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own active energy to work upon; not needing the conditions of an external material. . . . It supplies its own nourishment and is the object of its own operations. While it is exclusively its own basis of existence and absolute final aim, it is also its energizing power realizing this aim. . . . This idea or Reason, is the true, the external, the absolutely powerful essence. It reveals itself in the World, and in that world nothing else is revealed but this and its honor and glory."

This, Hegel thinks, has been established in philosophy and must be accepted in history as a confirmed thesis.

This view in its most general and broad forms had moved Fichte to state that man must not strive directly to blissfulness. He must only endeavor to perceive as deeply as possible the highest and most powerful, which guides and regulates and rules in and over the world; and primarily to be permeated by the good, which, as Fichte insisted, is the most beautiful and highest expression of the most powerful and infinite power. Such perception of the universal spirit and its attributes and permeation with them will eventually fill man with bliss.

"Not that is good," says Fichte, "which is blissful, but on the contrary, that which is good makes us blissful."

The most important in man is, therefore, his close approach to spirit, whose characteristic properties are independence and freedom; a close approach to his deep self, to the self which borders upon the essence of the world. The nearer man draws to the world spirit, the freer and more independent he becomes. This must be the goal of all specific human ventures. The function of culture, Fichte thinks, must be to bring man to this goal. For good and evil themselves have a meaning only when they are referred to beings that are free and independent, or are striving to become such.

"Culture," says Fichte, "is the last and the highest means for the goal of man, for the full identity of man with his own self.” And Fichte, therefore, defines culture as the revelation of the universal spirit which bends and utilizes every power to assure complete freedom and complete independence of all that we ourselves are in reality.

Thus the reply of the early part of the nineteenth century was, so to speak, thoroughly anti-realistic; and in the sense of a keen antithesis to materialism this reply was supremely idealistic. It was made as a no uncertain assertion, that the world as presented to us through our senses, is not the world wherein our life begins and

ends. And we must, therefore, not search in it and through it the aims and goals of our life and death.

No matter how favorable this world is to all the human, "worldly" interests, in the critical moments of our life it will be powerless to offer a solution that will fill the emptiness and ease the pain of the human soul, which yearns for meaning and value. These ⚫ exist for us perhaps no longer than the flash of our eye across paints of many colors. The meaning and value of life must be sought in the world to which all our feelings strive, even though our senses can never reach it. Only this higher world, and no other, must grant us the key to all that takes place and happens in the world where the momentous comes and passes.

The culture-historical view harmonizes well with such a positively idealistic solution, which perceives in the universal culture, which is the eternal, almighty and spontaneous expression of the Universal Spirit, the chief causes, the deepest motives and the greatest forces of all historical events; which sees in the national culture, i. e., in the inclinations, environments, conceptions, attitudes, experiences and reactions of a people the cause and driving forces, the seeds and fruits of all national events and phenomena. The stronger and more deeply affecting a phenomenon or an event, the deeper and the more vividly must the specific characteristics of the national culture be engraved in it. Culture must, therefore, be felt most deeply in those rarest and most fundamental social and political upheavals which we usually term revolutions.

And had the world outlook which controlled human thought in the beginning of the nineteenth century, not been forced back by materialism, which, for a while, drove the human spirit to surface rather than to depths, the assertion would perhaps have been made long ago that the kind of revolution a people goes through depends. directly upon the culture it possesses. For every revolution, every new order built upon the ruins of the old, is a result and reflection of the culture of a people, through which the Universal Spirit, for reasons known to It alone, has revealed itself in a certain manner.

However, before the relation between social revolutions and national cultures had become clear, materialism, thanks to the great successes and upheavals which science had achieved in the laboratory, broke its way into a considerable number of human brains. Philosophy with its idealism and spiritualism became silent for a while and science began to speak its materialistic tongue in a philosophic

manner. This philosophically feathered science offers an entirely different solution to the problems of idealism and realism.

This solution placed civilization before culture, cosmopolitanism before nationalism. Therefore, instead of seeking the causes and factors of revolutions in national cultures, they were sought in the national means of production and the cosmic material powers, with the faint light of the little materialistic lamps. The concepts of revolution chime in for a while with the conceptions of civilization in a quite mechanical manner.

Science begins to prevail over philosophy in the fifties of the nineteenth century. Metaphysical philosophy had for one reason or another abandoned the swift flight led by giants as great as Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schlegel and Schelling. Natural philosophy now takes the place of metaphysics. Materialism and realism take the leadership over idealism and spiritualism. Nature, matter and power are considered the ultimate and primary, the almighty and all-embracing causes of all the highest and deepest, the most beautiful and best in the world. Nature, in the purely physical sense, and matter and power begin to be looked upon as the only sources out of which life and spirit, sensation and thought, soul and will had issued and continue to issue. And what nature, matter and power had meant for the cosmos, the social organization, economics and tools begin to mean for the development of society. The materialistic conception of history is being created.

