/ 
 
THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
" A man's earnestness should be so attempered as to 
 become a gentle longing, not a bitter vehemence.' 
 
 " Let a man continually paint within liis heart Thine 
 image, O Lord Jesus — of Thee, eternal sunshine — how 
 Thou didst always bear Thyself with a gentle, genial 
 and benign earnestness." 
 
 Instructions of Brother David of Augsburg to the 
 first German Franciscan Novices, about a.d. 1250. 
 
 (From Pfeiffer's Deutsche Mystiker, 
 vol. i. 1845, pp. 319, 345-) 
 
THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 IN ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS 
 
 ETHICS AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 THE STATE AND WAR 
 
 TWO STUDIES 
 
 BY 
 
 BARON FRIEDRICH von HUGEL, LL.D. 
 
 Author of " The Mystical Element of Religion*^ 
 and " Eternal Life " 
 
 LONDON, PARIS ^ TORONTO 
 J. M. DENT & SONS LIMITED 
 NEW YORK: E. P. BUTTON y CO. 
 
 MCMXVI 
 
All rights reserved 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The following little book consists substan- 
 tially of two distinct Studies, as these appeared, 
 the first in The Church Quarterly Review for 
 January 1915, and the second, in two instal- 
 ments, in The Quest for April 191 5 and January 
 1 91 6. I have here to thank the respective 
 editors for their kind permissions thus to 
 reprint those articles in book form — in the 
 case of the last article, at so short a distance 
 of time. 
 
 I have learnt not a little from various 
 criticisms, public and private, and from my 
 own further observation and study, since the 
 earlier of these Papers was written. I have 
 here attempted to incorporate the chief 
 results, by means of many small, and of three 
 or four large, omissions, insertions, or changes. 
 Thus I have dropped the story of Margarete 
 Peter, at the end of the first stage of The 
 German Soul and the Great War, because three 
 mutually independent competent readers failed 
 to find it truly pertinent or fair. And I 
 
 5 
 
 3424S3 
 
6 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 have added a section on the latest Troeltsch 
 publications (pp. 74-107) ; I have amplified 
 the argument that finds a quite undesigned 
 but powerful connection between the early 
 Protestant Puritanism and our present-day 
 gigantic Capitalism and Industrialism (pp. 
 180-184); and I have now insisted, before the 
 four things as to which we can act or hope 
 as regards Germany's self-regeneration, upon 
 the two things which I consider we ought 
 most carefully to avoid (pp. 189-193). 
 
 An indication of the precise circumstances 
 which occasioned and moulded these essays 
 may possibly add something to their interest. 
 
 It was only in July 191 3 that I first studied 
 Naumann's booklet — ^his Brieje uher Religion, 
 The thing struck and stimulated, indeed stung 
 me, greatly; and I waited thenceforth for 
 an opportunity to publish an analysis, and 
 allocation, of what aroused in me my large 
 admiration for so much in the man, and my 
 profound dissent from the pathetically abso- 
 lute dualism exhibited by this most charac- 
 teristic latter-day German soul. Professor 
 Arthur Headlam gave me my chance by his 
 invitation to treat, in The Church Quarterly^ 
 the general question of the relations between 
 Christianity and War. The resulting Paper 
 
PREFACE 7 
 
 was first read by me to a private society for 
 the study of religious questions in December 
 1 9 14, and could thus benefit by various 
 criticisms and endorsements before appearing 
 in public, during the following month. 
 
 It was, some half-year further back, only 
 a few days before the outbreak of the war, 
 that I received a long letter from a still young, 
 highly cultivated. South German scholar and 
 lecturer — a man who knew English and 
 England well, ever since his student days 
 (of some ten years before) when he had 
 already been immersed in English subjects; 
 a delicately religious spirit, whose Protes- 
 tantism was greatly softened and suffused 
 by large Catholic sympathies. It was a long, 
 touchingly earnest, plea in favour of the 
 justice of the German claims, especially of a 
 cultural kind, and centred in the strange 
 assertion and argument that German culture 
 had by now, as a sheer matter of fact, fully 
 assimilated all that deserved to live in the 
 several civilisations of Greece and Rome, 
 Italy, France, and England; and hence that 
 the spreading and the substitution, by means 
 even of the force of arms, of this German 
 culture, now thus become the legitimate 
 heir (because the actual quintessence) of all 
 
8 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 those other cultures, was both no more than 
 justice on the part of Germany towards her- 
 self, and no kind of loss, but rather a great 
 gain in fruitful concentration, for Europe 
 and humanity at large. 
 
 Another long letter reached me, after the 
 war had lasted some three months, from a 
 distinguished British professor of Philosophy 
 who, for many a year a distinguished inter- 
 preter of Hegel, found himself dismayed and 
 bereft of his bearings at what he felt to be the 
 barbarous excesses of the German mentality 
 now at work. He wanted especially to know 
 how English and German could ever come 
 together again, if one after another of the 
 professed exponents of the higher German 
 mind voiced thus a passionate unreason ? 
 And did not all these violences even suggest 
 that the human mind, its laws and needs, 
 is, after all, not one and the same throughout 
 mankind ? 
 
 Probably the worst, certainly the longest, 
 of such repulsive shouts of sheer passion on 
 the part of German professors of high standing, 
 has, however, occurred only during these last 
 months. Professor Eduard Meyer's England, 
 — 7he Development of its State and Policy 
 and the War against Germany (Stuttgart) 
 
PREFACE 9 
 
 consists of over two hundred pages of the 
 kind of vituperation which, before the war, we 
 could hear, most assuredly unmoved, from 
 the lips of the least educated of Hyde Park 
 orators, against anything or everything that 
 happened to rouse the shouter's bile. But 
 here it is one of the most esteemed of specialists 
 in ancient history who thus loses all sense of 
 proportion, of cause and effect, indeed of 
 fact and of the educated man's responsibility. 
 Several of the more important German news- 
 papers have, indeed, warmly protested against 
 this sorry exhibition. 
 
 It was Mr. G. R. S. Mead who gave me the 
 means of attempting a public answer to these 
 two private letters, by his request to furnish 
 J he Quest with a study of the present mentality 
 of Germany — as to where and how its strength 
 and its weakness helped and hindered an 
 eventual change and mutual understanding. 
 A sad family trouble produced a break of 
 nine months between the composition of the 
 two parts of this Study. Yet it happened that 
 well-nigh half a year of this time (March 8 to 
 August 26, 191 5) had to be spent in Rome; 
 and there I had constant opportunities of 
 studying the mentality of " Real-PoHtik," 
 as this had been re-awakened and confirmed 
 
10 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 by Germany, during these last fifty years, 
 amongst a people that (no doubt largely 
 because of the political miseries of Italy in 
 those distant times) itself produced, four 
 centuries ago, the cold, contracted Machia- 
 velli as truly as, some sixty years since, it 
 gave to mankind the warm, world-embracing 
 Mazzini. And it is doubtless due to the close, 
 largely poignant, experiences of that time 
 that the second stage of this, my second 
 Study, owes whatever it may have of patience, 
 penetration, and pensiveness more adequate 
 to the great theme than appears in the first 
 stage. 
 
 I have taken care to mention the articles 
 which have helped me on particular points, 
 in these Studies themselves where I reach 
 those points. But it may be well to give here 
 together the exact titles of the books and 
 papers that have done most towards stimulat- 
 ing or articulating within me the problems or 
 convictions that run throughout this little 
 book. Busy as I specially was with the 
 comparison of the German and English 
 mentalities in these fundamental matters, 
 it is only natural that it was German and 
 English works that particularly helped me, 
 even though I was much attracted by the 
 
PREFACE II 
 
 three finely tempered articles on the war by 
 M. Emile Boutroux; and again by such 
 striking close reasoning as Guilielmo Ferrero's 
 study of the last days of July 1914. 
 
 The books and papers, then, which have 
 most helped me, taken roughly in the order 
 of their first publication, are as follows : 
 
 Otto (von) Gierke, " Die Staats- und Kor- 
 porationslehre des Alterthums und des 
 Mittelalters und ihre Aufnahme in Deutsch- 
 land " (vol. iii. of his Das Deutsche Genos- 
 senschaftsrecht)^ Berlin, 1881. Especially pp. 
 501-644. 
 
 Von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle 
 Ages (the English translation of these pages), 
 with Introduction by F. W. Maitland, Cam- 
 bridge, 191 3. A magnificent pioneer work, 
 deeply learned, yet utterly alive with thought, 
 and thoroughly original yet free from all 
 eccentricity. Maitland's Introduction is not 
 unworthy of it. 
 
 J. N. Figgis, Studies in Political Thought : 
 From Gerson to Grotius, Cambridge, 1907. 
 Still the richest of this author's remarkable 
 studies in Canon Law and political theory. 
 The later chapters especially have aided 
 me much. 
 
 A. L. Smith, Church and State in the Middle 
 
12 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 Ages, Oxford, 191 3 (the text dates from 1908). 
 Even more than Figgis inspired by Gierke 
 and Maitland — a nobly generous book that 
 only fails in its judgment as to the inevitable- 
 ness, for the papal system, of the great abuse 
 so vividly chronicled and so rightly condemned. 
 Such pages as the description of the Bene- 
 dictine chronicler Matthew Paris are a sheer 
 delight even after a dozen readings. 
 
 Bernard Bosanquet, 7he Philosophical 
 Theory of the State, London, 1910. This 
 admirable demonstration of the State, as 
 other and more than the simple sum-total of 
 its members, suffers only slightly by occa- 
 sional statements, quite contrary to the 
 deliberate intention of the book, indicative 
 of the State as, after all, essentially charac- 
 terised by force and constraint. 
 
 Ernst Troeltsch, Grundprohleme der Ethik, 
 Tubingen, 1902 (reprinted in his Gesammelte 
 Schriften, vol. ii., Tubingen, 1913, pp. 552-672). 
 
 Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Christli- 
 chen Kirchen und Gruppen, Tubingen, 191 2. 
 Especially pp. 178-430 (the " Mediaeval Social 
 Doctrines ") and pp. 965-986 (" Outlook 
 and Conclusion "). 
 
 I have attempted to give some account of 
 the astonishing mastery and penetration of 
 
PREFACE 13 
 
 these deeply religious works in The Construc- 
 tive Quarterly^ New York and Oxford, for 
 March and December 1914: " On the Specific 
 Genius and Capacity of Christianity, studied 
 in connection with the works of Professor 
 Ernst Troeltsch." 
 
 Ernst Troeltsch, " Die deutsche Idee von 
 der Freiheit" and " Privatmoral und Staats- 
 moral," two papers in Die Neue Rundschau, 
 Berlin, January and February 191 6. These 
 articles are considered here, pp. 74-107. 
 
 Friedrich Naumann, Briefe uher Religion, 
 13-15, Tausend, Berlin-Schoneberg, Buch- 
 handlung der Eilje, 19 10. This is discussed 
 at length in my first Study here. 
 
 Of the older literature, it is the great sections 
 of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas 
 Aquinas especially given to Law, the Law and 
 the Gospel, Nature and Supernature, Church 
 and State, which, in these last years, in spite 
 of a form almost as repellent as Spinoza's, 
 have taught me magnificent facts and cate- 
 gories, still only imperfectly apprehended in 
 most modern works. And the Enchiridion 
 Symbolorum, Definitionum et Declarationum 
 de Rebus Fidei et Morum of Denziger, Frei- 
 burg, ed. 191 3, gives in full the noble Encyclical 
 Im^nortale Dei of Pope Leo XI IL 
 
14 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 And here I would gratefully thank the 
 many friends who have so largely helped me 
 with these Studies, especially Professor F. C. 
 Burkitt and Mr. Edwyn Bevan — the latter 
 also by loans of the most recent German 
 works, accessible only through such a worker 
 for Government. 
 
 And finally, a word as to the precise subject 
 matter and point of the following Studies, 
 and as to the spirit and aim that inform them. 
 I have been grappling, now for some eighteen 
 months, not with Germany's claims to terri- 
 torial expansion, whether in Europe or outside 
 of it; nor again with Ethics or with Chris- 
 tianity, or with the State or with War, any 
 or all of these forces taken separately. True, 
 I very sincerely believe that territorial expan- 
 sion in Europe, of any one distinct race over 
 any other markedly different one, has become, 
 for the present day, a moral wrong and a 
 political mistake; and, again, that territorial 
 expansion, for any European power, outside 
 of Europe, is justifiable nowadays only by 
 the conferment of sterling and large benefits, 
 not necessarily upon the races thus subjecting, 
 but upon the races thus subjected. I am 
 uncertain whether official Germany is finally 
 
PREFACE IS 
 
 determined upon expansion in Europe of the 
 kind described, but I am very sure she is 
 mistaken and to be resisted in so far as, and 
 for as long as ever, she is thus determined. 
 And I am certain, as to any further great 
 colonial territorial expansion (over and above 
 the colonies she possessed in August 1914, 
 amounting in area to five times the entire 
 German Empire), both that official Germany 
 is fully determined to achieve it, and that she 
 has never shown any aptitude to rule natives 
 with advantage to those natives, nor indeed 
 any serious perception of the need for such 
 results as the sole decisive justification of such 
 expansion. Yet, even if I be wrong in both 
 these matters of specially German fact, the 
 full point and poignancy of my central 
 problems would remain — as to what are the 
 relations, in the actual nature of things, 
 between General Ethics and Christianity; 
 and again and especially, between such 
 General Ethics and Christianity on the one 
 hand, and the State and War on the other 
 hand; and whether, in sober earnest, the 
 " mixed " answer is sheer hypocrisy, and the 
 " pure " solution (now so dominant in Ger- 
 many) is alone the sad indeed, yet final, 
 truth. I have found the problem to present. 
 
i6 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 whilst I was thus immersed in it, precisely 
 those characteristics which always show them- 
 selves where the human spirit pursues, or 
 rather is pursued by, not simple theory but 
 rich reality, not its own sorry fancies but the 
 inexorable fact and law of life as it is in its 
 depths and interconnections. For during the 
 days or weeks of weariness the entire problem 
 would (except for the presence, all the same, 
 of a dull yet obstinate sense of underlying 
 reality) readily seem a, sentimental phantom; 
 but after persistence in the toil indicated as 
 fruitful during the past moments of light, it 
 would, in the moments of the light's return, 
 reappear, with unconquerable resiHency, as 
 inextricably bound up with all that makes 
 human life worth living to a would-be human 
 being at all, and as rich with various, quite 
 unexpected, applications. And even if the 
 practice of all us poor mortals fell equally 
 short of the noblest requirements of our souls, 
 that would only render such studies and 
 conclusions all the more necessary : we should 
 then merely have to strive after a repentance 
 in ourselves as great as we now hope for it 
 in the others. 
 
 After all, the Tu quoque argument is never 
 much more than an adjournment of serious 
 
PREFACE 17 
 
 investigation. Better far, if we labour to 
 attain to a vivid perception of the intrinsic 
 nature of Ethics and of Christianity, and of 
 the State and War — of the interrelations 
 between these three great complexes and 
 forces; and if we then examine how, where, 
 and why these realities are rightly or wrongly 
 apprehended by the German and the English 
 mentalities. May these Studies help on, in 
 spite of their limitations, faults, and repeti- 
 tions, such a penetration, and thus give us, 
 during these strenuous, most costly times, a 
 still fuller sincerity of conviction, a rock-firm 
 steadfastness of will, and a wise and warm 
 faith in the special and essential contribution 
 which our race and country are destined to 
 make towards the development of such a 
 universally ethical outlook and practice and 
 of the consequent happiness of mankind. 
 
 FRIEDRICH VON HUGEL. 
 
 Kensington, 
 March i, 191 6. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Christianity in Face of War: The "Realist" 
 
 AND THE True Solutions OF THE Problem . . 29 
 
 Introduction : The general sense of uneasiness, indica- 
 tive of the reality and difficulty of the problem. 
 Limitation of following inquiry. To be conducted 
 in three stages ....... 29 
 
 I. Leading sayings, temper and practice of Jesus and of 
 the primitive Christians in face of the State, 
 Patriotism, War; and spirit of Roman rule and 
 average West European present-day conception 
 of same things . . . . . • 3 1 
 
 1. The teaching and practice of Jesus . . .31 
 
 (a) The three main stages of Israelitish and Jewish 
 beliefs as to War. The religious and political 
 parties in Our Lord's own day. The practice 
 of John the Baptist. 
 
 (6) The attitude of Our Lord Himself: combat, but 
 of a spiritual kind. One single saying of 
 apparently contrary import. He is assuredly 
 neither Zealot nor Essene. He does not 
 shrink from using force Himself. His love of 
 physical nature and of the human complexes. 
 His intense abstraction from all things tem- 
 porary and earthly, free from any gnostic or 
 anarchist instincts concerning them. 
 
 (c) Practice of the Apostolic times. Characteristics 
 of their missionary work. First Christian com- 
 munity at Jerusalem, and its withdrawal to 
 Pella in a.d. 70. The Christians' attitude 
 during and after the revolt of Bar Kochba. 
 The Revelation of St. John: its various ele- 
 ments — warlike Messianism, and tender 
 respect for the abiding variety of nations, 
 each requiring the other even before God. 
 
 2. Main definitions and conceptions of the State and 
 
 War, in Western Europe, from Roman times 
 
 to now . . . . . '43 
 
 19 
 
20 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 PAGE 
 
 (a) Cicero's definition of the State, as approved by 
 St. Augustine. 
 
 (6) The development under Roman Empire, upon 
 the whole unfavourable to true personalistic 
 conception of the State. 
 
 (c) The specifically Mediaeval System, organic 
 throughout, with each wider complex respect- 
 ful of the narrower. Aquinas and Dante. 
 
 {d) The Roman Canonists Sinibaldo Fieschi and 
 Johannes Andreae revert to the non-personal- 
 istic conception of the State. But no such 
 conception defined as of faith by Roman 
 Church. Slow but sure growth of sense, at 
 least in Anglo-Saxon countries, of belief in 
 reality of " national sins," " national con- 
 science." The noble Encyclical Immortale 
 Dei of Pope Leo XIII. The central affirma- 
 tions of the Roman Catholic Church imply 
 and require a personalistic conception. 
 
 {e) The conception of War always follows that of 
 the State, Mr. Hilaire Belloc's definition of 
 War. 
 
 II. Confrontation of career and teachings of Friedrich 
 Naumann with facts and doctrines reached in 
 Stage 1 48 
 
 1. Friedrich Naumann's antecedents, career, and 
 
 general attitude ..... 48 
 
 2. Passages from his Brief e iiber Religion (1910) in 
 
 illustration of how he combines a thing- 
 conception of the State with a personalistic 
 conception of God and Man, the Family and 
 the Church ...... 50 
 
 3. Reinsistence upon, and fuller articulation and 
 
 defence of, the personalistic conception of 
 the State, in form of a critical analysis of 
 Naumann's arguments . . . • S9 
 
 (i) Introductory observations as to the three in- 
 fluences struggling each with the others 
 within Naumann's mind .... 59 
 
 (2) More detailed examination of Naumann's 
 
 arguments ...... 60 
 
 (a) The Darwinism here, undiscriminating and 
 excessive. 
 
CONTENTS 21 
 
 PAGE 
 
 (b) No stage or side of man's life, and no human 
 complex, simply pre-human, non-moral. 
 
 (c) Biblical criticism and Our Lord's teaching. 
 The Golden Rule, and the specifically 
 Christian Ethics, not identical or co- 
 extensive ; only the former directly con- 
 cerns the State. 
 
 III. Analysis of the two war-articles of Professor Ernst 
 Troeltsch, in further elucidation of positions 
 reached here ...... 
 
 74 
 74 
 
 1. Troeltsch's article, "The German Idea of Freedom,' 
 
 January 1916 ..... 
 
 ( 1 ) His irritation against what he feels as the hypo 
 
 crisy of the Idealism professed by the Allies 
 Yet he ends himself with the noblest idealism 
 also for the State . .... 76 
 
 (2) Points on which Troeltsch finds an objective 
 
 difference between the Western Allies and the 
 
 Central Empires: 
 (a) Aestheticism against development of sheer 
 
 force ; 
 (6) Political constitutionalism against political 
 
 bureaucracy ...... 78 
 
 (3) Two quite different points held in these Studies 
 
 to be dominant, if object sought be the 
 regaining by Germany of friends amongst 
 the Allies : a point of sheer fact, and a point 
 of method. 
 
 (a) The point of fact: the incurably " mixed " 
 attitude of the Englishman to the State, 
 illustrated by Lord Cromer's instinct and by 
 a pioneer Governor's test of his own work. 
 
 (6) The point as to method : the State, if taken 
 as simply thing and force at beginning, cannot 
 be found personal istic and ethical at the end. 79 
 
 2. Troeltsch's article, " Personal and State Morality," 
 
 February 191 6. Strange prejudices as to large 
 happenings in this war, but deep penetration 
 into the great questions of principle involved. 87 
 (i) His main positions: 
 
 (a) Two different valuations, ethical and non- 
 ethical, of State represented in both camps. 
 
 (b) Distinction between defensive and aggressive 
 wars unsatisfactory. 
 
22 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 PAGE 
 
 (c) Solution found in distinction, as elaborated 
 by the great German philosophers and 
 historians, between Private Morality and 
 State Morality. 
 
 (d) These two Moralities not identical, for four 
 reasons. 
 
 (e) Yet State Morality, a real Morality; in what 
 this Morality consists. 
 
 (/) Resemblances between the two Moralities. 
 
 ig) Practical application of principles thus 
 gained: general application; application to 
 the great groups of contemporary European 
 world — the Imperialists, the Democrats, 
 the Conservatives ..... 88 
 
 (2) Four counter-currents operative amongst sup- 
 
 porters of Troeltsch's main contentions, found 
 to have been passed over or even endorsed by 
 Troeltsch : 
 
 (a) The Chauvinist minor premise added, e.g., 
 by Fichte, to the richly comprehensive major 
 premise propounded by himself. 
 
 (b) Strict limitation by Ranke of all recognition 
 of other States by European States, to States 
 of European system only. 
 
 (c) Strangely close parallelism assumed by Fichte 
 and Ranke between political and military 
 power, and cultural and spiritual worth. 
 
 {d) These exclusivenesses and hardnesses ren- 
 dered incurable through their proclamation, 
 by Hegel, as direct self-manifestations of the 
 Divine Life ...... 96 
 
 (3) Troeltsch at his deepest and best : Christianity, 
 
 its intrinsic nature and perennial power ; 
 hopes as to religious effects of the war; the 
 three abiding constituents of all genuinely 
 moral conceptions of the State . . .105 
 
 IV. Rules and Conclusions . . . . .107 
 
 I. Three practical rules that flow from conclusions 
 
 reached ....... 107 
 
 (i) Necessity and reality of other life. Elimination 
 of all cynicism as to partial, halting heroisms 
 really discoverable in human life . .108 
 
 (2) Possibility and desirableness of a growing in- 
 fusion of even some supernatural morality 
 
CONTENTS 23 
 
 PAGE 
 
 into State, already in itself a complex ani- 
 mated by a natural" Ethic . . .108 
 (3) Necessity, nature, duty, danger of Church- 
 complex: importance of careful insistence 
 upon its double function — the other-worldly 
 function being always kept primary . .109 
 
 2. Twofold implications and affinities of Our Lord's 
 teaching. Its metaphysical basis. Transcend- 
 ence and Immanence. Polarity of the soul's 
 life. The Church, the exponent of the specific- 
 ally Christian life; but the State also essen- 
 tially though differently ethical — the warder 
 of the Golden Rule . . . . -113 
 
 The German Soul AND THE Great War . . .118 
 
 Introduction: Much brilliant writing already extant 
 on War and its causes. Massive existence and 
 peculiar character of present German Real-Politik 
 now fully proved and illustrated. Restriction of 
 this Study to vivid elucidation and analysis (by 
 means of generally German half of the writer's own 
 blood and mentality) of general German charac- 
 teristics that have permitted or favoured the large 
 domination of the Prussian spirit; and of the 
 other general German characteristics which, we 
 can trust, will eventually overcome that spirit. The 
 Study to consist of four Sections, with pause and 
 * recapitulation between second and third . . 118 
 
 I. Qualifications of writer. Paternal ancestors. Personal 
 
 contacts with Austria and Germany. German 
 mentality in some matters, warmly English sym- 
 pathies in others. German friends, teachers, books . 121 
 
 II. General characteristics of the German soul . .125 
 
 1. Imperious need of System, Weltanschauung. 
 
 Illustrations of this, in contrast with English 
 distrust of all theory . . . 12$ 
 
 2. Consequences of this fundamental characteristic: 
 
 great results; excesses and absurdities. But 
 even the excesses largely redeemed by this 
 their root cause . . . . . .128 
 
 3. Tendency to unconscious Mythology, Pantheism 
 
 and Monism. And to Machiavellianism. 
 Examples : Hegel and Schelling, especially in 
 
24 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 PAGE 
 
 their youth. Frederick II. of Prussia. Noble 
 revolt against Napoleonic domination. But 
 " Realism " of Louis XIV. and Napoleon 
 towards Germany, repeated by Germany in 
 1870 against France . . . . .132 
 
 4. Attempted explanation of how Prussian " Real- 
 
 ism " could so dominate Germans generally. 
 The Germans not a political race. Their 
 great successes in military and mercantile 
 matters misled their over-systematising 
 minds to hold themselves called to a great 
 political world-rule. Errors involved in this 
 reasoning . . . . , .138 
 
 5. Double cause of German bitterness against Eng- 
 
 land. The sudden, immense material success 
 of 1870 has turned the German Soul, essen- 
 tially attracted to great things, away to 
 fascination by big things . . . .143 
 
 6. Germans, especially Prussians, are being proved 
 
 in this War to be more systematically cruel 
 than can similarly be proved against their 
 western neighbours, especially the English. 
 But whether Germans, in themselves and 
 where not long obsessed and roused by racial 
 or other non-egotistic visions and passions, 
 more cruel than are other races, doubtful for 
 two reasons: The German not self-conscious 
 in the English way. Illustrations. High pitch, 
 strain, and hence danger, of the German's 
 psychic life: illustration from case of 
 Nietzsche, and his great influence over 
 German youths. Rohde, representative of 
 sane, recuperative forces of German soul . 145 
 
 Short recapitulation of Sections I. and II. ; great 
 part played by Philosophy and Doctrinal 
 Religion, and their doctrinal negations, in 
 life-history of the German soul . . -154 
 
 III. Analysis of main helps and hindrances afforded, to 
 the strengths and weaknesses discovered, by the 
 chief German groups of religious and philosophical 
 affirmation or negation. Four such groups to be 
 considered . . . . . . .158 
 
CONTENTS 25 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1. The Roman Catholic position. Its strength and 
 
 weakness have passed through three stages: 
 First stage, up to about 800 a.d. Second 
 stage, up to about 1240 a.d. (this stage 
 nearest to the ideal). Third stage, prevalent 
 down to our own times. Attitude of Roman 
 Catholic authorities, peoples and parties 
 during this war . . . . -159 
 
 2. The Protestant position, in so far as still a definite 
 
 doctrine and distinct organisation. The 
 unsatisfactory character of its philosophical 
 antecedents. Luther, on the matters in 
 question, far less satisfactory than Calvin; 
 his brutal strain. The contrary, astonishingly 
 subtle, central current in Luther, Doubtless 
 deeply religious motive at work here; yet 
 result, a subtly segregating, indocile spirit . 166 
 
 3. The Idealist position. This the most specifically 
 
 German attitude, tending to increase both 
 strengths and weaknesses of German soul. 
 Fichte chiefly chosen to illustrate latter 
 influence. Passages from his Reden an die 
 deutsche Nation, 1808: as to the new educa- 
 tion; as to the prerogative of the Germanic 
 peoples retaining Germanic speech. Reflec- 
 tions upon these passages. Three prominent 
 characteristics of Hegel's thought, which 
 undoubtedly tend to strengthen the German 
 weaknesses . , . . . .172 
 
 4. The Materialistic position, more influential in 
 
 deflecting the German soul than all the 
 weaknesses of other three positions combined. 
 Invasion of this spirit traceable in four 
 waves : the industrial invasion from America 
 (the Protestant Puritanism unconsciously 
 prepares the human instruments of excessive 
 Industrialism) ; the mathematico - physical 
 scientific advance; the dangerously rapid 
 politico - military success of 1870; the pre- 
 sent-day " the -State -is -Force " mentality. 
 America and England greatly responsible 
 for all this ...... 179 
 
26 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 PAGE 
 
 IV. The things we should not do; and the points, in 
 the now dominant outlook of the German soul, at 
 which we can help, and should hope for a change 
 or development . . . . . .189 
 
 1. Two things we must not do . . . .189 
 (i) We must not ourselves become infected by the 
 
 very spirit which we deplore in the Germans. 
 Warning example of J. A. Cramb's book 
 Germany and England . . .189 
 
 (2) We must not lump everything in the German 
 together, as though all were evil, or as though 
 we did not require contribution of the speci- 
 fically German best. Examples of such a 
 spirit. But country, on the whole, remark- 
 ably free from such a temper. Illustrations. 191 
 
 2. Four points at which we can help towards, t • can 
 
 hope for, a change in the German soul . .193 
 
 (i) Germany must be beaten in this war, in a quite 
 definite, great degree and way. Two-fold 
 difficulty of attaining this. Yet this quite 
 possible to Allies. Such a fact produced by 
 ourselves alone could furnish starting-point 
 towards German soul's self-interrogation and 
 self -correction . . . . . -194 
 
 (2) Germany may then awaken to need of some 
 
 form or degree of genuine self-government; 
 home politics and colonisation could then be 
 schools of large responsibility in politics gene- 
 rally. As to an organic conception of the 
 State, it is German thinkers who are the 
 teachers of us all. And German municipal life 
 largely already a true model. But changes 
 from theory to practice, and from subordinate 
 complexes to supreme one, are fundamental 
 changes and especially difficult for German 
 soul. Yet Englishmen and Frenchmen have 
 changed profoundly in course of their 
 respective histories. We are, perhaps, not 
 asking for any greater changes in the Germans. 197 
 
 (3) Germans to recognise, instinctively and practi- 
 
 cally, morality of State when acting outwards. 
 Three difiiculties for us all in recognition of 
 such morality in International politics. 
 
