The New Society | Page 5

they
clamoured for "shining armour." The most wretched victims in soul and
body, who were obliged to flee forwards because they could not flee in
any other direction, were called heroes, and the manliest word in our
language, a word of which only the freest and the greatest are worthy,
was degraded. One who has experienced the hate and fury of the
turn-coats who poured contempt upon every word against the war and
the "great days," is unable to understand how a whole people can throw
its errors overboard without shame and sorrow--or he understands it
only too well. At this day we are being mocked and preached at by the
turn-coats of the second transformation, and to-morrow we shall be
smiled at by those of the third.
But it does not matter. The moving forces of our epoch do not come
from business offices nor from the street, the rostrum, the pulpit, or the

professorial chair. The noisy rush of yesterday, to-day and to-morrow is
only the furious motion of the outermost circle, the centre moves upon
its way, quietly as the stars.
We have in our survey to leap over several periods of forward and
backward movement and we shall earn the thanks of none of them.
What is too conservative for one will be too revolutionary for another,
and the æsthete will scornfully tell us that we have no fibre. When we
show that what awaits us is no fools' paradise, but the danger of a
temporary reverse of humanity and culture, then the facile Utopianist
will shout us down with his two parrot-phrases,[4] and when we, out of
a sense of duty, of harmony with the course of the world and
confidence in justice at the soul of things, tread the path of danger,
precipitous though it be, then we shall be scorned by all the
worshippers of Force and despisers of mankind.
But we for our part shall not pander either to the force-worshippers or
to the masses. We serve no powers that be. Our love goes out to the
People; but the People are not a crowd at a meeting, nor a sum-total of
interests, nor are they the newspapers or debating-clubs. The People are
the waking or sleeping, the leaking, frozen, choked, or gushing well of
the German spirit. It is with that spirit, in the present and in the future,
as it runs its course into the sea of humanity, that we have here to do.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: The emblem of the Hohenzollerns.]
[Footnote 4: The reference, apparently, is to the argument that any
change must be for the better, and to the reliance on surplus value. See
pp. 13, 14.]

III
The criterion which we have indicated for the socialized society of the
future is a material one. But is the spiritual condition of an epoch to be
determined by material arrangements? Is this not a confession of faith

in materialism?
We are speaking of a criterion, not of a prime moving force. I have no
desire, however, to avoid going into the material, or rather we should
say mechanical, interpretation of history. I have done it more than once
in my larger works, and for the sake of coherence I may repeat it in
outline here.
The laws which determine individual destinies are reproduced in the
history of collective movements. A man's career is not prescribed by
his bodily form, his expression, or his environment; but there is in these
things a certain connexion and parallelism, for the same laws which
determine the course of his intellectual and spiritual life reflect
themselves in bodily and practical shape. Every instant of our
experience, all circumstances in which we find ourselves, every limb
that we grow, every accident that happens to us, is an expression or
product of our character. We are indeed subject to human limitations;
we are not at liberty to live under water or in another planet; but within
these wide boundaries each of us can shape his own life. To observe a
man, his work, his fate, his body and expression, his connexions and
his marriage, his belongings and his associations, is to know the man.
From this point of view all social, economic and political schemes
become futile, for if man is so sovereign a being there is no need to
look after him. But these schemes re-acquire a relative importance
when we consider the average level of man's will-power, as we meet it
in human experience--a power which, as a rule, shows itself unable to
make head against a certain maximum of pressure from external
circumstances. And again, these schemes are really a part of the
expression of human will, for through them collective humanity battles
with its surroundings, its contemporary world, and freely shapes its