ABSTRACT
The present world crisis is the result of a spiritual and political development which, originating in the Renaissance, yet growing more pronounced only in the course of the last two centuries—the eighteenth and nineteenth—has finally led to the situation in which people find themselves today. This fateful period was marked by a plenitude of changes in the intellectual, spiritual and physical world, culminating in two events both of which are equally unique: the political and the economic revolution. Rationalism too, together with its offspring—political and economic liberalism—belongs to that class of things which should not be praised or condemned wholesale, but should be delimited and then confined to their proper sphere. Not only in internal politics, but also in foreign affairs, rationalism has wrought far reaching destruction. Once the rationalist has decided to appropriate the nationality principle he will not rest until he has succeeded in flogging it to death, after he has thoroughly discredited it by misuse.
