ABSTRACT
The nearer an epoch is to us, the less we understand it: our own we understand least of all. For this reason alone, the sketch of the cultural pattern of the period to be surveyed must be drawn with greater care than was required in the case of the preceding period. Moreover, the cultural pattern actually grew everywhere more complex as the bourgeois era wore on. The reader will please recall what has been said in Part iii (ch. 3) on the subject of the lack of uniformity in the cultural pattern or Zeitgeist of any epoch: to speak of a single dominant Zeitgeist at all spells distortion of the facts—in most cases ideological distortion. But this fundamental truth of cultural sociology applies to the period under discussion with a vengeance. However severely we must simplify things, the following comments will make this abundantly clear.
