would avail. With the single word “Pessimism;” it was hoped to strangle the 20th century outlook on History. 

It would be mistaken to put this down to the malice of the “Progress” religionists. No age submits quietly to the Spirit of the coming age. 

The witchcraft religionists certainly did not agree with the first materialists who denied the very existence of witches. The conflict between the Established and the Becoming goes on continually, and the Becoming always prevails. It does so, not because it is true, and the Established was false, but because both were the life stage of an organism, a Culture. Truth and falsehood have as little to do with this process as they do with the transformation of the boy into a youth, the youth into a man, the man into a dotard. The grandson is no more true than the grandfather, yet he will prevail, because of the organic advantage he has. Similarly does the historical attitude of the 20th century supplant the 19th century religion of Materialism. Materialism, Rationalism, “Progress,” are all worn out, but the historical attitude of the 20th century is full of vigor and promise, eagerness to set itself to its great factual tasks, to create its great deeds. This organic necessity alone gives it its compelling quality. No one in this gigantic age when nations are world powers in one decade, and colonies in the next, can conscientiously maintain even before himself any shallow and infantile pretense that underneath all these cataclysms there is the meaning of a steady “moral improvement” of “humanity.”

Some men have been rational for short periods— this is the sum total of the appearance of Reason in History. But such men have never made History, for it is irrational. The pretense of Reason being the meaning of History was itself irrational, since it was a product of History. 

When the worship of Reason was instituted in Revolutionary France as a religion— a Faith— a fille de joie was crowned as the Goddess of Reason. Even Rationalism bears the stamp of Life— it is irrational. 

The meaning of the word pessimism must be further laid bare. As we have seen, the word is subjective, and thus describes everybody, if he has a conviction that something is doomed. Suppose I say— Imperial Rome inwardly decayed, and within a few centuries the Roman idea was completely dead. Is this pessimism? My grandfather is dead— am I a pessimist to say so? Someday I shall die— pessimism? Everything living must die— pessimism? To Life belongs Death— pessimism? Is there any example of an individual which has moved completely outside the organic sequence of that Life-form to which he belongs, and remained constantly at one life-stage for such long time-periods as to justify the conclusion that it was a case of Life without Death? An example would be a man who lived for— not 100 years, for we all believe such a man will eventually die— but two or three hundred years, and continually at one life stage, say the biological age of 65 years. 

We know no such man, no such life-form. The criers of “pessimism” will call this pessimism, no doubt. We should keep up the pretense before ourselves all of our individual lives that we shall not die, for to admit mortality is pessimism. 

History discloses seven precedent High Cultures to us. Their gestation-periods were morphologically identical, as were their birth-pangs, their first life-activities, their growth, their mature stages, their great Civilization-crises, their final life-forms, the gradual relaxing, the coming to each of a time when one had to say, looking at the landscape where the mighty being had fulfilled itself, that it was no longer, that it had died. This realization gives extreme pain to the “Pessimism” wailers, and I know of no remedy for their pain. These seven Cultures are dead— it would have been much more remarkable if they had gone on forever. 

II

But our Civilization is itself a stage of a High Culture, the Culture of the West. Its millennium of history shows that it is an individual organism belonging to the Life-form High Culture. Can fact-thinkers pretend that it belongs to the Life-form but has no Life-span? 

The question can now be formulated: exactly how is it “Pessimism” to say that since seven High Cultures fulfilled themselves that an eighth will also? If this is “Pessimism,” then anyone admitting his own mortality is inevitably a “Pessimist.” The alternative to pessimism thus becomes idiocy. 

However pessimism is an attitude, and if someone says that to admit the fact that Life is fulfilled in Death is pessimism, he shows something about himself. He shows his own cowardly fear of death, his entire lack of heroism, of respect for the mysteries of Being and Becoming, his shallow materialism. One must never forget that these same people are the ones who write and read, in their book and magazine press, a literature on indefinitely prolonging the life-span of the human species. Again, this shows something about them. How they delight in juggling insurance statistics in such a way as to make them think they are living longer! This is their valuation of life: the longest life is the best. To this mentality, a short and heroic life is sad, not inspiring. Heroism generally is thus merely foolish, since indefinitely prolonged life is the aim of “Progress.” 

In the Gothic religious times, the Western form of the idea of immortality of the soul was formed and developed. With the age of Materialism, this became caricatured into the immortality of the body. The doctor of medicine became the priest of the new religion, and a whole literature glorified him as the ultimate human type, since he was saving life. And yet, shocking though it is to these people, Death continues to accompany Life. 20th century wars take more lives than 19th century wars. The generations continue their procession to the grave, and even the most cowardly materialist, who can never admit that anything living will ever die, goes the way of the materialists in the other eight Cultures. 

To people who live in a nameless terror of personal death, naturally the idea of the passing away of a super personal soul is also horrible and frightening. Materialists have never been respecters of facts— whatever was not measurable by their ruler did not exist. Historical facts are per se uninteresting to a rationalist outlook, which begins with a critical principle, and not with facts, and it was hardly to be expected that a view of history resting on five millennia of history rather than on a simple philosophical platitude would take them along with it. 

It is curious that the Pessimism-wailers, who denied the Culture would ever die, also denied the organic nature of a Culture. In other words, they also denied it lives. Their materialism compelled them to the last, their cowardice to the first. Most important about all their attitudes was that they did not understand the central idea of the 20th century outlook. The hundreds of volumes that they wrote against it each one echoing the magic word “Pessimism”— show that distressingly clearly. On every page is a fundamental misunderstanding of the great thesis. By their lack of comprehension, they provided another proof of the accuracy of the outlook, for the view of one age only reflects the soul of that age, and the 20th century outlook was definitely not adapted to their 19th century outlook. 

One great historical fact could have given them consolation: the passing of this Culture, which was not alive, and also would never die, according to them, would mean little to them in particular. In the first place, a Culture is not born, nor does it die in a few years; these processes are measured in generations and centuries. Thus no man could ever see a Culture appear or disappear, and no materialist would ever be obliged to undergo the painful experience of watching it die. More important, the lives of the ordinary people, on the everyday plane of life, are little affected by the presence of the Culture or the Civilization, during and after its passing, the life of the ordinary people, in its stark fundamentals, is simply life. The great numbers vanish, since they were only there to perform the last great life-tasks of the Civilization; the artificial living-conditions go, the great wars cease, the great demands, the great deeds. Pacifism— organic pacifism, not ideological pacifism, which stirs up wars— is the end-condition of a Culture. 

Now then, the materialists are exclusively among the ordinary people— what concern have they with great things like heroism, great wars, and imperialism? Therefore the end of a Culture should beckon to them. Actually, however, their whole terror rested on an illusion. It would be as foolish for someone now to worry about the events of 2300 A.D. as it would have been for Frederick the Great to worry about the conditions of 1900. He could not have imagined those exact conditions, hence he could not have planned for them, hence it would have been foolish for him to dread them. They were to be the concern of other people. The day’s demands, as Goethe said, constitute one’s immediate duty. We living in Europe today have a certain task imposed upon us by the situation, the times, and our own inner imperative. The most we can do about forming the remote Future is to do our utmost in giving to this age the strong and manly form it demands. The generation after the next will have its task also, and the only way we can make ourselves effective in their age will be so to conduct ourselves now that our deeds and example will live after us. 

To a materialist, this is pessimism. 

III

There are many intellectuals who stop at the title of leading works of an historical age: these gathered the basis for their charge of pessimism against the 20th century world-outlook from the title of the first book fully to outline it: The Decline of the West. Decline had a definitely pessimistic sound to these gentlemen; they needed no more. In his essay Pessimism? (1921), Spengler mentioned that some people had confused the sinking of a Culture with the sinking of a steamship, whereas, as applied to a Culture, the idea of a catastrophe was not contained in the word. He explains further that this title was decided upon in 1911, when, in his words, “the shallow optimism of the Darwinistic age lay over the West European-American world.” He prepared the book, in which he set forth the thesis of an age of annihilation-wars for the immediate future, for the coming age, and chose the title to contradict the prevailing optimism. In 1921, he wrote, he would choose a title that would contradict the equally shallow pessimism then prevailing. 

If pessimism be defined as seeing nothing more to be done, it does not touch a philosophy which sets forth task after task remaining to the Western Civilization. Apart from the political and economic, to which this work is devoted, Western physics, chemistry and technics all have their peaks before them, as have also archaeology and historical philosophy. The formulation of a legal system freed from philology and conceptualizing is also a need. National economy needs to be approached and organized thoroughly in the 20th century spirit, and above all, an education must be created, in the grand sense of consciously training the coming generations, in the full light of the historic necessity of our Future, for the great life tasks of the Civilization. 

The cry of “Pessimism” is dying down— the 20th century outlook on History surveys from its historical peak and to its own unique, vast, historical horizons, the life-courses of eight High Cultures accomplished, and even looks boldly and confidently into its own Culture’s future, yet to be accomplished. Readers in 1950 have forgotten, and readers in 2050 will possibly have no way of finding out, that before the 20th century outlook on History appeared, unrealized history was regarded as a blank tablet on which man might write whatever he wished. This was of course the instinctive attitude of no single man of action— they have to know better in order to accomplish the veriest trifle, but even they had to maintain the pretense that the Future was carte blanche. 

No one thinks in this fashion during the second half of the 20th century; the bleating of the rationalists and the whimpering of the materialists are growing fainter. Even they are now talking about History, instead of about their old platitudes. Even their press now fits out its herd of readers with a history outlook. History begins in 1870, and it ends after the next war; each war is portrayed as the last. This History-picture did service for more than a generation, and its very existence in materialistic journalism is a sign of the increasingly historical attitude of the age. After the First World War, a “League of Nations” was established to bring about “World Peace,” and there was a considerable number of persons in the Western Civilization who took it seriously. Within the short space of one generation, however, a second “League” was founded after a Second World War, but this time, owing to the inner victory in the West of the 20th century world-outlook which had occurred meanwhile, almost no one looked upon the “League” as anything other than a localization of diplomatic war-preparations between the two remaining powers. We have come a long way from the old “Progress” days. 

The tables are turned on the wailers of “Pessimism.” Actually they are merely the representatives of the Spirit of an Age that has gone forever. Thus they are anachronistic in this Age, and to the extent that they try to intervene in its Life, they must fight against its every expression-tendency. They can only negate the Future with their hopeless attempt to revive the Past. Does not this make them pessimists ? 

The definitive word can now be said about pessimism, and about optimism, for the two are inseparable as concepts. If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. Is there any need to choose between them? They are twin soul-diseases. Between them lies realism, which wants to know what is, what must be done, how it can be done. Realism is historical thinking, and it is also political thinking. Realism does not approach the world with a preconceived principle to which things ought to submit— it is this prime stupidity which begets both pessimism and optimism. If it looks as though things will not fit, so to declare is pessimism. Optimism continues to pretend that they do, despite the entire course of History, to the contrary. Of the two diseases, optimism is more dangerous to the soul, for it is more blind. Pessimism, by not being afraid to affirm the unpleasing, is at least capable of seeing, and may yield to a flaring-up of healthy instincts.

Every captain must prepare for both victory and defeat, and tactically, the latter part of his plan is more important, and no captain would refrain from taking measures to apply in defeat because someone said to him that this was pessimism. Let us go further— a hundred odd Americans were surrounded in 1836 in the Alamo by Mexican armies numbering thousands. Was it pessimistic for them to realize that their position was hopeless? But there happened something which the materialists— the real pessimists— can never understand. The members of the tiny garrison did not allow the obvious hopelessness of the situation to affect their personal conduct— every man chose to fight on rather than surrender. They thought rather of what was left to do than of the ultimate annihilation.

