Part 10

As far as our chief question is concerned, our result was a decided negative. True, much that is great and much that may not be lost again has been achieved. The new systems of life have indeed appropriated whole groups of facts; have invigorated whole groups with new powers; have revealed new tasks of the most fruitful kind, not only in the individual but also for the whole; and have given to life dominating impulses and a powerful impetus. But all this becomes a doubtful gain, indeed it threatens to become a loss, if particular experience and achievement desire to govern the whole of life, and to impress upon it their own peculiar stamp. Not only does life become intolerably one-sided in such a case, but its wealth of experience is cut down in order to fit it into the given framework. We also saw that a serious inner inconsistency originates. For a long period this inconsistency may be concealed, but where any great energy is present in life, it must break forth with a disturbing force and become intolerable. Since the modern systems regard the whole of life as arising from relation, whether it be to the environment or to the subjective states of consciousness, they must reduce everything inward and universal to the level of a derived and secondary product; they must repudiate and oppose an original and independent spirituality, a self-conscious inner world. Such an inner spiritual experience has evolved through the whole of history, and transcends all forms of life-organisation: it is impossible to explain it away. The modern systems must themselves experience this. For they could not possibly transform the abundance of diverse appearances into an organised whole; they could not pass from universal to universal, without presupposing and employing the same transcendent and encompassing inner world, which directly they attack. At the same time, however, they give to every factor of life a position and a depth wholly inconsistent with what they are justified in doing with their own mode of thought. They cannot perform their own tasks without drawing incessantly upon another kind of reality, one richer and more substantial. In truth, they are something other, and something far more than they believe themselves to be. Does this not show, beyond possibility of refutation, that they do not fill the whole of life?

The contradiction immanent in the modern systems of life is especially apparent in the fact that they are unable to banish supersensual powers and to limit life to sense experience, without attributing to sense experience more content and more value than that which experience itself justifies, and which, to be consistent, they should not overstep. The naturalistic thinker ascribes unperceived to nature, which to him can be only a co-existence of soulless elements, an inner connection and a living soul. Only thus can he revere it as a higher power, as a kind of divinity; only thus can he pass from the fact of dependence to a devotional surrender of his feelings. The socialist bases human society, with its motives mixed with triviality and passion, on an invisible community, an ideal humanity, which he clothes with the splendour of a power and dignity that transfigures the immediate appearance of society. It is only in this way that he is able to direct his whole effort upon the welfare of mankind, and to expect a pure victory of reason within its sphere. The individualist in his conception exalts the individual to a height far more lofty than is justified by the individual as he is found in experience; for his thought, the individual is far more powerful and far more prominent and noble than immediate impressions indicate. Only thus is he able, from the freedom and the development of the individual, to hope for the beginning of a new epoch.

In these newer systems of life the conception of reality as a whole is also subjected to the same groundless and, likewise, false idealisation. As in these systems nothing may be acknowledged which transcends sense experience, there can be no universal which pervades and holds together the manifold. This being the case, reality must be a co-existence of single pieces; but no one will readily confess himself of this opinion. A pantheism, vague to the highest degree, is therefore seized upon as a cure-all, that man may have something which permeates and connects; but of this something, however, all more detailed description is lacking, and is carefully avoided. A conception so vague allows us at the same time to think and not to think something; at the same time to affirm and to deny. It seems to accomplish so much and to demand so little; it makes the impossible possible; and offers the most convenient asylum to all indefiniteness and confusion. It is a pity that in all this it is not a reality that surrounds us, but a mere _fata morgana_ which deceives. And a conception so vague is to displace religion and accord support to the new life! Truly, this requires a stronger faith than that with which the older religions were satisfied.

The modern systems of life desire a more forceful reality; in this they set work an aim which cannot be rejected. The course they have entered upon, however, does not bring them nearer to this aim, but rather removes them further from it. Neither the self-evidence of the senses nor the oscillation of mood can ever represent genuine reality to a being who, for good or for evil, has once learned to think. Many and varied impressions may come and go in sense experience; but their abundance cannot prevent the chief conceptions, by which they are here accompanied, from receiving a character abstract and vague in the highest degree. We hear continually of the whole, of reason, of power, of evolution; but all these conceptions have no stability and little content; they are like shadows and phantoms which vanish as soon as we wish to take hold of them. So, by an irony of fate, just those modes of thought whose chief impulse was the desire for more reality dissipate, dissolve reality. We see that the spiritual life may be denied by the individual, but not driven from the work of culture. It is true that immediate experience, outer and inner, has become much more to the present age than it was to earlier ages; but it has become so only through spiritual endeavour. If, therefore, the Modern Age now turns definitely against this spiritual activity, to rob it of all independence, it destroys that which first gave it its own power.

