ABSTRACT
IN the summer of 1914, all barriers erected during the preceding decades in the restless and eager search for the unknown were thrown down. A common fate was calling and threatening all. Many of those who had been feeling stifled by the specialization and demands of modern life saw the events of this month of August as the intervention of divine powers in a life that had become too petty, saw them as a violent but necessary restoration of instinctive unity cutting across the undergrowth of intellectual and emotional subtlety by which they had been engulfed. The dynamism that had characterized life for some decades, but which had begun to slacken owing to the departmentalization it had caused, was suddenly flowing along a broad new channel, departing not only from a number of remaining traditions but also from many of its own self-made channels. Poets and philosophers had already been preaching surrender to the instinctive life with which they fought all remaining traditions, hoping that that surrender would flood the narrowing restrictions of the days of materialism and neo-romanticism. The way was being prepared for an eruption that would sweep away the complacent belief in progress together with the neo-romantic dream-world.