CONTENTS 27 
 
 PAGE 
 
 (a) The apparent hypocrisy, because inevitable 
 inconsistency, of every man or institution 
 proclaiming a standard and ideal, as against 
 those who proclaim none, or deny the possi- 
 bility of such idealisms. Examples. 
 
 (b) Some of the moral obligations, even of the 
 individual, admittedly eJlow exceptions, 
 sometimes difficult to fix. 
 
 (c) The morality of the State cannot be just 
 simply the morality of the individual. 
 
 Nevertheless all these difficulties must be 
 faced, and all should collaborate in developing 
 the theory, above all the instinct and practice, 
 of such a morality of States towards States. 
 The need here greater than all the difficulties 
 combined ...... 200 
 
 (4) Deepening of the Supernatural Life, its practice 
 and vivid faith in it. Two difficulties here 
 special in their degree to German soul: 
 obsession of gigantic industrial competition 
 and supremacy; and tendency to a purely 
 Immanental Idealism. But three great hopes 
 here, in three directions: The Churches, 
 especially the Roman Catholic Church, of 
 Germany; the Philosophy of Germany, now 
 largely turning to a wise, critical Realism; 
 the artisan classes, showing signs of wanting 
 more than bread and material power . . 205 
 
 Conclusion : Germany to remain visionary still, but to 
 acquire a vision more adequate to its noblest self, a 
 vision not exclusive but inclusive — of all the com- 
 plexes in her own borders, of the other nations and 
 States, and above all, of the eternal, other-world 
 life, the true moderator of the excesses of us all . 210 
 
 Index 213 
 
THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR: THE 
 ** REALIST" AND THE TRUE 
 SOLUTIONS OF THE PROBLEM 
 
 We are all probably more or less conscious 
 of a certain uneasiness, or vagueness, or 
 inconsistency, of a strange aloofness in the 
 thinkings and declarations special to religious 
 souls, perhaps particularly to Christian indi- 
 viduals and heads and organs of the Christian 
 Churches, upon the outbreak of any great war 
 which directly afFects us individual observers. 
 It is, of course, plain that something of all 
 this is attributable, in various degrees and 
 ways, to particular compromises and com- 
 mittals or to individual weaknesses or selfish- 
 nesses, more or less inevitably operative 
 within human individuals and in institutions 
 worked and voiced by mortal men. Yet the 
 indications are, surely, many and far-reaching 
 that this in no wise exhausts, that it does not 
 really account for, the phenomenon under 
 
 consideration. Let us then attempt to pene- 
 
 29 
 
30 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 trate this much into the problem of Christian- 
 ity in face of war — ^let us strive to seize what 
 may lie involved within the direct teachings 
 and spirit of Jesus and within the fundamental 
 nature and needs of man and of the State — 
 within these two groups of facts and forces 
 when brought acutely to face each other, 
 within the unitary soul of any one Christian 
 who is sufficiently awake and comprehensive 
 in some degree to apprehend both groups in 
 their profound idiosyncrasies. 
 
 Even so, we shall not have developed or 
 met the complete problem of Christianity 
 and War. For already the attitude of Jesus 
 Himself towards the State (inclusive of War) 
 is but part of His general attitude towards 
 the Family, Private Property, Labour, Trade, 
 Law — to what these and other complexes 
 and activities of man's earthly life possess 
 of simply passing circumstances and condi- 
 tions. And the State (inclusive of War) is, 
 in its earthly circumstances and conditions, 
 closely and variously related to those other 
 complexes and activities in their own respec- 
 tive earthlinesses. Nevertheless our self- 
 limitation does still leave us the range within 
 which we can reasonably hope to find the 
 special strength and the special difficulty 
 
PLAN OF STUDY 31 
 
 (derived from its own original revelation) of 
 Christianity in face of War. 
 
 I propose to do this in three studies 
 and stages. First, a concise enumeration or 
 description of the leading sayings, temper and 
 practice of Jesus and of the primitive Chris- 
 tians in face of the State, Patriotism, War; 
 and a short account of the spirit of Roman 
 rule, and of our average West European 
 present-day conception of these same things. 
 Next, a vivid illustration of the problems 
 involved in the attempt fruitfully to inter- 
 relate these two sets of experiences, as fur- 
 nished by the career and the teachings of 
 Friedrich Naumann (born in i860, still very 
 active in Berlin) and by two quite recent 
 " War " articles by Professor Ernst Troeltsch, 
 with a careful restatement of the antinomies 
 thus brought out. And lastly, a quite short 
 attempt to answer the problem with which 
 this study began. 
 
 I 
 I 
 
 The teachings of Jesus Himself and the 
 practice of His early followers would require, 
 for their full elucidation, a description of the 
 
32 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 Israelitish and Jewish thought and life that 
 preceded Him, and of the religious and 
 political parties that more or less surrounded 
 Him. But here we can only note the three 
 main stages of Israelitish-Jewish beliefs as 
 to war. First the ,stage, roughly before the 
 great literary prophets, when Joshua, Saul, 
 David " fight the Lord's battles " (Josh, 
 iii. II; I Sam. xxv. 28; xxx. 26); when the 
 wars are wars of extermination, as indeed 
 were the wars of the surrounding heathen; 
 and when Jahweh is conceived as Himself 
 delighting in battle against the gods (the 
 inferior, and evil, yet real gods) of the Gentiles. 
 Next, the stage of the great prophets, where 
 Jahweh is recognised, more and more plainly, 
 as the God of all the earth and in His moral, 
 spiritual nature; and where convictions and 
 pictures of a time of universal peace and 
 righteousness find magnificent articulation 
 (Is. ii. 4; ix. 2-6; xi. 6-9; Hos. ii. 18, 19; 
 Is. xi. 10, II; xxx. 27, 31). And there is the 
 stage stretching from the Maccabees, 167 B.C. 
 onwards through the Zealots, up till the 
 destruction of Jerusalem in a.d. 69, 70, and 
 till the final revolt under Bar Kochba in a.d. 
 132-135, during all which time the Apocalyptic 
 writers prevail; a great war is believed to 
 
JEWISH POSITIONS AS TO WAR 33 
 
 lie in the future, waged by the Messiah at the 
 end of this our world against super-earthly 
 spirits, Satan and his angels — although the 
 Messiah appears, at times, not as the great 
 fighter but as the Judge (iv. Esra); and, 
 more or less throughout, a patriotic and 
 warlike enthusiasm can be traced in large 
 sections of the people. 
 
 And as to the rehgious and political parties 
 in our Lord's own day, there were the Zealots, 
 the acutely national and beUicose group, and 
 the Essenes, who Hved a monastic, celibate 
 life in a large community by the Dead Sea, 
 and who overcame every warlike inclination 
 — they forbade every trade related to war. 
 
 The Baptist, the great precursor of Jesus, 
 was very certainly no Essene, at least in this 
 matter of war. For when John stood preach- 
 ing and baptising and " the soldiers demanded 
 of him, saying, And what shall we do ? he said 
 unto them. Do violence to no man, neither 
 accuse any falsely, and be content with your 
 wages " (St. Luke iii. 14). John said this, 
 and not " Leave the army without delay." 
 His advice was doubtless identical with what 
 an Isaiah or an Amos would have given. 
 
 As to Jesus Himself, His attitude is more 
 
 c 
 
34 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 difficult to seize, and this (as I hope to end 
 by showing) because of its rich profundity. 
 
 The Sermon on the Mount culminates in 
 such passages as " Whosoever shall smite thee 
 on the right cheek, turn to him the other also " ; 
 and " Love your enemies, do good to them 
 that hate you . . . that you may be the 
 children of your Father which is in heaven, 
 for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and 
 on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and 
 the unjust " (St. Matt. v. 39; 44, 45). There 
 is too the great instruction to James and John : 
 
 " Ye know that they which are accounted to rule 
 over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them : but 
 so shall it not be among you. But whosoever 
 desires to be great among you, shall be your minister, 
 and whosoever of you desires to be the chiefest, shall 
 be the servant of all. For even the Son of man came 
 not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to 
 give his life a ransom for many." — St. Mark x. 42-45. 
 
 The Kingdom of God is not to come through 
 visible wars. " If I cast out devils by the 
 Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is 
 come unto you " (St. Matt. xii. 28). And the 
 passages breathing the keenest combat are 
 certainly to be understood spiritually, as, 
 e,g,y " Think not that I am come to send 
 peace on earth: I came not to send peace, 
 
GENERAL ATTITUDE OF OUR LORD 35 
 
 but a sword " (St. Matt. x. 34) ; a sword of 
 inevitable division of conviction even within 
 the same family, and the sword of persecution 
 on the part of the hostile, anti-Christian 
 world. Hence the prompt rebuke to Peter: 
 "Put up thy sword again into its scabbard; 
 for all they that take the sword shall perish 
 by the sword " (St. Matt. xxvi. 52). 
 
 There is only one saying of our Lord's which 
 can raise a doubt as to this, His fundamental 
 abstraction away from the use of all physical 
 force. St. Luke (xxii. 36, 38) tells us : " Then," 
 after the Last Supper, " said he unto them," 
 the Apostles : " But now," in contrast with 
 the time of the peaceful, quite unarmed 
 preaching-mission, " he that hath no sword, 
 let him sell his garment, and buy one." 
 " And they said : Lord, behold, here are two 
 swords. And he said unto them, It is enough." 
 Two things only are quite clear here. This 
 order or advice or ironical comment refers 
 back to His sending forth of the disciples, 
 not indeed to that of the Twelve in St. Luke 
 ix. 3, but to that of the seventy-two in St. 
 Luke X. 4, which latter account is undoubtedly 
 based upon the primitive document Q. And 
 this saying, whatever it may mean, stands in 
 the most marked contrast with all Jesus' 
 
36 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 other sayings, and indeed with the known 
 attitude of the primitive Christian com- 
 munities, so that the text cannot be a reflec- 
 tion back from such a later generation. This 
 saying is thus most authentic, but, at the 
 same time, so unique and so obscure ^hat 
 common sense requires us to interpret, not 
 all those other clear sayings by it, but it by 
 them, or, at least to take this solitary passage 
 as the expression of a passing unique situation 
 and disposition. The least unsatisfactory 
 solution seems to be that which connects 
 these verses with the saying in St. Luke xii. 
 49-51, " I am come to send fire on the earth; 
 and what will I, if it be already kindled? I 
 have a baptism to be baptised with; and 
 how am I straitened till it be accomplished," 
 and with the prophecy there of the divisions 
 that will arise within families. Thus our Lord 
 has proceeded to Jerusalem with the conscious- 
 ness that He will there have to enkindle a 
 fiery conflict and calamity, in which He will 
 fall; but, as to His disciples. He hopes that 
 they will be able to cut their way out and 
 escape, and He feels that they will be morally 
 free to do so. But even this much He adverts 
 to only for a moment; since, when they offer 
 Him the two swords, and He says "It is 
 
JESUS AND JEWISH PARTIES 37 
 
 enough," He has already dropped that passing 
 attention to this earthly contingency; and, 
 in a sad ironical reference to the non-compre- 
 hension by the disciples of the magnitude of 
 the coming trouble, and to the obvious 
 inadequacy of these physical defences, if 
 physical force were really to be used. He breaks 
 off the discussion by this short, ambiguous 
 word. (So Johannes Weiss.) 
 
 Jesus is, in any and every case, far beyond, 
 high above, the first stage of the Israelitish 
 Wars of extermination; indeed. He shows 
 no touch of the warlike Messianism so frequent 
 in the Apocalyptic literature. But if He thus 
 very clearly does not belong to the movement 
 of the Zealots (even though one of His apostles, 
 Simon Zelotes, appears to have come to Him 
 from those ranks), neither is His spirit and 
 practice really that of the Essenes. For 
 nowhere does He avoid meeting the secular 
 world, even publicans and sinners, inclusive 
 of women of evil lives ; nowhere does He call 
 upon soldiers to abandon their calling as 
 intrinsically unjust; a Roman centurion 
 " came to Him," and Jesus indeed declares 
 that He " has not found so great faith in 
 Israel" (St. Matt. viii. 5, 10), but not a word 
 does He utter to arouse this officer to the 
 
38 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 intrinsic iniquity of his calling. Indeed in the 
 words " Render to Caesar the things that are 
 Caesar's, and to God the things that are 
 God's " (St. Matt. xxii. 21), it would be 
 difficult to think of Him as deliberately 
 including within these *' things " the Temple- 
 tribute, the direct occasion and object of the 
 question, and at the same time deliberately 
 excluding military service, that army which, 
 more than anything else, represented the 
 " thing " of Caesar. 
 
 But indeed Jesus Himself does not shrink 
 from using force, and this deliberately, on 
 a public, crucial, momentous occasion, one 
 which, besides, determined His arrest and 
 precipitated His death. Immediately after 
 the solemn ride into Jerusalem " Jesus went 
 into the temple of God, and cast out all them 
 that sold and bought in the temple, and 
 overthrew the tables of the money-changers, 
 and the seats of them that sold doves " (St. 
 Matt. xxi. 12); the Fourth Gospel adds the 
 details that " He made a scourge of small 
 cords," and with this " He drove them all 
 out of the temple, and the sheep, and the 
 oxen, and poured out the changers' money " 
 (St. John ii. 15). And the solemn exclamation, 
 still nearer to His death : " Jerusalem, 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS'S TEACHING 39 
 
 Jerusalem . . . how often would I have 
 gathered thy children together, even as a hen 
 gathereth her chickens under her wing, and 
 ye would not! " (St. Matt, xxiii. 37), appears 
 indeed to be taken from some earlier prophetic 
 writer, but may well have been appropriated 
 by our Lord. Its tender love for the Jewish 
 people, its patriotism in the deepest sense of 
 the word, is evident. 
 
 The fact is, doubtless, that the soul of Jesus 
 is entirely free from all sheer individualism 
 even simply as between man and man — ^He 
 sees and loves the natural complexes and the 
 rich, non-interchangeable variety of all the 
 children of God; and yet that this same soul 
 is immensely concentrated upon the profound 
 reality of God, the reality of His kingdom, 
 and the proximity of its coming. Hence, 
 before these realities, those other facts and 
 conditions appear to fade away; and, in His 
 fullest intention, these natural complexes 
 are seen and taught to require continuous 
 purification, elevation, fructifying, by means 
 of these great central realities. 
 
 Hence we can readily trace the tender, 
 humane, outgoing, constructive character of 
 His teaching in the very names and schemes 
 under which He continually presents His 
 
40 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 message to us — ^the Father in heaven, the 
 brethren upon earth, the Messianic banquet, 
 the shepherd and his sheep; in the simple 
 yet solemn acts of His public ministry, the 
 constitution of the college of Twelve, the 
 sending of them out in twos and twos, the 
 appointment of one as their head; and 
 perhaps above all in the qualities of the 
 Kingdom as He announces it, social, varied, 
 organic through and through. And, on the 
 other hand, the instructions, parables and 
 prophecies, which specially mark the Public 
 Life from the great scene at Caesarea Philippi 
 onwards, are predominantly concentrated 
 upon the advent of the Kingdom — as future 
 (St. Matt. viii. ii; xix. 28; xiii. 43); as 
 imminent (St. Matt. xvi. 28; xxiv. 33; xxvi. 
 64); as sudden (St. Matt. xxiv. 27, 43); 
 and as a pure gift of God (so also still in 
 Rev. xxi. 2). And especially the immediacy 
 gives here to all the simply earthly connec- 
 tions and institutions a look of remoteness 
 which very certainly in nowise springs from 
 any gnostic instinct as to their intrinsic 
 sinfulness, or from any anarchist desire for 
 their abolition. Jesus does not reject, does 
 not suspect, these things; for Him the flesh 
 is not wicked but weak (St. Matt. xxvi. 41). 
 
APOSTOLIC ATTITUDE TO WAR 41 
 
 But the time is short, eternity is long, God 
 is the great reality, before Him we are about 
 to stand. Our Lord's heart and will are there. 
 
 The ApostoHc times continue and illustrate 
 (although only rarely in its full comprehensive- 
 ness) this non-gnostic aloofness, this absorp- 
 tion in God and in the specifically religious 
 relations of men with God and (in and for 
 Him) with each other, and this expectation 
 of the proximity of the Second Coming. The 
 Christian missionaries go forth, not into the 
 way of the Gentiles but to the lost sheep of 
 the house of Israel ; freely they have received, 
 freely they give; when persecuted in one 
 city, they flee to another; they do not provide 
 themselves even with staves (St. Matt. x. 
 5~io); not one of them takes up arms. 
 
 The first Christian community at Jerusalem 
 is an entirely peaceful association (Acts i. 4); 
 and in the war of Vespasian and Titus, when 
 the final fate of the country and of the sacred 
 city was at stake, this community flies to 
 Pella, some fifty English miles away, beyond 
 Jordan, and there peacefully awaits " the 
 judgment of God," as Eusebius very quietly 
 teUs us (HisL Eccles, iii. 5, 3). During 
 the final terrible revolt and repression of 
 
42 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 Bar Kochba, under Hadrian, the Christians 
 suffer martyrdom for their pacific attitude. 
 Thus, " My Kingdom is not of this world " 
 (St. John xviii. 36) is, surely, what those early 
 Christians felt with the noblest intensity. 
 And this, although the Revelation of St. 
 John contains not a little of the warlike 
 Messianism and of a spirit of vindictiveness 
 (Rev. vi. 2-8; 9, 10; xii. 7, 8; xiii. 10; 
 xix. 11). 
 
 On the other hand the beautiful, deeply 
 important episode and story of Peter and 
 the Centurion Cornelius (Acts x.) shows how 
 entirely free were the peaceable majority of 
 these first Christians from any repulsion to a 
 soldier, or from any notion that his conversion 
 to Christianity involves renunciation of the 
 military life, thus carrying on entirely the 
 spirit of the Baptist and of our Lord Himself. 
 And the Revelation of St. John gives us per- 
 haps the most moving expression extant of 
 tender respect for the abiding variety of 
 nations, as different and requiring each the 
 supplementation of all the others, even in the 
 life to come and before God, the source and 
 overflowing pattern, the end and defence of 
 all right richness : " After this I beheld, and, 
 lo, a great multitude, which no man could 
 
HOW CICERO DEFINES THE STATE 43 
 
 number, of all nations, and kindreds, and 
 people, and tongues, stood before the throne, 
 and before the Lamb . . . and cried with a 
 loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which 
 sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb " 
 (Rev. vii. 9, 10). 
 
 We will be much shorter as regards the 
 State and War and their conception by the 
 great West-European thinkers and rulers. 
 Some three or four definitions and descriptions 
 must suffice. 
 
 Cicero's definition of the State is interesting, 
 not only as his but also because it is approved 
 by St. Augustine, and we thus attain to a 
 consentient Pagan and Christian witness of 
 simply boundless influence. In his Dialogue 
 De Republican then, Cicero makes Scipio 
 Africanus the Younger define the Common- 
 wealth {Respublica) as the weal of the people 
 {res popult). But he decides that " the people " 
 is not every assemblage of a multitude, but 
 an assemblage conjoined by a common con- 
 sent to right and a common share in utihty. 
 And he concludes, from his various defini- 
 tions, that the commonwealth, the weal 
 
44 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 of the people, is truly extant when the State 
 is well and justly administered, by a single 
 King, or a few nobles, or the entire people. 
 But where the King or the nobles or the 
 people are unjust, there, in strictness, we 
 find, not a vicious state but no state at all 
 (St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei^ 11. xxi. 2, 
 quoting Cicero's De Republican I. 25). 
 
 The development, under the Roman Empire, 
 of the conceptions as to the individual and 
 the State, the intermediate corporations (the 
 family, the clan, the guild, the religious 
 association), and the kind and range of person- 
 ality and responsibility to be admitted as 
 real within this scale of realities or abstrac- 
 tions, hardly favoured that Ciceronian defini- 
 tion. True, if " no text of the Roman jurists 
 has come down to us which directly calls the 
 universitas (corporation) a persona^ still less 
 does any call it a persona ficta,''^ Nevertheless, 
 " Roman jurisprudence, starting with a strict 
 severance of ius publicum from ius privatum^ 
 found its highest development in * an abso- 
 lutistic public law and an individualistic 
 private law.' " Hence : 
 
 " the theory of corporations which derives from 
 this source may run (perhaps its straightest course) 
 into princely absolutism, or it may take a turn 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL SYSTEM 45 
 
 towards mere collectivism (which in this context 
 means individualism); but for the thought of the 
 living group it can find no place; it is condemned 
 to be * atomistic ' and * mechanical.' " — F. W. 
 Maitland, in his Introduction to Otto von Gierke's 
 Political Theories of the Middle Ages (191 3), pp. xviii, 
 xxviii. 
 
 As concerns the Middle Ages and their still 
 living legacy, and their even more largely 
 still operative contrasts, the following three 
 convictions, each in closest relation to the 
 other two, appear to be the chief: 
 
 " The specifically mediaeval system of thought 
 proceeded indeed from the Whole and from the 
 Unity, but attributed to each narrower whole, down 
 to the Individual, a special purpose and an inde- 
 pendent value within the harmoniously articulated 
 organism of the world-whole as filled by the spirit 
 of God. Between the highest universaHty of the State 
 and the indefectible unity of the Individual, there 
 intervenes thus a series of mediating Units, each of 
 which holds together and embraces the units narrower 
 than itself." — Von Gierke, Jlthusius, ed. 191 3, 
 pp. 226, 227. 
 
 Aquinas and Dante are the greatest expoun- 
 ders of this noble system; indeed the former 
 makes discriminations concerning war which 
 still remain very admirable. 
 
46 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 The great canonist Sinibaldo Fieschi, who 
 in A.t). 1243 became Pope Innocent IV., 
 appears to be the first to use the phrase 
 persona ficta : the corporation is thus a 
 person, but a person by fiction, and only by 
 fiction: it can commit neither crime nor 
 delict. And the canonist Johannes Andreae 
 (who died in a.d. 1348) bids the body politic 
 fear no pains in another world. And plainly, 
 the State cannot be considered an immortal 
 metaphysical entity, entirely independent of 
 the human souls which occasion and support 
 it. Nevertheless the doctrine has never been 
 proclaimed as an article of faith in the Roman 
 Church; the belief in the reality of " national 
 sins," " the national conscience " and the 
 like, is strong and growing; and even in the 
 law courts (at least of England and America) 
 the intermediate corporations are increasingly 
 being admonished, condemned, considered 
 responsible, as though very real persons, which 
 do not derive their authority simply from a 
 Fiction, and by concession from the only real 
 forces, the individual or the State. {See 
 F. W. Maitland, op, cit, pp. xix, xl.) The 
 Papacy has, as recently as 1885, in the 
 Encyclical Immortale Dei of Leo XIII., given 
 us an authoritative and helpful document 
 
THE PAPACY AND THE STATE 47 
 
 proclaiming the State and the Church to be 
 two powers, each operating with its own right 
 within its own sphere, each a society, perfect 
 in its own kind and right, each a power 
 springing from God Himself (Denzinger, 
 Enchiridion Symbolorum, ed. 191 3, No. 5, 
 1866, 1868, 1869). And all this seems to 
 require some kind of real personality. 
 
 And above all, from first to last, the Roman 
 Catholic Church, and very specially the 
 Papacy, have been the faithful, massive 
 witnesses and embodiments of the Givenness, 
 the Transcendence, the Incarnation, the move- 
 ment from Above downwards, from the One 
 and the Few to the many, and back (for these 
 many) through the Visible to the Invisible, 
 which not only appears in the vocation by 
 Jesus (in His humanity) of Twelve, and then 
 through the Twelve of the multitude, and the 
 Hke, but also, and still more fundamentally, 
 in the central characteristics of the Kingdom of 
 God: its descent from above, its givenness. 
 
 The conception of war, indeed our judg- 
 ments concerning it, evidently, always in 
 reality, depend upon our ideas and estimates 
 of the State. Probably Mr. Hilaire Belloc's 
 definition is as good as any: 
 
48 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 " When two independent communities conflict in 
 will, if neither give way, there must be recourse to 
 force. That is, each community must attempt to 
 render life so unpleasing to the members of the other 
 community that, rather than continue under such 
 conditions, that other community will accept the 
 enemy's will." — Land and Water, Aug. 22, 1914, p. i. 
 
 II 
 
 Let us now put Friedrich Naumann, his 
 career and his teachings, in confrontadon with 
 all the foregoing, and attempt thereby certain 
 further discriminations. 
 
 Friedrich Naumann was born in i860, the 
 son of a Lutheran pastor, near Leipzig; his 
 mother's father was a well-known Lutheran 
 preacher. He studied at the strongly Lutheran 
 Universities of Leipzig and Erlangen. Thus 
 his early development was entirely under 
 theological conservative influences. In 1883- 
 1890 he learnt, as a Lutheran cleric, in posts 
 near Hamburg and in Saxony, to sympathise, 
 at closest quarters, with the miseries and 
 problems of the peasants' home-industries, 
 
FRIEDRICH NAUMANN'S CAREER 49 
 
 of the great factories, and of the coal-mines. 
 He also learnt here to recognise Social Demo- 
 cracy as a spiritual force, and henceforth 
 combated less its economic demands than its 
 hostile attitude towards Christianity. And 
 he began to find the saving of individual souls 
 and individual beneficence to be insufficient 
 in face of the misery of the masses of our 
 times; only social organisation and reform, 
 and legal protection could suffice here. All 
 this drew him away from the group of " the 
 Interior Mission " (under Wickert) to the 
 Evangelical-Social movement (at that time 
 vigorously led by Stoecker). 
 
 From 1890 to 1897 Naumann was a pastor 
 of the Lutheran-Calvinist Union in Frankfort- 
 on-the-Main, and in 1895 founded with his 
 friends the periodical Hilfe^ which remains 
 still the special expression of his work and 
 views. Christian and Social had, now for many 
 a day, stood quite unreconciled, side by side 
 within his mind; but now Naumann found 
 the substitute for a leading principle in the 
 recognition of the existing State, as the pre- 
 supposition and foundation of all social reform. 
 From henceforth he proclaims, not a " Chris- 
 tian," but a " practical patriotic " or a 
 "national Socialism"; this newer Christian 
 
so CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 Socialist movement thus turns into the National 
 Social movement. 
 
 In 1897 Naumann abandoned his clerical 
 office and settled in Berlin; his new party 
 intervened in the elections to the Reichstag 
 in 1898; and in 1907 Naumann was elected as 
 member for the South German seat, Heilbronn. 
 He has worked steadily, during the last well- 
 nigh twenty years, for a union of all the parties 
 of the Left, but this in fervent support of 
 Bismarck's policy and temper, and indeed of 
 the big armaments, the fleet and Weltpolitik 
 of William II. All this, however, existed along 
 with a persistently deep, even tender devotion 
 to the poor and the outcast, and to the 
 character, teaching and spirit of our Lord, as 
 unique and inexhaustible. (See the careful 
 article, " Naumann, Friedrich," in Die Reli- 
 gion in Geschichte u. Gegenwart, 191 3.) 
 
 Let us now see how Naumann reconciles, 
 or at least practises and defends, both these 
 certainly very disparate things. 
 
 The following passages are all translated 
 by me from the striking Briefe ilber Religion 
 (5th ed., Berlin, 1910). 
 
NAUMANN: JESUS AND OUR AGE 51 
 
 First let us take extracts concerning the 
 Christianity of the modern individual: 
 
 " We see Jesus, in the international empire of 
 the Romans, in the Uttle Jewish corner. Only there 
 could he arise, only there did he arise. . . . What 
 Jesus offers is adoption to be children of God in 
 Galilee. ... I lay stress upon the words * in 
 Galilee.' This adoption remains, indeed, in its 
 deepest nature, one and the same, but it expresses 
 itself differently in different environments. . . . 
 We have, then, to transfer this adoption from GaHlee 
 to other conditions." 
 
 " There existed a time when I also was deter- 
 mined to apply every word of Jesus to ourselves. 
 Jesus says * From him that would borrow of thee 
 turn not thou away ' (Matt. v. 42). Only those 
 have a right to join as experts in the discussion of 
 this saying who have actually attempted to follow 
 it literally. Jesus says * When thou makest a feast, 
 call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind ' 
 (Luke XV. 13). Just you transfer this directly to 
 our circumstances ! He says * Take no thought for 
 the morrow,' ask not * What shall we eat ? or What 
 shall we drink? ' (Matt. vi. 34, 31). But what does 
 our political economy teach, and what do we instil 
 into our children ? Jesus says * Sell that thou hast, 
 and give it to the poor ' (Matt. xix. 21). But who 
 is ready to sell, simply to transform his field or his 
 factory into alms? Is it only the hardness of our 
 
52 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 hearts and our innate sinfulness, if we do not carry 
 out all these injunctions to the letter? Indeed, 
 would it be a good fortune for any one, if we did so ? 
 Are we even free, morally free, to will to do so ? " . . . 
 
 " Once only there existed a primitive community, 
 and even that did not flourish for long. The words 
 of Jesus were originally intended to be taken literally; 
 but, alas, they cannot by us be fulfilled to the letter." 
 
 " We live in the age of Capitalism, and we possess 
 a religion which was born before this age. . . . We 
 all live in the midst of Mammonism, however little 
 we may individually be servants of Mammon. Our 
 age has become financial and speculative. And in 
 this age we possess a Saviour who says, with incon- 
 siderate decision, * Ye cannot serve God and Mam- 
 mon ' (Matt. vi. 24). How can we escape the pricks 
 of our own conscience? " — ^Pp. 58-60. 
 
 " I and my friends wanted to utilise Jesus simply 
 as the high and supreme advocate of modern in- 
 dustrial and economic struggles. But every time that 
 we seriously attempted to derive specific demands 
 from his gospel, it failed us. For the Gospel was 
 Galilean. . . . We are late-comers, who have to 
 learn to understand him in his own time, in order 
 that we may then, fortified by the fulness of his 
 personality, make our way, free from any scruples 
 of enslavement to the letter, within our own time." 
 —Pp. 62, 63. 
 