The modern systems of life have raised the standard of human existence enormously in regard to power and content; but they have done this at the cost of its spiritual concreteness. They have suppressed the life of inner spiritual experience and denied the problems of man's inner nature. They know of no grappling of man either with the infinite or with his own nature; they recognise no conflict between freedom and fate, and no inner development of the soul. And all this because their view of life as a whole takes away all depth, and transforms existence into a mere series of appearances. Thus, for anyone who regards such depth as the basis of life, and who, therefore, will not reject the experience and the result of the work of universal history, it becomes a necessity to reject and oppose the modern systems as guides of life. The more explicitly and exclusively they are presented, the more decided must his opposition be. For, what shall all the gain on the circumference of life profit man if through attention to that the centre of his life becomes empty and weak, if there emerges no content and no meaning in life itself? What is the value of all the advancing and refining of human existence if it does not bring with it a genuine spiritual culture and an inward elevation of mankind?

The increasing experience and perception of such limitations in the new may lead men to give more attention again to the old. The striving to transcend mere sense experience can no longer appear as a mere flight into an "other" world of dreams, or as due to a feeble and cowardly disposition; it may now be admitted rather as a deeply rooted endeavour to reach greater depths of life. Yet such a relaxation of the opposition to the old, and such an inclination to estimate it more highly, by no means justifies us in simply taking it up again in the form in which it lies before us. For to this not merely the modern system of life, but the whole development of life and work, is opposed. The contradictions and doubts which have grown up in the course of this development are not in the least overcome by the failure of the modern systems of life. For we do not find ourselves confronted here with an "either--or," in which the invalidity of the one alternative immediately establishes the validity of the other; but both may be inadequate. So we remain surrounded by the old and the new, under powerful influences from both, but not in a position to accept either the one or the other exclusively.

(b) THE CONDITION OF THE PRESENT

This situation, with its juxtaposition of the new and the old, is so full of confusion and perplexity that only a feeble disposition is capable of acquiescing in it. In the old we respect or surmise a depth; but this depth does not know how to give itself a form suitable to the present, or to influence us with the means available in our own time. The new directs all our attention to the immediate present and fills us with its intuitions; but this present becomes superficial to us, and with increasing power a desire for more substance and soul in life rises up in opposition to it. The old lifted us to the proud height of a new world, but this height showed signs of becoming severed from the rest of existence, and lapsed therefore into a state of painful insecurity. The new builds up from the experience of sense, but it finds no conclusion without going beyond this experience and thus contradicting itself. The old regarded the spiritual life of man, if not man himself, as occupying the centre of all and thereby fell into the danger of a hastened conclusion and of an anthropomorphic conception of reality. The new takes from man every position by which he is especially distinguished, and ignores all connection with ultimate depths, but in so doing it overthrows more than it intends; it undermines nothing less than the possibility of all spiritual work, all science, all culture.

And so we find ourselves in the midst of contradictions, drawn first in one direction, then in another: that we are at a crisis in life as a whole and in culture, that we are in state of spiritual need, cannot fail to be recognised. This crisis is made all the more acute through the peculiarity of the historical circumstances which have led up to it and the social conditions which surround us. Historically, we are under the influences of two cultures: one older, which up to the seventeenth century was in undisputed supremacy and which has asserted its authority up to the present day, especially in regard to the arrangements of social life; and one newer, which, after the influence of many varied preliminary tendencies, has arisen since that time with the energy of youth, and which, in the minds of individuals, has easily become the dominant power. The two cultures had different starting-points and followed different main courses. The old culture carried within itself the experiences of Greek life, the inner progress of which may be seen especially in the development of its philosophy. In the old culture endeavour was driven more and more beyond the world of sense to a world of thought, in which it went on from a universal to an ethical and ultimately to a religious conviction. To the thought of Greece, as she grew old, the world of sense experience sank more and more in reality and value, and life found its basis and chief realm of experience in a region transcending sense. Christianity definitely established this view of life, and made the invisible Kingdom of God the true home of man, the most immediate and the most secure that this life knows.