This was also the attitude of the Kamikaze pilots who in the Second World War drove their explosive laden airplanes on to enemy ships of war. Not only is this attitude entirely outside any stupid optimism pessimism scheme, but it is the essence of heroism itself. Fear of death does not prevent the hero from doing what has to be done. The 20th century has this heroic attitude once more, and it thinks of its task, and not of the ultimate end of all Life in Death. Least of all does it fear death so much, both individual death and the fulfillment of the Civilization within which we must actualize our possibilities, that it attempts to deny Death in any way. It wants to live Life, not cringe before Death. Optimism and pessimism are for cowards, weaklings, fools, and stupid persons, incapable of appreciating the mystery, power, and beauty of Life. They shrink from sternness and renunciation, and escape from the brutality of facts into dreams of immortality of the body, and indefinite perpetuation of the world-outlook of the 19th century.

As I write— 1948— these cowardly pessimists lord it over the submerged Western Civilization, propped up by extra-European forces. They pretend that all is well, now that Europe is the spoils for powers from without, sunk to the level of India and China. The 20th century spirit, however, which they hate because it is young and full of Life, intends to sweep them one day soon into History’s dust-bin, whither they were long since consigned. Theirs is the attitude— Do nothing. And yet they have the temerity to brand the representatives of the 20th century spirit with the positive attitude of accomplishment as “Pessimists.” The materialists and Liberals talk of “return” to better conditions— always return. The new spirit commands: Forward to our greatest Age of all.

This age and its spirit would not shrink from entering upon its task of building the Empire of the West even if it were told that the outer forces are too strong, that they will never succeed. It prefers to die on its feet rather than live on its knees, like the materialists and other cowards who now make themselves serviceable to the outsiders in their great task of looting and destroying the Western Civilization.

The great ethical imperative of this age is individual truth-to-self, both for the Civilization and its leading persons. To this imperative, an unfavorable situation could never bring about an adaptation of one’s self to the demands of the outsider, merely in order to live in slavish peace. One asserts himself, determined on personal victory, against whatever odds exist. The promise of success is with the man who is determined to die proudly if it is no longer possible to live proudly.

 The Civilization-Crisis 

ALL THE CULTURES arrived at the point in their development when their possibilities for culture— in the narrower sense— were fulfilled. The Life-directions of religion, philosophy, and the arts of form, were fully expressed and formed definitively. The Counter-Reformation was the period of the definitive shaping of Western religious formative potentialities, and thence-forward religion was on the defensive against profane tendencies, which gradually increased and finally, with the turn of the 19th century, gained the upper hand. Kant is the high point of Western possibilities in inorganic philosophy, as was his contemporary Goethe for organic philosophy. Mozart is the high point of music, the art that the Western Culture chose as its most perfect for its own soul.

Naturally the Culture had always had both an inner and outer life; politics and war had always continued, since they are inseparable from the life of Culture-man. But in the first centuries of the Culture— say until 1400— Religion had dominated the total Cultural life. Gothic architecture, Gothic sculpture, glass-painting and fresco— all these arts had served religious expression, and these centuries may be called the Age of Religion. This period yielded to new tendencies, less inward, reflected also in the greater development of trade and economic production. The new tendencies are more urban; they contain more adaptation to the external world, but they are still primarily inward. The arts pass into the custody of “Great Masters,” and become emancipated from religion. The maturity of the Culture shows itself in its development at this time of its greatest and most refined art. In the West, this was music; in the Classical, it was sculpture. 

The Reformation and Counter-Reformation are both steps away from the Age of Religion. Philosophy becomes independent of theology, and natural science challenges dogmas of Faith. The basic attitude toward the world is still sacred, but the illuminated foreground widens constantly. This period is the Baroque in our Culture, lasting from 1500 to 1800, the Ionic in the Classical. 

During these centuries, the politics reflected the strict formative stage of the Culture. The struggle for political power was strictly within the bounds imposed by the Culture-soul. Armies were small, professional; war was the possession of the nobility; peace treaties were arrived at by negotiation and compromise; honor was present at every decision of politics or war. 

The later Baroque produced the Age of “Enlightenment.” Reason was now felt as all-powerful, and to challenge its all mightiness became as unthinkable as it would have been to challenge God in Gothic times. The English philosophers from Locke onward, and the French Encyclopedists who adopted their ideas, were the custodians of the spirit of this age. 

By 1800, the externalizing tendency has prevailed completely over the old inwardness of the strict Culture. “Nature” and “Reason” are the new gods; the outer world is regarded as primary. From having examined his own soul, and having expressed its formative possibilities to the limit in the inner world of religion, philosophy, and art, Culture-man now finds his imperative directed to subjecting the outer world to himself. 

The great symbol of this transition in our Culture is Napoleon, in the Classical, Alexander. They represented the victory of Civilization over Culture. 

Civilization is in one way a denial of the Culture, in another way it is the sequel. It is organically necessary, and all the Cultures went through this stage. This present work is concerned throughout with the problems of Civilization in general, and of our immediate problem for the period 1950-2000 in particular. Therefore it is not necessary to do more than present in this place a bare outline of the significance to the organism of the Civilization-phase. 

With the triumph of Reason comes an immense liberating effect on the Culture-populations. The feelings that were formerly expressed only in strict forms, whether in art, war, cabinet-politics, or philosophy, are now given free rein, increasingly independent of Culture-bounds. Rousseau for instance advocated the doing away with all Culture, and the descent of Culture-man to the purely animal plane of economics and reproduction. Art develops increasingly away from strict form, from Beethoven to our day. The ideal of the Beautiful yields finally to the ideal of the Ugly. Philosophy becomes pure social ethics, when it is not a coarse and crude metaphysics of materialism. Economics, formerly merely the foundation of the great structure, now becomes the focus of immense energy. It too succumbs to Reason, and in this field, Reason formulates the quantitative measure of value, Money. 

Reason applied to politics produced Democracy; applied to war, it produced the mass army to replace the professional one, and the dictate instead of the treaty. The authority and dignity of the Absolute State are felt as tyranny by the new life-tendencies, and in heavy battles, the forces of Money, Economics, and Democracy overcome the State. For its responsible, public, leadership, is substituted the irresponsible, private, rule of anonymous groups, classes, and individuals, whose interests the parliaments serve. The psychology of monarchs is replaced by the psychology of crowds and mobs, the new base for power of the man of ambition. 

Production, technics, trade, public power, and— above all— population-numbers increase fantastically. These numbers are produced by the enormous final life-task of the Culture, namely the subjection of its known world to its domination. In an area where formerly there were 80 millions there are now 260 millions. 

The great common denominator of the Civilization ideas is mobilization. The masses of the Culture populations, and the masses whom they conquer, the earth itself, and the power of intellectual ideals— all are mobilized. 

II 

From the standpoint of the whole life of the organism this stage is a crisis, for the whole idea of the Culture itself is attacked, and the custodians of the Culture must wage a battle of more than two centuries against inner attacks, in class war. Down beneath the Culture, the idea awakens in the minds of intellectuals that this Culture is a thing that must be done away with, that man is an animal and is corrupted by development of his soul. Philosophies appear, denying the existence of anything but matter; life is defined as a physico-chemical process; its twin-urges are economic and reproductive; anything above this level is sinful. Both from the economic leaders and from the class-warriors comes the doctrine that all life is nothing but economics. From self-styled “psychologists” comes the doctrine that life is nothing but reproduction. 

But the strength of the organism, even in crisis, is too great for a few intellectuals and their mobs to destroy it, and it goes its way. In the Western Civilization, the expansive tendency reached the point where by 1900, 18/20 of the surface of the earth was controlled politically from Western capitals. And this development merely brought an aggravation of the crisis, for this power-will of the West gradually awakened the slumbering masses of the outer world to political activity. 

Before the inner war of classes had been liquidated, the outer war of races had begun. Annihilation wars and World Wars, continuous internal strain in the form of unrelenting class-war, which regards outer war merely as a means of increasing its demands, the revolt of the colored races against the Western Civilization— these are the forms which this terrible crisis takes in the 20th century. 

The peak of this long crisis exists now, in the period 1950-2000, and possibly in these very years will be decided forever the question whether the West is to fulfill its last life-phase. The proud Civilization which in 1900 was master of 18/20 of the earth’s surface, arrived at the point in 1945, after the suicidal Second World War, where it controlled no part whatever of the earth. World power for all great questions was decided in two outer capitals, Washington and Moscow. The smaller questions of provincial administration were left to the nations-become-colonies of the West, but in power-questions, the regimes based in Russia and America decided all. Where formal control was left with Europe, as in Palestine,actual control was retained in Washington. The food-rations, trade-union policy, leaders, and tasks of the former Western nations were decided upon outside of Europe. 

In 1900, the State-system of Europe reacted as a unit when the negative will of Asia thought, by the Boxer rebellion, to drive out the Imperialism of the West from China. Western armies from the leading States moved in, and smashed the revolt. Less than half a century later, extra-European armies are moving freely about Europe, armies containing Negroes, Mongols, Turkestani, Kirghizians, Americans, Armenians, colonials and Asiatics of all areas. How did this happen? 

Quite obviously, through the inner division of the West. This division was not material— material cannot divide men if their minds agree. No, it was spiritual division that brought Europe into the dust. Half of Europe had a completely different attitude toward Life, a different valuation of Life, from the other half. The two attitudes were respectively the 19th century outlook, and the 20th century outlook. The division continues, and the amount of food a man in the Western Civilization can eat is dependent on the decision of someone in Moscow or Washington. When the spiritual division of Europe comes to an end the extra-European powers will be unable to hold down the strong-willed populations of Europe. 

The first step in action is thus the liquidation of the spiritual division of Europe. There is only one basis on which this can be done; there is only one Future, the organic Future. The only changes that can be brought about in a Culture are those which its life-stage necessitates. The 20th century outlook is synonymous with the Future of the West, the perpetuation of the 19th century outlook means the continuation of the domination of the West by Culture-distorters and barbarians. The task of the present work is the presentation of all the fundamentals of the 20th century outlook necessary as the framework for comprehending and thorough action. First is the Idea— not an ideal which can be summed up in a catchword, or one which can be explained to an alien, but a living, breathing, wordless feeling, which already exists in all Westerners, articulate in a very few, inchoate in most. This Idea, in its wordless grandeur, its irresistible imperative, must be felt, and thus only men of the West can assimilate it. The alien will understand it as little as he has always understood Western creations and Western codes. In his victory parade in Moscow in 1945, the barbarian exhibited his Western captive slaves to the jeering crowds of his cities, and made them drag their national flags behind them in the dust. If any Westerner thinks that the barbarian makes nice distinctions between the former nations of the West, he is incapable of understanding the feelings of populations outside a High Culture toward that Culture. Tomorrow the captive slaves offered up to the annihilation-instincts of the Moscow mobs may be drawn from Paris, London, Madrid, as well as from Berlin. A continuation of the spiritual division of the West makes this not only possible but absolutely inevitable. Both the outer forces are working for the continued division of the West; within they are helped by the least worthy elements in Europe. This is addressed however to the only people that matter— the Westerners who can feel the Imperative of the Future working within them. 

It is necessary that their world-outlook be the same in all its fundamentals, and we know in this historical age that the prevailing spirituality of an age is a function of its soul, and that comparatively little latitude is allowed in its necessary formulation. Therefore, the present work contains not arguments, but commands of the Spirit of the Age. These thoughts and values are necessary for us. They are not personal, but super-personal and compulsory for men who intend to do something with their lives. 

Our action-task is dictated for us by the fact that the soil of our Civilization is occupied by the outsider. Our inner imperative and outlook on Life is determined for us by the Age. A part of the outlook of any age is simply the negation of the outlook of the previous age. Each age has to assert its new spirit against its predecessor, which would continue, even in the stage of rigor mortis, to dominate the spiritual landscape of the Culture. In establishing itself, the new spirit must deny the hostile old one. In a substantial part, therefore, our 20th century outlook is the negative of the 19th century materialism. Having destroyed this dank ruin, it erects over it its own, appropriate, view of the world and Life.