 " This our capitaHstic world, in which we live, 
 because none other exists for us, is organised accord- 
 
NAUMANN: JESUS AND WAR 53 
 
 ing to the principle * Thou shalt covet thy neigh- 
 bour's house! Thou shalt will to gain the market 
 which the English hold, thou shalt get the influence 
 in Constantinople which the French possessed, thou 
 shalt produce in painting what hitherto appears to 
 be the privilege of the Parisians, thou shalt eat the 
 bread which, in strictness, the Russian peasant him- 
 self should eat! And so on, endlessly: Thou shalt 
 — covet! ' . . . All the moods of the Gospel only 
 hover, like distant, white clouds of longing, above 
 all the actual doings of our time." — P. 65. 
 
 The remaining quotations deal with the 
 teaching of Jesus and the modern State and 
 its militarism: 
 
 " In the days of Augustus, the Light of the World 
 grew up in Nazareth ! Salvation in the stable, the pearl 
 in the earth of the field, Jesus amongst the plebeians! 
 . . . Nothing in the world exterminates so thoroughly 
 the pursuit of the vanities of the aristocratic manner 
 of life, as does devotion to the utterances of Jesus. 
 He it is who, always anew, precipitates us from all 
 our heights: What are you doing for the blind and 
 lame? Are you living for them? What is weak 
 in the eyes of the world, that God hath chosen in 
 him. He it is who succeeds in infusing a strange 
 longing into our heart and brain: be a brother to 
 the small and obscure! — ^And yet only when one has 
 come to know this spirit of boundless and active 
 compassion in all its acuteness and one-sidedness, 
 
54 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 does one also know, that only a few human beings 
 can possess it in its entirety. It is impossible to 
 attempt to erect the entire development of mankind 
 upon compassion and fraternal dispositions." " This 
 Gospel of the poor is one of the standards of our life, 
 but not the only standard. Not our entire morality 
 is rooted in the Gospel, but only a part of it, although 
 an extremely important and easily despised con- 
 stituent. Beside the Gospel there are demands of 
 power and of right, without which human society 
 cannot exist. — I myself, at least, do not know how 
 to help myself in the conflict between Christianity 
 and other tasks of life, save by the attempt to re- 
 cognise the limits of Christianity. That is difficult, 
 but it is better than the oppression of half-truths 
 which I have had to bear." — Pp. 68, 69. 
 
 " Primitive Christianity attached no value to the 
 preservation of the State, Law, Organisation, Produc- 
 tion. It simply does not reflect on the conditions 
 of human society. This is in no sense a reproach, 
 it is nothing but the determination of a limit: there 
 exist human problems, of the greatest size and 
 greatest difficulty, which are not essentially touched 
 by the New Testament. By the occasional assur- 
 ance of obedience towards the Roman Emperor, the 
 question, as to how Christianity stands towards the 
 State, is in no way solved. The State rests upon 
 entirely different impulses and instincts from those 
 which are cultivated by Jesus. The State requires 
 rulers, the democratic State as well as the aristo- 
 
NAUMANN: JESUS AND THE STATE 55 
 
 cratic. The State grows up upon the will to make 
 others subservient to oneself. All constructions 
 which attempt to explain the State from brotherly- 
 love to our neighbour are, considered historically, 
 so much empty talk. The State can, when it per- 
 fects itself, be impregnated with the motives of 
 brotherly love, at least one can attempt it; but, 
 according to its nature, the State is not love, but 
 constraint. The State does not belong to the sphere 
 where, if a man takes away my coat, I am to let 
 him have my cloak also; nor to that where sins are 
 forgiven, as soon as they are repented of. The 
 State has no right to reckon with the end of the world, 
 nor even with the voluntary goodness of all men. 
 It forms part of the struggle for existence, a cuirass 
 which grows out of the body of the tortoise, a set 
 of teeth which a nation creates for itself, a compound 
 of human wills, of soldiers, of paragraphs, and of 
 prisons. This compound is, in all its harshness, the 
 prerequisite of culture. And it found its pattern 
 form in Rome, not in Nazareth." " How am I to 
 say that Bismarck's preparations for the Schleswig- 
 Holstein War were a service in the Kingdom of 
 Jesus Christ? I cannot manage to do so. Yet all 
 the same, I admire these preparations. It does not 
 occur to me to lament them. Not every doing of 
 one's duty is Christian. Bismarck did his duty, for 
 his avocation was the cultivation of power. But 
 such a duty and its fulfilment are not directly an 
 imitation of Christ." — Pp. 71, 72. 
 
S6 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 " We thus stand small and poor before the pro- 
 blem of problems; we possess a knowledge of the 
 world, which teaches us a God of power and strength, 
 who sends out death and life, as simultaneously as 
 shadow and light, and a revelation, a faith as to 
 salvation, which declares the same God to be Father. 
 The following of the World-God produces the 
 morality of the struggle for existence, and the service 
 of the Father of Jesus Christ produces the morality 
 of compassion. And yet, they are not two Gods, 
 but one God. Somehow or other their arms inter- 
 twine. Only, no mortal man can say, where and 
 how this occurs. That is indeed a pain, but religion 
 without pain does not exist, has never existed." — 
 
 Pp. 74» 75. 
 
 " A Christian who exclusively follows his Chris- 
 tian theory is impossible within this our world. Go 
 to the Pope, to the Lutheran chief Court Preacher, 
 to the Monk, to the Professor; to the devout lady, 
 to the devout man of business, the devout peasant, 
 the devout beggar, the devout old woman: every- 
 where you will find a natural substratum of self- 
 preservative and struggling shrewdness conjoined 
 with the spirit of devotedness and brotherly love. 
 Everywhere Christianity is a part of life, nowhere 
 life itself in its entirety. Christianity is like pure 
 oxygen, which cannot be breathed by us in its full 
 purity. ... In a word, I know that all of us, if 
 we are to live at all, are forced to accept and to use, 
 as the foundation of our existence, the conditions 
 
NAUMANN: THE STATE, FORCE 57 
 
 required by nature in the struggle for existence; and 
 that only upon this foundation do we possess the 
 capacity for realising the higher morality of the 
 Gospel, in so far as this realisation is possible upon 
 such a foundation." — ^Pp. ']'], 78. 
 
 " Militarism is the foundation of all order in the 
 State and of all prosperity in the society of Europe. 
 Say all that you know against the military! It will 
 all be correct, for the description of battles cannot 
 be more awful than the reaHty. And then go with 
 me to where miUtarism existed in the past, and where 
 it now exists no longer — to the countries by the 
 Mediterranean. The man who does not see what 
 the collapse of the Roman military government in- 
 volved is beyond cure. All the evils of military 
 power are slight compared with the misery of a 
 country in which no such rule exists. Dearth of 
 soldiery means, in reality, ruins, decline, beggary, 
 and war of all against all. And the smaller and the 
 less developed are the armies, the greater is the con- 
 stant danger of war. An armed peace is not beauti- 
 ful, but it is better than all past conditions known to 
 us through history. All our culture would go the 
 way of the Arabian culture, were we to grow weak in 
 a military sense. I believe this to be sheer fact; 
 and if, after this, a man attempts, with whatsoever 
 ethical exhortations, to persuade me away from this 
 conviction, I simply combat his assumption of the 
 right to twist the experience of all history according 
 to his idea of good and evil. ... A State not built 
 
58 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 up around a skeleton of militarism does not exist. 
 Hence, we either dare to aim at being without a 
 State, and thus throw ourselves deliberately into 
 the arms of anarchy; or we decide to possess, along- 
 side of our religious creed, a political creed as well." 
 —Pp. 83, 84. 
 
 " The more exclusively Jesus is preached, the less 
 does he help to form States; and where Christianity 
 attempted to come forward as a constructive force, 
 that is to form States, to dominate civilisation, there 
 it was furthest away from the Gospel of Jesus, Now 
 this means, for our practical life, that we construct 
 our house of the State, not with the cedars of Lebanon, 
 but with the building stones from the Roman Capitol. 
 But in this house Jesus is, still to-day, to proclaim 
 his Gospel as he did in the past in the Roman house. 
 Hence we do not consult Jesus, when we are con- 
 cerned with things which belong to the domain 
 of the construction of the State and of Political 
 Economy. — ^This sounds hard and abrupt for every 
 human being brought up a Christian, but appears 
 to be sound Lutheranism. Luther, when he was 
 placed before the very principles of the problem, 
 especially in the conflict with Karlstadt and Miinzer, 
 was of a quite unhesitating {riicksichtsloser) and 
 splendid definiteness, and discriminated between 
 spiritual and worldly matters with all the force of 
 his mind and temperament." — Pp. 86, 87. 
 
NAUMANN TREBLY INFLUENCED 59 
 
 3 
 
 (I) 
 Friedrich Naumann surely illustrates, with 
 a stimulating vividness, the effect upon an 
 unusually sincere mind, strong will, clean 
 heart, and genuinely religious temper, of 
 three influences and conceptions, which in his 
 case have not reached their ultimate element 
 of truth, their proper position, and correlation. 
 I take these influences to be, roughly, Darwin- 
 ism, New Testament criticism, and the (still 
 strongly operative) character and teaching of 
 our Lord, as these are handed down by the 
 Christian Churches and are experienced by 
 the religious soul. The Darwinism gives 
 Naumann his philosophy, revealing to him 
 the actual substratum of all human life, and 
 especially of the State. The New Testament 
 criticism furnishes him with such a conception 
 of our Lord as seems to leave all that sub- 
 stratum, and its more immediate expressions 
 and superstructures, entirely untouched, and 
 as capable of fullest acceptance, in this 
 " Darwinian " sense, even by the most sincere 
 believer in our Lord's direct attitude and 
 teaching. But it is the third influence, the 
 figure and the ethical and spiritual power and 
 
6o CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 help of our Lord, as these are derived from 
 Christian traditions and experiences, which 
 make Naumann conscious how keenly such 
 " Darwinism " is in conflict with, if not the 
 undeniable conclusions of that criticism, at 
 least with the force and fruitfulness of Jesus 
 Christ as found by Naumann himself in life 
 and through the Church. Thus Naumann is 
 deeply wistful over his own divided unbridged 
 soul — ^half Christian, half Pagan; half love, 
 half violence. Each half attempts to remain 
 or to become as " pure " as possible; but he 
 himself is strained and torn asunder by these 
 antagonistic forces thus continuously at full 
 war within him. And Naumann is, very 
 certainly, not an eccentric, still less a poseur 
 in all this, but a deeply instructive example 
 how a religious mind may come to find room, 
 not only for the passive toleration, but for the 
 active, deliberate, persistent encouragement 
 of a frankly naturalistic statesmanship of the 
 type propounded by MachiaveUi, and (as to 
 the means) especially Bismarck. 
 
 (2) 
 
 But let us attempt to discover more pre- 
 cisely why, where and how Naumann is 
 wrong, and where lie the fuller truth and solid 
 
NAUMANN'S DARWINISM 6i 
 
 safety in these deep, delicate, and supremely 
 important and pressing problems. 
 
 First, the influence upon Naumann of a 
 certain, very elementary Darwinism is strongly 
 apparent in the first half of his Letters on 
 Religion, The Struggle for Existence; the 
 Survival of the Fittest; Force and Fight as 
 fundamental to all life ; the continuity of this 
 life from plant to animal, from animal to 
 man; the inexorableness of external condi- 
 tions, and their strictly determining influence 
 — all these elements are contained therein. 
 Here, however, the Darwinism is, in part, 
 unlike the gentle temper of Darwin himself, 
 and resembles rather the hard, aggressively 
 naturalistic English and German popularisers 
 of some of Darwin's hypotheses; and even 
 if we take it as here presented, it is curiously 
 little prosecuted right down into its assump- 
 tions and ambiguities. 
 
 Thus it is plain, I think, that Naumann 
 has never possessed, or has lost, all vivid sense 
 of the profound difference between Evolution 
 (or Epigenesis) as a descriptive account or 
 working hypothesis, and Evolution (or Epi- 
 genesis) as the ultimate cause, as the meta- 
 physical nature, of the variation between the 
 creatures spread out before us in the organic 
 
62 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 world. Even if we could, with our bodily- 
 eyes, behold an orchid-flower turn into a 
 butterfly, or a gorilla change into a man, it 
 would not follow that that butterfly was 
 nothing more than the orchid as it appeared 
 to us, and that man was nothing more than 
 the gorilla. But either the orchid would, 
 even then, have to be held somehow to possess, 
 hidden within it, the germs of the qualities 
 which the butterfly shows additional to, and 
 different from, the qualities of the orchid 
 (Evolution proper); or the orchid would 
 have to be conceived as having, in the course 
 of time, somehow taken into itself, from 
 without, certain truly new elements and 
 forces characteristic of the butterfly (Epi- 
 genesis). In neither case could the onlooker 
 reasonably reduce the butterfly to the orchid : 
 the butterfly is noty " essentially " or " merely," 
 an orchid, that we know; the rest is ingenious 
 guess or probable history of the how, not sheer 
 statement as to the what. And it is with the 
 Whaty not with the How^ that the reason and 
 conscience and conviction, the faith, life and 
 death of man ultimately deal. 
 
 For indeed this fundamental distinction 
 holds much more in the case of the gorilla 
 and the man. Not even the actual sight of 
 
OBSESSION OF " ORIGINS *' 63 
 
 the lowest of men springing from the highest 
 of apes could reasonably make me hold the 
 man to be " essentially " an ape, if careful 
 analysis of the human mind, conscience, 
 history, achievement, showed real, serious 
 differences of kind between the two. 
 
 The obsession of " origins," the supersti- 
 tion that thus we can and do see into the 
 very nature of things is most natural, and 
 inevitably obstinate. For only such an actual 
 sight, or imaginative marshalling, of the 
 successive stages and results of development, 
 is pictorial, and hence indisputably clear. 
 
 And all men, in their average moments, are 
 weary of the strenuous living and thinking 
 of rich reality which holds them; and they 
 turn to the clear abstractions which they 
 themselves can hold, since they themselves 
 have actually made them. Indeed the genetic 
 method, which alone could give us a proces- 
 sion seen in motion onwards and upwards 
 into the external world where we men now 
 stand, would be more what science seeks than 
 what we are reduced to by our actual circum- 
 stances, when we would securely probe real 
 beings in their real life and growth — analyse 
 the actual creatures that we are ourselves, 
 and which we know much the best, since we 
 
64 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 know these alone from within. And, if we 
 work in accordance with this (our only safe 
 and sober) way — the analytic method, we 
 have to move inwards and backwards. And 
 we then find man's marriage and family, 
 his society, his warfare, law and state, to 
 range from all but animal-seeming savagery 
 to richer and richest spiritual contents and 
 ends. Indeed, even in the highest civilisations 
 there are, not only continual lapses from the 
 better insight there actually attained, and 
 patches of still more or less unconscious 
 barbarism of conception, but there remains, 
 of necessity, everywhere, amongst mankind 
 here below, the psycho-physical and material 
 substrate without which man, in this life at 
 least, would not be man. And yet, go we thus 
 back and back in the history of man, every- 
 where we find traces of his specific humanity. 
 
 Naumann's mistake lies especially, it would 
 seem, in this, that there are (for him) ranges 
 and levels and effects of man's activity which 
 are, as a matter of fact, not human, since (in 
 spite of Naumann's own definite nomen- 
 clature but uncertain hopes) they are not 
 really moral, nor even moralisable — ^neither 
 subject to law nor permeable by justice, by 
 
STATE NEVER SHEER FORCE 65 
 
 altruism, by mercy at all. In reality, the 
 very skin and flesh and bones of my hand or 
 foot are not simply animal; they have been 
 penetrated and modified, through and through, 
 by the neural, psycho-physical, and (more 
 and more subtly and centrally) by the imagina- 
 tive, mental, volitional, emotional life of a 
 being precisely human. The human State, it 
 is true, appears to have for its most immedi- 
 ate end the physical protection and well-being 
 of its subjects, and to require (in varying ways 
 and degrees it may be, but nevertheless per- 
 manently) the outfit of constraining physical 
 force. The State, again, may thus require, for 
 all time, more of force even than of justice, and 
 far more of justice than of mercy; just as, con- 
 trariwise, the complexes of the Family, and 
 still more that of the Church, will always, 
 and increasingly, require more of mercy than 
 of justice, and more of justice than of force. 
 But the human State is, in reality, penetrated 
 by humanity; it is based, if not upon 
 brotherly love, yet neither upon force, but 
 upon consent — the seeking and finding of some 
 inchoate justice and interdependence, with 
 force as its aid and sanction. The State can 
 and does rise, sink — otherwise than a stone; 
 it can be and is mixed, inconsistent— otherwise 
 
ee CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 than are the oxygen and the nitrogen in 
 the air; it can and does have an end, a 
 responsibility, a repentance, whilst alive in 
 its connection with human beings. It is under- 
 standable, judgeable, improveable, indeed 
 tolerable, only when thus apprehended and 
 operative in its true nature, not as a ruthless 
 machine, a tornado, a fate, a physical law, a 
 pack of wolves, a monkey horde, but as 
 essentially human, springing from man, operat- 
 ing through man, leading to man — man who 
 is man only, everywhere, only as a creature 
 of flesh and of spirit, of force and of justice, 
 and even of love. 
 
 Spinoza determined " to study the science 
 of Politics with the same liberty of mind with 
 which we are wont to investigate Mathe- 
 matics; and to consider the human passions 
 as properties which belong to human nature 
 in the same manner as heat, cold, storm and 
 the like pertain to the nature of the atmo- 
 sphere." (Tract, Polit, ch. i. iv.) This is true 
 only quite generally, but very false its special 
 point; for we must indeed search out and 
 follow the presuppositions and laws of human 
 PoHtics at least as carefully as we do those 
 of Natural Physics; but this very care will, 
 if untrammelled by a violent determination 
 
THE STATE CAN REPENT 67 
 
 to attain to clearness and unity by the shortest 
 cut and at any cost, lead us everywhere to 
 discover and to respect the delicate, profound 
 differences between the Organic, especially 
 the Human, and the simply Physical. 
 
 It is because of this profound difference 
 between the State and a cloud, and between 
 War and a thunderstorm, that (as we have 
 seen) Rome could, already under Cicero, 
 define the State, not in terms of force or 
 utility alone, but of justice as well; and that, 
 under the Antonines and Trajan, the State 
 could approach, — ^and this even precisely as 
 State, as Constitution, as Law, — the practice 
 of much justice within the force, and not a 
 little mercy within the justice. That England 
 has been able, for many a day, to abandon, 
 after a hundred years' war (full of brilliant 
 victories and transfigured for the English 
 imagination by the wizardry of Shakespeare), 
 all claims to France, all pretence that that 
 war was right and Joan of Arc, whom England 
 burnt, was wrong; that the English State 
 and Nation could so rapidly sink into frivolity 
 under the Merry Monarch, after their heroic 
 strenuousness under the grim Protector; that 
 this same England could, now for many a 
 day, deliberately regret her attempted coercion 
 
68 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 of her American colonies, and make the greatest 
 sacrifices in atonement for past injustice to 
 Ireland — all this is fact, because the personal- 
 istic unity of the English State is a fact. That 
 France, during these last forty years, has 
 thoroughly recovered from the Napoleonic 
 fever-thirst for world-conquest, after suffering 
 from it for well-nigh three generations; and 
 that Germany, from about 1863 increasingly 
 up to this moment, has, in its turn, become 
 infected with a " Realistic " world-policy, 
 which, surely, is not proving a permanent 
 success — these cases again show us plainly 
 that sheer force, mere self-regardingness for 
 the State, is, in the long run, as subtly contrary 
 to the wondrously inter-connected reality of 
 life for the State as such " Realism " is for 
 the Guild, the Shop, the Family, all which 
 complexes, without any goodwill on the part 
 of the general public and of other guilds, shops, 
 families, have no range or material in which 
 to practise even their unscrupulous cleverness. 
 Ethical inconsistency is indeed more or less 
 everywhere; even legitimate self-interest is 
 difficult to define, and still more difficult not 
 to overstep; yet the cynical rejection of all 
 altruism anywhere is no better, objectively, 
 than a senile childishness. 
 
THE STATE A MORAL COMPLEX 69 
 
 The State, indeed (a fact seen by Naumann, 
 even to excess), is never simply the sum-total 
 of the individuals, or of the families, guilds, 
 communes that compose it. Certainly the 
 family is not such a simple sum-total of its 
 individual members. Just because none of 
 these spontaneous human complexes are such 
 sheer sum-totals of human individuals, are 
 they so highly educative, so necessary, to the 
 individual soul. Yet this their educational 
 power over the individual man, shows also 
 how none of these complexes are sheer non- 
 moral forces. It is precisely because these 
 complexes are (in a mysterious yet most real 
 manner) personaHties endowed with a human, 
 even if a sui generis human, spirit and an 
 influence of their own, that they can and do 
 repay those individuals who loyally will them, 
 and who self-obliviously serve them, as being 
 such humane or humanisable entities, by 
 aiding these individuals to become more and 
 more truly persons. And the individuals, 
 thus benefited, in return benefit the State. 
 And if the State be not accountable in the 
 Beyond, the single soul is certainly thus 
 accountable for its share in accepting, in 
 awakening and increasing, or in numbing 
 
70 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 and misdirecting, the influence and character 
 of that personalistic complex, the State. 
 
 And with the State — ^with the conception 
 of its nature, personalistic or otherwise — the 
 character and functions of War rise and sink, 
 stand and fall. 
 
 Naumann, finally, is deeply impressed by 
 the conception of our Lord's outlook and 
 teaching now prevalent in Biblical critical 
 circles, which finds Him apocalyptic rather 
 than prophetic, and absorbed in the coming 
 of the Kingdom, and upon the detachments 
 and heroisms needful during such a short, 
 final crisis. Here, more certainly than with 
 the Darwinian interpretation of Nature and 
 of Man, Naumann is, we believe, upon the 
 track of a very precious element of the full 
 facts. But here again, as much as in the other 
 case, does he fail, we think, to press the 
 question home to its metaphysical foundations. 
 
 We have already found that nothing that 
 man is, does, or becomes, is just simply 
 animal, still less simply determined. Hence, 
 already thus quite generally, the teaching 
 and temper of Jesus, as ethical and spiritual, 
 do not stand in sheer contradiction to any- 
 thing that man is, does or becomes — to the 
 
NAUMANN'S BIBLICAL CRITICISM 71 
 
 ineradicable implications and ideals opera- 
 tive within these things. True, our Lord's 
 injunction " Whatsoever ye would that men 
 should do to you, do ye even so to them" 
 (St. Matt. vii. 12) is but a preliminary demand 
 in His teaching, a teaching which centres in 
 the two great loves, the love of God and the 
 love of man — a love even unto death and even 
 of man's enemies (St. Matt. xxii. 37-40; 
 V. 39, 44, 45). Yet that Golden Rule of 
 natural morality is thus fully presupposed 
 here, and that Rule will, inevitably, represent 
 (upon the whole) the high-water mark of the 
 ethical element in the ideal of the State. 
 Nevertheless the human individual soul is 
 certainly, in its depths and at its best, athirst 
 and restless after something more than the 
 Golden Rule; for assuredly, in the long run, 
 mankind (if taken as holding no touch or 
 apprehension of anything but its fellow-men) 
 does not suffice unto itself. Certainly, actual 
 humanity is not thus self-limited, either in its 
 capacity or in its desire, as regards what is 
 other but less than itself; the greatness of 
 Darwin is proved precisely by this ability 
 and longing to escape, from his own life, into 
 that of a fly-trap plant or of an earth-worm. 
 And as certainly, actual humanity in its 
 
72 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 deepest souls, and in the deepest moments 
 or capacities more or less of us all, is not 
 content with the entire series of such less than 
 human, or only human, existences and with 
 such experiences of them. But the dissatis- 
 faction of such souls and of such moments 
 (if recognised in its persistence and in its 
 profoundly noble fruitfulness) indicates the 
 presence and the pressure, within our pro- 
 foundest life, of a, of ihe^ Contrasting Other, 
 of the Non-contingent Reality, of God. We 
 cannot, indeed, in any true sense, get out of 
 our own skins; but, within these our skins, 
 He intimations and impHcations of more than 
 just merely human, or sub-human, realities. 
 And this instinct primarily wants God, not 
 man; and, in man, it wants his union with 
 God and his union with other men through 
 God. Survival, yes; but a survival in order 
 to attain fully to God and to His Kingdom — 
 to these realities, nothing more, nothing less. 
 Of such a hfe we can, here below, catch 
 only glimpses, they irradiate us for an instant 
 and they are gone; yet they it is that keep 
 us going, individual, family. State ; we cannot, 
 at our best, renounce, as though it were 
 fanatical folly, what, for such instants, we can 
 thus, sometimes, see, do and be. Such a life, 
 
JESUS AFFIRMS REALITIES 73 
 
 carried out in its spiritual substance to the 
 full, would indeed be Jesus' Sermon on the 
 Mount literally lived in its essential form: 
 war, force, constraint, external law, even 
 justice in so far as less than love — ^all this 
 would have passed away. It cannot be thus 
 carried out here below; it will, then, be 
 carried out elsewhere. 
 
 Metaphysics, Ontology, to this degree at 
 least, are thus of the very essence of religion; 
 religion is, primarily, a need, an experience 
 and an affirmation of what is; and only in 
 the second instance a command as to what 
 ought to be. Because our Father jV, and 
 because the blessed are and do His will in 
 heaven : because of this (and not because the 
 time is short or long before we have to leave 
 this lower scene) are we to do this same Divine 
 Will, as nearly as we can, here upon our earth. 
 Thus it is that our Lord's temper and teaching 
 precisely meet, after they themselves have 
 more fully awakened and articulated, this 
 metaphysical apprehension and thirst, this 
 need of a perfect purity and self-immolating 
 love — a need lying already present, in excess 
 of his simply natural endowments, within the 
 soul of man, since it is obscurely but really 
 touched by God, the Supernatural Life. 
 
74 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 Naumann himself has interesting admis- 
 sions as to this permanent need of an objective, 
 metaphysical, more than human source and 
 end, in and for religion, and clearly realises 
 the transitory attraction of all the purely 
 subjectivist and merely intra-human currents. 
 
 " In Religion we nowadays ask less what a man 
 believes than how, — whether he is capable of strong 
 and pure emotions. I do not hold this to be the 
 last and the highest that can be attained in religion, 
 but for our own selves now it is the highest." — 
 P. 32. 
 
 It will thus, I think, be more in his conceptions 
 as to God and as to man, than in his affective 
 attitude towards our Lord, that Naumann 
 will require to modify his position. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It will be well, before concluding this study, 
 to analyse Professor Ernst Troeltsch's two 
 presentments of the problems here concerned, 
 since they lead to striking hopeful elucida- 
 tions, and this during the war itself. 
 
 Naumann has now, towards the end of the 
 first year of the world-war, reiterated, if 
 
TROELTSCH: GERMANS v, ALLIES 75 
 
 anything with a heightened emphasis, this, 
 his " pure " doctrine, in a further book, on 
 Central Europe, Professor Ernst Troeltsch, 
 on the contrary, we shall presently study as a 
 strenuous labourer for a truly ethical concep- 
 tion of the State; yet even he reveals how 
 great, for himself also, is the fascination of the 
 "realistic" conception of the State, in an 
 address delivered in Vienna last October, 
 and published in the Neue Rundschau of 
 Berlin, January 1916, pp. 50-75. Here the 
 fascination is, I submit, especially impres- 
 sive and instructive; every line of the paper 
 breathes the most sincere desire to allow, not 
 only as subjectively sincere but also as 
 objectively not without some foundation, 
 two differences, to be described presently, that 
 exist between the Allies and the Central 
 Empires, and yet no line here shows the least 
 apprehension that a third difference — the 
 repulsion manifested in England and France 
 against the elimination of all ethical concep- 
 tions and of all striving after moral obligations 
 of any kind in statesmanship and war — may, 
 after all, be sincere. He nowhere divines that 
 this repulsion can be quite spontaneous — 
 indeed that it lies deeper down, and is- more 
 unchangeable, within us than are the two 
 
76 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 other differences he so fully respects; and 
 that it may be — may it not? — one of those 
 struggling, largely inarticulate or stammering, 
 but unconquerable, pressures and pushes of 
 the fuller, ethical and spiritual life which is 
 coming. Such pressures and pushes his own 
 deep Christian soul has most largely taught 
 us, his grateful learners, to discern in the other 
 complexes of human existence, where the 
 human soul is found struggling upwards to 
 its own more adequate self - articulation. 
 " There was no room for Him in the inn " 
 is true, always, if in varying degrees, with 
 respect to every deeper vital truth as it 
 achieves its place in this rough world of the 
 Market-place and the Barracks. 
 
 (i) Professor Troeltsch, then, here finds that 
 " policy, where it has for its basis the natural 
 need of growth on the part of strong states (a 
 need reinforced, in such cases, by the motives 
 of the will to supremacy, of the requirement 
 of glory, and of economic advantage), is a 
 merciless game of force, to-day as it has ever 
 been. And such is also the policy which has 
 led to this War." " Especially since the 
 world-war has become the Balkan war, the 
 entire Idealism, which had been put upon the 
 boards for the more European beginnings of 
 
HIS CHARGE OF HYPOCRISY 77 
 
 the conflict, has turned into an obstacle for 
 the Allies, and has been laid aside by them." 
 " The nimbus of Democracy and of Western 
 culture " has gone or is going: " everywhere 
 the Allies are themselves now manifesting a 
 militarism, a policy of force and prestige^ a 
 gagging of the press and a centralisation and 
 irresponsibility of power, such as could not 
 be greater in any autocracy." 
 
 I will not stop to examine this charge of fact 
 — of " hypocrisy " amongst the Allies — since 
 I know Troeltsch to accept our principle — 
 International Morality. I will only ask how 
 Troeltsch, after such impatience with us for 
 our non-admission of the full Naturalism of 
 the State's international relations as a fact 
 operative everywhere to-day, can, in good 
 logic or (more important still) in self-con- 
 sistency of instinct and impulse of soul, retain 
 an intense faith in the possibility, and indeed 
 the vital need, of an eventual mutual under- 
 standing within the common conviction of the 
 ethical character of the State. Most assuredly, 
 and highly to his credit, Troeltsch (still now 
 as always, and perhaps more than ever before) 
 realises and nobly voices such a final Idealism 
 — " a system of mutual respect and liberty 
 of development constituted by the various 
 
78 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 peoples in their several individualities, each 
 alongside of the others ; a system which would, 
 doubtless, involve the self-limitation of each 
 to what was truly necessary to its existence 
 as a State, and the granting by each to the 
 others of the liberty of existence within these 
 limits." Indeed Troeltsch will have it that it 
 is this dual character, this inclusion of " the 
 no doubt daring, and highly idealistic, concep- 
 tion of an unforced mutual respect and a 
 mutual granting of development " which 
 constitutes the true specific nature of the 
 German idea of liberty, in contrast with the 
 French and English ideas of it, which, in their 
 various ways, are, to his mind, of an essen- 
 tially exclusive, and intolerantly missionary, 
 type (pp. 74, 75). 
 
