ABSTRACT
Logical and honest materialists are quite ready to admit that the abolition of God brings with it the abolition of art as such. What they will not admit is that such a development must inevitably lead to the abolition of man, to the transformation of man into something subhuman, into a human machine, a robot or into the anarchic human atom which, however, could in actual fact not be called 'a-tom' at all, since it could be still further split and broken down. First of all, an epoch does not consist merely of the dangers that happen to threaten it. There existed in the nineteenth century, and there still exists in the twentieth, a vast stock of soundness which, despite all the assaults made upon it, has by no means been used up; there are still large sections of society which have not yet fallen victims to the disease nor taken any particular hurt from it.
