ABSTRACT
Count Keyserling is a phenomenon that needs to be judged with extreme caution. Keyserling is not to be taken as a joke, though he himself suffers from the delusion that his book was written with a sense of humour. The chief value and meaning of the book, as author see it, is that it gives clear expression to the need for the intellectual today to wean himself from the purely rational point of view. It bears witness to a psychological reality which has vanished from sight ever since the days of a common Latin language, the one universal Christian Church, and a universal Gothic style, so completely that one never even thinks of it. If it be true that we are the most backward, conservative, stiff-necked, self-righteous, smug, and churlish of all European nations, this would mean that in Switzerland the European is truly at home in geographical and psychological centre.