 (2) Now the two points on which Troeltsch 
 finds a real and objective and legitimate 
 difference between the Western Allies and the 
 Central Empires, and where he courageously 
 presses his fellow-Germans to closer study 
 and sympathy, and indeed (on the second 
 point) to extensive changes and to consider- 
 able acceptances of Western habits and 
 arrangements, have, so it seems here, no 
 connection with any affirmation or denial of 
 g Naturalistic conception of the State, " Two 
 
HE ADMITS TWO DIVERGENCES 79 
 
 great contrasts to German culture are repre- 
 sented by the Western powers and peoples. 
 There is, first, the great aesthetic-artistic 
 contrast. On the one side, there is the ancient 
 and powerful opposition of France, the assimi- 
 lator of the Latin Renaissance, to all North- 
 German influence; and, on the other side, 
 the high-pitched will and ambition of the 
 political and economic forces constituting 
 Protestant North Germany, a country as 
 unartistic as you please. And the second 
 great contrast essentially concerns political 
 Ethics, and consists in the world-wide agita- 
 tion carried on by the Western democratic 
 ideas against Germany in the first place, 
 but then also against its Allies — ^Austria, 
 Hungary and Turkey, which, as the most 
 autoritaire of the powers, have found them- 
 selves at one with reactionary Germany" 
 (p. 54). The main body of his Address then 
 studies this question of political liberty, largely 
 with an admirable penetration and instructive 
 many-sidedness. 
 
 (3) But it is, I submit, on two quite different 
 questions that we, the Western Allies, especially 
 I believe we here in England, feel the most 
 deep-seated of impulsions and instincts of 
 immemorial operation, questions which the 
 
8o CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 more closely analytic and circumspect minds, 
 at least amongst ourselves, cannot (precisely 
 after the longest and best thought we have 
 been able to give to the matter) place after 
 those merely aesthetic and political differences. 
 The first question, on which we feel thus 
 with a primary intensity, is a question of 
 sheer, indeed long extant, matter of fact. 
 And the witnesses to this simply factual 
 matter, who arise in my mind, are not philo- 
 sophers and assuredly not sentimentalists, 
 nor avowed philanthropists at all, but just 
 two British officials — the one already full 
 of years and honours, the other still ruling 
 a vast multitude of coloured men. Lord 
 Cromer was originally a military man, later 
 on a brilliant Finance Minister for all British 
 India, and then, in Egypt, probably the most 
 successful organiser of the agriculture, finances 
 and general prosperity of a land and of races 
 neglected and oppressed by long centuries of 
 misrule, that the world has ever seen under 
 at all similar conditions. He has been great 
 precisely in the most " realistic " of fields : 
 even a Treitschke and a Bernhardi could, in 
 what they retain of fruitful insight and 
 intention, profitably sit as docile disciples at 
 his feet. 
 
FIRST DIVERGENCE FELT BY US 8i 
 
 Now what is it that instantly and per- 
 manently strikes Lord Cromer as the most 
 peculiar, and at bottom the most repulsive, 
 feature in the confession and programme of 
 a German statesman comparatively so sane, 
 successful and serene as is Prince von Biilow 
 in his book Imperial Germany ? Lord Cromer 
 finds the work especially characteristic, "be- 
 cause it may be confidently asserted that 
 no ex-Minister, save one of North German 
 nationality, could or would have published 
 such a book. ... A French or English ex- 
 Minister, similarly situated, however deeply 
 imbued with the idea that foreign policy should 
 be dictated by the interests of his own country, 
 would not improbably have endeavoured to 
 throw a more or less transparent veil of 
 cosmopolitan sympathy over any extreme 
 display of egotism. Prince Biilow " (with the 
 sole exception of his references to Italy, 
 where " we do, indeed, come across a faint 
 trace of idealism") *'has done nothing of the 
 kind." " He deprecates ' exaggerated expres- 
 sions of friendship.' He is desirous to let all 
 concerned know that Germany cannot ' be 
 trampled on with impunity,' a fact of which 
 the world has for a long time past been very 
 fully aware. But the reader rises from a 
 
82 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 perusal of these pages without any strong 
 conviction that, should the necessity arise, 
 Germany would not readily trample upon 
 others. It is, at all events, abundantly clear 
 that whenever any German interest is involved 
 no moral obstacles will be allowed to stand in 
 the way of furthering German views by the 
 resources of a diplomacy which is not over- 
 scrupulous, supported by prodigious force 
 in the background." Germany " will not go 
 out of her way to seek the amity of other 
 nations. Oderint dum metuant is Prince 
 Billow's watchword." (Reprinted from ^he 
 Spectator, February 1914, in Lord Cromer's 
 Political and Literary Essays, II., 1914, pp. 
 149-15 1.) 
 
 And the younger man is now ruling a vast 
 stretch of the Dark Continent, with admirable 
 success. And this highly competent, remark- 
 ably unemotional official once told me — not 
 as anything at all special to himself — ^how 
 when he went to rest at night, a full month's 
 journey from home, living a life of hard 
 pioneer's work, one of a handful of whites 
 amongst a teeming coloured population in a 
 climate profoundly trying to a European, and 
 with an essentially modest pay ending in an 
 equally modest pension: how then he would 
 
CRY OF * HYPOCRISY ' INADEQUATE 83 
 
 regularly ask himself a question. The question 
 was : " What is it that renders this my 
 authority and my labours here reasonable, 
 right and endurable ? " And there was only 
 one answer which ever satisfied him : " The 
 decisive thing that thus sustains me, is a fact 
 which I cannot doubt; the condition of the 
 native population is (in all calculable respects) 
 profoundly, astonishingly better than it was 
 before England came, than it would be if 
 England went." It was this, and not the 
 very certain advantage for England also, 
 that was the determining support to him 
 out there. 
 
 I submit, then, that it is waste of good 
 breath, for our German critics, even for those 
 we so gladly learn from in other, still deeper 
 matters, to treat our squeamishness and our 
 humanitarianism, when they appear at these 
 levels and in such men, as a sheer hypocrisy 
 which, in our inmost hearts, we know to be 
 merely such, and which therefore must, in 
 the still hours of the night, leave us impressed 
 with the sublime veracity of German " Real- 
 Politik." I take it that even Machiavellian- 
 ism, on its wiser side, persistently allows for 
 even the most demonstrable of prejudices, 
 provided only they be inveterate. Indeed all 
 
84 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 these " Realisms " recognise and utilise the 
 passions — do they not ? — the passions as they 
 are, not as they ought to be. Thus if " Fright- 
 fulness " does not frighten, but only stiffens 
 our resolve to hold out till final victory at 
 any cost, such an " hypocrisy " clamours 
 aloud for practical recognition, as a fact, 
 quite especially by those " Realists." 
 
 My second point concerns the logical, and 
 still more the psychical, tenability of any 
 postponement of the ethico-political question. 
 The method in Ethics that is involved by 
 any such postponement vividly recalls, to 
 my mind, the theory of knowledge in the 
 Cartesian philosophy. Descartes starts with 
 a subject only; cogito ergo sum — I think, 
 not this or that, but I just think : and then 
 Descartes ends somehow with an object as 
 well. Yet our experience (which is our only 
 satisfactory starting point) always gives us 
 subject and object, the two together or 
 neither of them. Only if experience be thus 
 taken as it is in itself, do the elementary, 
 simple-seeming, as yet confused and mostly 
 inarticulate, impressions of the child, the 
 peasant, or the savage reveal, when pressed, 
 analysed and interrogated with delicate 
 docility, the fountain and channels, the form 
 
OUR SECOND DIVERGENCE 85 
 
 and laws, of our larger and largest, of our 
 richest and most particularised experiences — 
 our actual contacts with the various realities 
 amidst which we live and move. Nothing, in 
 those earlier stages of it, could well be more 
 dim, dreamlike, " sentimental," if you will, 
 than this experience of knowledge; yet 
 nothing is more doctrinaire and disastrous 
 than to start with one half of that dim 
 experience, and then expect to find, at the 
 end of our investigation and conviction, the 
 whole of experience, as it now faces us distinct 
 in our fully-expanded life. 
 
 Now in Ethics, whether individual or 
 social, we have to be alert to a closely similar 
 difficulty, pitfall and need. As Descartes 
 starts with the Subject bereft of any Object 
 to stimulate that Subject to thinking, not of 
 Thought but of that Object, and thus leads 
 us into a bHnd-alley in which most of the 
 Epistemologists, from his day downwards, 
 have been vainly groping about for a satis- 
 factory escape out to the Object, and to the 
 frank proclamation of the universal trinity 
 in unity of all knowledge (the knower, the 
 known, and the knowing); so also with all 
 solipsistic Ethics, whether of the human 
 individual or the human complexes. Go as 
 
86 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 far back in man's history as you can, his 
 knowledge is thus treble and his conduct 
 also. Mere self-knowers and mere self-seekers, 
 whether they be individuals, families, clans, 
 trades, classes, churches, nations, states — 
 these things are non-existent ; and the strictly 
 consistent dreamers of such things are not to 
 be found even in chanceries and in camps, 
 but only in lunatic asylums. Everywhere 
 Conduct, as Knowledge, is triune^ a two-fold 
 action — ^the action of myself upon the other 
 and the action of the other upon myself — 
 and the activity that thus links these two 
 realities. And the action of the one can never, 
 in the long run, be an action of sheer hatred 
 and hostility against the other; for such 
 action would again be mere maniacal solipsism. 
 How much of this very doctrine, in its 
 latest, fullest articulation, we all most grate- 
 fully owe to Germans, especially to Professor 
 Troeltsch himself! I am only urging here that 
 you cannot end as he certainly does, if you 
 begin as he here seems to do — that you cannot 
 be both fully, definitely Machiavellian in 
 politics and deeply, tenderly Christian in the 
 life of the individual, the family and the 
 church. 
 
TROELTSCH ON NATURE OF STATE 87 
 
 Troeltsch's " Personal Morality and State 
 Morality " {J^leue Rundschau^ February 1916) 
 meets and satisfies many of the misgivings 
 likely to remain in the mind of an English 
 reader of " The German Idea of Freedom." 
 True, even in this later, deeper article we 
 have (if we would be fair to, and learn from, 
 its standards) first to get away from what 
 we Allies will be unable to feel as other than 
 strange misapprehensions concerning large 
 facts of the War. Thus the wickedness of the 
 attempt to starve out an entire people is 
 dwelt on — ^although blockade is recognised 
 as legitimate by International Law, and 
 though Germany, had she but possessed the 
 power, would have been the first to intro- 
 duce it against us with incomparably greater 
 stringency. And again we are assured that 
 the German authorities, military and political, 
 " have throughout preserved justice and 
 fairness in a quite exemplary way." Indeed, 
 also the frequent insistence upon the gigantic 
 " hypocrisy " of the Allies, their temper and 
 programme in general, will not, I beheve, be 
 accepted by the historian of the future, 
 anxious, surely, to discover here also the 
 
88 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 kernel of truth lurking in so admittedly large 
 a husk of obstinate and successful profession 
 of revolt felt by these AUies against the official 
 temper of Prussianised Germany. 
 
 Nevertheless, we can and ought quickly to 
 reach, in this striking Paper, page upon page 
 of all but pure instructiveness. I will give here 
 the main passages; I will then press certain 
 of Troeltsch's conceptions or implications as 
 really hostile to his own deepest convictions; 
 and I will end upon the most ultimate points 
 where we are in whole-hearted agreement. 
 
 (i) Troeltsch, then, first undertakes to 
 show how real for us all is the problem before 
 us; how, on either side in this world-war, 
 there is an inner conflict between different 
 modes of ethical valuation, " between Peace 
 ethics and War ethics; Humanitarianism and 
 National Egoism; Christian Love and the 
 Fight for Existence; Democratic Equity 
 and the Aristocratic aim at the Highest; an 
 ethics of self-limitation and an ethics of 
 unbounded will and exaltation of the self." 
 The second mode of valuation Troeltsch finds 
 " amongst the Allies just as it exists amongst 
 the Germans, e,g, in Homer Lea's Day of the 
 Anglo-Saxony Cramb's England and Germany, 
 and the sacro egoismo of the Italians." Most 
 
ENGLISH PREACHERS OF FORCE 89 
 
 assuredly Troeltsch is right so far; the idolatry 
 of sheer force and of a boundless expansion, 
 self-justified by their sheer existence, is to 
 be found in every country; nor is it more 
 true if urged by Carlyle and Cramb than if 
 canonised by Treitschke or Bernhardi. " But 
 among the Allies," continues Troeltsch, 
 " this mode of valuation is confined to some 
 leading publicists and influential groups, 
 whose opinions are deliberately kept in the 
 background; for the masses, the Humani- 
 tarian-Democratic-Civilisation Gospel is put 
 in the forefront, whilst the Germans are 
 denounced as standing exclusively for 
 National Egoism. ... In Germany people 
 are more honest; and besides that, we are 
 less politically trained, and undervalue the 
 psychological-ethical elements in the con- 
 trasts between the nations as these accentuate 
 themselves; and, again, a certain bent to 
 doctrinarianism in the German character 
 leads them to think out and to emphasise 
 contradictory theories even in the hour of 
 greatest peril " (p. 147). We shall find, I 
 think, that this " greater honesty " is a far 
 more complicated thing than here appears; 
 but it is a gain to have the clear admission of 
 two other, very certain, defects. 
 
90 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 Then Troeltsch proceeds, rightly I believe, 
 to refuse to be content with the distinction 
 between a war of self-defence, as always right, 
 and a war of " aggression," as always wrong; 
 since, e,g, in this war, whoever it was that 
 began the war, even " aggressively," the war 
 is no more, for either side, one for a simple 
 maintenance of the conditions extant when the 
 war broke out (p. 148). The problem then is 
 profoundly real. 
 
 Troeltsch finds the solution of the problem 
 in the distinction between Private MoraHty 
 and State Morality, which Germans inherit 
 from their great philosophical and historical 
 teachers. " This distinction maintains the 
 validity of the Ethical for both domains; but 
 allows to this Ethical, in each domain, because 
 of its particular practical conditions, a sense 
 so different as, in certain circumstances, to 
 issue in an apparent contradiction, a contra- 
 diction which, nevertheless (if confronted 
 with the final depths of the ethical conception 
 operative here throughout), is found to be 
 indeed only apparent " (p. 149). Thus Kant 
 starts with the ethics of the individual, who is 
 bound to respect the freedom and the rights 
 of other individuals. An analogous ethical 
 relation could, he held, prevail between states 
 
KANT AND FICHTE ON STATE 91 
 
 only in a Utopia, in which all the states were 
 subject to some supreme authority which 
 could actively check any mutual aggression. 
 " Yet he characterises such a conception as 
 the final ideal of reason and of its develop- 
 ment, an ideal to which men should approxi- 
 mate as much as possible " (pp. 149, 150). 
 Fichte added to Kant's teaching a new con- 
 ception of the State as such, the State with 
 an individual existence of its own. " We thus 
 have the series : Individual, State, Mankind " 
 (pp. 150, 151). I reserve a point of my own 
 as to Fichte, and Troeltsch's account of Hegel 
 and of Ranke for my own objections further 
 on. But Troeltsch's general retrospective 
 conclusion I give at once. " If the historians 
 of the age of Bismarck (and Bismarck himself) 
 emphasised State -Egoism they only meant 
 to insist upon the difference between Private 
 Morality and State Morality; they did not 
 mean that states, in their relations to each 
 other, were not subject to any moral law." 
 So especially with Treitschke (pp. 152, 153). 
 Wistful little reservations which play around 
 the references to the " morality " of Bis- 
 marck's statesmanship indicate, also here in 
 Troeltsch, how impossible in practice is the 
 maintenance of international obligations of 
 
92 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 any articulable kind, with an unqualified 
 acceptance of all Bismarck's actions and 
 spirit in these matters. We could as well 
 defend the strict " morality " of Cromwell's 
 action in Ireland. 
 
 Pressing the problem still closer, Troeltsch 
 finds that Private and State Morality cannot 
 be the same, because there exists no superior 
 power to protect the single state, as there 
 exists to defend the single man ; because 
 states, unlike individuals, are complex multi- 
 tudes with indistinct outlines, rendering it 
 difficult to fix responsibility for action; because 
 the consequences of action have, for the State, 
 to be thought out in vast ranges of space and 
 time; and, above all, because the moral 
 relation between the individual and the super- 
 individual unity is not alongside of the moral 
 relations between individuals, but itself pro- 
 vides the sphere and presupposition for these 
 individual relations (pp. 158, 159). 
 
 It is precisely this last point of difference 
 •within interdependence which is used by 
 Troeltsch, with delicate penetration, directly 
 to introduce the affirmation of the moral 
 character of the State, also in its inter-State 
 relations. The principle of States is not 
 " collective egoism," but faith in the value 
 
STATE MORALITY, ITS NATURE 93 
 
 of the special culture they each embody, and 
 duty towards the present and future genera- 
 tions of their members. " The mere tendency 
 to expand, collective egoism, would not be 
 morally nobler in the nation than egoism in 
 the individual " (p. 159). Inter-State morality 
 " requires not only fidelity and trust, con- 
 sistency and clearness, the greatest possible 
 measure of honesty and frankness, mutual 
 respect and recognition," but it requires also 
 each State to take its place in the system of 
 the great Powers of European culture, in 
 which the small Powers have their assured 
 place also — " a system full of common spiri- 
 tual values and of moral unanimities " (pp. 
 160, 161). 
 
 Again the difference between the two 
 moralities is diminished by the fact that, even 
 for Private Morahty, the duty of self-sacrifice 
 is an exception, whilst the duty of the mode- 
 rate assertion of our own rights, as limited by 
 the rights of others, is our ordinary task; and 
 by the corresponding fact that, also for the 
 State, there can be occasional self-sacrifice 
 and there always ought to be self-limitation. 
 A State may be called to self-sacrifice, not 
 indeed for other States, but for ideals, e,g, free- 
 dom; as Fichte exhorted the German people 
 
94 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 to sacrifice itself rather than to exist enslaved. 
 The usual morality of the State, its self- 
 limitation, " implies the demand for such a 
 position among the world powers as corre- 
 sponds with its own real contents and real 
 needs; honest recognition of the vital needs 
 of the other single states ; and regard for the 
 vital interests of the system of European 
 Culture as a whole" (pp. 159, 160). This 
 treble recognition of these three kinds of real 
 political complexes and of their real inter- 
 relations is, maintains Troeltsch, the true 
 meaning of Real-folitik, 
 
 And Troeltsch concludes all with the practical 
 application of these principles in pages almost 
 entirely of deepest helpfulness for us all. First, 
 generally : Statesmen indeed will have to deter- 
 mine the details, " but the people must bear 
 in mind the principle that the safeguarding 
 of our own dignity and of room for our future 
 development must coincide with consideration 
 for the possibilities of free States, existing 
 alongside of each other within one single 
 great cultural system" (p. 162). And next, 
 in particular, with regard to each of the six 
 great groups or currents of German, indeed 
 of European, contemporary life, the Imperial- 
 ists, Liberals, Democrats, pure Socialists, 
 
CRITICISM OF VARIOUS GROUPS 95 
 
 Conservatives and Christians. A few words 
 must suffice here from the criticisms of the 
 first, third and fifth group. 
 
 Imperialism (Troeltsch carefully distin- 
 guishes the excessive kind he condemns from 
 the rightful drawing together of the various 
 parts of one and the same State) " thinks in 
 terms of biology, or of old German pagan 
 heroism, or of Roman ambition and dominion " 
 — this, so far, applies to Naumann; " or even 
 in the style of Assyrian deportations " — a 
 neat thrust at Professor Eduard Meyer. " If 
 the egoism of the State is really * essenti- 
 ally unlimited,' then all morality, Kantian or 
 Christian, falls to the ground." Some of these 
 writers indeed speak of " both extensive and 
 intensive " unlimited development ; " but 
 these are quite different things — the first 
 being the principle of War, which in itself can 
 consider no one; the second, a principle of 
 culture, which has a meaning only where the 
 State forms part of an enriching, interactive 
 System of cultured States " (p. 163). And, 
 however inconsistently, these writers repre- 
 sent a current of thought " which is beginning 
 to prevail all the world over. But the danger 
 is not the less plain for that — the danger 
 both in foreign and in home relations, both 
 
96 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 in our own case and in that of others" 
 (p. 163). 
 
 Democracy is to-day divided. The old 
 pubis citarian^ Swiss, Pacificist type has been 
 driven from the field by the coalescence of 
 the will of the masses with expansive Imperial- 
 ism. " But the democratic Imperialism of the 
 Entente Powers continues to give lip-homage 
 to the old anti-Imperial democratic ethics." 
 Hence, according to Troeltsch, the boundless 
 hypocrisy on their side. We shall presently 
 find, I think, an equally great " hypocrisy " 
 — ^surely, inconsistency — of a subtler kind in 
 the Prussianised German mentality. 
 
 And as to the Conservatives, at least in 
 Germany, there is for them no ethical problem 
 at all: it is a simple matter of a class code, 
 loyalty to the Crown, the command of religion. 
 *' These men require continual reminders of 
 how difficult it is to reconcile e,g, such Imperial- 
 ism as that to which Count Reventlow inclines 
 with the Christianity to which they attach 
 such high value; and how, with such a concep- 
 tion of power," as it is also preached by 
 General Bernhardi, " the problem of political 
 ethics begins indeed, but does not end " 
 (p. 166). 
 
 (2) The positions thus attained by Troeltsch 
 
OBJECTIONS: SUPER-GERMANISM 97 
 
 are so costly and, to my mind, so substantially 
 true, that I feel it almost a meanness here to 
 trace out four counter-currents which, although 
 mostly held in careful check here, are (one or 
 the other or all) strongly at work amongst 
 many, perhaps amongst most, Germans, even 
 where these hold views otherwise similar to 
 those here championed — currents which then 
 leave the final outcome of this mentality more 
 incorrigibly blind and oppressive towards non- 
 Germans than even a frankly materialist 
 Imperialism would leave it. 
 
 The first counter-current is strongly exem- 
 plified by Fichte's Reden an die deutsche 
 Nation (1808), extracts from which will be 
 found in my second study. Troeltsch is glad 
 that these addresses are, at last, being really 
 read, since they inculcate the conception of 
 the State as " the incorporation of a special 
 ideal which could not be destroyed without 
 loss to the Universe." Yes: but these ad- 
 dresses (most closely studied throughout by 
 myself quite recently) couple this major 
 premise of worth and of standard straightway 
 with a minor premise of fact and of existence, 
 viz. that the German people is the people ; that 
 the Germans stand, to all the West Euro- 
 pean peoples and civilisations of non-Teutonic 
 
98 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 speech, as does the true, the genuine and the 
 intrinsically precious to the false, the insincere 
 and only contingently useful — useful, when 
 these non-German peoples furnish materials 
 and occasions for their elaboration by the 
 German people. Thus did the Lion prepare a 
 feast for all the beasts of the field, even the 
 field-mice and the moles had their seat and 
 share assigned, each strictly according to its 
 intrinsic merits. But then at the feast the 
 Lion took, in most careful attention to this 
 culturally graduated scheme, his " true," 
 i.e. the Lion's, share. Let us not retaliate 
 here with the cheap cry of " hypocrisy " ; 
 enough, if we insist that Fichte's major pre- 
 mise, if used with such a minor premise as 
 would be supplied by the rich outlooks of a 
 Leibniz, Goethe or Troeltsch himself, will 
 greatly aid us all towards international equity; 
 but that, if Fichte's major premise be used 
 with such a minor premise as he so spontane- 
 ously furnishes, we are further off than ever 
 from our goal. 
 
 The second counter-influence is fully adopted 
 by Troeltsch himself. He tells us how Ranke 
 definitely set the concrete conception of the 
 European Fellowship of Nations in the place 
 of the general idea of Humanity and of Reason 
 
EXCLUSIVE EUROPEANISM 99 
 
 and exclaims : " this Occidental community 
 of nations alone is our Reason, it alone forms a 
 real historical complex of life possessing actual 
 significance for us " (p. 152). Hence the 
 gravity of the charge that the Allies " break 
 the solidarity of Western culture by stirring 
 up strange races against us " (p. 161). It is 
 probably not unfair to remember here that 
 if the Emperor William II. really adjured the 
 Germans to rival the fright fulness of the Huns, 
 he did so in addressing the troops about to 
 depart for China after the Boxer troubles 
 there. A Scottish officer friend of mine, a man 
 of niost careful speech and great experience, 
 described to me what he himself saw, as a 
 member of the British contingent in that 
 international army under Field-Marshal von 
 Waldersee, soon after that address, out- 
 side of Pekin. He saw quite harmless women 
 and children of the Chinese poor, who 
 were looking on at the drill of a squad of 
 German soldiers, deliberately shot down in 
 obedience to the deliberate order of the 
 commanding ofiicer, a friend of my friend. 
 And this ofiicer, the act accomplished, very 
 quietly defended his action to my friend, as 
 truly wise and alone kind: did not his inter- 
 locutor know that thus to strike terror into 
 
100 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 the civilian population meant inducing them 
 to bring pressure to bear upon their govern- 
 ment, for the prevention or ending of war 
 — ^war which essentially means the suspen- 
 sion of all restraints ? Indeed the well-known 
 general harshness of the Prussianised German 
 to native races, markedly beyond that now 
 in vogue certainly on the part of England, 
 assuredly springs from, or is defended and 
 fixed by, or again is itself the part-cause of, 
 such a cast-iron demarcation between Euro- 
 pean races and governments (to whom we 
 owe serious consideration) and all non-Euro- 
 pean races and governments (which, as such, 
 and from our own races and governments, are 
 completely and finally to count for nothing). 
 True, the American proclamation of the 
 natural full equality of all men, and even the 
 emancipation of the negro there, have not 
 prevented racial exclusiveness from attaining, 
 in those lands, probably the maximum of 
 intensity known to history. Yet the German 
 who, at the top of his scale of racial values, 
 finds, with Fichte, but one super-nation (his 
 own), and, with Ranke, keeps four-fifths of 
 the human race altogether outside of even the 
 bottom of this scale, will, by this latter addi- 
 tion, have admitted an influence to work in 
 
POWER AND WORTH iDENTlFIED loi 
 
 his mind that cannot fail to harden him all 
 round. Why not, here again, be less definite 
 and final ? Why should the Hindoos and the 
 Japanese simply not exist, as possible or actual 
 states, for my European State consciousness ? 
 And indeed are the Turks, the much-prized 
 allies of Germany, really constituents of the 
 European cultural system? Yet the Turks 
 actually hold and barbarise a large part of 
 Europe, whilst no Hindoo or Japanese 
 (assuredly not barbarous peoples) covets a 
 single square foot of European territory. 
 Graduated attention and regard, ranging 
 from closest friendship to almost indifference 
 — ^are they not essential to ripe wisdom ? 
 
 The third counter-influence does not seem 
 to have been noted, even by Troeltsch himself, 
 as dangerously, because subtly, hostile to 
 his ethical convictions. Thus in the descrip- 
 tion of Ranke's position we read : " the con- 
 flicts between the great State-individualities 
 are considered here, in substance, as expres- 
 sions of their expanding will to live, but are 
 held, nevertheless, to gain " for the individuali- 
 ties thus engaged " the position of power 
 corresponding to their interior significance." 
 This view is thought by Troeltsch to correspond 
 also with Fichte's conception of humanity 
 
102 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 and its conflicts; but Troeltsch appends no 
 criticism (p. 152). Thus "die Weltgeschicht' 
 ist das Weltgericht " ; thus the flux or fixation 
 of physically palpable facts is found to be the 
 strict expression of perennial values — of " all 
 the world's coarse thumb and finger failed 
 to plumb." History ceases to be tentative, 
 approximate, to begin and end in mystery and 
 hope and humble trust, and becomes fully 
 pragmatic, final, the unroUing of a series of 
 definite tests as to the intrinsic spiritual worth 
 of peoples and of states — so, presented in its 
 richest and finest form, in the case of Ranke's 
 histories. Yet, press this position — it refuses 
 to satisfy precisely the moral and spiritual 
 sense which so largely gave rise to it. What ? 
 The Assyrian and Babylonian States were 
 not only more populous, stronger materially 
 or physically, more martial than the Jews, 
 but they were richer in cultural and spiritual 
 worth than the latter ? And we know this, as 
 a demonstrable fact, because these lords of 
 Nineveh and Babylon successfully deported 
 the subjects of Jerusalem and Samaria ? So 
 too Rome, by its sack of Corinth and suppres- 
 sion of Hellenic nationality, did not merely 
 show herself martially and politically stronger 
 than Greece; but the estimate is erroneous 
 
YET POWER AND WORTH DISTINCT 103 
 
 that " Greece the captive led captive Rome her 
 conqueror," and the simple fact that Rome, 
 as a State and an army, could (for she did) 
 conquer and incorporate the Greek State and 
 army decides that Rome possessed the richer 
 cultured content: Rome, as a State and 
 army, survived in precisely the degree to 
 which, as a civilisation and a spiritual force, 
 Rome deserved to do! I take the error here 
 to spring from a coalescence of the German 
 intense longing for, and impressedness, by 
 power — even by power of the physical kind — 
 and the equally German desire to trace, beyond 
 the possibility of cavil, the operation of spirit. 
 The resulting confusion lies in precisely the 
 clear and dramatic portion of the position — in 
 the attempt, not to trace the workings of the 
 aesthetic, ethical, spiritual needs, experiences, 
 discoveries and productions of man throughout 
 the specific history of each faculty, but to 
 trace them in a close identification, or at least 
 paralleHsm, with the rise and fall of military 
 and political power. Those deeper and deepest, 
 largely elusive, forces are never identical with, 
 indeed they are normally in a certain condi- 
 tion of tension against, these latter, the more 
 superficial, readily noticeable powers; and 
 if between the two there is some real connec- 
 
104 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 tion, it is not close nor constant. Thus the 
 zenith of the Jewish, the Greek, the Roman 
 State did coincide with the fullest blossoming 
 of the Jewish, Hellenic and Roman spirit and 
 literatures. Yet France's Hundred Years' 
 War with England left her largely and for long 
 a desert; the German Thirty Years' War led 
 to a terrible lapse back into savagery of the 
 population generally; the Napoleonic vic- 
 tories issued from a vulgar court and the 
 counter-victories of the Allies were succeeded 
 by some thirty years of general European 
 moral and spiritual laxity and decline. Here, 
 then, is a point where a certain subtle material- 
 ism urgently requires the most careful exor- 
 cising. 
 
