The Germans have committed the great crime; but they have been born and
nurtured in an atmosphere which made that crime possible; and we live in
the same atmosphere. Their error, though they carried it to an extreme
in theory and in practice with the native extravagance of their race, is
the error of the whole Western world; and we shall not understand what
it is unless we are aware of it in ourselves as well as in them. For it
is a world-error and one against which men have been warned for ages;
but in their pride they will not listen to the warning. Many of the old
warnings, in the Gospels and elsewhere, sound like platitudes to us; we
expect the clergyman to repeat them in church; but we should never think
of applying them to this great, successful, progressive Western world of
ours. If we are not happy; if we do not even see the way to happiness;
if all our power merely helps us to destroy each other, or to make the
rich more vulgarly rich and the poor more squalidly poor; if the great
energy of Germany has hurried her to her own ruin; still we do not ask
whether we may not have made some fundamental mistake about our own
nature and the nature of the universe, and whether Germany has not
merely made it more systematically and more philosophically than the
rest of us.
But the German, because he is systematic and philosophical, may reveal
to us what that error is in us as well as in himself. We do not state it
as if it were a splendid truth; we merely act upon it.
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