I. Social Impulses for the Healing of Modern Civilization

We have got once for all to admit to ourselves that our civilisation has grown feeble, and must again find strength. I have expressed this in a rather abstract way, and to make it more concrete will put it as follows:—The old pre-Christian civilisations of the East produced, as you know, great cities. Great cities existed in them. We can look back over a wide spread range of civilisations in the East, which all produced great cities. But the great cities they produced had, as well, a certain character about them. All the civilisations of the East had this speciality for creating, along with the life of great cities, the conception that, after all, man's life is a void, a nothing, unless he penetrates beyond the merely physical into the super-physical. And so, great cities such as Babylon, Nineveh, and the rest, were able to develop a real growth, because men were not led by these cities to regard what the cities themselves brought forth as being itself the actual reality, but, rather, what is behind it all. It was in Rome that people came to make the civilisation of cities a gauge of what was to be regarded as real. The Greek cities are inconceivable without the country round them. If history, as we have it, were not such a conventional fiction,—a “fable convenue,”—and would only revive past times in their time aspect, it would show us the Greek cities rooted in the country. But Rome no longer had her roots in the country. Indeed, the whole history of Rome consists in the conversion of an imaginary world into a real world, the conversion of a world which is unreal into one which is real. It was in Rome that the Citizen was first invented,—that ghastly mock-figure alongside the living being, Man. For man is a human being; and if he is a citizen besides, that is a fiction. His being a citizen is something that is entered in the church register, or the town register, or somewhere of the sort. That besides being a human being, endowed with particular faculties, he is also the owner of assessed property, duly entered in the land register,—that is a fiction alongside the reality. That is thoroughly Roman thought. But Rome achieved a great deal more than that. Rome managed to take all that results from the separation of the town from the country,—the real, actual country,—and to give it a fictitious reality. Rome, for instance, took the old religious concepts and introduced into them the Roman legal concepts. If we go back to the old religious concepts with an open mind, we do not find the Roman legal concepts contained in the old religious ones. Roman jurisprudence simply invaded religious ethics. All through religious ethics, thanks to what Rome has made of them, there is, at bottom, a notion of the supersensible world as of a place with judges sitting, passing judgment on human actions, just as they do on the Benches of our law-courts, that are modelled on the Roman pattern.