 And the fourth current pushes home this 
 identification and strict parallelism between 
 spiritual worth and visible power unflinch- 
 ingly into the Absolute. Hegel, Troeltsch 
 tells us, " looked upon humanity as the rise 
 and decline of the great State-complexes in 
 which the World-Spirit reveals Itself, succes- 
 sively or simultaneously" (p. 151). Thus the 
 rise of the Holy Roman Empire and of Louis 
 XIV. of France (in so far as they became large 
 visible facts). King Frederick II. of Prussia's 
 brilliant unscrupulous victories against the 
 
STATES EXPRESS DIVINE LIFE 105 
 
 Empress Maria Theresa, and the German 
 Empire of 1870 (in so far as it has imposed 
 itself now for fifty years upon friend and foe) 
 are even more than so many demonstrations 
 of cultural and spiritual human superiority; 
 they are direct episodes in the self-mani- 
 festation and growth of the Divine Life Itself! 
 We shall return to this point in the second 
 study. Here I would only observe how once 
 more the German has gone too quick, too fast 
 and too far. As Luther could not live without 
 absolute certainty that he was already saved, 
 and found all " working out your salvation 
 with fear and trembling," all moderate trust 
 in sacraments and strivings and ever renewed 
 repentances, with abandonment to God's 
 mercy as complement of all these moral 
 approximations, to be but snares and satanic 
 substitutes for that quite simple absolute 
 certainty, so here. A real, though varyingly 
 close and nowhere completely traceable, rela- 
 tion between the Divine and the Human is not 
 found enough; the very God must Himself 
 fully express Himself in the succession of 
 apparently Human acts, not of the human 
 individual but of the human State. 
 
 (3) As always with Troeltsch we find him, 
 in this Paper also, at his very best where the 
 
io6 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 subject is deepest — in his religious conviction 
 and outlook. " Christianity " in our day 
 " has retired," he tells us, " to the depths of 
 the inner life, and at the same time risen to a 
 height that transcends State and War and 
 Culture — the union of souls in a sphere above 
 this earth, the sphere of the Highest and the 
 Ultimate. From thence Christianity still 
 overcomes the world; but it has, in the first 
 instance, to allow the world to subsist and 
 ' work itself out ' ; it leaves room for a 
 Private Morality, far below the sublimity of 
 its own highest laws; for a State Morality, 
 which lies far outside its horizon; and for a 
 Morality of the Fellowship of Nations, which 
 is bound up with the cultural values belonging 
 to the sphere of this earth." Thus, the crisis 
 of Christianity also has led to State Morality 
 coming to the front; and even if there are 
 bridges between this Morality and a " King- 
 dom of God," we must recognise the great 
 gulf between them. " It may well be that the 
 frightful widening of the gulf, which we witness 
 to-day, will intensify the religious yearning 
 later on, just as the old Roman Civil and 
 World Wars did in their time." But mean- 
 while " the significance of the State, for the 
 present and the immediate future, rises upon 
 
TROELTSCH'S FINAL VIEWS, TRUE 107 
 
 us in an almost staggering way. . . . Yet 
 let us remember that State Morality is not 
 the only Morality, that it rests upon the broad 
 ground of the moral consciousness generally. 
 Only a Private Morality of increased and 
 purified power, together with a fundamental 
 recognition of the cultural values common to 
 our group of nations, will give the State the 
 right to think so highly of itself, and the power 
 to assert itself as a moral good raised above 
 all brute force and national vanity." " This 
 synthesis must be maintained in the new 
 State Morality " for the fundamental reason 
 that " the essence of all genuine State Morality 
 is to be found implicit within it " (p. 169). In 
 this deep faith and large hope we can assuredly 
 all gratefully join. 
 
 IV 
 
 It is time to conclude this study, first by 
 certain practical recommendations, and then 
 by an attempt to give a clear answer to the 
 clear question with which the entire enterprise 
 began. 
 
 I 
 
 The rules for our action appear to be three 
 — the third requiring the longer explanation. 
 
io8 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 (1) We will encourage, practise, articulate, 
 within ourselves and in others, the sense that 
 man and this earthly life of his, do not, as a 
 simple matter of fact, suffice to man, at his 
 noblest and his best. Thus the deepest, noblest 
 devotednesses of the battlefield wiU appear in 
 no sense as sentimentalities or superfluities, 
 but as specimens and fragments of what we 
 are secretly invited to become, of what 
 already is the Hfe Hved by the saints in God. 
 We thus gain a levelling-up, a standing-on- 
 tiptoe, a yearning to kiss the feet of the 
 Crucified. 
 
 (2) We will encourage, practise, articulate, 
 within ourselves and in others, the sense that, 
 though this full supernatural life cannot be per- 
 ceived, still less Hved, except as a gift, in rare 
 moments where at all fully, in modest frag- 
 ments where at all continuously, here on earth : 
 yet that any or all, or ever so slight an hunger 
 after or approach to it, constitute the true salt 
 of our lives already here below. And this, 
 not only as regards man's individual or family 
 life; no, but, in their various degrees, as 
 regards his guild or trade, his society and 
 country, and his State as well. Such approxi- 
 mations will all, of necessity, be more or less 
 compromises, mixtures, inconsistencies; they 
 
THREE PRACTICAL RULES 109 
 
 will not, because of this, be, of necessity, hypo- 
 crisies or foolishnesses. Mediaeval Chivalry 
 and the Truce of God, the Geneva and the 
 Hague Conventions — they were, and are, 
 not nothing, they are much; for thus we 
 refuse, in our public action also and legal 
 agreements, to leave even War itself outside 
 of, and beneath, the pale of the human — 
 as a condition in which anything and every- 
 thing is permissible. If not the Sermon on 
 the Mount at its culmination, then at least 
 its presupposition, the Golden Rule, or some 
 approach to this Rule, appears thus recog- 
 nised as binding, even in War; and the divine 
 gentleness of Jesus can put out timid blossoms 
 even there, in various approaches to the ideal 
 of " a very perfect gentle Knight " such as 
 Chaucer strove to picture. 
 
 (3) And we will apprehend, penetrate, en- 
 dorse, more fully and courageously than ever, 
 the fact and nature, the need, the dangers and 
 the duties, of a Church, of Churches, of the 
 Church; and of the double, irreplaceable 
 r61e the Church has and ought to play in the 
 perpetuation and application of the teaching 
 and spirit of Jesus in face of War. 
 
 We have found that man cannot fail to 
 indicate some traces or implications of his 
 
no CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 humanity, of justice as well as of force, of 
 love as well as of justice, in all even that he 
 singly is, does, or touches; yet also that he 
 requires to find, or to constitute, certain social 
 complexes for the more complete fulfilment 
 of his various larger needs and aims. And 
 these complexes will, like unto the individual's 
 different acts and levels, necessarily vary, 
 each from the other, in the amount and kind 
 of their physical, forceful substratum and self- 
 seeking, and in the amount and kind of liberty, 
 capacity and duty possessed by each, for 
 the prosecution of justice and of love. And 
 thus man requires also a specifically religious 
 social complex — ^all the more in proportion as 
 religion attains to the fuller consciousness of 
 its own nature as a Givenness, a Transcend- 
 ence in Immanence, an Incarnation, a witness 
 to the full Life there, with glimpses and 
 suggestions of it here. The State will continue 
 to have an overflowing task in the furnishing 
 of the preconditions, the earlier stages, and 
 the external liberty for such a witness and 
 such complexes; but evidently the State 
 itself is not, and cannot become, a complex 
 directly, specially busy with these later stages 
 and gifts of the spiritual life. 
 
 Such a complex the Church is, in its very 
 
NEED OF CHURCH COMPLEX in 
 
 idea. It is not indeed the actual Kingdom of 
 God, the Kingdom which, in its fulness and 
 unfailingness, is man's final social call and 
 which lies beyond the grave; but yet the 
 most massive witness to, and means towards, 
 that Kingdom during this our earthly training- 
 time. The Kingdom has still not come; the 
 Church came promptly, indeed its elements 
 existed from the first in the central character 
 of the Christian religion — ^its givenness, and 
 in the apostolic band, not self-chosen nor 
 popularly chosen, but chosen by the one, 
 earthly, visible Jesus. We will not be so 
 cynical as to consider the early articulation 
 of cleric and lay, of Priest, Bishop and Pope, 
 or even the mediaeval theocracy, as just 
 simply a long story of decay and of fraud; 
 but we will see here, in considerable part, the 
 operation of two fundamental needs of religion : 
 the need of the special complex, and the need 
 of givenness, of prevenience. And in all our 
 criticisms or claims we will, if we primarily 
 seek the lines which religion itself indicates 
 to us as immanent to her own life and history, 
 assume, as essential, some such complex and 
 givenness. It is deeply satisfactory to note 
 how finely these points have been seized by 
 such, otherwise (respectively) strongly Pro- 
 
112 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 testant and somewhat Agnostic writers as 
 Professor Ernst Troeltsch in his great Sozial- 
 lehren, and Mr. A. L. Smith in his brilliant 
 Church and State in the Middle Ages, Indeed, 
 in this their keen sense that the religious 
 complex cannot be straightaway conceived 
 as to be built up from below, in such wise as 
 can be and are the other complexes, these 
 two thinkers have advanced, I think, even 
 beyond von Gierke (so great when engrossed 
 away from immediate politics) and his strik- 
 ing English expounders, the late Professor 
 F. W. Maitland and the Rev. Dr. J. N. 
 Figgis. 
 
 The two chief functions of the Church, then, 
 will here be the persistent, vivid witness to 
 the reality of God, and of His Kingdom in 
 the Beyond; and the continuous encourage- 
 ment of, and labour at, the most fully Chris- 
 tian compromises, the nearest approaches to 
 the Sermon on the Mount, fruitfully possible 
 in any one age and place. And these highest 
 approximations will be continually reat- 
 tempted, both within her own complex, and 
 without it. Within, by the noblest develop- 
 ment both of the monastic and heroic and 
 of the marital and domestic ideal and practice, 
 and of their richest inter-stimulation, possible 
 
ANSWER TO OPENING QUESTION 113 
 
 in the particular age. And, outside of the 
 Church's own complex, by the most strenuous 
 preparation, encouragement and sanction of 
 the wisest and widest moralisations of the 
 other complexes, especially also of the State 
 and of War, feasible in the particular civilisa- 
 tion confronting it. By all means let us exact 
 much, require all, of the Church in these two 
 respects; such pressure and criticism will be 
 the truest service to it, and to the great ends 
 of its existence. But the State also will require 
 to be pressed, by us all, its servants, ever to 
 rise to its own level and kind of morality. 
 
 The answer to our opening question appears 
 to be as follows. 
 
 The causes of the (apparent or real) hesita- 
 tion, vagueness and complication on the part 
 of Christians and of their Churches with regard 
 to War in general, or to any particular War, 
 are, of course, always in some degree, faulty 
 and remediable. Yet they also spring from 
 the very strength, and from the strictly 
 co-related difficulty, of the Christian position 
 itself. 
 
 The teaching, implications and life of our 
 Lord are free from all Gnosticism — ^there is 
 
114 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 no shrinking from the body, marriage, the 
 family, society, the State, as intrinsically 
 evil; yet the attention, heart, will and work 
 of Jesus are absorbed away from these things 
 as they operate, according to their specific, 
 intrinsic laws and needs, during and for this 
 transitory life. But then, again. His soul is 
 thus absorbed away, not for concentration 
 upon fanatical dreams or, say, idle fancies, 
 or, at least, upon things no greater than those 
 from which it turns away: for it is concen- 
 trated upon the quite ultimate, the fully 
 abiding realities, upon God and upon souls 
 seeking and finding Him in His Kingdom. 
 Hence there are, in strictness, no regulations 
 for this transitory life as such, but exhorta- 
 tions to recognise its transitoriness, and 
 maxims for the abiding life. Yet, at bottom, 
 not even these maxims absorb Jesus, but the 
 realities from which they come and to which 
 they go; and it is this metaphysical ground- 
 work, certainty and afiirmation which keeps 
 His ethics, in all their immense tension 
 and tenderness, free from all sentimentality, 
 abstraction, or decay. 
 
 The end thus proposed to us can be, and is, 
 an abiding end, precisely because it is thus 
 so entirely ultimate and metaphysical; it 
 
CHRISTIAN DOUBLE POLARITY 115 
 
 remains as true, as fresh, as fruitful, as neces- 
 sary to our full vocation, and our full soul's 
 assuagement now, as it was when He preached 
 it with His earthly lips. But it is, thus, in its 
 fulness, directly applicable, actually executed, 
 not in this life, but in that one. Yet this same 
 end can and must and does, as nothing else 
 succeeds in doing, leaven, purify, sweeten, 
 raise, advance, in various ways and degrees, 
 the several levels and ranges of our human 
 life even here, although it can do this only 
 by various mitigations, compounds, indirect- 
 nesses, compromises. The uncompromising 
 Transcendence and the compromising Imman- 
 ence, the intense touch of God the Super- 
 natural, and the genial dilution of it within 
 the human nature which, in its essential 
 qualities and needs, is good and comes from 
 Him, are both necessary and closely inter- 
 related in our Christian call and work. Never- 
 theless they are inevitably each different from 
 the other, and demand a certain polarity and 
 alternation in the soul's complete life. 
 
 The double duty and fruitfulness of the 
 Christian individual and of the Christian 
 Church would thus consist in the strenuous 
 bringing to light, in the devoted living, of 
 this, as it were, amphibious life; this doubly 
 
ii6 CHRISTIANITY IN FACE OF WAR 
 
 solicited, this (metaphysically) intermediate 
 position of man's soul. Such devotedness 
 would have to manifest itself in the persistence 
 and vividness with which God, the Kingdom, 
 the ultimate life of the soul, of souls, would 
 be apprehended and loved and preached, as 
 thus abidingly real and final; and in the alert- 
 ness and disinterestedness with which every, 
 however small, however difficult advance in 
 the approximations to that full eventual life 
 and standard would be sought out, or en- 
 couraged and sustained. 
 
 In the proportion that these two great 
 tasks, intrinsic to the Christian position, are 
 thus devotedly accomplished does the residual 
 complication appear to be clearly inevitable, 
 as itself indeed a proof and expression of the 
 noble realism of the Christian insight and 
 ideal, based, as these are, upon the meta- 
 physical reality and nature of God, of man, 
 and of their interrelations. And thus especially 
 the earthly, human State will not have any 
 bounds set to its possible improvements, and 
 yet this hopefulness will be free from all 
 Utopianism. For the Kingdom in which there 
 is only justice and love, not force, is real and 
 already extant, but not here; and the work 
 of getting, however slowly, intermittently, 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM 117 
 
 costingly nearer to that ideal for us here, can 
 ever begin anew, can ever become more 
 largely realised, because this our ideal here is 
 already fully real there. There, there is no 
 War; and here War can be made less and 
 less frequent, extensive, unmitigated, more 
 and more filled with ethical motives, with 
 justice, and even love, things without which 
 the State itself cannot persist, extend and 
 truly flourish, things indeed, never, nowhere 
 wholly absent from the life and aim of man. 
 
THE GERMAN SOUL AND THE 
 GREAT WAR 
 
 Much admirable writing has already appeared 
 in England upon the causes, remote and 
 proximate, of the present world-war, so that 
 even the least modest and best equipped of 
 mortals might wellhesitate before he attempted 
 to bring a further contribution of his own. 
 And, as will be rendered clear in a moment, 
 my special limitations are numerous and 
 grave. Especially may my filial piety and 
 sense of deep indebtedness appear doomed 
 to render any utterance of mine, just now, 
 inevitably disloyal to one side or to the other> 
 — ^it will be colourless or else truculent and 
 embittering. Certainly, nothing can be here 
 attempted that could compare with the 
 monumental political authority of Sir Edward 
 Grey's despatches, or with the delicate politi- 
 cal penetration of the French Yellow Book 
 (especially the earlier documents), with the 
 brilliant literary quality furnished by Sir 
 Walter Raleigh in his Might is Right, or with 
 the first-hand evidence as to the present 
 
 mentality of the Prussian General Military 
 ii8 
 
FINE WORK BY OTHERS 119 
 
 Staff furnished by the German War Book; 
 nor, further back, with such searching revela- 
 tions of the latter-day German political soul 
 as are furnished by the strikingly contrasted 
 memoirs of Princes Bismarck and Biilow. 
 
 These and other documents, and the events 
 accumulating weekly under the eyes of all, 
 have by now fully proved and elucidated 
 the massive existence and the peculiar charac- 
 ter of the present German Real-folitik, All 
 men, at least here in England, see and know 
 that this frankly Machiavellian policy, origin- 
 ally special to the Prussian militarist school, 
 is now practised, inculcated, systematised 
 and assumed by Germany (in so far as 
 Germany now operates as a determining 
 political, diplomatic and military power) 
 with a deliberation, preparedness, persistency 
 and ruthlessness, both towards its own 
 German instruments and towards its non- 
 German opponents, unmatched, on such a 
 scale and amidst such civilised peoples, 
 throughout the annals of the world. 
 
 There is, then, no occasion to attempt again 
 the establishment of this great fact itself. 
 Nor could I add much towards explaining the 
 origins of this mentality amidst the specific 
 Prussians. I can only attempt vividly to eluci- 
 
120 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 date and analyse, by means of the generally 
 German half of my own blood, those general 
 German idiosyncrasies which have permitted, 
 or even favoured, this large domination of 
 the Prussian spirit, and those other general 
 German characteristics which we can trust 
 will eventually overcome this same spirit — 
 a spirit not confined to Germany, and which 
 is even more the enemy of the German soul 
 itself than it can ever be of our own military 
 peace. 
 
 I here purpose, first to state the nature 
 and range of my qualifications and interest; 
 and then to attempt a vivid account and 
 exemplification of the main psychic, mental 
 and moral needs, affinities, weaknesses and 
 strengths of the German soul, in contrast with 
 the English — both as seen from within. And 
 in a second stage I will seek out the main 
 influences of German religion and irreligion 
 upon these German weaknesses and strengths ; 
 and I will strive to discover and locate the 
 probabilities, the hopes, the ideals which can 
 and ought to lead and steady us in this sad 
 welter of conflict, and in the hardly less 
 difiicult work of reconstruction. Thus four 
 sections must hold the substance of what I 
 have here to say. 
 
AUTHOR'S ANTECEDENTS 121 
 
 I 
 
 Many a pure Englishman has lived much more 
 in Germany, especially amongst Prussians 
 proper, than has been the case with myself. 
 Of my sixty-three years of life, well over forty 
 have been spent in England; and only twice 
 has a full year been lived unbrokenly amongst 
 a Teutonic people, — ^in Vienna and in the 
 Austrian Tyrol. Moreover, though my father 
 was of pure German blood, he was entirely 
 West German; his father was from Coblenz, 
 his mother from Mainz, and this whilst those 
 territories had still some twenty years to run 
 as CathoHc Prince-Bishoprics strongly opposed 
 to Protestant Prussia. My father was born 
 at Ratisbon (Bavaria) in 1795. My grand- 
 father had moved, from the chancellorship 
 to the last Prince-Bishop of Treves, into the 
 diplomatic service of Austria, — ^at first under 
 the last two Holy Roman Emperors, Leopold 
 n. and Francis I. And my father himself 
 continued this general and genial, quite 
 un-Prussian, German spirit, as an Austrian 
 military officer and diplomat, and as an 
 Oriental traveller and botanist, up to his 
 death in 1870. The racial, national attraction 
 
122 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 which, increasingly since his Indian travels 
 in 1833, rivalled that of German Austria, 
 was, assuredly, never Prussia, but always 
 England. 
 
 In my own case it was inevitable that Eng- 
 land, almost from the first, equalled, and 
 then, fairly early, out-balanced, in social and 
 political matters, the attrait of Austria, even 
 though I have never received anything but 
 kindness from that country, and though I 
 felt keenly having to decide against her, in 
 her present unhappy involvement against 
 England. Born in Florence, when my father 
 was already fifty-seven, of a young English, 
 or rather Scotch, mother; seeing Austria for 
 the first time, from seven' to eight, and then, 
 practically for the last time, at eighteen; 
 never at school or university there or indeed 
 elsewhere, but coming away from Vienna in 
 1 871, an invalid for many years, and exempted, 
 as such, from military service; Italy, then 
 Belgium, with my seven years' residence at 
 my father's Embassy in each, could not fail 
 to be more real to me than Austria. And since 
 those early years it has been England that has 
 been my home, except for nine winters spent 
 in Rome, a summer in Westphalia, and two 
 short visits to Jena, Heidelberg and Wiirzburg, 
 
GERMAN AND SCOTTISH STRAINS 123 
 
 and one (further) visit to the Tyrol. And an 
 English wife and British-born daughters of 
 course strengthened these British ties. 
 
 Nevertheless, I am continuously conscious, 
 by the mental methods and habits natural to 
 me, in matters of history, philosophy, theology, 
 of a certain subtle difference in temper and 
 instinct, throughout a considerable range of 
 my nature, from even the dearest of my many 
 dear English friends, and indeed, in a lesser 
 degree, from the non-German blood and 
 range within myself. This consciousness of 
 difference and of isolation, with its sadness, 
 all but wholly and promptly disappears in 
 the society of Scotchmen, so that it probably 
 springs as much from my Scottish blood as 
 from my German. In any case the general 
 German affinity I am tracing here, brings me, 
 I find, no nearer to the Prussian mentality 
 than the pure Englishman is brought, by his 
 affinity, to the Prussian state of soul; nor 
 does this affinity prevent my social and 
 political outlook and sympathies from being 
 thoroughly, consciously, gratefully EngHsh. 
 Even in 1858 I remember feeling strongly, in 
 Florence, with the Italian movement for an 
 Italian Italy; and I have never lost this 
 feeling, even though I early came to realise 
 
124 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 how pure was the administration, and how 
 light the taxation, by Austria, of Tuscany, 
 Lombardy and Venice; and ever since eigh- 
 teen, Edmund Burke (in all but his latest, 
 shrill utterances) and, hardly less early, 
 Samuel Johnson have been amongst my chief 
 inspirers in such large social and political 
 matters. 
 
 Yet my much loved tutor, from eight to 
 fifteen, was a Rhenish Prussian Lutheran, 
 and my education was, for those years, super- 
 vised by the well-known Catholic historian, 
 the Rhenish Prussian diplomat, Alfred von 
 Reumont. And my late initiation into Hebrew 
 I owe to the Hessian convert, the strongly 
 anti-Prussian Catholic Priest-Professor, Dr. 
 Gustav Bickell. Most of the recent books that 
 have influenced me much — the great works 
 of Rohde, Oldenberg, Gunkel, Bernard Duhm, 
 Heinrich Holtzmann, Otto von Gierke, Ernst 
 Troeltsch — are all German. And then there 
 have been the friendships, w4th roots too 
 deep, I trust, for even this terrible war and 
 its poignant differences to destroy, with such 
 Catholic laymen as Martin Spahn and such 
 CathoHc clerics as Albert Ehrhard and Joseph 
 Prenner; and with Protestant University 
 Professors, such as Rudolf Eucken and Ernst 
 
THEORY PERVADES THE GERMAN 125 
 
 Troeltsch. Heinrich Holtzmann, that utterly 
 guileless soul and ceaselessly generous friend, 
 has already gone to where wars are no more. 
 
 H 
 
 An Indian Swami, who from Brahmanism 
 had come to Roman Catholic Christianity, 
 but who retained a grateful veneration for 
 the Vedic literature at its best, once insisted 
 to me upon the bewilderment which seized 
 him when, in the company of West Europeans, 
 he had to sufFer from their perpetual deprecia- 
 tion of mysticism. " What these Europeans 
 thus airily despise as ' mere mysticism,' 
 that," said the Swami, " for us Indians is 
 our very life." Similarly, theory, system, 
 Weltanschauung^ is, for the average English- 
 man, something that instantly puts him ill at 
 ease, or at least something that he disbelieves 
 and avoids; for the German, it is in his very 
 blood. Indeed, the Continental European 
 generally is, in this important respect, very 
 unlike, not indeed the Scotchman, but the 
 Englishman. Thus a young maritime lawyer 
 from Genoa reported to me, after a year's life 
 
126 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 spent, it is true, not amidst University 
 students or men of letters, but amongst 
 young English fellow lawyers in London, 
 that the main difference he had found between 
 the two sets of his contemporaries, of the 
 same class and same calling, in Italy and 
 England, had been as follows: that in Italy 
 he could always promptly tell whether his 
 comrade was clean-living or not, — since, as 
 soon and as long as he was of good Hfe, his 
 thought and talk would overflow with prob- 
 lems and theories about the State, War, the 
 Church, Religion, etc.; and, as soon as he 
 abandoned a good life, all such interests 
 would go, and only dirty talk or mere 
 " shop " would remain. But that in England 
 his companions, whether clean or unclean, 
 had all equally shrunk from theorising about 
 anything whatsoever; and had restricted 
 their talk, during work-time, to " shop," and, 
 in their free time, to sport. And this difference 
 is doubtless even larger between Germans 
 and Englishmen. A young German scholar 
 and pastor quite recently reported to me, as 
 the main observation of an unexpected kind 
 made by himself, during the half-year he 
 had just spent amongst all kinds of religious 
 groups in England, the very general unpopu-' 
 
ENGLISH MISTRUST OF THEORY 127 
 
 larity, not of Roman Catholicism (as he had 
 forecasted), but of Unitarianism ; and how 
 he had finally discovered that this widespread 
 dislike sprang mostly, not from any sensitive 
 orthodoxy, but from the deep-rooted, ever 
 alert, antipathy of the average pure English- 
 man to everything deliberately systematic, 
 intellectualist or doctrinaire. I take it that 
 nine in ten out of all Englishmen would echo 
 the answer given to a French scholar friend 
 of mine, who, upon asking the authorities of 
 numerous large English schools, Roman Catho- 
 lic included, what was the view of life, the 
 general scheme, that they aimed at producing 
 in the minds of their boys, was answered in 
 substance by all : " We do not rear prigs here ! " 
 Extreme examples of this German thirst 
 for theory, and of the English contrary 
 shrinking from all systematic thought, are 
 often in my mind. Thus I turned over the 
 leaves of a German book on Inn-keeping — 
 Das Hotelwesen — and, sure enough, there was 
 a first part on the Theory of Inn-keeping, and 
 a second part on its Practice. Contrast this 
 with an English book where — after quoting 
 from Cardinal Newman the noble description 
 of how, confronted by the slums of one of our 
 vast, wicked cities, he would turn Pantheist 
 
128 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 or Atheist, but for the still, small voice of 
 conscience within himself — the author goes 
 on to say: " I do not ask. Is this the frame 
 of mind of a philosopher? I only inquire. 
 Is this English? And I answer. It is not! " 
 Surely, if to require a theory of inn-keeping 
 is a fantastic weakness, an attitude towards 
 life capable of shirking the fact and problem 
 of evil is a deplorable incompleteness for any 
 sane, adult human soul. 
 
 2 
 
 Now this continuous need of theory, of 
 system, is, doubtless, one of the primary 
 causes of all that the German effects and is 
 of deep, abiding worth and fruitfulness, and, 
 conversely, of all that the German effects and 
 is of a shallow and arid, of a transitory, and 
 even of a mischievous and destructive kind. 
 It is this innate need of system that renders 
 him steady, but also obstinate; virile and 
 brutal; profound and pedantic; comprehen- 
 sive and rich in outlook, and rationalist and 
 doctrinaire. It turns him into the one or the 
 other man, in various degrees, ways and 
 combinations, according as this thirst for 
 system, and its direct consequences within a 
 nature such as his, is or is not sufficiently 
 
GERMAN SYSTEM WHERE WISE 129 
 
 checked, completed and purified by a vivid, 
 continuous sense of how inexhaustible is the 
 depth of real life, and how largely hidden 
 remains for us the always terribly actual, 
 delicate interdependence of its simultaneous 
 varieties and successive stages, amongst the 
 several places, times and races, such as they 
 environ man or are incarnated by him, in 
 their severally always limited, slow, costly 
 contributions, interchanges and advances. 
 
 Can there well be nobler fruits of this 
 systematic bent than the sensitive, all-round 
 penetration into the ancient Greek search 
 after, and belief in. Immortality and Eternity, 
 that informs Rohde's Psyche ? or than Hein- 
 rich Holtzmann's analysis of the religious 
 experience and speculative theory of St. Paul ? 
 or than Gunkel's dehght in tracing the 
 spiritual depth of content, and the artistic 
 beauty of form, furnished by the spiritually 
 transfigured folk-lore embedded in the book 
 of Genesis? or than Wilcken's Aegyptische 
 Ostrakay that loving, infinitely patient resus- 
 citation of the lives of the obscure populace 
 of Greek Egypt as chronicled by them upon 
 broken potsherds ? And indeed this tenacious 
 thirst after an organism, a completeness, what 
 grand results it yields in the soberer parts of 
 
130 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 HegePs Logic ; in the analysis of the consti- 
 tuents of human certitude by Volkelt ; in the 
 monumental presentation by Gierke of the 
 mediaeval conceptions of the State, of their 
 early sources, their later dissolution, and their 
 elements of abiding worth; and, surely, not 
 least in the massive re-thinking, and sifting 
 out, of the social implications, aids and diffi- 
 culties of Christianity, given us by Troeltsch ! 
 