Since this is written for those whose world-view is researched to its very foundations, the preliminary, negative, aspect must be equally thorough. The world view of the millions is the task of journalism, but those who think independently have an inner necessity for a comprehensive picture. The great foundations of the old outlook were Rationalism and Materialism. They will be completely examined in this work, but here it is proposed to treat only three thought-systems, Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, products of materialistic thought, all of which were the focus of great spiritual energy in the 19th century, and which, continuing to have a vogue in the early 20th century, contributed greatly to lead Europe into its present abyss.

Darwinism 

ONE OF THE MOST fruitful discoveries of the 20th century was the metaphysics of nations. The unveiling of the Riddle of History showed that nations are different manifestations of the soul of the High Cultures. They exist only in Cultures, they have their life span for political purposes, and possess— vis-à-vis the other nations of the Culture— individuality. Each great nation is given an Idea, a life-mission, and the history of the nation is the actualizing of this Idea. This Idea, again, must be felt, and cannot be directly defined. Each Idea, to actualize which a given nation was chosen by the Culture, is also a stage of the development of the Culture. Thus Western History presents during the recent centuries, a Spanish period, a French period, an English period. They correspond to Baroque, Rococo, and early Civilization. These nations owed their spiritual and political supremacy during these years solely to the fact that they were the custodians of the Spirit of the Age. With the passing of the Age, these custodians of its Spirit lost their spiritually dominating position in the Culture. 

The early Civilization was the English period of the West, and all the thought and activity of the whole Civilization was on the English model. All nations embarked upon economic imperialism of the English type. All thinkers became Anglicized intellectually. English thought-systems ruled the West, systems which reflected the English soul, English life-conditions, and English material conditions. Prime among these systems was Darwinism, which became popular, and thus politically effective. 

Darwin himself was a follower of Malthus, and his system implies Malthusianism as a foundation. Malthus taught that population increase tends to outrun increase of food supply, that this represented an economic danger, and that “checks” on this population increase alone can prevent it from destroying a nation, such as epidemics and wars, unhealthy living conditions and poverty. Malthusianism expressly regards care for the poor, the aged, and orphans, as a mistake. 

A word on this curious philosophy; first it has no correspondence whatever to facts, and therefore is not valid for the 20th century. Statistically it has no basis, spiritually it shows complete incomprehension of the prime fact of Destiny, Man, and History— namely that the soul is primary, and that matter is governed by soul-conditions. Every man is the poet of his own History, and every nation of its History. A rising population shows the presence of a life-task, a declining population points to insignificance. This philosophy would legitimate a man’s existence by whether or not he is born into an adequate food-area! His gifts, his life task, his Destiny, his soul, are put at naught. It is one example of the great philosophic tendency of materialism: the animalization of Culture-man. 

Malthusianism taught that the food-population ratio imposed a continuous struggle for existence among men. This “struggle for existence” became a leading-idea for Darwinism. The other leading ideas of Darwinism are found in Schopenhauer, Erasmus Darwin, Henry Bates, and Herbert Spencer. Schopenhauer in 1835 set forth a Nature-picture containing the struggle for self-preservation, human intellect as a weapon in the struggle, and sexual love as unconscious selection according to the interest of the species. In the 18th century, Erasmus Darwin had postulated adaptation, heredity, struggle, and selfprotection as principles of evolution. Bates formulated before Darwin the theory of Mimicry, Spencer the theory of descent, and the powerful tautological catchword “survival of the fittest” to describe the results of the “struggle.” 

This is only the foreground, for actually the road from Darwin back to Calvin is quite clear: Calvinism is a religious interpretation of the “survival of the fittest” idea, and it calls the fit the “elected.” Darwinism makes this election-process mechanical-profane instead of theological-religious: selection by Nature instead of election by God. It remains purely English in the process, for the national religion of England was an adaptation of Calvinism. 

The basic idea of Darwinism— evolution— is as little novel as the particular theories of the system. Evolution is the great central idea of the philosophy of the 19th century. It dominates every leading thinker and every system: Schopenhauer, Proudhon, Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche, Mill, Ibsen, Shaw. These thinkers differ in their explanation of the purpose and technique of evolution; none of them question the central idea itself. With some of them it is organic, with most purely mechanical. 

Darwin’s system has two aspects, of which only one is treated here, for only one was effective. This was Darwinism as a popular philosophy. As a scientific arrangement it had considerable qualifications, and no one paid any attention to these when converting it to a journalistic world-outlook. As the latter, it had a sweeping vogue, and was effective as a part of the world-picture of the age. 

The system shows its provenance as a product of the Age of Criticism in its teleological assumptions. Evolution has purpose— the purpose of producing man, civilized man, English man— in the last analysis, Darwinians. It is anthropomorphic— the “aim of evolution” is not to produce bacilli, but humanity. It is free trade capitalism, in that this struggle is economic, every man for himself, and competition decides which life-forms are best. It is gradual and parliamentary, for continual “progress” and adaptation, exclude revolutions and catastrophes. It is utilitarian, in that every change in a species is one that has a material use. The human soul itself— known as the “brain” in the 19th century— is only a tool by which a certain type of monkey advanced himself to man ahead of his fellow-monkeys. Teleology again: man became man in order that he might be man. It is orderly; natural selection proceeds according to the rules of artificial breeding in practice on English farms. 

II 

As a world view, Darwinism cannot of course be refuted, since Faith is, always has been, and always will be, stronger than facts. Nor is it important to refute it as a picture of the world, since as such it no longer influences any but day-before-yesterday thinkers. However, as a picture of the facts, it is grotesque, from its first assumptions to its last conclusions. 

In the first place, there is no “Struggle for existence” in nature; this old Malthusian idea merely projected Capitalism on to the animal world. Such struggles for existence as do occur are the exception; the rule in Nature is abundance. There are plenty of plants for the herbivores to eat, and there are plenty of herbivores for the carnivores to eat. Between the latter there can hardly be said to be “struggle,” since only the carnivore is spiritually equipped for war. A lion making a meal of a zebra portrays no “struggle” between two species, unless one is determined so to regard it. Even so, he must concede that it is not physically, mechanically, necessary for the carnivores to kill other animals. They could as well eat plants— it is the demand of their animal souls however to live in this fashion, and thus, even if one were to call their lives struggles, it would not be imposed by “Nature” but by the soul. It becomes thus, not a “struggle for existence,” but a spiritual necessity of being one’s self. 

The capitalistic mentality, engaged in a competition to get rich, quite naturally pictured the animal world also as engaged in an intensive economic contest. Both Malthusianism and Darwinism are thus capitalistic outlooks, in that they place economics in the center of Life, and regard it as the meaning of Life. 

Natural selection was the name given to the process by which the “unfit” died out to give place to the “fit.” Adaptation was the name given to the process by which a species gradually changed in order to be more fit for the struggle. Heredity was the means by which these adaptations were saved for the species. 

As a factual picture, this is easier to refute than it is to prove, and factual biological thinkers, both Mechanists and Vitalists, like Louis Agassiz, Du Bois-Reymond, Reinke, and Driesch rejected it from its appearance. The easiest refutation is the palaeontological. Fossil deposits— found in various parts of the earth— must represent the possibilities generally. Yet they disclose only stable specie-forms, and disclose no transitional types, which show a species “evolving” into something else. And then, in a new fossil hoard, a new species appears, in its definitive form, which remains stable. The species that we know today, and for past centuries, are all stable, and no case has ever been observed of a species “adapting” itself to change its anatomy or physiology, which “adaptation” then resulted in more “fitness” for the “struggle for existence,” and was passed on by heredity, with the result of a new species. 

Darwinians cannot get over these facts by bringing in great spaces of time, for palaeontology has never discovered any intermediate types, but only distinct species. Nor are the fossil animals which have died out any simpler than present-day forms, although the course of evolution was supposed to be from simple to complex Life-forms. This was crude anthropomorphism— man is complex, other animals are simple, they must be tending toward him, since he is “higher” biologically. 

Calling Culture-man a “higher” animal still treats him as an animal. Culture-man is a different world spiritually from all animals, and is not to be understood by referring him to any artificial materialistic scheme. 

If this picture of the facts were correct, species ought to be fluid at the present time. They should be turning into one another. This is, of course, not so. There should actually be no species, but only a surging mass of individuals, engaged in a race to reach— man. But the “struggle,” again, is quite inconclusive. The “lower” forms, simpler— less fit?— have not died out, have not yielded to the principle of Darwinian evolution. They remain in the same form they have had for— as the Darwinians would say— millions of years. Why do they not “evolve” into something “higher”? 

The Darwinian analogy between artificial selection and natural selection is also in opposition to the facts. The products of artificial selection such as barnyard fowls, racing dogs, race horses, ornamental cats, and song-canaries, would certainly be at a disadvantage against natural varieties. Thus artificial selection has only been able to produce less fit life-forms. 

Nor is Darwinian sexual selection in accordance with facts. The female does not by any means always choose the finest and strongest individual for a mate, in the human species, or in any other. 

The utilitarian aspect of the picture is also quite subjective— i.e., English, capitalistic, parliamentarian— for the utility of an organ is relative to the use sought to be made of it. A species without hands has no need of hands. A hand that slowly evolved would be a positive disadvantage over the “millions of years” necessary to perfect the hand. Furthermore, how did this process start? For an organ to be utile, it must be ready; while it is being prepared, it is inutile. But if it is inutile, it is not Darwinian, for Darwinism says evolution is utilitarian. 

Actually all the technics of Darwinian evolution are simply tautological. Thus, within the species it is individuals which have a predisposition to adapt themselves that do so. Adaptation presupposes adaptation. 

The process of selection affects those specimens with definite aptitudes which make them worthy of selection, in other words, they have already been selected. Selection presupposes selection. 

The problem of descent in the Darwinian picture is treated as finding the interrelations of the species. Having assumed their interrelationship, it then finds they are interrelated, and proves the interrelationship thus. Descent presupposes descent. 

The utility of an organ is a way of saying it works for this species. Utility thus presupposes the existence of the very species which has the organ, but lacking that organ. The facts however, have never shown a species to pick up a certain missing organ, which seemed necessary. A Life-form needs a certain organ because it needs it. The organ is utile because it is utile. 

The naive, tautological, doctrine of utility never asked “Utility for what?” That which serves duration might not serve strength. Utility is not a simple thing, but entirely relative to what already exists. Thus it is the inner demands of a life-form which determine what it would like to have, what would be useful to it. The soul of the lion and his power go together. The hand of man and his brain go together. No one can say that the strength of the lion causes him to live the way he does, nor that the hand of man is responsible for his technical achievements. It is the soul in each case which is primary.

This primacy of the spiritual inverts the Darwinian materialism on the doctrine of utility. A lack can be utile: the lack of one sense develops others; physical weakness develops intelligence. In man and in animals alike, the absence of one organ stimulates others to compensatory activity— this is often observed in endocrinology in particular. 

III 

The whole grotesquerie of Darwinism, and of the materialism of the entire 19th century generally, is a product of one fundamental idea— an idea which happens also to be nonfactual to this century, even though it was a prime fact a century ago. This one idea was that Life is formed by the outer. This generated the sociology of “environment” as determining the human soul. Later it generated the doctrine of “heredity” as doing the same. And yet, in a purely factual sense, what is Life? Life is the actualizing of the possible. The possible turns into the actual in the midst of outer facts, which affect only the precise way in which the possible becomes actual, but cannot touch the inner force which is expressing itself through, and, if necessary, in opposition to, the outer facts. 

Neither “heredity” nor “environment” determine these inner possibilities. They affect only the framework within which something entirely new, an individual, a unique soul, will express itself. 

The word evolution describes to the 20th century the process of the ripening and fulfilling of an organism or of a species. This process is not at all the operation of mechanical-utility “causes” on plastic, formless, protoplasmic material, with purely accidental results. His work with plants led de Vries to develop his Mutation theory of the origin of species, and the facts of paleontology reinforce it to the extent of showing the sudden appearance of new species. The 20th century finds it quite unnecessary to formulate mythologies, either in cosmogony or biology. Origins are forever hidden from us, and a historical viewpoint is interested in the development of the process, not in the mysterious beginning of the process. This beginning, as set forth by scientific mythology, and by religious mythology, has only an historical interest to our age. What we note is that once these world-pictures were actual and living. 

