Chapter 6 - Page 2

men of our day try
unconsciously to maintain the old social conception of life, which
justifies their position, and to hide from themselves and others
its insufficiency, and above all the necessity of adopting the
Christian conception of life, which will mean the break up of the
whole existing social order. They struggle to keep up the
organization based on the social conception of life, but do not
believe in it themselves, because it is extinct and it is
impossible to believe in it.

All modern literature--philosophical, political, and artistic--is
striking in this respect. What wealth of idea, of form, of color,
what erudition, what art, but what a lack of serious matter, what
dread of any exactitude of thought or expression! Subtleties,
allegories, humorous fancies, the widest generalizations, but
nothing simple and clear, nothing going straight to the point,
that is, to the problem of life.

But that is not all; besides these graceful frivolities, our
literature is full of simple nastiness and brutality, of arguments
which would lead men back in the most refined way to primeval
barbarism, to the principles not only of the pagan, but even of
the animal life, which we have left behind us five thousand years
ago.

And it could not be otherwise. In their dread of the Christian
conception of life which will destroy the social order, which some
cling to only from habit, others also from interest, men cannot
but be thrown back upon the pagan conception of life and the
principles based on it. Nowadays we see advocated not only
patriotism and aristocratic principles just as they were advocated
two thousand years ago, but even the coarsest epicureanism and
animalism, only with this difference, that the men who then
professed those views believed in them, while nowadays even the
advocates of such views do not believe in them, for they have no
meaning for the present day. No one can stand still when the
earth is shaking under his feet. If we do not go forward we must
go back. And strange and terrible to say, the cultivated men of
our day, the leaders of thought, are in reality with their subtle
reasoning drawing society back, not to paganism even, but to a
state of primitive barbarism.

This tendency on the part of the leading thinkers of the day is
nowhere more apparent than in their attitude to the phenomenon in
which all the insufficiency of the social conception of life is
presented in the most concentrated form--in their attitude, that
is, to war, to the general arming of nations, and to universal
compulsory service.

The undefined, if not disingenuous, attitude of modern thinkers to
this phenomenon is striking. It takes three forms in cultivated
society. One