 In all these cases the thirst for wholeness 
 and closely-knit organisation has worked with, 
 and in, other great gifts and needs, and has 
 helped these Germans to rear works of a 
 largely unique and abiding kind — ^upon the 
 whole, superior to the corresponding English 
 attempts. In other cases, where this thirst 
 has remained comparatively unchecked or 
 unsupplemented, it leads to certain special 
 faults and absurdities, which, in their milder 
 forms, are common enough amongst Germans, 
 but which, since they are very truly the defects 
 of a fundamental German quality, are strik- 
 ingly rarely noted, still less resented, as faults, 
 by Germans themselves. 
 
 To illustrate my meaning, there is Kant's, 
 the old bachelor's, detailed instructions to 
 the lads, his students, in his lectures on 
 Education, as to the suckHng, swathing, 
 
GERMAN SYSTEM WHERE ABSURD 131 
 
 cradling, weaning of infants, and still more 
 of the highly significant reason he assigns for 
 such preposterous meddling — that many of 
 his hearers would become tutors in private 
 families, and that " it happens at times that 
 further children are born in the house, and 
 that a tactful tutor can aspire to be the 
 confidant of the parents and to be consulted 
 by them also with respect to the physical 
 education (of such children), and this also 
 because one is, often, the only Gelehrte in 
 the house." (Kant's Sdmmtliche Werke^ ed. 
 Hartenstein, 1868, vol. viii., p. 472.) Thus 
 Kant quietly assumes, without an inkling as 
 to the rich comicality of the assumption, that, 
 because a man has passed through his German 
 school and university and is devoting his still 
 early, bachelor years to teaching, he is more 
 Hkely to know, or to learn satisfactorily, than 
 the first washerwoman with children of her 
 own in any village, how often to suckle, when 
 to wean, how to swathe, to cradle, the baby! 
 Also, that the entire household, women and 
 men, will defer to the thoroughly dry-nurse 
 theorisings of such a sorry pedant. But, 
 indeed, are there many Germans who would 
 instantly seize the full depth and breadth of 
 this absurdity? 
 
132 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 I take it to be almost necessary for a man 
 to be, not purely English, but Scotch or half- 
 German, if he is to realise fully the extent to 
 which this instinctive deference to the Gelehrte 
 and to Wissenschafty to theory and system, 
 sways even the most materiaHst, anarchist or 
 sceptical of Germans. It is, in itself, doubtless 
 a noble, idealistic trait, and helps to give a 
 certain dignity of heroism and faith to much 
 in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, in Feuerbach 
 and Strauss, even here and there in Stirner 
 and in Haeckel, which otherwise would be 
 entirely wild and repulsive. Yet it is this also 
 that readily makes anything which is suffi- 
 ciently theorised appear to a German as worthy 
 of a hearing or even of belief. Not only or 
 chiefly because this or that piece of reasoning 
 starts from, keeps close to, and leads securely 
 to facts, all capable of re-testing; but largely 
 on no further ground than that it is reasoning 
 of a closely-knit, or daring, or clear, or para- 
 doxical kind, does it readily fascinate or 
 dominate the German mind. 
 
 3 
 This thirst for, and final obsession by, 
 general ideas and laws, theory and system, 
 leads at times to the, largely quite unconscious, 
 
GERMAN MYTHOLOGICAL BENT 133 
 
 mythology of giving to ideas, outside of any 
 mind or personality, human or divine, that 
 thinks them, a real existence, indeed a 
 creative power. The great example of such 
 unconscious mythology is, of course, Hegel, 
 who, towards the end of his longer Logic, 
 succeeds in bridging over the chasm between 
 Nature and conscious Spirit, as these have 
 been previously discriminated by himself, 
 only through suddenly assuming in Nature 
 a certain consciousness and volition charac- 
 teristic, not of Nature, but of Spirit only. 
 The dangerous reinforcement, chiefly of the 
 subtlest and most subversive weaknesses of 
 the German soul, by Pantheism and Monism 
 of every kind, will be considered in my second 
 stage. Here I want only to show, by the early 
 life and thought of Hegel, how congenial some 
 such Pantheism was to him, and (to anticipate 
 a further effect of the German intense sys- 
 tematisation and unification) how ominously 
 early and spontaneously this Pantheism did 
 not shrink from finding the State to be essen- 
 tially founded upon force alone. 
 
 Thus Schelling, at twenty-one (February 
 179s), answers Hegel, then twenty-five, with 
 regard to the sufficiency of Kant's moral proof 
 for behef in a distinct personal Being, by 
 
134 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 quoting to him Lessing's declaration : " Also 
 for ourselves the orthodox conceptions as to 
 God are no more. We push afield beyond all 
 Personal Being." Some . few months later 
 SchelUng's second publication, on The Ego as 
 the Principle of Philosophy^ insists upon how 
 the causahty of the Infinite, Absolute Ego, 
 may not be conceived as Morahty or as 
 Wisdom, Personality or Consciousness, but 
 only as absolute Force. Hegel assents to this 
 polemic against the divine attributes. And 
 when in 1801 Hegel discusses the nature of 
 the State, in connection with the Constitution 
 of Germany, he indeed expresses the keenest 
 antipathy to Prussia, — ^where " the people is 
 treated indeed with rationality and according 
 to necessity, but not with trust and liberty," 
 "a state whose dreary emptiness strikes 
 every one who enters whichever of its villages 
 happens to be the first thus come upon, or 
 who does not measure its abiding strength 
 by the ephemeral energy to which a solitary 
 genius [Frederick H.] has been able to force it 
 up." But already he insists that " liberty is 
 possible only within the legal union of a people 
 into a state," and develops, in conjunction with 
 a sympathetic account of Machiavelli and his 
 policy of force, how the highest duty of the 
 
HEGEL ON STATE AS FORCE 135 
 
 State is its self-preservation, and how what in 
 private life would be crimes can here become 
 duties, — " gangrenous limbs cannot be healed 
 with lavender-water." Whether a state is 
 really a state or not, is decided, here, in the 
 final resort by one only great test: War. 
 Indeed Hegel deliberately eliminates, one by 
 one, all the other supposed characteristics of 
 the State, as indifferent to its conception. 
 (Dilthey's Jugendgeschichte He gels, A b hand" 
 lungen der Berliner Akademiey 1905, Pt. iv., 
 pp. 19; 40, 41; 144, 142.) The Pantheism 
 and the Machiavellism thus more or less 
 evoke and strengthen each other; and, if the 
 latter is also largely called forth by the politi- 
 cal misery of Germany, and the seeming hope- 
 lessness of any other resource than the use 
 of such force, yet the Pantheism especially, 
 but indeed the Machiavellism also, evidently 
 fascinate both Schelling and Hegel by their 
 own severe, indeed savage simpHcity and 
 system. 
 
 The Prussian State had been organised in 
 a close-knit, conscientiously heartless and 
 humourless bureaucratic hierarchy by King 
 Frederick H., a great general, but — pace 
 Carlyle — ^not a really great, widely forecast- 
 ing statesman, still less a spiritually great, 
 
136 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 since not a morally pure, private character. 
 This narrowly benevolent despotism, this 
 " enlightened " mechanism, was indeed the 
 creation of clear heads, iron wills and a certain 
 cold heroism; but it required, if it was to live 
 for long and at large even simply amongst 
 non-Prussian Germans, the admixture and 
 clothing of sympathy, tenderness, imagina- 
 tion, humour, humility — it required the aid 
 of temperaments, souls, races, other than its 
 own. And these complements and draperies, 
 this large supplementation (rather than any 
 essential modification) of that Prussian nu- 
 cleus were furnished by such men of rich heart, 
 deep conscience and delicate historic sense, 
 as Hegel himself and von Stein and Niebuhr, 
 Jacob Grimm and Leopold von Ranke. 
 
 True, the unscrupulous devastating inva- 
 sions of Louis XIV., and, later on, the iron 
 oppression of Napoleon, had awakened and 
 concentrated a most legitimate German hos- 
 tility to such French intrusion, which found a 
 noble and ennobling expression in the War 
 of Liberation. Noble, because not only force- 
 ful and courageous, but also moderate and 
 just, since Prussia, as one of the Allies who 
 occupied France after their great joint defeat 
 of Napoleon at Leipzig, neither claimed nor 
 
FRENCH & PRUSSIAN " REALISM " 137 
 
 kept (any more than did Austria or Russia) 
 a single inch of French territory. It was 
 undoubtedly Napoleon's quite unjustifiable re- 
 turn from Elba, and the bloody Hundred Days 
 that culminated in Waterloo, which reawak- 
 ened the unhappy spirit of wakeful hostility 
 and reprisals against France. And some fifty 
 years later, the third Napoleon's international 
 restlessness and the general incompetence of 
 his government offered some real reason, and 
 much opportunity, towards working up a 
 pretext, for a further great German war with 
 France. 
 
 And it is true again that the ideal of a 
 unified Germany was and is, in itself, most 
 legitimate and noble; nor is it anything but 
 natural, and cannot be intrinsically wrong, 
 for a unified and strong Germany to seek a 
 colonial expansion truly necessary for itself. 
 
 Nevertheless it is impossible not to see, now 
 especially, very clearly that Frederick 11. of 
 Prussia was as " realist," as unscrupulous 
 towards Silesia, as Louis XIV. had been 
 towards the Palatinate; that the manner in 
 which the war of 1870 was brought about, in 
 which Alsace - Lorraine was treated, and in 
 which the sudden riches and overwhelming 
 prestige that came to Germany were met — 
 
138 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 that all this was a terrible " success," that it 
 involved a Nemesis, for Prussian militarism, 
 slow and obscure but very certain, and at last 
 majestically plain. 
 
 Whatever may be the differences of social 
 and religious conviction between German 
 Socialists, Junkers, Centre-men and Govern- 
 ment officials, or between German Agnostics, 
 Materialists, Catholics and Lutherans, cer- 
 tain German characteristics, common to them 
 all, evidently outweigh — ^at least for a time — 
 the influence of the restraints, modifications 
 or stimulations which their several social or 
 religious convictions could, or do, bring to 
 bear upon them. 
 
 4 
 
 The difficult point for any adequate explana- 
 tion consists here in such an apparently life- 
 and-death allegiance of a people, not only 
 highly educated and, in the professional 
 classes, mostly awake even unto scepticism, 
 but of a people, surely, incurably ideaUstic 
 and mystical, to so thoroughly cold and 
 calculating, mechanical and cynical a system 
 as is the Prussian Real-folitik^ with its con- 
 ception, and largely its practice, of a frankly 
 unmoral statesmanship. Yet it is also just at 
 
PRUSSIANISM AND GERMAN MIND 1 39 
 
 this point that, in addition to the need and 
 love of system, various further currents of 
 feeling, experience, fact and need, all more 
 or less again specifically German, can be traced 
 as they converge and coalesce into one very 
 tenacious, because thus both complex and 
 close-knit whole, a whole which, if irksome 
 in many of its effects as such a whole, is 
 nevertheless profoundly congenial to the 
 Teutonic mind in its several constituents. 
 
 For one thing, this people, so highly gifted 
 in so many, and in some of the deepest ways, 
 possesses (facts cry the thing aloud) no strong 
 native capacity, instinct or need for self- 
 government or for the wise government of 
 non-German races. " The Germans not a 
 political race " is, at bottom, the judgment 
 passed upon them by their own statesmen, 
 when these are of real size and when they are 
 speaking their quiet mind, such as Bismarck 
 and Biilow. But these and other statesmen 
 and rulers have, unfortunately for all the 
 world, first tolerated, then encouraged, and 
 finally led, the German passions as well as 
 the German reason along the very path thus 
 not fitted for them. 
 
 Here again over-systematising — ^the militar- 
 ism that would be simultaneously a colonialism 
 
140 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 — is apparent as a constituent cause of the 
 otherwise strange failure of Germany's colonis- 
 ing policy. And this very over-systematising 
 doubtless also hinders the German from re- 
 cognising this excess as the true cause of the 
 mischief it actually creates. Hence the roots 
 of his colonial failure must be elsewhere, he 
 thinks. He sees and feels how triumphantly 
 successful he has been as a soldier under 
 Frederick the Great; in the War of Libera- 
 tion; and finally in 1870, 1 87 1. And again, he 
 sees how uncommonly prosperous he is in 
 manufactures, trade, commerce, mercantile 
 marine. Thus he is not an unpractical dreamer, 
 but a hard-headed organiser; and hence he 
 possesses the strict right, because the full 
 might, to rule a large part of the world, to 
 hold a considerable " place in the sun." And 
 indeed, are not those mihtary and these manu- 
 facturing and mercantile capacities and suc- 
 cesses intrinsically cognate, the first to gifts 
 for home government, the second to the 
 genius for colonial expansion ? 
 
 The German is, I believe, mistaken in both 
 these inferences. In military matters it is 
 order, discipHne, organisation, system which 
 — ^at least during long stages of humanity and 
 against certain enemies — ^are overwhelmingly 
 
GERMAN IMPERIALISTS MISTAKEN 141 
 
 more important than individual judgment 
 and initiative, ready understanding of the 
 mentahty of the antagonist, capacity for the 
 rapid modification of plans, and the like. In 
 political matters the limit is soon reached 
 where anything great can now-a-days be 
 achieved by the former gifts alone, and 
 without at least a large admixture of the 
 latter. Moltke's all but omnipotent General 
 Staff, with his own genius in its midst, and 
 with no such genius in the French head- 
 quarters, worked wonders in the War of 1870, 
 even though we w^ould not go even to that 
 General Staif for special insight into the 
 French character, or for the development of 
 the moderately independent habits necessary 
 also for Germans if they are to succeed in 
 political life. But Bismarck fared badly when, 
 a few years later, he attempted to coerce the 
 German Catholics, for here the other set of 
 virtues was of primary importance, and in 
 these imfonderabilia the Iron Chancellor was, 
 at least in this case, singularly lacking. 
 
 Manufacturing and mercantile powers, 
 again, do not necessarily imply colonising 
 gifts, if only because the manufacturer and 
 merchant are not, as such, supreme except 
 within the small world (and even there only 
 
142 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 over a part of the activity) of their employes 
 and customers, whereas colonial founders are, 
 or must attempt to be, supreme rulers through- 
 out that entire colonial world. And it is 
 precisely where the Prussianised German 
 attains to supreme power, that his defects 
 show and tell. " Live and let live," — ^patience, 
 tolerance, geniality, comradeship, trust, gener- 
 osity; the willingness, the desire, to see races, 
 social organisations, religions, subtly different 
 from our own, developing, each at its best, 
 in an atmosphere of large tolerance, with the 
 benefit of the doubt (where the State appears 
 endangered by such tolerance) always given 
 in favour of the liberty and responsibility of 
 these various individuals and complexes — ^all 
 this is fundamentally necessary for successful 
 colonial rule, and this is not necessarily con- 
 tained in manufacturing and mercantile gifts. 
 And, let it be noted, if a very pronounced 
 mihtarist spirit and organisation are hardly 
 compatible even with a full and vigorous 
 development of a free home-government, 
 they are in keen conflict with the capacities 
 and methods essential to any permanently 
 successful rule over alien races, where these 
 are of any considerable civilisation, and in our 
 own difiicult times. It is no accident that 
 
WHENCE ANTI-ENGLISH FEELING 143 
 
 England, a great colonial power, is not a great 
 military power, and that it holds India with, 
 comparatively, a handful of European troops. 
 You are hardly likely to possess both gifts 
 and tastes to a high degree; and you will, in 
 any case, find that an intense militarism 
 profoundly hinders, and does not help, a 
 wholesome colonial rule. Recent Germany, 
 unfortunately for us all, thinks that not 
 only are these things, at their intensest, 
 thoroughly compatible, but that the one neces- 
 sarily furnishes the might, and hence the 
 right, to the other. 
 
 S 
 The bitterness felt by so many home Ger- 
 mans against the English successes amongst 
 foreign and native races, is doubtless greatly 
 intensified by the EngHsh appearing to the 
 German to succeed thus, as it were in playing 
 — ^as cricketers and golfers, as " good fellows " 
 who, with a school and university education 
 of little concentration, and with, say, some 
 six hours of office work, comparatively simple 
 administrative machinery, and small bodies 
 of military, succeed where he fails. These 
 Britishers are mostly not theoretical at all, 
 they possess loosely-knit minds and moderate 
 
144 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 passions. And the German works intensely, 
 systematically, he prepares everything; and 
 yet his complex bureaucracy, his militarist 
 self-repression, his huge plans lead to little 
 or nothing. Thus the amateur and " flannelled 
 fool " utterly out-distances the iron will and 
 fierce labour of highly trained specialists. 
 Hogarth's Idle Apprentice, unjustly yet quite 
 understandably, envied the solid successes 
 of the Industrious Apprentice. But would 
 not the Industrious Apprentice grow wildly 
 bitter if the Apprentice who seemed to him 
 Idle, at least as compared with himself, some- 
 how carried off one great solid success after 
 the other from under his very eyes ? 
 
 And then, again, there has been the great 
 material prosperity, the influx of gold, after 
 the war with France in 1870, a turning from 
 agriculture and the inner life of Science, 
 History, Music, Poetry, Philosophy, Religion, 
 to Industrialism and the visible, tangible 
 world of Banking, Commerce, Colonisation, 
 Fleets and Armies. And, let us note carefully, 
 the theoretical capacity and need, a sort of 
 genuine idealism, gives here passion and power 
 to one system more. The passion is hard and 
 fierce, because rare powers and deep needs 
 have here been deflected from their co-natural 
 
GREATNESS VERSUS BIGNESS 145 
 
 subject-matters. And the passion now seeks 
 colossal material things, because, if we are 
 made for spiritual greatness but turn away 
 from it, then we try to make up for such 
 spiritual greatness by seeking material bigness. 
 The grandly noble acceptance and heroic 
 utilisation of poverty, which revealed and, in 
 great part, occasioned the interior richness of 
 the great Germans before 1870, now largely 
 gave way to a vulgar hunt for material riches. 
 Nations of small territorial expansion now 
 began to be generally despised. And Bismarck 
 helped, terribly largely, to popularise a start- 
 ling insensibiHty to the great spiritual and 
 moral element so subtly present in, and needed 
 by, all permanently fruitful statesmanship. 
 
 The present great War is bringing to light so 
 much of systematic hardness on the part of 
 German military authorities, that many obser- 
 vers are evidently inclined to attribute an 
 incomparably greater fund of cruelty to the 
 German, especially the Prussian, nature than 
 can be found amongst their Western neigh- 
 bours, and especially the English. Yet I 
 doubt whether there exist sufficient facts to 
 require us to hold that the German generally, 
 
146 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 or even the Prussian, independently of his 
 congenital need of concentration and capacity 
 for strain, and when these peculiarities of his 
 have not been racially roused and heightened, 
 is more inclined to cruelty than the English- 
 man ; or that the pure Englishman is capable 
 of such concentration and strain, and conse- 
 quently of such irritation and vehemence 
 when, thus concentrated and strained, he is 
 strongly and persistently opposed. Hence I 
 take it that the two races cannot, in this 
 question of cruelty, be justly compared with 
 regard to it alone, or with each other straight 
 away. 
 
 The competent Ethnologist Dr. A. H. 
 Keane writes : " All admit that the German 
 is capable of a deep love of nature, of rare 
 poetical feeling, and devotion to any cause he 
 may have embraced. Hence he is easily led 
 into extremes, genuine sentiment becomes 
 over-sensitive, anger rises to fury, resentment 
 to rancour and hatred, in the pursuit even of 
 noble ideals." {^he Living Races of Mankind^ 
 p. 554.) Here I would only limit or elaborate 
 this observation in two directions. 
 
 For one thing, in the important difference 
 between the German and the Englishman as 
 regards self-consciousness. A distinctly able. 
 
GERMANS NOT SELF-CONSCIOUS 147 
 
 well-educated, upper-class South German lady 
 first visited England when middle-aged; and 
 she reported to me, after a month's continuous 
 stay in London, that she had (amongst other 
 things) been carefully observing the coun- 
 tenances of the hundreds of Anglican clerics 
 she had been meeting; and that upon every 
 one of these faces was written unmistakably 
 " hypocrite." Only after many a bewildered 
 surmise did I discover the interestingly far- 
 reaching, because racial, reason of this prepos- 
 terously unfair judgment. Anglican clerics 
 are mostly very self-conscious — she had 
 noticed this harmless, but (also to my own 
 German half) annoying peculiarity. They are, 
 in reality, self-conscious only as every pure 
 EngHshman tends to become, the moment he 
 defends, still more if he is pledged to defend, a 
 theory of any kind, however fully he may 
 believe it to be true. The exceptions, of the 
 Roman Catholic, with his massively tradi- 
 tional, strongly objective, and close-knit creed 
 and practice, and of the man of science, with, 
 again, his highly objective, indeed mostly 
 dry, or immediately experimental, subject- 
 matter, and, between these two, of some, 
 chiefly (I think) more or less Broad Church, 
 Anglican clerics, only confirm this rule. Now 
 
148 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 the German is not, in the English sense, self- 
 conscious; he is as anxious to get away from 
 himself (and others) into ideas and systems, 
 as the Englishman fears to lose this conscious- 
 ness of himself and of others. " My happy 
 moments," Ranke often says in his most 
 winning letters, " are when I, for a while, 
 completely forget myself." The German is 
 indeed considerably more nervous, sensitive, 
 offendible, vindictive than is the Englishman; 
 but this leads him to get away from this 
 readily painful self into ideas and theory and 
 into himself, as it is there projected and 
 enlarged. Because the German can, does and 
 must throw himself, heart and soul, into an 
 idea or system, which promptly becomes for 
 him more real than himself, and before which 
 pale his fellow creatures, especially the pro- 
 founder differences between himself and them 
 (differences which, of course, will make it 
 impossible for them to see eye to eye with him 
 about this idea or system, which has now 
 become the sensitive centre of his very soul) : 
 therefore does the German so habitually mis- 
 calculate the effect of his own actions, whilst 
 and after he is thus obsessed, upon others, 
 especially where these are of the very different, 
 loose-knit type of soul. 
 
HIGH PITCH OF GERMAN SOUL 149 
 
 Somewhat as the ancient Greeks and 
 Romans, the entire mediaeval world and 
 modern times till well past St. Teresa (1515- 
 1582) possessed no term for what we unhappy 
 recent generations now popularly mean by 
 " nerves " and " nervousness " — even with 
 Fenelon (1651-1715) the notion is rare — so 
 the German possesses no word for the English 
 " self-consciousness." In both cases, the 
 absence of the term implies the absence, or 
 (at least) the only slight and diffused presence, 
 of the thing. The equivalent given for " self- 
 conscious " in some English - German dic- 
 tionaries, " selhsibewusst^'^ means, of course, 
 nothing of the kind, but " well aware of his 
 own merits or importance." Thus, then, it 
 was all but inevitable that my shrewd, experi- 
 enced lady should gravely misjudge as she 
 assuredly did. 
 
 And a second thing I would emphasise is 
 the high pitch, strain and cost, and hence 
 danger, of the German's psychic life, where 
 its owner is at all of an educated and awakened 
 mind and character. From the nature of the 
 case, this assertion is incapable of mathemati- 
 cal or statistical proof; indeed what I believe 
 to be (more or less moderately) at work within 
 the great majority of cases, the healthy and 
 
ISO THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 normal ones, can be at all vividly presented 
 only by the picture of the excesses (of a kind 
 felt to be specifically German) as these appear 
 easily traceable — ^that is, amongst the few, 
 the maladif and abnormal souls. 
 
 In this manner and degree we can, I believe, 
 learn important psychic facts from the case 
 of Friedrich Nietzsche, if taken in conjunc- 
 tion with the widespread fascination exercised 
 upon Germans by precisely some of the least 
 balanced of his later moods and visions. 
 Hence we may fittingly close the first stage of 
 this attempt to picture the German soul, as 
 elucidative of this great war, by a short 
 description of Nietzsche in the attitude that 
 here concerns us, and of his friend Erwin 
 Rohde, the far-sighted courageous critic of 
 the dangerous extravagances of the other, as 
 these appeared in Nietzsche's letters to himself. 
 
 Nietzsche's case and mentality has already 
 been urged by countless writers, mostly, how- 
 ever, with little perception of how various, 
 indeed acutely contradictory, were his succes- 
 sive obsessions (hence, at times, also violently 
 anti-Prussian, anti-militarist); and, again, 
 how pure-lived and devoted, how sensitive 
 and tragically costly were the private bearing 
 and temper of this rarely-gifted soul. Here I 
 
NIETZSCHE AND GERMAN EXCESS 151 
 
 would only emphasise the touching pleadings 
 of the nobly devoted, similarly rich-natured, 
 but far more balanced friend Rohde, with this 
 his brilliant meteoric contemporary. I under- 
 stand these appeals as anxieties and apprehen- 
 sions which any man who congenitally knows 
 and deeply loves and believes in the German 
 soul, but who (for some reason) is also suffi- 
 ciently outside it to feel this soul's especial 
 dangers, might well, with but few modifica- 
 tions, address to this strong, sensitive, self- 
 destructive creature of God. 
 
 Thus, in 1878 Rohde pleads with Nietzsche, 
 who is now beginning his (intensely theoreti- 
 cal, yet amongst Germans all the more influen- 
 tial) crusade against Christian ethics ; " We 
 are all terrible egoists (I know well, beloved 
 friend, how much more I am this than you 
 are!). Yet no one ought to attempt to extract 
 from our souls the prick which admonishes us 
 that we ought not to be such. Perhaps it is the 
 fact, that we do the Good really because of 
 the sense of pleasure connected with its execu- 
 tion; but if a man derives pleasure, in a 
 conflict between his egoistic and anti-egoistic 
 impulses, from the sacrifice of the former, this 
 strange fact," this gratification, " cannot pos- 
 sibly be placed on the same level with the 
 
IS2 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 movements of his egoistic sense of pleasure; 
 it must be put, as all the world does put it, in 
 opposition to, above, them, in the order of 
 value, and must be venerated as the Good." 
 
 In 1879 Ro^<i^ tells a mutual friend : " How 
 characteristic of himself Nietzsche is again 
 being! We are, at all times, instantly to favour 
 one only kind of knowledge, of the contempla- 
 tion of life, and are to lose all appetite for 
 every conceivable other kind. Where, in this 
 way, can there remain any * freedom ' of 
 the spirit ? I know only one ' free man ' 
 in the spirit among the entirely great, and 
 that is Goethe; and assuredly he is thus 
 free, only because he was capable of allowing 
 a value to everything in its proper place, 
 and not because he would, forsooth, have 
 taken the liberty (as was done by Nietzsche's 
 supposed free spirit, Voltaire, and his similars) 
 to reject, as so much sheer nonsense, one half 
 of human nature for the sake of the other half ! " 
 
 In 1887 Rohde tells a friend how deeply 
 touched he has just been in reading the corre- 
 spondence between Wagner and Liszt. " Liszt 
 was evidently always of opinion that Wagner 
 thought little of his musical compositions. 
 And that this suspicion never for one moment 
 brought hesitation into Liszt's unconditional 
 
ROHDE AND GERMAN BALANCE 153 
 
 devotion to the cause and person of Wagner — 
 this I find more admirable than anything else 
 in the world. In the contemplation of such 
 greatness of heart I find a thousand times 
 more pleasure than in all the talk about the 
 strength, cheerfulness and unscrupulousness 
 of wild beasts of genius with which Nietzsche, 
 in his newest achievement, again regales us." 
 And Nietzsche writes of this very achievement, 
 his TjUt Genealogie der Moral : '* This book, 
 my touchstone for what belongs to me, has the 
 good fortune to be accessible only to minds 
 of the highest and severest disposition ; to the 
 remainder of the world the right ears are 
 lacking." Rohde now belonged for Nietzsche 
 to " the remainder." (0. Crusius, Erwin 
 Rohde, i()02,pp, gS,gg; 113; 118; 159,160.) 
 Soon the pall of hopeless insanity was to 
 descend upon Nietzsche. 
 
 What rare, rich, resplendent gifts are here! 
 and what alarming, heroic capacity for utter 
 absorption in, entire self-immolation to, one 
 over-vivid conception or system! But we 
 also find, here, in beautiful, friendly ministry, 
 another German figure, penetrated with the 
 finest understanding of, and with all but entirely 
 sufficient remedies against, the characteristic 
 defects of the high qualities of the German soul. 
 
1 54 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 The first stage of this study attempted to 
 describe the fundamental peculiarities of the 
 German soul; an imperious need (as soon as 
 this soul is fully aroused) of theory, system, 
 completeness, at every turn and in every 
 subject-matter; an immense capacity for 
 auto-suggestion and mono-ideism; and an 
 ever proximate danger, as well as power, of 
 becoming so dominated by such vivid projec- 
 tions of the racial imaginings and ideals, as to 
 lose all compelling sense of the limits between 
 such dreams and reality, and especially all 
 awareness, or at least alertness, as to the 
 competing rights and differing gifts, indeed 
 as to the very existence, of other souls and 
 other races, with their intrinsically different 
 civilisations, rights and ideals. Or again a 
 certain consciousness of these others can 
 remain, but they have now become for it 
 simply things, material obstacles, incentives 
 to a ruthless obliteration. Thus this soul easily 
 loses such initial sense as it may possess, of its 
 own abiding need of other races, other civilisa- 
 tions, not to conquer or to absorb, but to love 
 
\ 
 
 ENGLISH & GERMAN COMPARED 155 
 
 and to learn from, as so many God-willed 
 complements and correctives of itself, — each 
 peculiar race and civilisation contributing 
 different yet essential elements to the whole 
 of the human spirit-life and civilisation. 
 
