We still love monarchy and
aristocracy, together with that picturesque and dutiful order which
rested on local institutions, class privileges, and the authority of
the family. We may even feel an organic need for all these things,
cling to them tenaciously, and dream of rejuvenating them. On the
other hand the shell of Christendom is broken. The unconquerable mind
of the East, the pagan past, the industrial socialistic future
confront it with their equal authority. Our whole life and mind is
saturated with the slow upward filtration of a new spirit--that of an
emancipated, atheistic, international democracy.
These epithets may make us shudder; but what they describe is
something positive and self-justified, something deeply rooted in our
animal nature and inspiring to our hearts, something which, like every
vital impulse, is pregnant with a morality of its own. In vain do we
deprecate it; it has possession of us already through our
propensities, fashions, and language. Our very plutocrats and monarchs
are at ease only when they are vulgar. Even prelates and missionaries
are hardly sincere or conscious of an honest function, save as they
devote themselves to social work; for willy-nilly the new spirit has
hold of our consciences as well. This spirit is amiable as well as
disquieting, liberating as well as barbaric; and a philosopher in our
day, conscious both of the old life and of the new, might repeat what
Goethe said of his successive love affairs--that it is sweet to see
the moon rise while the sun is still mildly shining.
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