III. Fundamental Impulses in History

And so there exist, you see, spiritual reasons deeper down for the economic type of man having come to the top. He has, however, come to the top, and in socialistic theories this fact has been handled and exploited to the disregard of all others. The business-man has been the ruling type ever since the Reformation; and from this you can see, too, what kind of spirit really is the ruling one in the various religious denominations that have come up since the Reformation Recognise quite clearly, without any illusions, what that spirit is, my dear friends: Temporal science is to permeate with its technique the whole of our external everyday life, and we do not mean to have the complete chain of this external science interrupted by all sorts of religious matter. Faith is to be kept very nicely in a special little box all to itself, and as far away from the external affairs of life as possible. Science, one thing,—a separate banking- account; Faith, another thing,—a separate banking-account, and they must never on any account be amalgamated. We want our faith; indeed, we want to be religious people, says the business type of man,—the more religious, the better, according to many of them; and one sees them going off very ostentatiously to church with their prayer-book under their arm. Oh, certainly! But then, that banking book,—religion must not intrude there, with that religion has nothing to do, except, perhaps, on the first page, where one always sees written in banking-books, “By the Grace of God,” but then that is only a little bit of blasphemy, of course. The complete chain must not be broken. Otherside [Otherwise?] people might perhaps find out that the Reformation was, in many respects, only a roundabout way of arriving at the secularisation and confiscation of Church estates and of claiming them for the temporal lord. Of course, if one were a German princeling, for instance, or an English lord, one could very well say: We are going to create a new historic epoch by taking away the land and estates from those who have hitherto held them. That is what the modern socialist says: We are going to expropriate the owners of landed property. But naturally people did not say that at the beginning of the new modern age; they did it, and threw a haze over it all with: We are founding a new religious faith. So people do not know their real reason for being religious; but it makes them feel comfortable to spread this illusion over the real grounds for their being so religious. That is how the economic type of man came up.