III. Fundamental Impulses in History

There is one thing to be learnt from this, my dear friends. We are connected through our bodies with the physical conditions of the earth; and the earth's conditions express themselves socially in economic conditions. Now, as everything is crumbling away, as everything is in decadence, so also, in a certain respect, economic conditions are in a state of decadence; and only a fool could believe that It Is possible to-day to regenerate economic conditions simply by means o economic conditions alone. Anyone to-day who dreams of bringing about an economic paradise on earth by purely economic measures, is much the same as someone who has a corpse in front of him and believes that he can galvanise it back into life, wake it up again. So you can take all the theories that are based on pure economics to-day, listen to people telling you how the economic life can be adjusted so as to work by itself according to its own laws, listen to them telling you about the conditions under which production Is to be carried on, how the transition is to be effected from private ownership to communal ownership, etc.,—it is all founded on the false belief that one can, regenerate the economic life out of the resources of the economic life itself. Whereas the truth is that in the economic life, as elsewhere, everything physical is of itself going to ruin.