From the laboratory and the scientific treatises, materialism and atheism with it, are transported into the popular scientific text books and into the halls where learning is dispensed to the masses. In this way a kind of materialistic-atheistic movement is established. For a while the masses begin to like the idea that the real thing in the world is that which can be touched with the hand, and that which can be understood by sound judgment. Man was not made by God, but on the contrary man had with his power of imagination created God. Why not? If man could invent an airplane, telegraphy, railroads and telephones which he needed for making his life more comfortable, why could he not have invented a God and discovered a religion that would help, for instance, the capitalist to exploit his fellow-man, the worker?

All these concrete discoveries of human mind, especially those that increase the comfort of human life, begin, like the idols, those ancient embodiments of the idea of God, to take the chief place. Men begin to worship them and sacrifice on their altars inner good

ness and beauty, inner depth and excellence. In short, they sacrifice all the sensations and experiences, all the meanings and values of human life and universal existence which constitute the concept of culture. Civilization takes the place of culture. In the light of civilization national and social ideals are formed. Revolutions are foretold, prepared and made on the foundation of the complete blindness of nature, on the basis of the iron-strong matter and energy, and in correspondence with all the demands of the capitalistic idol-civilization.

Very great in number were the accomplishments of this period during which science and with it civilization reigned uninterrupted. One thing, however, all these achievements failed to accomplish, viz., to give man a little spiritual joy, a deeper penetration into happiness, and a stronger experience of blissfulness. They failed to do it because in all their deeds and works, they completely left out the meaning and value, the why and wherefore of human life. And inasmuch as revolutions of the last and this century were a part of human life, but were led by men who bowed to physical nature and material civilization, they have lost their meaning and value in the eyes of a large portion of humanity. The why and wherefore of revolution could not continue to be inspiring to those who could not give up the soul which is in them, and which can get along without them more easily than they without her. . . . "It is true," says Eucken, "that realism has not only carried the opinion of humanity with it with overwhelming force, it has also given an immense impetus to work, accelerated our whole existence, aroused us to a more manly overcoming of difficulties and to a more victorious attack upon all that is irrational."

"The nineteenth century more than any other epoch, enlarged the whole aspect of life and improved human conditions. One would have expected it to close with a proud and joyful consciousness of strength. The fact that it did not, points to an error in the type of life which dominates the period. This error is to be found in the desire of realism to eliminate the soul. And the soul will not allow itself to be eliminated. The very attempt to deny the soul only arouses it to greater activity."

This greater activity of the soul seems to have urged philosophy to revive and throw its strictly critical and intuitively penetrating glance at all the conquests and triumphs, at all the accomplishments and promises of science, and say to her: "I acknowledge and estimate your accomplishments, but you must, however, together with me.

recognize something that cannot be denied. You will never succeed in showing or proving how matter and energy caused, or how they succeeded in producing, life and spirit, and how life and spirit may be explained by them."

The world is not a complex of lifeless atoms. It is nothing but an exceedingly large social organism of wills. Philosophy looks upon the idea of universal associations of consciousness in its final analysis as upon the basis of that which used to be called nature, and in this manner she substitutes the full and complete synthesis of a living reality for scientific abstractions. Science considers the relation of things independently of the subject, which possesses will and thinking power; and, independently of existence in its totality, gives us merely an abstract image, an image which does not include the fulness of reality, the identity of the entire universe of things and of the spirit which is conscious of them.

Once science began to admit that it can in no way succeed and that it has no hope of succeeding in penetrating into the most concrete of the concrete phenomena, the phenomena which are called life and consciousness (and it could not help admitting this) it immediately began to spin the thread of metaphysics. Just as in the days of Spinoza, Leibnitz and Descartes, and later of Kant, Hegel and Fichte, it continues to catch within its nets the fluttering soul of man, only with surer and stronger haste.

With the revival of metaphysics culture will gain control over civilization, just as philosophy has begun to dominate science. For it is as clear as day, that the farther the spirit advances into the profundities, the less oportunities it has to spread over surface and the more man is interested in the world within him, the less he is charmed by the world external to him.

It is the same with time as with space. As man devotes his attention to the problems which touch eternity, the passing world interests him only in so far as he can find an organic relation between the transitory and the lasting. Moreover, hand in hand with the growth of human interest in everything excellent, deep and external, grows his interest in absolutisms, which surpasses his interest in relativities. And what does culture mean if not going to the roots of the problems of eternity and supernaturalness, which border upon the absolute-the something which is good for all times, all places, and all men. For it includes in itself time, space, and man, while itself, it is not included in any one of them.

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