What is the actual History of Life, as this age sees it? Various species of Life exist, ranked, according to increasing spiritual content, from plants and animals, through man, to Culture-man, and High Cultures. Some of the varieties, as shown by fossils, existed in former earth-ages in their present form, while other species appeared and disappeared. 

A species appears suddenly, both in fossil-finds, and in the experimental laboratory. Mutation is a legitimate description of the process, if the idea is free from any mechanical-utility causes, for these latter are only imagined, whereas mutations are a fact. Each species has also a Destiny, and a given Life energy, so to speak. Some are stable and firm; others have been weak, tending to split off into many different varieties, and lose their unity. They have also a life span, for many have disappeared. This whole process is not at all independent of geological ages, nor of astral phenomena. Some species, however, outlast one earth-age into the next, just as some 19th century thinkers have survived into the 20th century. 

Darwinians offered also an explanation of the metaphysics of their evolution. Roux, for instance, holds that the “fit for the purpose” survive, while the “unfit for the purpose” die. The process is purely mechanical, however, and is thus fitness for purpose without purpose. Nägeli taught that an organism perfects itself because it contains within it the “principle of perfection,” just as Moliere’s doctor explained that the sleeping potion worked because of a dormitive virtue inherent in it. Weismann denied the heredity of acquired characteristics, but instead of using it to destroy Darwinism, as it obviously does— if every individual has to start anew, how can the species “evolve”?— he props up the Darwinian picture with it by saying that the germ-plasm contains latent tendencies toward useful qualities. But this is no longer Darwinism, for the species does not evolve if it is only doing what it tends to do.

These tautological explanations only convinced people because they believed already. The age was evolutionary, and materialistic. Darwinism combined these two qualities into a biologic-religious doctrine which satisfied the capitalistic imperative of that age. Any experiments, any new facts, only proved Darwinism; they would not have been allowed to do otherwise. 

The 20th century does not see Life as an accident, a playground for external causes. It sees the fact that Life-forms begin suddenly, and that the subsequent development, or evolution, is only the actualizing of that which is already possible. Life is the unfolding of a Soul, an individuality. Whatever explanation one gives of how Life started only reveals the structure of his own soul. A materialistic explanation reveals a materialist. Similarly the imputing of any “purpose” to Life as a whole transcends knowledge and enters the realm of Faith. Life as a whole, each great Life-form, each species, each variety, each individual, has however a Destiny, an inner direction, a wordless imperative. This Destiny is the primary fact of History. History is the record of fulfilled (or thwarted) destinies. 

Any attempt to make man into an animal, and the animals into automata, is merely materialism, and thus a product of a certain type of soul, of a certain age. The 20th century is not such an age, and looks upon the inner reality of the human soul as being the determinant of human history, and the inner reality of the Soul of the High Culture as being the determinant of the history of that Culture. The soul exploits outer circumstances— they do not form it. 

Nor does the 20th century, not being capitalistic, see any struggle for existence going on in the world, either of men or animals. It sees a struggle for power, a struggle that has no connection with cheap economic reasons. It is a struggle for domination of the world that the 20th and 21st centuries see. It is not because there is a shortage of food for the human populations of the world— there is plenty of food. The question is power, and in the decision of that question, food, human lives, material, and everything else that the participants can dispose of, will come into play as weapons, and not as stakes. Nor will it ever be decided, in the sense that a lawsuit can be decided. Readers living in 2050 will smile when told that there was once a rather widespread belief in the Western Civilization that the First World War was the “last war.” The Second World War was also so regarded, all during the preparations for the Third. It was a case of wish-thinking pacifist idealism being stronger than facts. 

Darwinism was the animalization of Culture-man by means of biology; the human soul was interpreted as a mere superior technique of fighting with other animals. We come now to Marxism, the animalization of man through economics, the human soul as a mere reflex of food, clothing and shelter.

Marxism 

ALTHOUGH ENGLAND was the nation which actualized the ideas of the early Civilization phase of the West— the period 1750-1900— namely, Rationalism, Materialism, Capitalism, yet these ideas would have been actualized otherwise, even if England had been destroyed by some outer catastrophe. Nevertheless, for England these ideas were instinctive. They were wordless, beyond definition, self evident. For the other nations of Europe, they were things to which one had to adapt oneself. 

Capitalism is not an economic system, but a world-outlook, or rather, a part of a whole world-outlook. It is a way of thinking and feeling and living, and not a mere technique of economic planning which anyone can understand. It is primarily ethical and social and only secondarily economic. The economics of a nation is a reflection of the national soul, just as the way a man makes his living is a subordinate expression of his personality. 

Capitalism is an expression of Individualism as a principle of Life, the idea of every man for himself. It must be realized that this feeling is not universal-human, but only a certain stage of a certain Culture, a stage that in all essentials passed away with the First World War, 1914— 1919. 

Socialism is also an ethical-social principle, and not an economic program of some kind. It is antithetical to the Individualism which produced Capitalism. Its self-evident, instinctive idea is: each man for all. 

To Individualism as a Life-principle, it was obvious that each man in pursuing his own interests, was working for the good of all. To Socialism as a Life-principle, it is equally obvious that a man working for himself alone is ipso facto working against the good of all. 

The 19th century was the age of Individualism; the 20th and 21st are the ages of Socialism. No one has understood if he thinks this is an ideological conflict. Ideology itself means: the rationalizing of the world of action. This was the preoccupation of the early phase of the Western Civilization, 1750-1900, but no longer engages the serious attention of ambitious men. Programs are mere ideals; they are inorganic, rationalized, anyone can understand them. This age however is one of a struggle for power. Each participant wants the power in order to actualize himself, his inner idea, his soul. 1900 could not understand what Goethe meant when he said, “In Life, it is Life itself that is important, and not a result of Life.” The time has passed away in which men would die for an abstract program of “improving” the world. Men will always be willing to die however, in order to be themselves. This is the distinction between an ideal and an idea. 

Marxism is an ideal. It does not take account of living ideas, but regards the world as a thing that can be planned on paper and then set up in actuality. Marx understood neither Socialism nor Capitalism as ethical world-outlooks. His understanding of both was purely economic, and thus a misunderstanding. 

The explanation Marxism offered of the significance of History was ludicrously simple, and in this very simplicity lay its charm, and its strength. The whole history of the world was merely the record of the struggle of classes. Religion, philosophy, science, technics, music, painting, poetry, nobility, priesthood, Emperor and Pope State, war, and politics— all are simply reflections of economics. Not economics generally, but the “struggle” of “classes.” The most amazing thing about this ideological picture is that it was ever put forward seriously, or taken seriously. 

The 20th century finds it unnecessary to contradict this History-picture as a world-outlook. It has been supplanted, and has joined Rousseau. The foundations of Marxism must however be shown, since the whole tendency which produced it is one that this age is impelled to deny as a premise of its own existence. 

Being inwardly alien to Western philosophy, Marx could not assimilate the ruling philosopher of his time, Hegel, and borrowed Hegel’s method to formulate his own picture. He applied this method to capitalism as a form of economy, in order to bring about a picture of the Future corresponding to his own feelings and instincts. These instincts were negative toward the whole Western Civilization. He belonged with the class-warriors, who appear at a corresponding stage of every Culture, as a protest against it. The driving-force of class-war is the will to annihilation of Culture. 

The ethical and social foundations of Marxism are capitalistic. It is the old Malthusian “struggle” again. Whereas to Hegel, the State was an Idea, an organism with harmony in its parts, to Malthus and Marx there was no State, but only a mass of self-interested individuals, groups, and classes. Capitalistically, all is economics. Self-interest means: economics. Marx differed on this plane in no way from the non-class war theoreticians of capitalism— Mill, Ricardo, Paley, Spencer, Smith. To them all, Life was economics, not Culture. To them all, it was the war of group against group, class against class, individual against individual, whether they say so expressly or not. All believe in Free Trade, and want no “state interference” in economic matters. None of them regard society or State as an organism. Capitalistic thinkers found no ethical fault with destruction of groups and individuals by other groups and individuals, so long as the criminal law was not infringed. This was looked upon as, in a higher way, serving the good of all. Marxism is also capitalistic in this. Its ethics have super-added the Mosaic law of revenge, and the idea that the competitor is evil morally, as well as economically injurious. 

The competitor of the “working-class” was the “bourgeoisie,” and since the “victory of the working class” was the sole aim of the entire history of the world, naturally Marxism, being a philosophy of “Progress,” ranged itself with the “good” worker against the “evil” bourgeois. The necessity for thinking things are getting better all the time a spiritual phenomenon which accompanies every materialism— was as indispensable to Marxism as it was to Darwinism and 19th century philistinism generally. 

Fourier, Cabet, Saint-Simon, Comte, Proudhon, Owen, all designed Utopias like Marxism, but they neglected to make them inevitable, and they forgot to make Hate the center of the system. They used Reason, but Marxism is one more proof that Hate is more effective. Even then, one of the older Utopias (that of Marx was the last in Europe, being followed only by Edward Bellamy’s in America) might have played the Marxian role, but they came from countries with lower industrial potential, and thus Marx had a “capitalistic” superiority over them. 

II 

In the Marxian scheme, History got almost nowhere until the Western Culture appeared, and its tempo accelerated infinitely precisely with the appearance of Marxism. The class-war of 5,000 years was ready to be finally wound up, and History was to come to an end. The “victory” of the “proletariat” was to abolish classes, but it was also to dictate. A dictatorship of the proletariat implies someone to receive the dictate, but this is one of the mysteries of Marxism, which kept the conversation of disciples from flagging. 

By the time Marxism appeared, there were, says the theory, only two “classes” left, proletariat and bourgeoisie. Naturally, they had to carry on war to the death, since the bourgeois was taking nearly all the proceeds of the economic system, and were entitled to nothing. Au contraire, it was precisely the proletaire who was getting nothing who was entitled to everything. This reduction of classes to two was inevitable— all History had only existed in order to bring about this dichotomy which would finally be liquidated by the dictate of the proletariat. Capitalism was the name given to the economic system whereby the wrong people were taking everything, leaving nothing for the right people. Capitalism created the proletariat by mechanical necessity, and equally mechanically, the proletariat was fated to swallow up its creator. What the form of the Future was to be was not included in the system. The two catchwords “Expropriation of the Expropriators” and “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” are supposed to contain it. 

Actually it was, of course, not even in theory a plan for the Future, but simply and solely a theoretical foundation for class war, giving it an historical, ethical and economic-political rationale. This is shown by the fact that in the preface to the second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto a theory was put forth by Marx and Engels according to which Communism could come directly from Russian peasantry to Proletariat-dictate without the long period of bourgeois-domination which had been absolutely necessary in Europe. 

The important part of Marxism was its demand for active, constant, practical, class-war. The factory workers were selected as the instruments for this struggle for obvious reasons: they were concentrated, they were being mistreated, they could thus be agitated and organized into a revolutionary movement to realize the completely negative aims of the coterie of Marx. 

For this practical reason, Hate finds its way into a picture of History and Life, and for this reason, the “bourgeois”— simply mechanical parts of a mechanical evolution, according to Marx— are endowed with malice and evil. Hatred is useful in fomenting a war which does not seem to be occurring of itself, and to the end of increasing hatred, Marx welcomed lost strikes, which created more hatred than successful ones. 

