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 own destinies.

The inner laws of the community harmonize with those of the individuals who compose it. The fact that certain national traits of will and character are conditioned or even enforced by poverty or wealth, soil and climate, an inland or maritime position, tends to obscure the fact that these external conditions are not really laid on the people but have been willed by themselves. A people wills to have a nomadic life, or wills to have a sea-coast, or wills agriculture, or war; and has the power, if its will be strong enough, to obtain its desire, or failing that to break up and perish. It is the same will and character which decides for well-being and culture, or indolence and dependence, or labour and spiritual development. The Venetians did not have architecture and painting bestowed upon them because they happened to have become rich, nor the English sea-power because they happened to live on an island: no, the Venetians willed freedom, power and art, and the Anglo-Saxons willed the sea.

There is a grain of truth in the popular political belief that war embodies a judgment of God. At any rate character is judged by it; not indeed in the sense of popular politics, that one can "hold out" in a hopeless position, but because all the history that went before the war, the capacity or incapacity of politics and leadership is a question of character—and with us it was a question of indolence, of political apathy, of class-rule, philistinish conceit and greed of gain. Nowhere was this conception of the judgment of God so blasphemously exaggerated as with us Germans, when the lord of our armed hosts, at the demand of the barracks greedy for power, of the tavern-benches, the state-bureaus and the debating societies was summoned, and charged with the duty, forsooth, of chastising England—England, which they only knew out of newspaper reports! To-day this exaggeration is being paid for in humiliation, for God did not prove controllable, and His naÏve blasphemers must silently and with grinding teeth admit that their foes are in the right when they, in their turn, appeal to the same judgment to justify, without limit, everything they desire to do.

After these brief observations on the psycho-physical complex, Spirit and Destiny, we hope we shall not be misunderstood when for the sake of brevity we speak as if the spirit of the new order were determined by its material construction, while in reality it incorporates itself therein. The structure is the easier to survey, and we therefore make it the starting-point of our discussion.