 We thus find a soul startlingly unlike, not 
 the Scotch, but the English. The English 
 faults are, upon the whole. Defects ; the Ger- 
 mans' faults are, mostly. Excesses. The English 
 are too loosely-knit, " go - as - you - please," 
 fragmentary, inarticulate ; a continuous com- 
 promise and individual self - consciousness. 
 The Germans are too tightly buckled-up, 
 too much planned and prepared, too deliber- 
 ately ambitious and insatiable, too readily 
 obHvious of others — especially of their own 
 need of others, of esteeming others and being 
 esteemed by them. The Englishman rarely 
 loses, he would not wish to lose, his direct 
 consciousness of himself, a consciousness 
 which, to himself, is not unpleasant; but 
 neither does he lose, or wish to lose, the corre- 
 sponding direct, work-a-day consciousness 
 of the fellow-creatures around him. The 
 German, where at all fully awake or aroused, 
 wishes to lose, and largely does lose, such a 
 direct, full consciousness of himself as but 
 one amongst his differing fellows, for such 
 
IS6 THE GERMAN^SOUL 
 
 consciousness is painful to him. The English- 
 man inclines to be selfish in a small way — to 
 be egotistic, preferring his own immediate self 
 to the other immediate selves, whom he never 
 ceases to perceive as thus directly around 
 him. He is not, by nature, cruel; but even 
 if he were, this his freedom from all theoretical 
 obsession would save him from a great incite- 
 ment to cruelty. The German tends to forget 
 both his own self and the other empirical 
 selves altogether, to be egoistic, to see directly 
 his system, idea, alone, and only thus (upon 
 and within this now vivid cloud) his own, or 
 his race's, immensely magnified, simply poten- 
 tial, but thus immeasurably more potent, 
 self. Even if, by nature, he is not more cruel 
 than are other races, his visionary obsessions, 
 and especially his unhappy conviction that 
 fear and force are the true roots of all success- 
 ful rule, would make him harsher than those 
 others with their ceaseless awareness of the 
 empirical here and now. Thus the indelible 
 sense of other individual lives keeps the 
 Englishman moderate; the rightness and 
 richness of his theory, in so far as he has one 
 at all, matters comparatively Httle for his own 
 practice. But the German is ever liable to lose 
 such immediate sense of the empirical other 
 
RICH SYSTEM WHERE URGENT 157 
 
 lives, in his congenital need for, and ready 
 fascination by, theory; so that for him one 
 must account it to be of primary importance 
 that his system shall be adequate, especially 
 that it shall seriously supplement and correct, 
 that it shall not simply project, and (when 
 taken back as thus projected) shall not 
 immensely steady and strengthen, the weak- 
 nesses, prejudices, limitations peculiar to 
 himself qua German. Thus doctrinal religion 
 and philosophy, and their doctrinal negations, 
 doubtless play a larger, or at least a more 
 direct and decisive, part in the German soul's 
 life as a whole, than do the corresponding 
 doctrinal religion and philosophy, and their 
 philosophical negations, in the life of the 
 English soul. 
 
 I shall now attempt, in this concluding 
 stage, to show shortly how, where and why 
 the four chief types of German religious and 
 philosophical affirmation and negation express, 
 intensify, check or alter the congenital charac- 
 teristics of the Teutonic soul. And I shall end 
 by a short indication as to where appear to lie 
 the roots of reform, within the German soul 
 itself, for its own especial weaknesses and 
 excesses. 
 
IS8 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 III 
 
 Friedrich Naumann, in his Brief e ilber 
 Religion, vividly depicts how, to this very- 
 hour, even in deeply sceptical Berlin itself, 
 it is the religion of our fathers, especially the 
 Christian religion, which (in spite of the many 
 superficial counter-indications) still always 
 deeply affects, and often really determines, 
 the peculiar groupings, strengths and short- 
 comings of men. 
 
 Now the actual Hfe of such a highly educated 
 and immensely active population as is that 
 of contemporary Germany shows, of course, 
 on the surface a quite bewildering variety of 
 gradations, combinations, affinities, between 
 whatsoever religious and philosophical convic- 
 tions, positive or negative, we may fix upon 
 as primary. But for our purpose we shall 
 probably work with the most useful distinc- 
 tions, if we accept four great groups. There is 
 the Roman Catholic group, represented, let us 
 not forget, by close upon, if indeed not quite, 
 one half of all the German-speaking peoples, 
 although doubtless in large parts of Austria 
 this religious influence is mostly perfunctory. 
 There is the Protestant position which, if 
 taken as still predominantly affirmative and 
 
FOUR GERMAN GROUPS STUDIED 159 
 
 historically religious, can hardly, in ordinary 
 times, be actively held by more than, say, a 
 fifth or a sixth of all that population, yet 
 which, even in the majority which retains 
 little or no churchgoing or dogmatic faith, is 
 still strong, in moments of stress and conflict, 
 and in combination with other motives and 
 impulses. There is the Idealistic philosophical 
 conviction, which, for the last sixty years, 
 has lost such visible leadership as, for about 
 an equally long time before, it then un- 
 doubtedly possessed amongst the intellec- 
 tually influential classes ; yet which, in mostly 
 hidden and indirect ways, continues very 
 accurately to express, and powerfully to 
 strengthen, the most German peculiarities of 
 the German soul. And, finally, there is 
 MateriaHsm, theoretical and (still more) prac- 
 tical, which, since the fifties, and especially 
 since 1870, has, almost without pause or limit, 
 grown and thriven upon the less noble needs 
 and weaknesses, the immense material suc- 
 cesses, and even the very strength and truth, 
 of the German soul. 
 
 The Roman Catholic position still teaches 
 and practises, instinctively and massively, in 
 
i6o THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 frank application within this visible world, 
 the other-worldliness of man's ultimate call, 
 and the priority in worth of this call over 
 his this-world call and duty. The immense 
 importance of these facts and the ever-pressing 
 need of their proclamation require to be 
 remembered if we would be sufficiently grate- 
 ful to Rome, when at her best, and sufficiently 
 appreciative of the difficulties specially in- 
 herited by herself, when at her weakest. 
 
 The difficulty and weakness here meant I 
 take to have passed through three stages; 
 and the full fruitfulness of the Church, in its 
 this-world orientation, to be reached, only if 
 and when she can completely and persistently 
 resume, and improve and reapply, in the 
 greatly altered circumstances, a certain in- 
 sight and temper which, so far, she most 
 completely attained in the second of these 
 stages. 
 
 In the first stage, well-nigh to Carolingian 
 times, the overpowering predominance of the 
 other-worldly orientation, and of the cate- 
 gories of Sin and Redemption (as absolutely 
 primary or even as sole), caused the State 
 either to be overlooked or to appear chiefly 
 as part of that sin-occasioned, or at least 
 deeply sin-infected, order out of which Christ 
 
CATHOLIC POSITION, FIRST STAGE i6i 
 
 came to set us free. Thus Christians generally 
 could hardly yet vividly apprehend the State 
 as an essentially ethical complex, possessed 
 of its own unique rights, duties and laws of 
 life; and as necessary, in this its unique 
 character, to the all-round development of 
 man, even of religious man, and of the specifi- 
 cally religious complex, the Church. The 
 existing Roman State was (even after the 
 peace of the Church and up to the ancient 
 Roman Empire's full dissolution in the West) 
 accepted by Christians with little or no 
 attempt to apprehend or to develop its con- 
 ception and function as an ethical complex 
 of a special kind. 
 
 In the second stage, the early middle ages, 
 the ancient problems acquired a new form 
 and a fresh spirit amongst the newly Christian 
 races and peoples that had nowise, or but 
 slightly, experienced the old Graeco-Roman 
 Empires. The cities, with their free discipline 
 and ordered guild-life, now prepare the ques- 
 tions and the ground for the golden age of 
 Scholasticism, which culminates in Aquinas 
 and in Dante. In this system the leading 
 categories are, no more Sin and Redemption 
 (as in St. Paul and still more in Augustine), 
 but Nature and Supernature, as, in the 
 
i62 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 simplest and most spontaneous of images and 
 implications, they can well be said to permeate 
 the original message of Jesus Himself. But 
 now, some eleven centuries after that first, 
 immensely pregnant proclamation, the this- 
 world orientation, which there remains almost 
 entirely implicit, receives a loving attention 
 and careful elaboration, for which that first 
 millennium was not yet ripe. Here we get the 
 recognition of the polarity of man as he is 
 (his orientations both towards sense and the 
 fleeting, and towards spirit and the abiding), 
 recognised as prior to and independent of all 
 sin. Man is indeed a sinner and requires 
 redemption; but, more largely and funda- 
 mentally still, he is a creature with certain 
 natural powers, needs and ends (inclusive of a 
 certain kind of morality and religion), which 
 directly operate for and within space and 
 succession, sense and the body; and a creature 
 touched also by, thirsting for, and elevated to, 
 certain supernatural realities and require- 
 ments, which concern his duration and his 
 spirit, and which find their completion for him, 
 not in this earthly life, but in the other. That 
 centrally natural life (with its morality of the 
 Golden Rule) forms and finds its specific 
 complex in the State; this centrally super- 
 
CATHOLIC POSITION, wSECOND STAGE 163 
 
 natural life (with its ethics of the Sermon on 
 the Mount) has its specific expression and 
 means in the Church. The State here is recog- 
 nised as essentially ethical, although ethical 
 in an elementary, homely, give-and-take, 
 calculating and self-conscious way; and the 
 Church has not to infuse this morality into 
 the State, but has only to aid in awakening 
 it there, as a morality already always latent 
 in the State as such. The Church has, roughly, 
 to begin where the State leaves off; and her 
 ethics are of a transcending, abiding, self- 
 oblivious, God-seeking and God-finding order, 
 the whole a gift from the God of Grace, 
 intended to meet, penetrate, raise and satisfy 
 the aspirations infused by Himself into the 
 work of the God of Nature. And these Gods 
 are not two Gods, any more than these men 
 are two creatures; but the same God, once 
 for all the God of Nature and of Grace, sup- 
 ports, stimulates and satisfies man, once for 
 all a creature of sense and time, of spirit and 
 eternity, and does so, for each of these lives 
 and levels, in and through the other. And 
 hence State and Church are both necessary 
 to man's full development in his two levels 
 and calls; they are even variously necessary 
 each to the other. 
 
i64 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 The third stage followed, alas, pretty 
 rapidly. We can now trace very closely how, 
 at a particular moment in the struggle between 
 the Popes and the Emperors, certain canon- 
 ists of the specifically Church party ceased to 
 be satisfied with the true balance, — with two 
 complexes, each essentially though differently 
 ethical; and how they now conceived the 
 State as an essentially non-ethical, pre- 
 ethical complex, which (although itself neces- 
 sary to the Church as the Church's physical 
 substratum, support and defender) required 
 the Church's continuous impulsion and regula- 
 tion within the State's own degree and kind 
 of action. Thus we have already seen, in our 
 first study, how the great canonist Sinibaldo 
 de Fieschi, who shortly afterwards (in 1243) 
 became Pope Innocent IV., could teach that 
 the persona of the State is purely ficta ; moral 
 responsibility attaches to individuals and to 
 the Church, I suppose also to families, but not 
 to the State. And we there found that noble 
 Papal pronouncements, such as Leo XIII. 's 
 Immortale Dei of 1885, have, of late years, 
 again proclaimed the rich doctrine of the two 
 great Moral Complexes, and have thus met 
 the quite independent but similar conclusions 
 of great German and English jurists and 
 
CATHOLIC POSITION, THIRD STAGE 165 
 
 philosophers. But the conception of only one 
 great Moral Complex still possesses, unfortun- 
 ately, a wide impHcit influence, in considerable 
 part derived from the twin facts that Chris- 
 tianity began with a profound abstraction 
 from the earthly State, and that Christianity 
 remains turned, first and foremost, to its 
 heavenly Home. 
 
 During this great war we have indeed been 
 thrilled by such resonant utterances as those 
 of the Primate of Belgium and the Roman 
 Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow, and, in other 
 degrees and ways, by declarations of French 
 and English, and one or two Italian Bishops. 
 Nor can any just observer doubt the sensitive 
 soundness of instinct, upon these points, of 
 Roman Catholics generally in France, Belgium 
 and England. Yet such an observer would 
 have also to admit the apparent absence of 
 all check exercised by their religion upon the 
 '^ reahstic " affinities so markedly revealed 
 by the German Roman Catholic clergy gener- 
 ally and by the laity of the great Centre 
 Party. I take it to be beyond question that, 
 the Kulturkampf once settled, the bulk of 
 the Roman Catholics of Germany, although, 
 according to German standards, independent 
 enough in municipal and home-political affairs, 
 
i66 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 accepted and even helped on the Chauvinist 
 temper, megalomania and " realism " so pro- 
 minent in their Government's dealings with 
 other countries. 
 
 The Protestant position, in so far as it 
 persists in a definite doctrine and corporate 
 organisation of its own, continues, in our 
 questions, to be dogged by the great disad- 
 vantages of its origins. Historical research is 
 showing, ever increasingly, how profoundly 
 the original movement (however much occa- 
 sioned, excused, or even justifiable, by long- 
 standing abuses and excesses) was shaped and 
 coloured by the doctrines and temper pre- 
 valent in those times — by Occam's agnostic 
 Nominalism and a predestinarian Rigorism 
 which exaggerated the already hardly practic- 
 able tempers of Saint Paul and Saint Augus- 
 tine. What the Catholic second stage had so 
 nobly perceived was thus lost again; the 
 categories of Nature and Supernature (which 
 does not destroy but perfects Nature) were 
 dethroned from their primacy, in favour of 
 the categories of Sin and Redemption, with 
 mostly a jealous exclusion of the very idea of 
 
PROTESTANTS DENY POLARITY 167 
 
 a double level and polarity within man's 
 goodness itself. Man can thus be bad or he 
 can be good; and his life on earth is essen- 
 tially a conflict between this good and bad. 
 But man is not substantially good in a 
 certain kind, and called to a slow trans- 
 formation by and into a still higher kind of 
 good. 
 
 True, the most characteristically German, 
 and the most loved by German Protestants, 
 amongst the Protestant Reformers, Luther, 
 is the least systematic amongst them in this 
 acute rigorism and dualism. Much of the 
 CathoHc mystical depth and tenderness, and 
 not a little of the sacramental sense, still 
 persist in this astonishingly manifold genius. 
 Yet it is also unfortunately true that, precisely 
 in our matters, Luther is not more, he is 
 greatly less, satisfactory than Calvin, who, so 
 much wider in his influence in Europe at large 
 and in America, coloured so much less of 
 German hfe. For that most unhappy racial 
 arrogance of tone towards non-Germans, 
 which Luther so largely himself introduced, 
 and so largely fostered — that temper of 
 superiority and contempt with which the 
 German was encouraged by the Saxon miner's 
 son, largely because of the new religion itself, 
 
i68 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 to look down upon the Latin races — this was 
 necessarily absent from the temper of Calvin, 
 the middle-class Frenchman of humanist 
 training. And again the most distressing 
 coarseness, brutality and recklessness of 
 temper and advice, which so gravely dis- 
 figured and limited the finer gifts and capaci- 
 ties of the ardent, self-communicative Luther, 
 were conspicuously absent from the life and 
 teaching of the cold and relentless, but always 
 self-contained and deliberate Calvin. Luther's 
 Pecca fortiter answer to Philip of Saxony's 
 case of conscience; his inflammatory instiga- 
 tion to revolt of the poor German serf pea- 
 santry, and then, when their revolt came, his 
 adjuration to the German Protestant princes 
 to " brain them, as so many mad dogs " ; and 
 his sermon, to an ordinary church congrega- 
 tion, in the fulness of his experience and 
 authority, as to the man's universal and 
 absolute right to the satisfaction of his sex 
 instinct — say, with his maidservant, if only 
 he has first solicited his wife and she has 
 refused him three times: these are but 
 specimens of a brutality which, alas, has 
 (upon the whole) only helped still further to 
 endear Luther to a large section even of the 
 educated German public, and greatly to 
 
LUTHER'S BRUTAL IMPULSIONS 169 
 
 encourage the corresponding impulsions within 
 their own natures. Thus at the Luther centen- 
 ary celebration in 1888, perhaps the most 
 tumultuously applauded of the tableaux of his 
 life was the one which showed Catherine of 
 Bora, still in Nun's costume, being fondled on 
 the knees of Luther, still himself in the 
 Augustinian habit — surely, an unlovely form 
 under which to insist upon the doctrine of a 
 sole kind and stage of goodness. And, as 
 regards cruelty towards subject classes or 
 races, not a decade ago, at a centenary cele- 
 bration connected with the town and uni- 
 versity of Heidelberg, one of the scenes 
 enacted, which symbolised German colonial 
 rule, began with German colonial officials 
 in tropical costumes bastinadoing their native 
 subjects, and ended with these same officials 
 stringing up on trees these same coloured men. 
 And the vein of impulsive brutality in 
 Luther coexists alongside of a central current 
 of an astonishingly subtle, indeed strainingly 
 doctrinaire, character. He must and will 
 attain to absolute certainty of his own salva- 
 tion, as a fact fully achieved already here and 
 now; and absolute certainty he attains by 
 and within an act of the purest abstractive 
 thought — of sheer faith in the redemptive 
 
170 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 act of Christ alone, and in the all-sufficiency 
 of that act. Good works must and do follow 
 from this faith; yet it is the faith, not the 
 works, which alone is necessary. The visible, 
 sensible, institutional, is for Luther (when in 
 this, his most characteristic vein) not right 
 save as an expression of such a purely spiritual, 
 indeed intensely abstract, conviction. Only 
 the word of Scripture, taken in by your own 
 eyes, is an exception; indeed, as to that book 
 and these eyes, Luther repeatedly declares 
 that souls have been lost because they could 
 not read. But otherwise nothing sensible can 
 help towards the spiritual. The crucifix may 
 be retained as expressing faith, it may not be 
 used to awaken faith. I may kiss my child 
 because I love it; I may not kiss it in order to 
 love it, or with any belief that kissing it will 
 awaken or strengthen my love: the devo- 
 tional equivalents of these latter acts and be- 
 liefs are " superstition," " magic," " foreign," 
 even " Babylonish." Thus the bridge between 
 sense and spirit, demonstrably intended for 
 traffic in both directions, is to be used only 
 in the direction from spirit to sense. 
 
 Undoubtedly Luther, in these doctrinaire 
 subtleties, was, in great part, moved by the 
 thirst of all deeper religion, and especially as 
 
LUTHER'S SEPARATIST SUBTLETY 171 
 
 he found it in Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, 
 after the simply given and prevenient character 
 of Grace, and our utter need of it. Yet the 
 angry contempt with which he refused to 
 find any equivalent to his own strivings in 
 the average Catholic principles and practice, 
 during well-nigh fifteen centuries before his 
 sheer and complete rediscovery of these truths, 
 and his quite arbitrary aloofness, when in this 
 vein, from one of the two essentially inter- 
 related movements between sense and spirit, 
 remain potent stimulants to the similar 
 congenital weaknesses of Germans generally, 
 down to this very moment. These prejudices 
 still fully possessed my tutor's outlook; they 
 still strongly influence the powerful and 
 warmly Christian canonist Professor Rudolf 
 Sohm; they greatly limit the insight of a 
 philosopher, otherwise so free from all dog- 
 matic scruples as Professor Eucken; they 
 tax all the strength and vigilance, in such 
 perception of their erroneousness as he has 
 reached, of so virile and amazingly rich a 
 mind and soul as Professor Troeltsch. Indeed 
 wheresoever these influences do exercise their 
 sway, they necessarily feed a separatist atti- 
 tude towards the great bulk of other times, 
 other races, other churches, of a kind more 
 
172 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 subtle and difficult of detection and cor- 
 rection than was Calvinism in its frankly 
 iconoclastic and consistently contemptuous 
 springtide. 
 
 3 
 The Idealist position has now, for some 
 seventy years, been so little prominent in 
 Germany that it is difficult clearly to gauge 
 its present range and influence. Yet the 
 instinct of the arch-" realist " Napoleon, when, 
 especially in relation to Fichte, he expressed 
 his dread, thinly veiled by contempt, of the 
 German " ideologues," was utterly right in 
 its perception of the terrific force imparted 
 to the German character by such " mere 
 theorisings." Indeed it is this position that, 
 more than any other, reveals the deepest 
 idiosyncrasies, strengths, weaknesses and 
 dangers of the German soul. I propose here 
 to ignore Kant and Schelling: Kant, because 
 of the very traceable influence of his Scotch 
 Calvinist descent on his father's side, and 
 because, as the earliest clear exponent of a 
 scheme for a permanent peace, he is, in his 
 strong Moralism and prevalent Deism (rather 
 than Theism), less characteristic of what we 
 are here seeking; and SchelHng because, after 
 
IDEALISTS: FICHTE'S REDEN 173 
 
 passing through almost every possible phase, 
 he ended definitely friendly to Church institu- 
 tions of a hardly Protestant type. Schleier- 
 macher also, for other reasons, is less helpful. 
 I will here only consider certain features of 
 Fichte, in his Reden an die deutsche Nation, 
 1808, and three peculiarities of Hegel; and 
 this although I deeply admire the German 
 revolt against Napoleon and the steely purity 
 and strength of Fichte's central intention and 
 will, and again the wide stretches of magnifi- 
 cently rich, penetrating insight we owe to 
 Hegel, especially in his Phenomenology of the 
 Human Spirit and his Philosophy of Right, 
 
 As to Fichte, here are two groups of sayings 
 — ^the first, as to the new education he would 
 graft upon Pestalozzi's scheme; the second, 
 as to the ultimate cause of the essential 
 superiority, clear to his own mind, of the races 
 of Germanic speech to all other West-European 
 peoples. They will illustrate, even without 
 comment, the main contentions of this study. 
 
 " The new education must itself produce 
 with necessity the necessity that it intends " ; 
 " it is primarily the sure, deliberate art of 
 producing in man an infallibly good will *' 
 {fVerke, vii. 282). " This education never has 
 
174 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 to do with any self-seeking, because it suffo- 
 cates the root of all such self-seeking, obscure 
 feeling, by clear thinking." " The man thus 
 educated is impelled by a love which, in no 
 degree whatsoever, turns to any satisfaction 
 of the senses, but to activity of the spirit, for 
 the sake of the activity, and to the law of this 
 activity, for the sake of the law " {Ibid, vii. 
 291, 307). " Such a creative love pre-supposes, 
 in the person to be seized by it, a capacity for 
 producing, out of his own activity, pictures 
 independent of already extant reality — ^in no 
 wise copies and successors, but patterns and 
 precursors." Hence Pestalozzi is held " to 
 instigate the child's mind to the projection of 
 pictures, and to allow it to learn, whatsoever 
 it learns at all, only by such free creation " 
 and projection; for "he cannot mean by 
 contemplation (Anschauung) that blind hand- 
 ling of, and fumbling around, objects of sense 
 called perception (JV ahrnehmung) " (vii. 284, 
 404). And indeed, even " to attain a secure 
 conception " as to the true aim of Pestalozzi's 
 scheme " we must refuse to inspect any part 
 of the actual execution; since from such a 
 clear conception of his aim " as we have here 
 attained " there springs (directly) the further 
 concept of the execution and its necessary 
 
FICHTE'S INTENSE CHAUVINISM 175 
 
 consequences, without any of your empirical 
 experimentations " (vii. 402). 
 
 And as to the prerogative of the Germanic 
 peoples that retain Germanic speech, we learn 
 that the whole of modern central and western 
 Europe has been formed by the Teutonic 
 races — those that have retained their original 
 seats and language (Germans, Scandinavians), 
 and those that migrated into ancient Roman 
 territory and there adopted some Latin tongue 
 (French, Itahans, Spaniards : Fichte does 
 not mention the English). But it is the former 
 alone that thus possess an instrument which 
 is the spontaneous product, and the adequate 
 awakener and expression, of their true selves ; 
 whereas the latter nations are irretrievably 
 doomed (as regards their own selves) to 
 remain on the surface of things and of them- 
 selves, and (as regards Germans and Scandina- 
 vians and mankind at large) never to be more 
 than useful incentives to the German's true 
 penetration of such subjects and of himself, — 
 a penetration which he can then hand on to 
 the world at large, but not to those neo-Latin 
 countries (vii. 311-377). For "between life 
 and death there is no comparison; and hence 
 all direct comparisons between the German 
 and the neo-Latin languages are utterly 
 
176 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 futile." Besides, " a German who learns Latin 
 more thoroughly than does the foreigner (a 
 thing he may well achieve), thereby attains 
 to a far more thorough understanding of the 
 neo-Latin language than is possessed by this 
 foreigner who speaks it; and thus the German, 
 if he but uses all his advantages, can under- 
 stand this foreigner even better than the 
 latter can understand himself." Again, " only 
 the German truly possesses a people of his 
 own; only he is capable of specific, rational 
 love for his nation." In a word, " all who 
 either themselves truly live by a creative 
 production of the new; or who at least stand 
 attentive as to whether the current of an 
 original life may not, somewhere or other, 
 seize them also; or who at all events have 
 some foreboding of, and do not hate, it: all 
 these are original human beings; they are 
 (if contemplated as a people) an original 
 people, the people, Germans. All those who 
 resign themselves to be something only 
 secondary and derivative, and who clearly 
 know themselves to be such, are so in reality, 
 and become so always increasingly, because 
 of this their belief; they are but an appendix 
 to life, an echo of an already silent voice; they 
 are (contemplated as a people) outside of the 
 
FICHTE'S TREND VERY GERMAN 177 
 
 original people, the Germans, and, for the 
 latter, strangers and aliens " (vii. 374). Fichte 
 finds that Germans are without native words 
 possessing the same connotations as " the 
 three infamous neo-Latin words ' humanity,' 
 * popularity,' ' Hberality,' " and this, because 
 Germans are too original and sincere for such 
 clap-trap. But " character has no particular 
 German name, precisely because, without 
 any knowledge or reflection of our own, 
 character is expected to proceed directly from 
 our very being " — " to possess character and 
 to be German are, without doubt, synony- 
 mous " (vii. 321, 446). 
 
 It would be wrong to quote these things 
 here as though many a German had not, ever 
 since they were produced, smiled at or pro- 
 tested against them. Yet they are, alas, sadly 
 instructive as to the national weaknesses. 
 Just think one moment. Here is one of the 
 chief German philosophers in the full maturity 
 of his powers, teaching equivalently, through- 
 out a long course of pubhc lectures, that Dante 
 was hopelessly debarred from finding the 
 depths of his own soul, and that the deathless 
 Divina Commedia seriously profited mankind 
 only as a stimulus to Klopstock in the com- 
 position of his still-born Messias ! 
 
178 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 As to Hegel I would only point out how 
 curiously few have been the students, German 
 or even English, who have at all vividly 
 realised how serious are the incentives to 
 man's self-inflation contained in three pro- 
 minent characteristics of his thought, and 
 especially how closely interconnected are these 
 points within his teaching. Indeed, his doc- 
 trine that matter is simply a secondary 
 creation of the human mind — ^its leavings, so 
 to say: this is even often supposed greatly to 
 help religion to be spiritual. His utter insen- 
 sibility to the overwhelming probability of the 
 existence of other finite intelligences which, not 
 human, are far more intelligent than man: 
 this is held to eliminate superstition. And the 
 more characteristic of his two ultimate trends, 
 in which he holds no God distinct from the 
 world (all reality consisting of but one and 
 the same mind in process of variously slow 
 01 rapid, easy or difficult, evolution), is softened 
 down into some would-be compatibiHty with 
 genuinely Christian mysticism. And yet these 
 three doctrines are closely interconnected 
 and are all equally characteristic of Hegel; 
 and they all help to leave his disciple in a 
 universe empty of all realities really distinct 
 from the one single mind as to which he him- 
 
HEGEL'S THREE EXCESSES 179 
 
 self is not only an ever integral part, but of 
 which he, qua man, is always the supreme 
 flower and expression throughout all space 
 and time. Self-reverence can indeed exist 
 here, but no adoration, no creaturely temper, 
 no articulate humility, no anticipation and 
 utiHsation of the body's claims and stimula- 
 tions. If, along many noble stretches, Hegel- 
 ianism has expressed and helped the German 
 at his best, it has also, on these crucial points, 
 for the most part projected and strengthened 
 his native weaknesses — his inclinations to 
 excess. 
 
 4 
 
 But it is MateriaHsm, if we take the word in 
 the broadest of its unfavourable senses, that, 
 on the surface at least, appears interiorly 
 to have sapped, or utterly to have swept 
 away, by far the greater part of the three 
 idealisms hitherto considered, — even of the 
 ground which these have in common. And 
 indeed I believe it undeniable that it has 
 been the influence of Materialism which has, 
 more directly and massively than the weak- 
 nesses of all the three above groups even taken 
 together, deflected and changed the German 
 soul. This influence can perhaps best be traced 
 
i8o THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 if we discriminate between four successive 
 waves or stages — all this well within the last 
 three or four generations. 
 
 There was first the invasion, from America 
 rather than England, of an intense Industrial- 
 ism, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 
 turning the population ever increasingly from 
 agriculture and patriarchal village-life, or 
 moderate, local trades-work within and for 
 the town guilds, to great mining, factory, 
 commercial enterprises and to a large prole- 
 tariat existence in certain hugely swollen 
 centres of relentless, feverish labour and 
 competition. It is in 1812 that the Romanti- 
 cist Ludwig Tieck, then a young man, in the 
 Introduction to his Phantasus, utters his 
 disgust against " the almost fantastic enthu- 
 siasm " with which the teacher of one of his 
 companions welcomes " all that is useful, 
 new, factory-like," " as in Fiirth " (in contrast 
 with its senior and neighbour, the patriarchal 
 Niirnberg) — Fiirth " with its mirror-polishings, 
 button-makings, and all the other noisy 
 trades — ^a North America " transplanted into 
 Germany. All this in contrast with a warm 
 admiration for " the strong Englishmen " 
 (pp. 8, 9, 13). 
 