New peoples then grew up in this way of thinking; peoples who still had their work before them; to these, the break with the world of sense came more as the imposition of an overpowering authority than as due to their own experience. This fact constituted a point of weakness in every way; but no serious complication arose so long as these peoples were not yet ripe for spiritual independence. As soon, however, as this was the case, it was inevitable that contradictions should manifest themselves, and that a newly awakened impulse should urge the movement into an entirely opposite direction.

That is what really happened; the main tendency of life is now directed just as much upon the world as earlier it went beyond it; it has been transferred from the invisible to the visible, from the supernatural to the natural. We see this most clearly in the case of religion, which, as though with immanent necessity, runs through the sequence of a predominant transcendent Theism, a Panentheism, a Pantheism--gradually becoming colourless--an Agnosticism, and a Positivism. Everything supernatural disappears from thought, and life is concerned solely with sense experience. Thus, finally, we appear to have arrived at the same point as that from which the Greeks started out: the Monism of the most modern coining, for example, is hardly to be distinguished from the Hylozoism of the ancient Ionian thinkers. But is the whole result of the movement of universal history really only a deception? Has it simply brought us back again, from the false paths that we have tried, without according us any kind of positive profit whatever? We have become men of another kind; we think and feel differently; we have built up a rich culture, have transformed the world, have created a spiritual atmosphere; and we are capable of striving after infinite life and ultimate truth. Could all of this spring out of mere error? If that were so, should we not be compelled to reject the whole of this as phantasy and deception? But if the error was a means and an instrument in the attainment of truth, and if mankind in its going out from itself and in its return to itself is inwardly developed, where does the boundary between truth and error lie, and what is the meaning of the whole? So here again we lapse into uncertainty; history, to other ages a secure support, leads us into still greater doubt.

Finally, we must add to this crisis of culture the onward march of the social movement, which continually increases in power; the passionate longing of ever-growing groups of men for immediate participation in culture and the joys of life. Such movements may accomplish themselves within a fixed and acknowledged sphere of culture and of life; what changes they then bring lie within this sphere; they do not place the whole in question. Thus, the democratic movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries left certain principles of religious conviction untouched; they left the conception of the world entirely unchanged. But the matter is quite otherwise when a movement of this kind comes in contact with a culture which is inwardly unstable and which is growing uncertain concerning its final aims. We cannot fail to recognise what a great danger of degeneration there is under such circumstances. The masses, thus struggling upward, then seek their own way of life, and in so doing they naturally concentrate their attention upon that which lies immediately before their eyes and affects their immediate well-being. From this position they will advance all the more quickly to a certain conclusion, in that they are unconcerned with the experiences and perplexities of the work of universal history, and therefore, with unclouded enthusiasm, expect complete truth and pure happiness from freer exercise of their powers and the rejection of all authority. If we wish to ignore the dangers to culture which thus grow up, we must either estimate man as he is too highly, or spiritual tasks too meanly. Until the present, an independent spiritual life, making man more comprehensive in being, raising and freeing him, has manifested itself only at individual points; in the first place in chosen individuals, from whom it has been conveyed to the common life. The spiritual world made its appearance as a power superior to the interests and the opinions of individuals and of the masses. Only in such transcendence of the merely human did it develop any characteristic content, find an inner unity, arouse respect, and lead man beyond mere nature. If all this should now become different, if man in the mass should come to feel himself to be the measure of all things, and should relate all to his perception as the centre of infinity, would not a severe contradiction arise between human enterprise and spiritual necessity, and would not the full development of this opposition threaten the whole state of culture with a violent convulsion? Ultimately the inner necessities of our being would certainly win the day against all errors of superficiality, but what severe conflicts and losses the division must cost!