Only to serve this purpose of action are the absurd propositions about labor and value put forth. Marx understood journalism, and had no scruple whatever about saying that the manual laborer is the only person who works, who creates economic value. To this theory, the inventor, the discoverer, the manager are economic parasites. The fact is, of course, that the manual type of labor is merely a function of the value-creating, precedent, prerequisite labor of organizer, entrepreneur, administrator, inventor. Great theoretical importance was attached to the fact that a strike could stop an enterprise. However, as the philosopher said, even a sheep could do that if it fell into the machinery. Marxism, in the interests of simplification, denied even a subsidiary value to the work of the creators. It had no value— only manual labor had value. Marx understood propaganda long before Lord Northcliffe was heard of. Effective mass-propaganda cannot be too simple, and in the application of this rule, Marx should have received some sort of prize: all History is class-war; all Life is class-war; they have the wealth, let us take it. 

Marxism imputed Capitalistic instincts to the upper classes, and Socialistic instincts to the lower classes. This was entirely gratuitous, for Marxism made an appeal to the capitalistic instincts of the lower classes. The upper classes are treated as the competitor who has cornered all the wealth, and the lower classes are invited to take it away from them. This is capitalism. Trade unions are purely capitalistic, distinguished from employers only by the different commodity they purvey. Instead of an article, they sell human labor. Trade-unionism is simply a development of capitalistic economy, but it has nothing to do with Socialism, for it is simply self-interest. It pits the economic interest of the manual laborers against the economic interest of the employer and manager. It is simply Malthus in new company. It is still the old “struggle for existence,” man against man, group against group, class against class, everyone against the State. 

The instinct of Socialism however absolutely precludes any struggle between the component parts of the organism. It is as hostile to the mistreatment of manual laborers by employers as it is to the sabotage of society by class-warriors. Capitalism convinces itself that a “Struggle for Existence” is organically necessary. Socialism knows that any such “struggle” is unnecessary and pathological. 

Between Capitalism and Socialism there is no relationship of true and false. Both are instincts, and have the same historical rank, but one of them belongs to the Past, and one to the Future. Capitalism is a product of Rationalism and Materialism, and was the ruling force of the 19th century. Socialism is the form of an age of political Imperialism, of Authority, of historical philosophy, of super personal political imperative. 

It is not at all a matter of terminology or ideals, but a matter of feeling and instinct. The minute we begin to think that a “class” has responsibilities to another class, we are beginning to think Socialistically, no matter what we call our thinking. We may call it Buddhism, for all History cares, but we will think that way. If we use the terminology of Capitalism and the practice of Socialism, no harm is done, for practice and action are what matter in Life, not words and names. The only distinction between types of Socialism is between efficient and inefficient, weak and strong, timid and bold. A strong, bold, and efficient Socialist feeling will, however, hardly use a terminology deriving from an antithetical type of thought, since strong, ascendant, full Life is consonant in word and deed. 

III 

Marxism showed its Capitalistic provenance in its idea of “classes,” its idea toward work, and its obsession with economics. Marx was a Jew, and had thus imbibed from his youth the Old Testament idea that work was a curse laid upon man as a result of sin. Free Capitalism placed this same value on work, regarding it as something from which to be delivered as a prerequisite to the enjoyment of Life. In England, the classic land of Capitalism, the ideas of work and wealth were the central ideas of social valuation. The rich had not to work; the “middle classes” had to work, but were not poor; the poor had to work to exist from one week to the next. Thorstein Veblen, in his “Theory of the Leisure Class,” showed the wide ramifications in the life of 19th century nations of this attitude toward work. 

The whole atmosphere of the Marxian Utopia is that the necessity for the proletariat to work will vanish with its “victory.” After the “Expropriation,” the proletariat can retire, and even have cidevant employers for servants. 

This attitude toward work is not universal-human, but a thing tied to the existence of English Capitalism. Never before in the Western Culture was there a prevailing feeling that work should be despised; in fact, after the Reformation, the leading theologians all adopted a positive attitude toward work as a high, if not the highest, value. From this period comes the idea that to work is to pray. This spirit is once again uppermost, and Socialistic instinct regards a man’s work, not as a curse laid upon him, a hated thing from which money can free him, but as the content of his Life, the earthly side of his mission in the world. Marxism has the opposite valuation of work from Socialism. 

Similarly, the Marxian concept of “class” has nothing to do with Socialism. The articulation of society in Western Culture was at first into Estates. Estates were primarily spiritual. As Freidank said in Gothic times: 

God hath shapen lives three, 

Boor and knight and priest they be. 

These are not classes, but organic ranks. After the French Revolution came the idea that the articulation of society was a reflection of the situation of money-hoards. The term class was used to describe an economic layer of society. This term was final for Marx, since Life to him was simply economics, saturated as he was with the Capitalistic world-outlook. 

But to Socialism, money-possession is not the determinant of rank in society any more than it is in an Army. Social rank in Socialism does not follow Money, but Authority. Thus Socialism knows no “classes” in the Marxian-Capitalistic sense. It sees the center of Life in politics, and has thus a definite military spirit in it. Instead of “classes,” the expressions of wealth, it has rank, the concomitant of authority. 

Marxism is equally obsessed with economics as its contemporary English environment. It begins and ends with economics, focusing its gaze on the tiny European peninsula, ignoring the past and present of the rest of the world. It simply wanted to frustrate the course of Western history, and chose class-war as a technique for doing it. 

There had been class-war before Marxism, but this “philosophy” gave it a theory which said there was nothing else in the world. There had been jealousy in the lower orders before Marxism, but now this jealousy was given an ethical basis which made it alone good, and everything above evil. Wealth was branded as immoral and criminal, its possessors as the arch-criminals. Class-war was a competition, and something more it was a battle of good against evil, and thus more brutal and unlimited than mere war. Western thinkers like Sorel could not adopt this attempt to make the class-war exceed any limitations of honor and conscience; Sorel conceived of class-war as similar to international war, with protection of non-combatants, rules of warfare, honorable treatment of prisoners. Marxism regarded the opponent as a class-war criminal. The opponent could not be assimilated into a new system; he was to be exterminated, enslaved, starved, persecuted. 

The Marxist class-war concept thus far exceeded politics. Politics is simply power-activity, not revenge-activity, jealousy, hatred, or “justice.” Again, it has no connection with Socialism, which is political through and through, and regards a defeated opponent as a member of the new, larger organism, with the same rights and opportunities as those already in it. 

This was one more connection of Marxism with Capitalism, for the latter had a tendency to moralize politics, making the opponent into a wicked person. 

Lastly, Marxism differs from Socialism in being a religion, whereas Socialism is an instinctive organization-political principle. Marxism had its bible, its saints, its apostles, its heresy tribunals, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, its dogmas and exegesis, sacred writings and schisms. Socialism dispenses with all this; it is interested in procuring cooperation of men with the same instincts. Ideology has even now little importance to Socialism, and in the coming decades it will have ever less. 

As Socialism creates the form of the Future, Marxism slips into the Past with the other remnants of Materialism. The mission of Western man is not to become rich through class-war; it is to actualize his inner ethic-politico-Cultural imperative.

Freudianism 

AS WAS THE CASE with Darwinism and Marxism, Freudianism has no Cultural, but only anti-Cultural significance. All three are products of the negative side of the Civilization-crisis, the side which destroys the old spiritual, social, ethical, philosophical values, and substitutes for them a crude Materialism. The principle of Criticism was the new god to whom all the old values of the Western Culture were offered up. The spirit of the 19th century is one of iconoclasm. The outstanding thinkers nearly all had their center of gravity on the side of nihilism: Schopenhauer, Hebbel, Proudhon, Engels, Marx, Wagner, Darwin, Duhring, Strauss, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Strindberg, Shawl. Some of these were also, on the other side of their beings, heralds of the Future, the spirit of the 20th century. The leading tendency was however, materialistic, biological, economic, scientific— against the soul of Culture-man and the hitherto acknowledged meaning of his life. 

Not on a par with them, but in their tradition, is the system of Freudianism. The soul of Culture-man is attacked by it, not from an oblique direction of economics or biology, but from the front. The “science” of psychology is chosen as the vehicle to deny all the higher impulses of the soul. On the part of the creator of psychoanalysis, this assault was conscious. He spoke of Copernicus, Darwin, and himself as the three great insulters of mankind. Nor was his doctrine free from the fact of his Jewishness, and in his essay on The Resistance to Psychoanalysis, he says that it is no accident that a Jew created this system, and that Jews are readily “converted” to it, since they know the fate of isolation in opposition. Vis-à-vis the Western Civilization Freud was spiritually isolated, and had no recourse but to oppose. 

Freudianism is one more product of Rationalism. It turns rationalism on the soul, and finds that it is purely mechanical. It can be understood, and spiritual phenomena are all manifestations of the sexual impulse. This was another one of those marvelous and grandiose simplifications which guarantee popularity for any doctrine in an age of mass-journalism. Darwinism was the popular outlook that the meaning of the life of the world was that everything else was trying to become man-animal, and man was trying to become Darwinian. Marxism: the meaning of all human life is that the lowest must become the highest. Freudianism: the meaning of human life is sexuality, actual, optative, conative, or otherwise. All three are nihilistic. Culture-man is the spiritual enemy. He must be eliminated by animalizing him, biologizing him, making him economic, sexualizing him, diabolizing him. 

To Darwinism, a Gothic cathedral is a product of mechanical evolution, to Marx it is an attempt of the bourgeois to trick the proletariat, to Freud it is a piece of frozen sexuality. 

It is both needless and impossible to refute Freudianism. If everything is sex, a refutation of Freudianism would also be sexual in significance. The 20th century does not approach phenomena that have become historical by asking whether they are true or false. To its historical way of thinking, a Gothic cathedral is an expression of the intensely religious, newly awakening young Western Culture, which shadows forth the striving nature of this Culture-soul. In its necessity for self-expression, however, this new outlook must reject the materialistic tyranny of the older, immediately preceding outlook. It must free itself also from Freudianism. 

This last great attempt to animalize man also uses critical-rationalistic methods. The soul is mechanical: it consists of one simple impulse, the sexual instinct. The whole life of the soul is the process of this instinct getting misdirected, twisted, turned upon itself. For it is elemental to this “science” that this instinct cannot go correctly. To describe the mechanical functions of the soul is to describe diseases. The various processes are neurosis, inversion, complexes, repression, sublimation, transference, perversion. All are abnormal, unhealthy, misdirected, unnatural. As one of its abecedarian truths, the system states that every person is a neurotic, and every neurotic is a pervert or invert. This applies not only to Culture-man, but to primitive man as well.

Here Freud surpasses Rousseau, who at the beginning of the early Civilization phase of the West, affirmed the purity, simplicity, and soul-healthiness of the savage, in contrast to the wickedness and perversion of Culture-man. Freud has widened the attack— the whole human species is the enemy. Even if one did not know from all the other phenomena that the early Civilization-phase of Materialism and Rationalism had closed, one would know from this system alone, for such complete nihilism is obviously not to be surpassed, expressing as it does anti-Cultural feeling to its uttermost limits. 

As a psychology it must be called a patho-psychology, for its whole arsenal of terms describe only aberrations of the sexual instinct. The notion of health is completely dissociated from the soul-life. Freudianism is the Black Mass of Western Science. 

Part of the structure of the system is the interpretation of dreams. The purely mechanical workings of the “mind” (for there is no soul) are shown by dreams. Not clearly shown, however, for an elaborate ritual is needed to arrive at the real meaning. “Conscience censorship”— the new name for Kant’s “moral reason”— “symbolism,” “repetition-compulsion”— these and many more Kabbalistic numina have to be invoked. The original form of the doctrine was that all dreams were wishes. 

To dream of the death of a loved person was explained by psychoanalysis as latent parent-hatred, the symptom of the almost universal Oedipus-complex. The dogma was rigid: thus if the dream was of the death of a pet dog or cat, the animal was the focus of the Oedipus-complex. If the actor dreams of not knowing his part, it shows that he wishes he might sometime be so embarrassed. In order to attract more converts, including those of weaker faith, the doctrine was slightly changed, and other dream interpretations were admitted, such as the “repetition-compulsion,” when the same fear-dream recurs regularly. 

