The criterion which we have indicated for the socialized society of
the future is a material one. But is the spiritual condition of an
epoch to be determined by material arrangements? Is this not a
confession of faith in materialism?
We are speaking of a criterion, not of a prime moving force. I have no
desire, however, to avoid going into the material, or rather we should
say mechanical, interpretation of history. I have done it more than
once in my larger works, and for the sake of coherence I may repeat it
in outline here.
The laws which determine individual destinies are reproduced in the
history of collective movements. A man's career is not prescribed by
his bodily form, his expression, or his environment; but there is in
these things a certain connexion and parallelism, for the same laws
which determine the course of his intellectual and spiritual life
reflect themselves in bodily and practical shape. Every instant of our
experience, all circumstances in which we find ourselves, every limb
that we grow, every accident that happens to us, is an expression or
product of our character. We are indeed subject to human limitations;
we are not at liberty to live under water or in another planet; but
within these wide boundaries each of us can shape his own life. To
observe a man, his work, his fate, his body and expression, his
connexions and his marriage, his belongings and his associations, is
to know the man.
From this point of view all social, economic and political schemes
become futile, for if man is so sovereign a being there is no need to
look after him. But these schemes re-acquire a relative importance
when we consider the average level of man's will-power, as we meet it
in human experience--a power which, as a rule, shows itself unable to
make head against a certain maximum of pressure from external
circumstances. And again, these schemes are really a part of the
expression of human will, for through them collective humanity battles
with its surroundings, its contemporary world, and freely shapes its
own destinies.
The inner laws of the community harmonize with those of the
individuals who compose it. The fact that certain national traits of
will and character are conditioned or even enforced by poverty or
wealth, soil and climate, an inland or maritime position, tends to
obscure the fact that these external conditions are not really laid on
the people but have been willed by themselves. A people _wills_ to
have a nomadic life, or wills to have a sea-coast, or wills
agriculture, or war; and has the power, if its will be strong enough,
to obtain its desire, or failing that to break up and perish. It is
the same will and character which decides for well-being and culture,
or indolence and dependence, or labour and spiritual development. The
Venetians did not have architecture and painting bestowed upon them
because they happened to have become rich, nor the English sea-power
because they happened to live on an island: no, the Venetians willed
freedom, power and art, and the Anglo-Saxons willed the sea.
There is a grain of truth in the popular political belief that war
embodies a judgment of God. At any rate character is judged by it; not
indeed in the sense of popular politics, that one can "hold out" in a
hopeless position, but because all the history that went before the
war, the capacity or incapacity of politics and leadership is a
question of character--and with us it was a question of indolence, of
political apathy, of class-rule, philistinish conceit and greed of
gain. Nowhere was this conception of the judgment of God so
blasphemously exaggerated as with us Germans, when the lord of our
armed hosts, at the demand of the barracks greedy for power, of the
tavern-benches, the state-bureaus and the debating societies was
summoned, and charged with the duty, forsooth, of chastising
England--England, which they only knew out of newspaper reports!
To-day this exaggeration is being paid for in humiliation, for God did
not prove controllable, and His naïve blasphemers must silently and
with grinding teeth admit that their foes are in the right when they,
in their turn, appeal to the same judgment to justify, without limit,
everything they desire to do.
After these brief observations on the psycho-physical complex, Spirit
and Destiny, we hope we shall not be misunderstood when for the sake
of brevity we speak as if the spirit of the new order were determined
by its material construction, while in reality it incorporates itself
therein. The structure is the easier to survey, and we therefore make
it the starting-point of our discussion.