I. Social Impulses for the Healing of Modern Civilization

But it is with Realities we are dealing when we say; The Anglo- American Being—a striving towards cosmogony; the European Being—a striving towards freedom; the Asiatic Being—a striving towards altruism. When we then try to comprehend these three divided forces in a consciousness that embraces the universe as a whole,—when, from out of this consciousness of the universal whole, we say to ourselves: “The old civilisation is bursting through its partitions, it is doomed,” to try to save it -would be to work against one's age, not with it. We need a new civilisation upon the ruins of the old one. The ruins of the old civilisation will get ever smaller and smaller; and that man alone understands the present times who has will and courage for one that shall be really new. But the new must be grounded, neither in a sense of country as among the Greeks and Romans, nor in a sense of the Earth, as with men of modern times. It must proceed from a sense of the Universe, the world-consciousness of future man, that world-consciousness which once more turns its eyes away from the earth here, and looks up to the Cosmos. Only, we must arrive at a view of this Cosmos which shall carry us in practice beyond the Schools of Copernicus and Galileo.