The dream-world of course reflected the universal sexuality of the soul. Every conceivable object in a dream was capable of being a sexual symbol. “Repressed” sexual instinct appeared in dreams, symbolizing, transferring, sublimating, inverting, and running the whole gamut of mechanical terminology. 

Every person is a neurotic in his mature life, and it is no accident, for he became so in his childhood. Experiences in infancy determine— quite mechanically, since the whole process is non-spiritual— which particular neuroses will accompany the person through his life. There is really nothing that can be done about it, except to deliver oneself into the care of a Freudian adept. One of these announced that 98 per cent of all persons should be under the treatment of psychiatrists. This was later in the development of the system; at first it would have been 100 per cent, but, as with Mormonism, the original purity of the doctrine was compromised by the Elders for reasons of expediency. 

The average man who is doing his work presents a great illusion to the eye of an observer— it looks as though he is doing what he is doing. Actually, however, Freudianism shows that he is only apparently doing it, for in actuality he is quietly thinking about sexual matters, and all that one can see is the results of his sexual fantasy sifted through mechanical filters of conscience-censorship, sublimation, transference, and the like. If you hope, fear, wish, dream, think abstractly, investigate, feel inspired, have ambition, dread, repugnance, reverence— you are merely expressing your sexual instinct. Art is obviously sex, as are religion, economics, abstract thought, technics, war, State and politics. 

II 

Freud earned thus, together with his cousin Marx, the Order of Simplicity. It was the coveted Decoration of the age of Mass. With the demise of the Age of Criticism, it has fallen into the discard, for the new outlook is interested, not in cramming all the data of knowledge, experience, and intuition, into a prefabricated mold, but in seeing what was, what is, what must be. Over the portal of the new outlook is Leibnitz’s aphorism: “The Present is loaded with the Past, and pregnant with the Future.” The child is father to the man— this is ancient wisdom, and describes the unfolding of the human organism from infancy to maturity, every stage being related backwards and forwards because one and the same soul speaks at every moment. Freudianism caricatures this deep organic vision with a mechanical device whereby childhood determines the form of maturity, and makes the whole organic unfolding into a causal process, and what is more a diabolical, diseased one. 

Insofar as it is Western at all, Freudianism is subject to the prevailing spirituality of the West. Its mechanism and materialism reflect the 19th century outlook. Its talk of the unconscious, of instinct, impulse, and the like, reflects the fact that Freudianism appeared at the transition point in the Western Civilization when Rationalism was fulfilled and the Irrational emerged again as such. It was not at all in the terminology or the treatment of the new, irrational elements in the doctrine that Freudianism presages the new spirit, but simply and solely in the fact that irrational elements appear. Only in this one thing does this structure anticipate; in every other way, it belongs to the Malthusian-Darwinian-Marxian past. It was merely an ideology, a part of the general Rationalistic-Materialistic assault on Culture-man. 

The irrational elements that the system recognizes are subordinated strictly to the higher rationalism of the adept, who can unravel them and lead the suffering neurotic into the light of day. They are, if possible, even more diseased than the rest of the mind-complex. They may be irrational, but they have a rational explanation, treatment, and cure. 

Freudianism appears thus as the last of the materialistic religions. Psychoanalysis, like Marxism, is a sect. It has auricular confession, dogmas, and symbols, esoteric and exoteric versions of the doctrine, converts and apostates, priests and scholastics, a whole ritual of exorcism, and a liturgy of mantle. Schisms appear, resulting in the foundation of new sects, each of which claims to be the bearer of the true doctrine. It is occult and pagan, with its dream-interpretation, demonological with its sex-worship. Its world-picture is that of a neurotic humanity, twisted and perverted in its strait jacket of Western Civilization, toward whom the new priest of psychoanalysis stretches out the hand of deliverance through the anti-Western Freudian Gospel. 

The Hatred that formed the core of Marxism is present in the newer religion also. In both cases it is the hate of the outsider for his totally alien surroundings, which he cannot change, and must therefore destroy. 

The attitude of the 20th century toward the subject-matter of Freudianism is inherent in the spirit of this age. Its center is in action— external tasks call to Western soul. The best will hear this call, leaving those to busy themselves with drawing soul-pictures who have no souls. 

Scientific psychology was always thus— it has never attracted the best minds in any Culture. It all rests on the assumption that it is possible by thought to establish the form of what thinks, an extremely dubious proposition. If it were possible to describe the Soul in rational terms— a perquisite to a science of psychology— there would be no need for such a science. The Reason is a part, or better, a partial function, of the Soul. Every soul-picture describes only the soul of him who draws it, and those like him. A diabolical sees things Freud-wise, but he cannot understand those who see things otherwise. This explains the vileness of the Freudianistic attempts to diabolize, sexualize, mechanize, and destroy all the great men of the West. Greatness they could not understand, not having inward experience of it. 

Soul cannot be defined— it is the Element of Elements. Any picture of it, any psychological system, is a mere product of it, and gets no further than self-portrayal. How well we understand now that Life is more important than the results of Life. 

Psychology-systems use the terminology— in all Civilizations— of the material sciences of physics and mechanics. They reflect thus the spirit of natural science, and take rank therewith as a product of the age. To the higher rank to which they aspired, namely the systematization of the Soul, they do not attain. No sooner was Freudianism well-established as the new psychoanalytic Church than the onward development of the Western Civilization made it old-fashioned. 

The psychology of the 20th century is one adapted to a life of action. To this age psychology must be practical or it is worthless. The psychology of crowds, of armies, of leadership, of obedience, of loyalty— these are valuable to this age. They are not to be arrived at by “psychometric” methods and abstruse terminology, but by human experience— one’s own, and that of others. The 20th century regards Montaigne as a psychologist, but Freud as merely the 19th century representative of the witch obsession of the Western Culture in its younger days, which was also a disguised form of sex-worship. 

Human psychology is learned in living and acting, not in timing reactions or observing dogs and mice. The memoirs of a man of action, adventurer, explorer, soldier, statesman, contain psychology of the type that interests this age, both in and between the lines. Every newspaper is a compendious instruction in the psychology of mass-propaganda, and better than any treatise on the subject. There is a psychology of nations, of professions, of Cultures, of the successive ages of a Culture, from youth to senility. Psychology is one aspect of the art of the possible, and as such is a favorite study of the age. 

The greatest repository of psychology of all is History. It contains no models for us, since Life is never recurring, once-happening, but it shows by example how we can fulfill our potentialities by being true to ourselves, by never compromising with that which is utterly alien. 

To this view of psychology, any materialism could not possibly be psychology. Here Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, and Freud meet. They may have understood other things, but the human soul, and in particular the soul of Culture-man, they did not understand. Systems like theirs are only historical curiosities to the 20th century, unless they happen to claim to be appropriate descriptions of Reality. Anyone who “believes in” these antiquated fantasies stamps himself as ludicrous, posthumous, ineffective, and superfluous. No leading men of the coming decades will be Darwinians, Marxians or Freudians.

The Scientific-Technical World-Outlook 

SCIENCE is the seeking after exact knowledge of phenomena. In discovering interrelations between phenomena, that is, observing the conditions of their appearance, it feels it has explained them. This type of mentality appears in a High Culture after the completion of creative religious thought, and the beginning of externalizing. In our Culture, this type of thinking only began to feel sure of itself with the middle of the 17th century, in the Classical, in the 5th century B.C. The leading characteristic of early scientific thinking, from the historical standpoint, is that it dispenses with theological and philosophical equipment, only using them to fill in the background, in which it is not interested. It is thus materialistic, in its essence, in that its sole attention is turned to phenomena, and not to ultimate realities. To a religious age, phenomena are unimportant compared with the great spiritual truths, to a scientific age, the opposite is true. 

Technics is the utilization of the macrocosm. It always accompanies a science in its full blooming, but this is not to say that every science is accompanied by technical activity, for the sciences of the Classical Culture, and the Mexican Culture had nothing at all which we would call technical proficiency. In the early Civilization stage, Science predominates, and precedes technics in all its attempts, but with the turn of the 20th century, technical thinking began to emancipate itself from this dependence, and in our day, science serves technics, and no longer vice versa. 

In an Age of Materialism, which is to say, an anti-metaphysical age, it was but natural that an anti metaphysical type of thinking like science would become a popular religion. Religion is a necessity for Culture-man, and he will build his religion on economics, biology, or nature, if the Spirit of the Age excludes true religion. Science was the prevalent religion of the 18th and 19th centuries. While one was permitted to doubt the truths of the Christian sects, one was not allowed to doubt Newton, Leibnitz, and Descartes. When the great Goethe challenged the Newtonian light-theory, he was put down as a crank, and a heretic. 

Science was the supreme religion of the 19th century, and all other religions, like Darwinism and Marxism, referred to its great parent-dogmas as the basis for their own truths. “Unscientific” became the term of damnation. 

From its timid beginnings, science finally took the step of holding out its results, not as a mere arrangement and classification, but as the true explanations of Nature and Life. With this step, it became a world-outlook, that is a comprehensive philosophy, with metaphysics, logic and ethics for believers. 

Every science is a profane restatement of the preceding dogmas of the religious period. It is the same Cultural soul which formed the great religions that in the next age reshapes its world, and this continuity is thus absolutely inevitable. Western Science as a world-outlook is merely Western religion represented as profane, not sacred, natural, not supernatural, discoverable, not revealed. 

Like Western religion, science was definitely priestly. The savant is the priest, the instructor is the lay brother, and a great systematizer is canonized, like Newton and Planck. Every Western thought-form is esoteric, and its scientific doctrines were no exception. The populace were kept in touch with “the advance of science” through a popular literature at which the high-priests of science smiled. 

In the 19th century, science accredited the “Progress” idea, and gave its own particular stamp to it. The content of “Progress” was to be technical. “Progress” was to consist in faster motion, further sound, wider exploitation of the material world ad infinitum. This showed already the coming predominance of technics over science. “Progress” was not to be primarily more knowledge, but more technique. Every Western world-view strives after universality, and so this one declared that the solution of social problems was not to be found in politics and economics, but in— science. Inventions were promised which would make war too horrible for men to engage in, and they would therefore cease warring. This naivete was a natural product of an age which was strong in natural science, but weak in psychology. The solution of the problem of poverty was machinery, and more machinery. The horrible conditions that had arisen out of a machine-Civilization were to be alleviated by more machines. The problem of old age was to be overcome by “rejuvenation.” Death was pronounced to be only a product of pathology, not of senility. If all diseases were done away with, there would be nothing left to die from. 

Racial problems were to be solved by “eugenics.” The birth of individuals was to be no longer left to Fate. Scientific priests would decide things like parentage and birth. No outer events would be allowed in the new theocracy, nothing uncontrolled. The weather was to be “harnessed,” all natural forces brought under absolute control. There would be no occasion for wars, everyone would be striving to be scientific, not seeking power. International problems would vanish, since the world would become one huge scientific unit. 

The picture was complete, and to the materialistic 19th century, awe-inspiring: all Life, all Death, all Nature, reduced to absolute order, in the custody of scientific theocrats. Everything would go on this planet just as it went in the picture of the heavens that the scientific astronomers had sketched out for themselves; serene regularity would reign— but— this order would be purely mechanical, utterly purposeless. Man would be scientific only in order to be scientific. 

II 

Something happened, however, to disturb the picture, and to show that it, too, bore the hall-mark of Life. Before the First World War, the disintegration of the psychical foundations of the great structure had already set in. The World War marks, in the realm of science, as in every other sphere of Western life, a caesura. A new world arose from that war— the spirit of the 20th century stood forth as the successor to the whole mechanistic view of the universe, and to the whole concept of the meaning of Life, as being the acquisition of wealth. 

With truly amazing rapidity, considering the decades of its power and supremacy, the mechanistic view paled, and the leading minds, even within its disciplines, dropped away from the old, self-evident articles of materialistic faith. 