The consideration of all these facts reveals us under the power of different, indeed antagonistic, movements, and most especially in the midst of the great struggle for supremacy between the visible and invisible world, as the conflict between Positivism and Idealism gives expression to it. Life for us contains two movements, one of which starts from the centre and the other from the circumference; the former cannot embrace the fullness of reality, and its basis is also insecure; the latter gives no inner unity to life and lowers the standard of the whole. As each of these main tendencies again divides, movements the most varied surround us, tear us asunder, and crush our souls under their oppositions. God and reason have become uncertain to us, and the substitutes that are offered--nature, society, the individual--fail to satisfy us. The unrest and uncertainty that arise from this are not limited to a single sphere, they extend to the ultimate basal principles of life. The new mode of thought declares the chief world of the ancients to be a delusion; but we saw its own world dissolved in shadows and schemes by spiritual activity. Since the one dissolves the reality of the other, we are threatened with the loss of all definite results; our own being becomes a dark problem to us; we know neither what we are nor what we are not.

The impression that we get of the condition of the present as a whole may also be represented in the following manner: the historical movement of humanity unfolds an incalculable wealth of life; this life, however, cannot reach its own highest point and cannot win a character of a spiritual kind unless it organises itself into a whole, unless it attains an inner synthesis transcending all isolated states. Such syntheses have been realised, and have led to distinctive organisations of life; but these organisations have all proved to be too insignificant and too narrow, and none has been able to overcome the rest and to embrace the whole wealth of life. So life as a whole has broken them down; and since it has thus lost all inner structure, it must inevitably fall into a state of rapid degeneration, and must threaten to lose all content and meaning.

The evil effects on the development of life that are caused by this convulsion and division, and by the lack of a dominant tendency; how this condition leads to the destruction of everything simple and self-evident, and lends to an unrestrained reflection an unwarrantable power; how it robs endeavour of all its main tendencies, and permits true and untrue, good and evil, to run confusedly together, all this and much else is to-day so much and so widely discussed, and presents itself with such overpowering clearness to our vision, that its description need not detain us even for a moment.

Ought we to submit to this disintegration and degradation of life as to an inevitable destiny, or is it possible to work against it and to strive after a unity transcending the division? The fact that the division makes so strong an impression on us and that we feel it to be so intolerable is at once in favour of the latter alternative. How could this experience be possible if all multiplicity did not fall within a comprehensive whole of life--if our nature were not superior to the oppositions and did not drive us compulsorily to seek a unity? The life which, in distinct contrast to decaying Antiquity, flows through our age in a powerful, ceaselessly swelling flood; the unwearied activity of this age; the excellence of its work; its passionate longing for more happiness and fullness of life, all forbids a hasty and light renunciation. It is true that there are hard contradictions, and that spiritual power is at present not equal to cope with them; but this power is not a given and fixed magnitude: it is capable of an incalculable increase. Thus we ought not to be too ready to assert that the limitations of the age are identical with the bounds of humanity, and we ought not faint-heartedly to discontinue the struggle for a unity and a meaning in life.

This problem cannot be acknowledged without at the same time being admitted as the most important and the most urgent of all problems. For, on the decision concerning the whole, that concerning the spiritual character of life depends, and, as this character extends through the whole of life, every single matter will be differently decided according to the decision concerning the whole. Only purely technical and merely formal matters of work may remain unaffected by the problem, but wherever a content comes into question it will at once arise and manifest its urgency. This problem, therefore, will not suffer itself to be thrust into the background; we can neither dally with it nor turn aside from it. The individual, indeed, in his sphere of free decision and of independent action can withdraw himself from the question, but he can do so only at the price of the debasement of the quality of his life, only in that, from an independent co-operator in the building up of the ages, he becomes a dependent under-worker.

(c) THE FORM OF THE PROBLEM

Only a few words are now necessary to come to a more definite understanding concerning the form of the problem, which, with compelling force, rises into prominence out of all this complexity. Where the convulsion is such a fundamental and universal one as it shows itself to us to be, it is of the first importance to rise above the existing chaos, and to avoid all that which, even indirectly, would lead us back to it. Many of the aids which would-be healers of the time's evils recommend with vigour therefore need not be considered.

Every attempt to make a direct compromise between the different forms of life, to appropriate eclectically this aspect from one and that aspect from another, is inadequate. The view that none of the systems of life could have won so much power over mankind without containing some kind of truth, which may not be lost, has, to be sure, a good deal of truth in it. It is first necessary, however, to attain a position from which this truth in each case may be ascertained and rightly appreciated; and we can only reach such a position in opposition to the confusion which surrounds us.