ABSTRACT
We are living in an age of the most powerful and most encompassing tensions that have ever characterized any period in the history of man. The conquest of space and time has rendered illusory the mere idea of seclusion; the rise of the masses, or at any rate of immense majorities (as opposed to the minorities which up to the world war actually ruled all countries, whatever may be the theories professed), to political and social power has made of the mere number a formidable force, representing, moreover, a definite quality. And since life means an ever unstable equilibrium between opposing and contending forces, of which many are polar in quality—(like the electric energy which manifests itself in the correlation of positive and negative electricity, one pole evoking and even creating its anti-pole)—the changes outlined above have led to a state of things where on the psychical and spiritual plane currents of unheard-of powers, comparable to the strongest imaginable electric currents, act in correlation to each other. The definite ideas attached to definite movements matter little, and they are always misleading; for, firstly, each of them contains and unifies many more components than is indicated by the name given to it, and secondly, the real power behind a “name and form” has in the long run, as all history shows, very little in common with the latter. A movement which began its career with one definite aim in view always grew, as life proceeded, into something different. Accordingly, I do not, in the very least, believe in the accuracy of any of the current designations for world movements; no nation in the world really means what it says when pretending to struggle for Democracy or Socialism or Freedom or Godlessness. In reality all of them grope in the dark for a goal as yet unknown to them, which will reveal its final outlines only after the embryo, that each is now, not only has been born but has grown up. And no single one of the causes that men fight for in our days can possibly achieve final victory: the world of man being divided into gigantic fields of tension, centres of formidable power, only a harmonized synthesis of all that survives—a distant synthesis very difficult to reach—will eventually produce a relatively stable equilibrium. 1