As is the usual case with historical movements, expressions of a super-personal soul, the point of highest power, of the greatest victories, is also the beginning of the rapid down-going. Shallow persons always mistake the end of a movement for the beginning of its absolute dominance. Thus Wagner was looked upon by many as the beginning of a new music, whereas, the next generation knew that he had been the last Western musician. The passing away of any expression of Culture is a gradual process— nevertheless there are turning points, and the rapid decline of science as a world-outlook set in with the First World War. 

The down-going of science as a mental discipline had long preceded the World War. With the theory of Entropy (1850), and the introduction of the idea of irreversibility into its picture, science was on the road which was to culminate in physical relativity and frank admission of the subjectivity of physical concepts. From Entropy came the introduction of statistical methods into systematic science, the beginning of spiritual abdication. Statistics described Life and the living; the strict tradition of Western science had insisted on exactitude in mathematical description of reality, and had hence despised that which was not susceptible of exact description, such as biology. The entrance of probabilities into formerly exact science is the sign that the observer is beginning to study himself, his own form as conditioning the order and describability of phenomena. 

The next step was the Theory of Radioactivity, which again contains strong subjective elements and requires the Calculus of Probabilities to describe its results. The scientific picture of the world became ever more refined, and ever more subjective. The formerly separate disciplines drew slowly together, mathematics, physics, chemistry, epistemology, logic. Organic ideas intruded showing once more that the observer has reached the point where he is studying the form of his own Reason. A chemical element now has a lifetime, and the precise events of its life are unpredictable, indeterminate. 

The very unit of physical happening itself, the “atom,” which was still believed in as a reality by the 19th century, became in the 20th century a mere concept, the description of whose properties was constantly changed to meet and prop up technical developments. Formerly, every experiment merely showed the “truth” of the ruling theories. That was in the days of the supremacy of science as a discipline over technics, its adopted child. But, before the middle of the 20th century, every new experiment brought about a new hypothesis of “atomic structure.” What was important in the process was not the hypothetical house of cards which was erected afterwards, but the experiment which had gone before. 

No compunction was felt about having two theories, irreconcilable with one another, to describe the “structure” of the “atom,” or the nature of light. The subject-matter of all the separate sciences could no longer be kept mathematically clear. Old concepts like mass, energy, electricity, heat, radiation, merged into one another, and it became ever more clear that what was really under study was the human reason, in its epistemological aspect, and the Western soul in its scientific aspect. 

Scientific theories reached the point where they signified nothing less than the complete collapse of science as a mental discipline. The picture was projected of the Milky Way as consisting of more than a million fixed stars, among which are many with a diameter of more than 93,000,000 miles; this again as not a stationary cosmic center, but itself in motion toward Nowhere at a speed of more than 600 kilometers a second. The cosmos is finite, but unlimited; boundless, but bounded. This demands of the true believer the old Gothic faith again: credo quia absurdum, but mechanical purposelessness cannot evoke this kind of faith, and the high priests have apostatized. In the other direction, the “atom” has equally fantastic dimensions— a ten-millionth of a millimeter is its diameter, and the mass of a hydrogen atom stands to the mass of a gram of water as the mass of a post card stands to the mass of the earth. But this atom consists of “electrons,” the whole making up a sort of solar system, in which the distances between the planets is as great, in proportion to their mass, as in our solar system. The diameter of an electron is one three-billionth of a millimeter. But the closer it is studied, the more spiritual it becomes, for the nucleus of the atom is a mere charge of electricity, having neither weight, volume, inertia nor any other classic properties of matter. 

In its last great saga, science dissolved its own psychical foundations, and moved outside the world of the senses into the world of the soul. Absolute time was dissolved, and time became a function of position. Mass became spiritualized into energy. The idea of simultaneity was discarded, motion became relative, parallels cut one another, two distances could no longer be said absolutely to equal one another. Everything which had once been described by, or had itself described, the word Reality, dissolved in the last act of the drama of science as a mental discipline. 

The custodians of science as a mental discipline, one after another, abandoned the old materialistic positions. In the last act, they came to see that the science of a given Culture has as its real object the description, in scientific terms, of the world of that Culture, a world which again is the projection of the soul of that Culture. The profound knowledge was realized through the very study of matter itself that matter is only the envelope of the soul. To describe matter is to describe oneself, even though the mathematical equations drape the process with an apparent objectivity. Mathematics itself has succumbed as a description of Reality: its proud equations are only tautology. An equation is an identity, a repetition, and its “truth” is a reflection of the paper-logic of the identity-principle. But this is only a form of our thinking. 

The transition from 19th century materialism to the new spirituality of the 20th century was thus not a battle, but an inevitable development. This keen, ice-cold, mental discipline turned the knife on itself because of an inner imperative to think in a new way, an anti-materialistic way. Matter cannot be explained materialistically. Its whole significance derives from the soul.

III Materialism from this standpoint appears as a great negative. It was a great spiritual effort to deny the spirit, and this denial of the spirit was in itself an expression of a crisis in the spirit. It was the Civilization-crisis, the denial of Culture by Culture. For the animals, that which appears— matter— is Reality. The world of sensation is the world. But for primitive man, and a fortiori for Culture-man, the world separates out into Appearance and Reality. Everything visible and tangible is felt as a symbol of something higher and unseen. This symbolizing activity is what distinguishes the human soul from the less complicated Life-forms. Man possesses a metaphysical sense as the hall-mark of his humanity. But it is precisely the higher reality, the world of symbols, of meaning and purpose, that Materialism denied in toto. What was it then, but the great attempt to animalize man by equating the world of matter with Reality, and merging him into it? Materialism was not overcome because it was false; it simply died of old age. It is not false even now— it merely falls on deaf ears. It is old-fashioned, and has become the world view of country cousins. With the collapse of its Reality, Western science as a mental discipline has accomplished its mission. Its by-product, science as a world-outlook now belongs to yesterday. But as one of the results of the Second World War, there appeared a new stupidity— technics-worship as a philosophy of Life and the world. Technics has in its essence nothing to do with science as a mental discipline. It has one aim: the extraction of physical power from the outer world. It is, so to speak, Nature-politics, as distinguished from human politics. The fact that technics proceeds on one hypothesis today, and on another tomorrow, shows that its task is not the formation of a knowledge-system, but the subjecting of the outer world to the will of Western man. The hypotheses that it proceeds on have no real connection with its results, but merely afford points of departure for the imagination of technicians to think along new lines for new experiments to extract ever more power. Some hypotheses are of course necessary; precisely what they are is secondary. Technics is even less capable than science, then, of satisfying the need for a world-outlook to this age. Physical power— for what? The age itself supplies the answer: physical power for political purposes. Science has passed into the role of furnishing the terminology and ideation for technics. Technics in turn is the servant of politics. Ever since 1911, the idea of “atomic energy” has been in the air, but it was the spirit of war which first gave this theory a concrete form, with the invention, in 1945, by an unknown Westerner of a new high explosive which depends for its effect on the instability of “atoms.” Technics is practical; politics is sublimely practical. It has not the slightest interest in whether a new explosive is referred to “atoms,” “electrons,” “cosmic rays,” or to saints and devils. The historical way of thinking which informs the true statesman cannot take today’s terminology too seriously when he remembers how quickly yesterday’s was dropped. A projectile which can destroy a city of 200,000 persons in a second— that however is a reality, and affects the sphere of political possibilities. 

It is the spirit of politics which determines the form of war, and the form of war then influences the conduct of politics. Weapons, tactics, strategy, the exploitation of victory— all these are determined by the political imperative of the age. Each age forms the entirety of its expressions for itself. Thus to the form-rich 18th century, warfare also was a strict form, a sequence of position and development, like the contemporary musical form of variations on a theme. 

An odd aberration occurred in the Western world after the first employment of a new high-explosive in 1945. Essentially, it was referable to remnants of materialistic thinking, but there were also perennially old mythological ideas in it. The idea arose that this new explosive would blow up the whole planet. In the middle of the 19th century, when the railway idea was projected, the medical doctors said that such swift motion would generate cerebral troubles, and that even the sight of a train rushing past might do so; furthermore the sudden change of air-pressure in tunnels might cause strokes. 

The idea of the planet blowing up was just another form of the old idea, found in many mythologies, Western and non-Western, of the End of the World, Ragnarök, Götterdämmerung, Cataclysm. Science also picked up this idea, and wrapped it up as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The technics worshipers fancied many things about the new explosive. They did not realize that it was no end of a process, but the beginning. 

We stand at the beginning of the Age of Absolute Politics, and one of its demands is naturally for powerful weapons. Therefore, Technics is ordered to strain after absolute weapons. It will never attain them, however, and any belief that it will stamps its possessor as simply a materialist, which is to say, in the 20th century, a provincial. 

Technics-worship is completely inappropriate to the soul of Europe. The formative impulse of human Life does not come from matter now any more than it ever did. On the contrary, the very way of experiencing matter, and the way of utilizing it, are expressions of the soul. The naive belief of Technics worship that an explosive is going to remake the Western Civilization from its foundations is a last dying gasp of Materialism. This Civilization made this explosive, and it will make others— they did not make it, nor will they ever make or unmake the Western Civilization. No more than matter created the Western Culture can it ever destroy it. 

It is still materialism to confuse a civilization with factories, homes, and the collectivism of installations. Civilization is a higher reality, manifesting itself through human populations, and within these, through a certain spiritual stratum, which embodies at highest potential the living Idea of the Culture. This Culture creates religions, forms of architecture, arts, States, Nations, Races, Peoples, armies, wars, poems, philosophies, sciences, weapons and inner imperatives. All of them are mere expressions of the higher Reality, and none of them can destroy it. 

The attitude of the 20th century toward science and Technics is clear. It does not ask them to furnish a world-outlook— this it derives elsewhere— and it positively rejects any attempt to make a religion or a philosophy out of materialism or atom-worship. It does however have use for them, in the service of its unlimited will-to-power. The Idea is primary, and in actualizing it, superiority in weapons is essential in order to compensate for the immense numerical superiority of the enemies of the West.

The Imperative of Our Age 

BY SURVEYING the entire previous happening of the world, Western man understands himself in his 20th century phase. He sees where he stands, he sees also why it was that he was impelled to orient himself historically. His inner instinct forbade that he distort History in the materialistic fashion by subjecting it to an ideology of some kind. He sees the ages of previous Cultures to which his present phase is related: the “Period of the Contending States” in the Chinese, the transition to Caesarism in the Roman, the “Hyksos” era in the Egyptian. None of them are ages of the flowering of art or philosophy, all have their center of gravity in politics and action. They are the periods of large-space thinking, of the greatest deeds, of external creativeness of the highest possible magnitude. Philosophers and ideologists, world-improvers and art-traders, slip down to the street-level in these ages, when the imperative is directed to action and not to abstract thought. 

Because of his historical position, in a Civilization at the beginning of its second phase, his soul has a certain organic predisposition, and the custodians of the Idea of this time will of necessity think and feel thus, and not otherwise. It can be definitively stated what this relationship is to the various forms of human and Cultural thought and action. 

To religion, this age is once more affirmative, the very opposite of the negative atheism of Materialism. Every man of action is in constant contact with the unforeseeable, the Imponderable, the mystery of Life, and this precludes the laboratory attitude on his part. An age of action lives side by side with Death, and values Life by its attitude toward Death. The old Gothic religious idea is still with us— it is at his last moment that a man shows what is in him in its purity. Though he may have lived a wastrel, he may die a hero, and it is this last act of his life that creates the image of him that will survive in the minds of his descendants. We cannot possibly value a life according to its length, as Materialism did, or believe in any doctrine of immortality of the body. 

Between his earthly task and his relationship to God, there is no conflict for Western man. At the beginning of a battle, it is the custom of soldiers to pray. The battle is the foreground, that toward which the prayer is directed is the transcendent, is God. Our metaphysical imperative has to be fulfilled within a certain Life-framework. We have been born into a certain Culture, at a certain phase of its organic development, we have certain gifts. These condition the earthly task which we must perform. The metaphysical task is beyond any conditioning, for it would have been the same in any age anywhere. The earthly task is merely the form of the higher task, its organic vehicle. 

