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The common feature of the cult of all Idols is the adaptation of an ideal to the evil instincts of mankind. Man cultivates the vices which are profitable to him, but feels the necessity of legitimizing them; being unwilling to sacrifice them, he must idealize them. That is why the problem at which he has never ceased to labor throughout the centuries has been to harmonize his ideals with his own mediocrity. He has always succeeded. The crowd has no difficulty here. It sets side by side its virtues and its vices, its heroism and its meanness. The force of its passions and the rapid course of the days which carry it along cause it to forget its lack of logic.
But the intelligent few cannot satisfy themselves with so little effort. Not that they are, as is often said, less readily swayed by passion. This is a grave error; the richer a life becomes the more does it offer for passion to devour, and history sufficiently shows the terrifying paroxysms to which the lives[{110}] of religious leaders and revolutionaries have attained. But these toilers in the spirit love careful work, and are repelled by popular modes of thought which perpetually break through the meshes of reasoning. They have to make a more closely woven net in which instinct and idea, cost what it may, combine to form a stouter tissue. They thus achieve monstrous chefs-d'œuvre. Give an intellectual any ideal and any evil passion and he will always succeed in harmonizing the twain. The love of God and the love of mankind have been invoked in order to burn, kill, and pillage. The fraternity of 1793 was sister to the Holy Guillotine. We have in our time seen Churchmen seeking and finding in the Gospels the justification of Banking and of War. Since the outbreak of the war a clergyman of Würtemberg established the fact that neither Christ nor John the Baptist nor the apostles desired to suppress militarism.[23] A clever intellectual is a conjuror in ideas. "Nothing in my hands—nothing up my sleeves." The great trick is to extract from any given idea its precise contrary—war from the Sermon on the Mount, or, like Professor[{111}] Ostwald, the military dictatorship of the Kaiser from the dream of an intellectual internationalism. For such conjurors these things are but child's play.
Let us expose them, by examining the words of this Dr. Ostwald, who has appeared during the last few months as the Baptist of the Gospel of the spiked helmet.
Here is the Idol to begin with—Kultur (made in Germany), with a capital K "rectiligne et de quatre pointes, comme un chevel de frise," as Miguel de Unamuno wrote to me. All around are little gods, the children of its loins: Kulturstaat, Kulturbund, Kulturimperium....
"I am now" (it is the voice of Ostwald[24]) "going to explain to you the great secret of Germany. We, or rather the Germanic race, have discovered the factor of Organization. Other peoples still live under the régime of individualism while we are under that of Organization. The stage of Organization is a more advanced stage of civilization."
It is surely clear that, like those missionaries who, in order to carry the Christian faith to heathen peoples, secure the co-operation of a squadron and a landing party which straightway establish in the[{112}] idolatrous country commercial stores protected by a ring of cannon, German intelligence cannot without selfishness keep her treasures to herself. She is obliged to share them.
"Germany wishes to organize Europe, for Europe has hitherto not been organized. With us everything tends to elicit from each individual the maximal output in the direction most favorable for society. That for us is liberty in its highest form."
We may well pause to marvel at this way of talking about human "culture" as though it were a question of asparagus and artichokes. Of this happiness, and these advantages, this maximal output, this market-garden culture, this liberty of artichokes subjected to a judicious forcing process, Professor Ostwald does not wish to deprive the other peoples of Europe. As they are so unenlightened as not to acquiesce with enthusiasm:
"War will make them participate in the form of this organization in our higher civilization."