To philosophy, the Spirit of the Age has its own attitude, different from all previous centuries. Its great organizing principle is the morphological significance of systems and events. It rests upon no critical method, for all these critical methods merely reflected the prevalent spirit, and its spirit has outgrown criticism. The center of its thought-life is in History. By History we orient ourselves, we see the significance of the previous centuries of our own Culture, we understand beyond any system or ideology the nature of what we have to do, we see the significance of our own inmost feelings and imperative. 

For systems of world-improvement, products of a type of thinking which has become old-fashioned, this age has no use. It is interested solely in what must be done, and what can be done, and not at all in what ought to be done. The world of action has its own organic rhythms, and ideologies belong to the world of thought. Living ideas interest us, stillborn ideals do not. 

To art, the Age can have only one attitude. At best, our artistic tasks are secondary, at worst, art has degenerated to frightfulness and chaos. Mass clangor is not music, pictorial nightmares are not even draughtsmanship, let alone the art of painting. Obscenity and ugliness are not literature, materialistic propaganda is not drama, disconnected words thrown formlessly on to paper are not lyric poetry. Whatever art-tasks the age has to fulfill will be carried out by individuals acting quietly within old Western traditions, not noising themselves about with journalistic art-theories.

In an age of action and organization, legal thought reaches a new development. Western law will not stand outside the age of politics, with its accompanying thought-forms of history and psychology. It will be entirely renewed with these ideas, and its old materialism, in public law, commercial, and in particular, in criminal law, will be thrown into the discard. 

Technics, and its handmaid, science, are of high importance to the Western Civilization in its present phase. Technics must provide Western politics with a strong fist for the coming struggles. 

Into the social structure of the Western Civilization there will be infused the principle of authority, supplanting the principle of wealth. This view is not at all hostile to private property or private management— that belongs to the negative feeling of hatred and jealousy which inform class war. The 20th century Idea liquidates class war, as it does the idea of economics being the determining force in our life. 

Economics occupies the position in the new edifice of the foundation and its spiritual importance is indicated thereby. The foundation is not the important thing in a structure, but strictly secondary. But in an age of action, economic strength is indispensable to political units. Economics can be a source of political strength, can serve sometimes as a weapon in the power-struggle. For these reasons, the 20th century will not neglect the development of the economic side of life, but will provide it with a new impetus from the now dominant idea of politics. Instead of economics being the sphere wherein individuals battled one another for private spoils, it becomes now a strong and important side of the political organism which is the custodian of the Destiny of all. 

The view of the 20th century toward the various directions of thought and action is not arbitrary, any more than that of previous ages was. Most of the best minds of the 19th century were nihilistic in tendency, sensualistic, rationalistic, materialistic— because the age was one of crisis in the Culture-Life, and these ideas were the Spirit of the Age. Similarly, the idea of political nationalism was self-evident to that age, but that too was a product of the great crisis, thus a form of disease as destructive as it was necessary. 

Every juncture of organic happening presents a choice and an alternative. The choice is to do the necessary, the alternative is chaos. This has nothing to do with school-book logic; that logic is just one of the numberless products of Life, and Life will always invent as many logic's as it has need for, but Life will always obey one logic, organic logic. This is not describable by any system, but can be comprehended by Destiny-thinking, the only form of thought serviceable to action. Life goes forward, or it goes nowhere. Opposition to the Spirit of the Age is the will-to-nothingness. 

In the realm of theory, this age has as many alternatives as it has ideologists to dream them up. In the realm of fact, it has only one choice— and that is delineated for it by the Life-phase of the Civilization, and the outer circumstances in which we find ourselves at the moment. 

We know that the transition of one age into the next is gradual, and we know that even as it has fulfilled itself in some directions, it thinks it is just beginning in others. Thus while science as a mental discipline has achieved its goal, science as a popular outlook for fools and uncreative persons continues to exist. Materialism no longer claims any of the best minds, but the best minds are not in control at this moment. The West is dominated by the outer world, in the control of barbarians and distorters, and they find the least valuable minds of Europe most serviceable to them. Materialism serves the great cause of destroying Europe, and that is why it is forced on the populations of Europe by the extra-European forces. 

There are two ways in which we are sensible of our great task, our ethical imperative which claims our lives. First from our inward feeling, which impels us to look at things this way and no other. Secondly from our knowledge of the history of seven previous High Cultures, each of which went through this same crisis, and each of which liquidated the long Civilization-crisis in precisely the way that our instincts tell us ours is to be resolved.

II 

Our momentary situation takes the form of a great battle— a battle which may take more than one war to resolve it, or which may be resolved by a sudden cataclysmic happening, entirely unforeseeable to us now. On the surface of history it is the unforeseen that happens. The most human beings can do is to be prepared inwardly. In complete contradiction to our instinct, feelings, and ideas, the 19th century sits leering upon the throne of Europe, wrapped in the cerements of the grave, and propped up by the extra European forces. This means that the age in which we find ourselves takes the form of a deep and fundamental conflict. These ideas can never live again— their supremacy merely means the strangulation of the young, living tendencies of the New Europe. Their supremacy simply consists in forced lip-service to them. They do not affect the action-thinking, the organic-rhythms of the age, they are merely instruments of thwarting the will of Europe by holding it in subjection to the least valuable elements in Europe, who are maintained in power by extra-European bayonets. 

The conflict is far-reaching; it affects every sphere of Life. Two ideas are opposed— not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the Rule of Money; Order to Social Chaos, Hierarchy to Equality, socio-economico-political Stability to constant Flux; glad assumption of Duties to whining for Rights; Socialism to Capitalism, ethically, economically, politically; the Rebirth of Religion to Materialism; Fertility to Sterility; the spirit of Heroism to the spirit of Trade; the principle of Responsibility to Parliamentarism; the idea of Polarity of Man and Woman to Feminism; the idea of the individual task to the ideal of “happiness”; Discipline to Propaganda-compulsion; the higher unities of family, society, State to social atomism; Marriage to the Communistic ideal of free love; economic self sufficiency to senseless trade as an end in itself; the inner imperative to Rationalism. 

But the greatest opposition of all has not yet been named, the conflict which will take up all the others into itself. This is the battle of the Idea of the Unity of the West against the nationalism of the 19th century. Here stand opposed the ideas of Empire and petty-stateism, large-space thinking and political provincialism. Here find themselves opposed the miserable collection of yesterday-patriots and the custodians of the Future. The yesterday-nationalists are nothing but the puppets of the extra-European forces who conquer Europe by dividing it. To the enemies of Europe, there must be no rapprochement, no understanding, no union of the old units of Europe into a new unit, capable of carrying on 20th century politics. 

In the previous seven High Cultures, the period of the nationalistic disease was liquidated by the spread of one feeling over the whole Civilization. It was not unaccompanied by wars, for the Past has always, and will always, fight against the Future. Life is war, and to wish to create is to bring about the opposition of the great Nay-sayers, those whose existence is tied to the Past, is sunk into the Past. The division of the Civilization was in each case resolved by the reunion of the Civilization, the reassertion of its old, original, exclusiveness and unity. In each case, from petty-stateism came Empire. The Empire Idea was so strong that no inner force could oppose it with hope of success. 

Nationalism itself in Europe transformed itself into the new Empire-Idea after the First World War, the beginning of our age. In each Western country, the “Nationalists” were those who were opposed to another European War, and who desired a general political understanding in Europe to prevent its sinking into the dust where it now struggles. They were thus not nationalistic at all, but Western-Imperial. Similarly the self-styled “internationalists” were the ones who wished to stir up wars among the European states of yesterday, in order to sabotage the creation of the Empire of the West. They hated it because they were alien to it in one way or another, some because they were completely outside the Western Culture, others because they were incurably possessed by some ideology or other which hated the new, vital, masculine, form of the Future, and preferred the old conception of Life as money-chasing, money spending, hatred of strong, ascendant Life, and love of weakness, sterility, and stupidity.

And thus, the extra-European forces, together with the traitorous inner elements in Europe, were able to bring about a Second World War which defeated on the surface the powerful development of Western Empire. But the defeat was, and had to be, only on the surface, since the decisive impulse, as this century knows once more, comes always from within, from the Inner Imperative, from the Soul. To defeat on the surface the actualization of an Idea that is Historically essential is to strengthen it. Its energy, that would have been diffusing itself outward in self-expression turns inward and is concentrated onto the primary task of spiritual liberation. The materialists do not know that what does not destroy, makes stronger, and destroy this Idea they cannot. It uses men, but they cannot use it, touch it, injure it. 

This whole work is nothing but an outline of the Idea of this Age, a presentation of its foundations and universality, and every spiritual root of it will be traced to its origins and necessity. But in this place, it should be mentioned that the idea of a universal Europe, an Empire of the West, is not new, but is the prime form of our Culture, as of every other. For the first five centuries of our Culture, there was a universal Western people, in which the local differences counted but slightly. There was a universal king emperor, who might have been often defied, but was not denied. There was a universal style, Gothic, which inspired and formed all art from furniture to the cathedral. There was a universal code of conduct, Western chivalry, with its honor-imperative for every situation. There was a universal religion and a universal Church. There was a universal language, Latin, and a universal law, Roman law. 

The disintegration of this unity was slowly progressive from 1250 onward, but was not entirely accomplished, even for political purposes, until the age of political nationalism, beginning c. 1750, when Westerners for the first time allowed themselves to use the barbarian against other Western nations. 

And now, as we enter upon the late Civilization-phase, the idea of a universal Europe, an Empire of the West in the 20th century style emerges once more as the single, great, formative Idea of the age. The form in which the task presents itself is political. It is a power question whether this Empire will be established, for strong extra-European forces oppose it, and these forces have divided the soil of our Culture between them. 

III 

The Empire of the West is a development that no inner European force could possibly oppose with more than token resistance, but its establishment is now crossed by the decisive intervention of outer forces in the life of the West. The struggle is thus spiritual-political, and its motive force derives from the Idea of Western unity. At this moment, the existence of the West in freedom for self-development is a function of the distribution of power in the world. 

The age is political in a sense that no previous Western age has been so. This is the Age of Absolute Politics, for the whole form of our life is now a function of power. 

Action, to be effective, must be within a spiritual framework. As Goethe said, “Unlimited activity, of whatever kind, leads at last to bankruptcy.” Our action must not be blind. Our ideational equipment must be of a kind which can turn everything to its own account. It frees itself therefore from every kind of ideology, economic, biological, moralistic. It springs directly from the fact-sense which this age takes as its point of departure. 

In the universities and in most of the books, outmoded methods of looking at the field of politics are presented. The doctrine is still taught that there are various “forms of government” which can be moved about from one political unit to another. There is republicanism, there is democracy, monarchy, and so on, and so on. Some of these “forms” are held out as “good”; others as “bad.” It is better to have Europe occupied by the barbarian than to have a Western Empire under a “bad” “form of government.” It is better to eat the rations that Moscow and Washington allow than it is to have a proud and free Europe with a “bad” government.

This is the very height of stupidity. Asininity on this level can only be reached by ideologists without soul and without intellect. 

This sort of thing is book-politics, and is traceable to the fact that the word politics has two meanings: it means human power-activity, and it also has the dictionary meaning of a branch of philosophy. Now, if by politics, one means a branch of philosophy, very well. It can then turn into whatever one wishes. Carte blanche reigns in the world of philosophy. But— the real meaning of the word politics is power activity, and in this sense, acting Life is itself politics. In this sense, facts rule politics, and the making of facts is the task of politics. This is the only possible meaning of the word to the 20th century, and this most serious moment of our Cultural life demands the utmost clarity of the minds of active men in order that they may be entirely free from any trace of ideology, whether derived from logic, philosophy, or morality. 

And thus we stand before the view of politics which answers the inner demand of the Age of Absolute Politics.

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