 It is not Luther who can be blamed for 
 
MATERIALISM, FIRST INVASION i8i 
 
 any share, even an unconscious one, in the 
 preparation or stimulation of this particular 
 excess. But Puritanism, with its reaction 
 against the three monastic vows and yet with 
 an asceticism of its own, peculiar in kind and 
 degree — Calvin's and WilHam Penn's sub- 
 stitute for the monastic vows — ^was (as a 
 matter of fact, not of intention) the training- 
 school, for some twelve or more generations, 
 chiefly in America, of an activity unnatural 
 in the intensity of its concentration upon 
 matters largely of little or no intrinsic attrac- 
 tion or educative worth. The monastic 
 movement had assuredly been profoundly 
 right in its ideal, and in its practice when 
 the movement was at its best, of holding 
 aloft, incarnate before the world, the practice 
 of self-renouncement, as an essential element 
 of Christianity, indeed of all fully alive 
 religion, and even of all serious and fruitful 
 human living. But, in the actual working of 
 this ideal by and amongst frail men, certain 
 grave abuses had doubtlessly arisen. Never- 
 theless I believe that the history of the world 
 since those times is proving the Protestant 
 Reformation to have been an excessive revolu- 
 tion, in its attempt to abolish monasticism, 
 root and branch. However, Calvin and Penn 
 
1 82 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 (contrasting very favourably, in this respect, 
 with a large portion of our more recent West 
 European and American trend) retained too 
 vivid a sense of the abiding place of some kind 
 and degree of asceticism amongst the essential 
 constituents of all virile religion, not to feel 
 that the mere abolition of the three monastic 
 vows and of an externally distinct class of 
 men, devoted especially to the self-renuncia- 
 tory element, was insufficient. They had to 
 discover a substitute for that monastic Hfe 
 generally, and one that could be adopted by 
 all men — but what was this substitute to 
 be ? Their rigorism condemned pretty well all 
 art and philosophy, the social and sensuous 
 amenities and relaxations of life, — ^in the case 
 of the Quakers, also every military activity: 
 all this was too dangerous for inclusion, within 
 any and every Christian's life, even as simply 
 so much raw material and occasion of self- 
 discipHne for and by the Christian soul. The 
 asceticism, then, could not here consist in any 
 moderating of, or in any dividing up amongst 
 mankind of the attention to, these intrinsically 
 unassimilable things. The monk had gone at 
 the one end of the scale; the maypole had to 
 go at the other. Indeed how retain ends of a 
 scale at all, if the very notion of a scale, with 
 
PURITANS AND MATERIALISM 183 
 
 its steps and stages, is all wrong ? Yet the need 
 and the will for activity of some kind had not 
 been killed amongst these rigorists, it had 
 indeed been immensely steeled and stimulated 
 (for and within certain narrow limits) by the 
 very intensity and concentration of their 
 rigoristic creed. One great field for action 
 (alongside of administrative and governmental 
 interests) here alone remained open to the 
 zealous soul — the practice of determined con- 
 centration upon the virtues of industry and 
 honesty, as exercised and developed in trade, 
 business, money-making. Besides, such acti- 
 vity turned out the most sure of the means 
 towards the acquisition of the money neces- 
 sary for the spreading and the flourishing of 
 this conviction and mode of life. 
 
 And long after the originally religious 
 motive and restraints had relaxed, their 
 effects remained, in a human will fashioned 
 in the mode necessary for the prevalence of 
 the type of business man who will, for half a 
 century, starve out seven-tenths of his nature, 
 with a view to making quite unneeded money 
 in the most mechanical of ways. The results 
 of such excessive concentration and produc- 
 tion are, sooner or later, huge, soul-destroying 
 7 rusts y immense national rivalries, and appal- 
 
i84 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 ling bloody wars largely occasioned by the 
 existence and ever-growing needs of such 
 insatiable machines. If the Neapolitan Laz- 
 zarone is a human monstrosity and no neces- 
 sity, also the over-busy business man is, as 
 truly, both these things. Nor should the case 
 of the Jews be adduced in refutation. For if 
 the Jews have not been steeled and narrowed 
 by Puritanism, yet they have passed through 
 two millenniums of circumstances even stranger 
 and stronger as so many forces of deflection 
 from the natural course of development. 
 The violent, and (later on) the apparently 
 permanent, uprooting from their own land and 
 from all agriculture, the dispersion amongst 
 intensely unfriendly alien peoples, and the 
 mostly severe exclusion from all the profes- 
 sions regarded (at the time) as the more 
 regular and liberal — all this could not, and did 
 not, fail to produce a type of mankind con- 
 centrated, beyond the instincts and needs of 
 normal human nature, upon the few activities 
 which, for so long, were alone left open to this 
 race, so wonderful withal in its deathless 
 tenacity and vigour. 
 
 But as to Germany, there was the second 
 invasion, — the advance by leaps and bounds 
 of Mathematico-physical Science in its direct, 
 
MATERIALISM, SECOND INVASION 185 
 
 triumphantly successful application to human 
 physical comfort, and with the all but inevit- 
 able weakening of the sense, which alone 
 ensures the soul's nobility, as to the true (the 
 ever secondary and ministerial) place of all 
 such things. A pedantic barbarism was (in 
 Germany as more or less in other countries 
 also) the necessary result, a coarsening of 
 man's feeling, thinking and theory — " philo- 
 sophical " MateriaHsm, Naturalism, Monism 
 became the vogue. And this vogue, still so 
 powerful everywhere, arises undoubtedly in 
 part on occasion of noble discoveries and of 
 the labours of men far more cautious and 
 spiritual than their mostly noisy and reckless 
 popularisers ; and again, also, as a reaction 
 against, or as a relentless application of, 
 various excesses or weaknesses of the Idealist 
 philosophy. It was in 1854, ^^ ^^^ Naturalists' 
 Congress in Gottingen, that passionate de- 
 bates on Materialism showed how largely it 
 then held the attention and imagination of 
 the pubHc. Vogt, Moleschott, Biichner were 
 intensely active in this direction. And as 
 late as 1872 D. F. Strauss could, in his last 
 book, The Old and the New Faith^ declare 
 himself a MateriaHst. Since 1859 ^^^ Darwin's 
 Origin of Species, Evolution had been especially 
 
i86 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 pressed by Germans into the service of a 
 variously aggressive Monism of a preponder- 
 antly materialistic kind — so especially by 
 Ernst Haeckel, whose World-Riddle (1899) was 
 at its 240th thousand, in the German original 
 alone, in 1908. 
 
 There was the third invasion, — the danger- 
 ously rapid, complete and immense success 
 of the Bismarckian poHcy, in its three closely 
 interconnected wars of 1864, 1866, 1870. 
 The great influx of gold from France came 
 as the third on top of those other two waves 
 of Materialism; and it came, not indeed 
 without great previous sacrifices and virtues 
 of the German people at large, yet still planned 
 (to the last detail), not by themselves or by 
 men of liberal sympathies, but by a genius 
 scornful of all truly constitutional government, 
 of small nationalities, of all moral scruples 
 that stood in the way, not simply of the exist- 
 ence or slow growth, but of the violent political 
 consoHdation and the physical predomin- 
 ance, of Germany. Bismarck himself was 
 too observant a mind not to fear the full 
 triumph now before us of Junker militarism 
 and Colonial megalomania. If International 
 Morality consists in scrupulosity as to the 
 means and in self-limitation as to the ends, 
 
MATERIALISM, LAST INVASIONS 187 
 
 then Bismarck, in the latter respect, must be 
 accounted a moral statesman. His successors, 
 as Prince Bulow's Imperial Germany shows 
 so vividly, have continued Bismarck's means 
 but have, mostly quite deliberately, dropped 
 his ends. 
 
 The fourth and present invasion is precisely 
 this Pan-Germanism and " The State is 
 Force " doctrine, which the AUies are up in 
 arms against, and which has been fed, for 
 half a century, upon most of the finer, most 
 even of the finest, needs and qualities of the 
 German character. 
 
 It is plain from all this how greatly the rest 
 of Europe, and indeed America too in an 
 especial degree, shares the responsibility for 
 the first two invasions of Materialism here 
 indicated. Monsieur le Play, that remarkable 
 French observer in his very careful books 
 upon the working-men of Europe and upon 
 the social reforms he considered urgent, found, 
 in 1 864-1 878, the agricultural and family 
 system to be almost everywhere undermined, 
 and the reforms to be chiefly necessary in 
 France. And the most influential preachers, 
 throughout Europe generally, of man's sacred, 
 
i88 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 primary right to ever increasing creature* 
 comfort were, not Germans, but the EngHsh- 
 men Bentham and Herbert Spencer. These 
 movements doubtless possessed their element 
 of truth and usefulness, at and for their times. 
 But now, for some thirty years at least, the 
 finer minds and outlooks have everywhere 
 been recovering a hearing against the Phihs- 
 tinism that, assuredly, lurks very plentifully 
 in those positions. 
 
 As to the Bismarckian wars, we in England 
 now see clearly how deplorable was our non- 
 intervention in 1864, when we ought to have 
 succoured Denmark in her straits. 
 
 A final point. Germany is now so formidable 
 a foe, and one that so profoundly requires 
 defeating, not directly because a false doctrine 
 peculiar to herself possesses her, with only as 
 much devotion given to her conviction as the 
 Allies would give to any conviction of theirs; 
 but because a spirit of sheer money-making 
 and boundless commerciaHsm, which more 
 or less penetrates and vulgarises us all, and 
 which we ourselves rather than they began, 
 has, in the German, found a lodging within an 
 incredibly vehement and concentrated, sys- 
 tematic and visionary soul. 
 
AVOID GERMANIST INFECTION 189 
 
 IV 
 
 The things that we ourselves should not do, 
 and the points, in the now dominant outlook 
 of the German soul, at which we can and 
 should act and where we can hope for a change 
 or development, appear to be, respectively, two 
 and four. 
 
 There are, assuredly, two very contrary 
 things, which, as all extremes, pretty easily 
 call forth and supplant each other, that we 
 must avoid, if we would not, whilst damaging 
 our own minds and characters, still further 
 complicate the future difficulty of awakening 
 Germany to her own best state of soul. 
 
 (I) 
 
 We must not ourselves become infected by, 
 and envious of, the very spirit and method 
 which we deplore in the Germans. This 
 warning is, very certainly, not superfluous. 
 Let us, indeed, work for better organisation 
 — of our own best kind; for a permanent 
 national home defence on the Swiss model; 
 for greater concentration in our school and 
 
190 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 university education; and for many another 
 development and improvement of which the 
 first idea and impulsion may well come to us 
 from Germany, and from this war with the 
 Central Empires. Yet all such movements 
 will have to be carefully assimilated to, and 
 integrated within, our own special past his- 
 tory and special persistent psychic capability, 
 these things taken of course at their best and 
 as capable of considerable modification. 
 
 This rule is assuredly not observed by such 
 a writer as the late Professor J. A. Cramb, in 
 his much circulated book Germany and Eng- 
 land, of 1 9 14. The vivid, generous-minded 
 sketches, especially that of Treitschke, there 
 given, are indeed most useful helps towards 
 our understanding the war mentality of pre- 
 sent-day Germany; and no doubt it is this 
 descriptive side of the book that won it the 
 high praise of Lord Roberts, whose own 
 mentality was assuredly not that shown by 
 the background, the ultimate admirations of 
 the writer. For Cramb is, at bottom, himself 
 too much impressed and influenced by that 
 very outlook not to long that things and dis- 
 positions might come about amongst ourselves, 
 which would be in place only within a Caesarist 
 democracy. After all, even our own Cromwell 
 
ESCAPE SHEER ANTI-GERMANISM 191 
 
 requires to be received with a decided mixture 
 of praise and of blame. And a resuscitation of 
 the worship of the One Man and of Force, so 
 intemperately preached by Carlyle, is neither 
 what we require, nor what, if we sincerely 
 strove for it, would leave us any adequate 
 reasons, of a larger and abidingly important 
 kind, for our most costly opposition to the 
 now dominant German spirit. 
 
 (2) 
 
 And we must not, on the other hand, lump 
 everything German together, as though it were 
 all evil, or, at least, as though mankind at 
 large, and we ourselves, did not require the 
 German contribution, at its best, as truly as 
 the others, the Germans included, require our 
 own contribution to the world's, surely not 
 over-great, stock in the things that must not 
 die. We must escape the thinning down and 
 deterioration of our outlook to any sheer, 
 direct anti-Germanism, and the admittance of 
 ever weak and weakening panic into our souls. 
 The greatness of England has consisted, and 
 we will each of us see to it that it continues to 
 consist, in moderation; equitableness ; pre- 
 supposition of innocence where there are no 
 
192 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 serious reasons, in that particular case, for 
 suspecting the man's guilt; and the absence 
 of all fanaticisms. Hence the impulsions 
 deprecated would be doubly deplorable 
 amongst ourselves. Professor Gilbert Murray 
 speaks most justly, in his delightful contribu- 
 tion to The International Crisis (Oxford, 
 1915, p. 32), of " the semi-insane suspicions 
 of Prince Louis of Battenberg, of Lord 
 Haldane, and of persons even more exalted." 
 The attempt to secure the declaration that 
 no naturalised British subject could legally 
 be a Privy Councillor suffered from an analo- 
 gous weakness ; whilst the looting of the shops 
 of poor Germans in the East End of London 
 was of course deeply disgusting to all truly 
 responsible persons amongst us. 
 
 But indeed the country has remained, upon 
 the whole, remarkably free from hatred or 
 wholesale condemnation — those ever weak 
 and weakening states of soul; although this 
 relative equanimity is, of course, no miracle for 
 us who have been spared the occupation of any 
 of our territory by the enemy, such as has be- 
 fallen especially Belgium and Servia, and in 
 parts France and Russia also. Noble fruit has 
 sprung up for us from the best British sowing, 
 watering and pruning in the past. So with 
 
EXAMPLES OF ENGLISH SANITY 193 
 
 the decision given in favour of the legality 
 of the Privy Councillorships just mentioned; 
 the repeated explicit refusal of the Govern- 
 ment, in Parliament and elsewhere, to take 
 the fact of a man's originally German or 
 Austrian nationality as of itself alone branding 
 him as a suspect person ; the impressive com- 
 pleteness of trust reposed in the whilom enemy 
 Generals Louis Botha and Smuts and the 
 splendid answer to, and success of, this trust; 
 and the mutually generous and collaborative 
 relations between the native Indian rulers 
 and troops and the central British authorities. 
 And, on a smaller scale, and in literary ways, 
 how refreshingly sane and just in their warm 
 patriotism are such utterances as those of the 
 Vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds, 
 Dr. M. E. Sadler, Modern Germany and the 
 Modern Worlds and of Sir James Donaldson, 
 Principal of St. Andrews University — both 
 given forth after the war had lasted a month 
 or two, and the latter the final address to his 
 students of that strong, serene soul. 
 
 The points, at which we can and should 
 help, or where we can hope for a change or 
 
194 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 development in the now dominant outlook 
 of the German soul, appear to be the following 
 four. I move from the point where we our- 
 selves, the Allies, will have to do pretty well 
 everything, to the deeper and deepest matters 
 where directly we can do nothing except 
 admit and correct our own similar or contrary 
 deviations. 
 
 (0 
 
 The starting-point must be supplied by the 
 failure of Germany in this war, a failure suffi- 
 ciently clear and massive to awaken the 
 majority of the German people to an active, 
 efficacious, persistent dissatisfaction with the 
 militarist Absolutism and feverish Pan- 
 Germanism increasingly dominant during the 
 last three generations. It is Germany's visible, 
 " realistic " preponderance in the world, the 
 reputation of ultimate physical irresistibility, 
 that are now evidently dear above all 
 to the average German; only a very clear, 
 very large failure of these pretensions, as 
 brought to a test in this war, will make him 
 change his mind. And such a failure is difficult 
 for the Allies to obtain against a Government 
 and people bent upon the precisely opposite 
 success, with a length and extensiveness 
 
ALLIES MUST WIN DECISIVELY 195 
 
 of preparation, and an intensity of con- 
 centrated purpose, probably unmatched in 
 history. 
 
 Indeed the difficulty here is twofold. Abso- 
 lute Government undoubtedly possesses great 
 advantages for the successful prosecution of 
 war; and the German people has long shown 
 how much it cares for success in war and, 
 almost from time immemorial, how little it 
 dreads Absolutism. On this, the starting- 
 point for change, it is not the Germans them- 
 selves that can be expected to supply the 
 materials for so extensive a modification of 
 their present state of mind. The Allies have 
 either to win very great, quite tangible suc- 
 cesses, or they have so hugely to drain the 
 resources of Germany, as, in either case, to 
 bring the majority of the German people 
 itself to realise that it has lived for a legend 
 or, at least, for something costing more than 
 it is worth. 
 
 Yet, after all, such consummations are well 
 within the power of achievement by the 
 AUies. Such a concentration upon war as 
 has been effected by Germany, even if now 
 over half a century in operation, cannot be 
 kept up for ever even by Germans; especially 
 since, precisely because of the special temper 
 
196 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 and methods which have made her so formid- 
 able a military machine, she can indeed win 
 over to active alliance such semi-barbarous 
 governments as Turkey and Bulgaria, and can, 
 perhaps, keep dynastically related Greece and 
 Rumania neutral to the end: but she can 
 hardly win or check any one else. And yet 
 not all her present helpers will suffice against 
 the Allies, even if these acquire no further 
 active adherents, provided only that they 
 continue strenuous and united until the clear 
 and crushing defeat or exhaustion of the 
 Central Empires. Thus, and thus alone, can 
 and will German Real-Politik be refuted on 
 its own ground. 
 
 Here we English can profoundly help 
 Germans to re-find their best selves: all 
 thoughts of any peace stopping short of such 
 clear great victory mean the abandonment 
 of the attempt to furnish the datum and 
 starting-point for Germany's own true regene- 
 ration. Thus none but Germans themselves 
 can take the place, or can directly aid the 
 re-development, of their own true selves; 
 yet only non-Germans, indeed only men for 
 the time arrayed in a bloody war against them, 
 can furnish Germans, as they have now 
 become predominantly, with the kind of facts 
 
GERMANS & SELF-GOVERNMENT 197 
 
 necessary for any such change in their mental 
 orientation . 
 
 (2) 
 
 Perhaps the first point that we can hope to 
 see changed in the Germans by the Germans 
 themselves, will be the awakening of the need 
 for some form and degree of genuine political 
 self-government, so strong as to force the 
 abandonment of the present very real auto- 
 cracy, the repression of the Junker and Pan- 
 Germanic swagger, and either the renunciation 
 of the ambitious colonial policy (a thing so 
 recent, and so profoundly distrusted even by 
 Bismarck all his life) or, at least, the infusion 
 of a new spirit into such large colonisation. 
 Colonisation would then primarily become a 
 means for genuine improvement in the lot of 
 the natives and for the training thereby of 
 young German officials in self-restraint and a 
 wisely sympathetic government of aHen, and 
 more or less barbarous, races. Genuine self- 
 government at home would transform the 
 political parties in the Reichstag, from 
 critics perennially possessing only the power 
 to reject, modify or accept the Budget of the 
 Government, and deprived of what alone is a 
 full cure for doctrinaires — the opportunity of 
 themselves carrying out successfully their 
 
198 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 own ideas — ^into groups ever liable to achieve 
 the responsibility of office. Thus all the chief 
 sections, interests, currents of the body politic 
 would receive a genuinely political education; 
 each would actively contribute to the all- 
 round development and health of the State's 
 rule within; and the State's respect for, and 
 restraint towards, the specific lives of the 
 family, the trade, the municipality would grow 
 more genuine and articulate. 
 
 Here, with regard to this organic conception 
 of the State as but one, though the most 
 extensive, of the organisms which lie around 
 the individual man, the State which, in its own 
 manner and degree, is itself also a persona non 
 ficta, it is precisely German thinkers (especially 
 the great Otto von Gierke) who have been 
 leading the way, also for us here in England, 
 by much admirable work. And municipal life 
 in Germany has so long a history and so 
 vigorous an activity, that in it, and in the 
 guild, lie ready the concrete preliminaries for 
 the more general, the political, evolution of 
 this organic sense. True, the advance from 
 even the richest, most vividly apprehended, 
 theory to practice, in fields unfamiliar to a 
 people, is usually very difficult; and here the 
 transition, from such limited complexes to 
 
NATIONAL CHARACTER CHANGES 199 
 
 the supreme, the all-englobing complex of the 
 State, is a change, not simply of degree, but 
 of kind; and it is especially when the average 
 German's practice touches this supreme com- 
 plex that he has ever shown so strange a 
 passivity, indeed an actual liking for being 
 ordered about in a minutely regulated manner, 
 provided only it be mechanically perfect. 
 
 Yet, after all, national character is, if really 
 limited, limited in ways that cannot be forecast 
 in any detail by even its deepest representa- 
 tives or acutest critics. Thus the Englishman, 
 typified by St. Thomas k Becket and by King 
 Henry VHL, as an Ironside under Crom- 
 well and as a fellow-reveller of the Merry 
 Monarch, as a subject of George II. and such 
 as he is now under George V. — ^what bewilder- 
 ing changes, many of them quite unforesee- 
 able! Nor is the modification of the German, 
 here hoped for, essentially greater than has 
 been the change of the Frenchman, from the 
 dreamer of a domination of Europe under 
 Louis XIV. or Napoleon I. to the sober- 
 minded Frenchman of our time ; or, again, 
 than the change from the German of an 
 outlook largely determined by Goethe, or by 
 Kant, or by Wilhelm von Humboldt, to the 
 German temper which we now deplore. 
 
200 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 (3) 
 
 But the State, thus conceived as a moral 
 complex in its action inwards — as the environ- 
 ment, stimulator and protector of the other 
 complexes (each different in kind from one 
 another and from it) which it includes — ^has 
 also to be recognised as a moral complex in its 
 dealings with the other complexes (similar to 
 itself in kind) outside itself. That is, there 
 exists, deep within the nature of things them- 
 selves, such a thing as international morality. 
 Here is the point where the problems are 
 especially difficult, and still only dimly, inter- 
 mittently recognised and practised by us all. 
 It is here also that the official German spirit 
 has, for these last seventy years, been especi- 
 ally faulty and deleterious. 
 
 The intrinsic difficulties appear here to 
 be threefold. Every man, group, institution 
 that claims to act and to be treated morally 
 is, as regards the apparent consistency and 
 honesty of his position, at a necessary disad- 
 vantage when contrasted with men, groups, 
 institutions that disavow any such pretensions. 
 No human beings or groups do, or can, always 
 live up to even their most sober and sacred 
 convictions; hence the less they put up a 
 
GERMANS AND STATE MORALITY 201 
 
 standard of living, the less their actual life will 
 be chargeable with empty rhetoric or wily 
 hypocrisy. Thus an acutely observant Roman 
 Catholic cleric told me how impressive had 
 been a Mussulman's vibratingly sincere plea 
 to him for polygamy, as alone truly manly 
 and straightforward — that it alone frankly 
 legalises what amongst monogamous peoples 
 is also well known to be part of the unalterable 
 nature of things, the very frequent poly- 
 gamous practice being there hypocritically 
 covered over with fine monogamous theories 
 and empty, sickening rhetoric. Then again 
 even some of the moral obligations of the 
 individual, such as " thou shalt not steal," 
 " thou shalt speak the truth," incur suspen- 
 sion where, say, a man dying of hunger carries 
 off an unpaid-for loaf; or where a man, to save 
 the Hfe of an innocent fellow-creature, mis- 
 directs the pursuers. And at least equally 
 great analogous exceptions have to be granted 
 in the moral life and duties of the state. And 
 lastly, there is the quite specific, as yet hardly 
 elaborated, difference within similarity, that 
 the relations between state and state cannot 
 indeed, in the long run, be treated as intrinsi- 
 cally non-moral, yet that their morality differs 
 from the morahty of the relations between 
 
202 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 man and man. For the State's existence and 
 action is, not the parallel or response to the 
 individual man's existence and action, but 
 the presupposition and medium of this in- 
 dividual man's wholesome action and secure 
 existence. 
 
 Yet, as with the individual so with the State, 
 we have, not to run away from or succumb 
 to difficulties, but partly to resolve, partly 
 to bear them, as intrinsic to the task of man- 
 kind. The first obstacle must be met by a 
 frank admission of the universaHty of the 
 fact that a man's practice always lags be- 
 hind his conviction, and that the more ade- 
 quate his conviction the more prolific in ever 
 new problems it will be; and by a persistent 
 demonstration how futile the use of this fact 
 is as against the admission of moral concepts 
 here or anywhere else. The second objection 
 probably finds its best answer in a constant 
 distinction between Ethics and Casuistry, 
 and by the practice of a maximum of Ethics 
 and a minimum of Casuistry, — cleaving the 
 exceptions to be met, in what then will 
 always be felt to be more or less rare or 
 unique occasions, by a moral sense ren- 
 dered simple and straight precisely by the 
 long preceding periods of its exercise and 
 
LIFE TEACHES STATE MORALITY 203 
 
 application in what are recognised as the nor- 
 mal circumstances. And any efficient answer 
 to the third difficulty can make headway 
 only if and after, and never before, we have 
 recognised the State as essentially moral, as 
 (after all) the creation, however spontaneous 
 and necessary, of human beings, who begin to 
 be, and who remain, human only so long as 
 they possess, in any and all of their functions 
 and formations, some interior strivmg, con- 
 ffict, groping, ideal, all of an ever incomplete 
 kind, never more than partially practised, 
 yet none the less truly moral. 
 
 The first stage of this study will have shown 
 how differently, yet everywhere really, diffi- 
 cult is any such full and persistent recognition 
 of the essentially moral character of the State, 
 within each of the four large German groups 
 there considered. Yet Hfe, the great teacher, 
 is subtly yet unconquerably against all these 
 groups, in so far as they will ignore or deny, 
 in word or in deed, the ethical nature of the 
 State. This war will itself teach us all very 
 much on this point : it will refute all hanker- 
 ings after " the splendid isolation " of Eng- 
 land and, especially, the now official German 
 doctrine that the State is based upon force 
 (not will); that, in relation to other states, 
 
204 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 it has solely to consider its own physical 
 aggrandisement and superiority (instead of, 
 first, its own existence); and that it needs no 
 trust, no friendship, from other states but 
 their fear alone (instead of their respect based 
 both upon its honesty and its force). No such 
 " pure " teachings correspond to real human 
 Hfe, ever essentially " mixed," and ever 
 (slowly and inconsistently yet truly) growing 
 in the depth and range of its standards even 
 more than in the consistency of its practice. 
 The long competition between polygamy and 
 monogamy, of slavery and freedom and the 
 like, shows plainly how impracticable and 
 sentimental appeared, for tens of centuries, 
 the men who, in such other matters, stood 
 where now stand the promoters of Hague 
 Conferences. Those men and these men 
 appeared and appear thus to such others, 
 because the latter are too much obsessed by 
 brute force and the immediate effects of blind 
 battle, primarily within and for the complex 
 of the State and the function of war, to 
 perceive and to foster the eventually all- 
 conquering power of the elastic, subtle growths 
 of the deeper Hfe itself, and its variously 
 large, yet everywhere real, presence and 
 operation. 
 
MAN ESSENTIALLY AMPHIBIOUS 205 
 
 (4) 
 
 Yet the last change is the most clamorous 
 for us all; and here especially we can see how 
 strongly the first two groups are working, in 
 Germany itself, to stimulate and incorporate 
 the most ultimate and ineradicable need of 
 man as he remains persistently throughout 
 time and space. The fact is that, now less 
 than ever, can man be made into something 
 not essentially amphibious. True, he has his 
 earthly life, with its predominantly physical 
 requirements and individual self-seeking; he 
 finds himself, from the first, environed and 
 moulded by the complexes, largely one within 
 the other, of his family, his trade, his state; he 
 even discovers, and (in practice) is largely 
 determined by, the fact that his own state 
 (and he himself with it) depends extensively 
 upon the existence, the rivalry, the trust and 
 the friendship of other states. Yet all this, 
 indefinitely improvable though it all be, does 
 not, in the long run, suffice him: sooner or 
 later he finds himself solicited by " another 
 state " or condition, " a new rule "; he gets 
 a glimpse of what has variously impelled him 
 all along. The supernatural life, in a word, is 
 as real a fact as is the natural life. My dog 
 
2o6 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 requires his fellow-dogs, but he also requires 
 me, once he has experienced human society. 
 And I myself require my fellow-men, but I 
 also require God and intercourse with Him, 
 as the great realities revealed to me at work 
 within my life, by religion. 
 
 Now here there are two difficulties, special 
 (in the intensity of their degree) to the German 
 soul. It is clear at once that the feverish race 
 for wealth and material power, prevalent 
 especially in Germany, yet also in America 
 and England during these last three genera- 
 tions, inevitably deadens the soul to its own 
 deepest intimations. But then this obsession 
 of the soul by, say, one tenth — and the least 
 fruitful, least final tenth — of a fully awake 
 soul's interests, is too near to mania to last 
 permanently anywhere; it is no more satisfy- 
 ing than is the opposite, the do-nothing 
 existence. And especially the artisan classes, 
 in Germany as elsewhere, already show clear 
 signs of a fuller awakening to these deepest of 
 man's interests; and this will powerfully aid 
 the classes above and below them in their turn 
 more fully to regain or to discover the same, 
 their own greatest, needs. But it is surely also 
 clear how powerful in our times are the solicita- 
 tions that tend to deflect, or to arrest, the 
 
GERMAN RELIGIOUS HINDRANCES 207 
 
 genuine development of any such movement, 
 and to make it rest, not in Historical Religion, 
 taken as a truthful witness to more than 
 human reality — a real God, a real soul, a real 
 life of each in the other, begun here and 
 completed beyond the grave — but in some 
 form of pure Immanence — or, at most, in 
 some variety of Fichteism — belief in the more 
 than human, quite ultimate, reahty of certain 
 laws of the ethical life. This danger, assuredly 
 real even in England, is trebly real in Germany 
 for reasons presumably obvious to us now. 
 
 Our best hopes for Germany here lie, I 
 believe, in three directions. 
 
 The Churches, and in particular the great 
 Roman Catholic Church, are not played out. 
 Especially if, and when, they fully wake up 
 to the moral character of the State also in 
 its international dealings, will they be driven 
 back upon their primary domain and function, 
 the witness to what Hes beyond, what ulti- 
 mately requires, and is required by, even the 
 widest of such natural complexes and outlooks 
 — seas of Nature surrounded by the ocean of 
 Supernature. Roman Catholicism, even in 
 Germany, cannot permanently become Chau- 
 vinistic; and, by its fuller recognition of the 
 
208 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 State as the specific organ of natural morality, 
 it will stimulate both the State to this morality 
 and itself, the Church, to its own supernatural 
 ethics. 
 
 Philosophy is not played out. Assuredly it 
 cannot be dictated to by any theology or 
 Church. But religion, where it exists suffi- 
 ciently massive and sincere, can both sober 
 and stimulate philosophy to an ever greater 
 sensitiveness towards the specific facts of 
 religion and towards philosophy's own stan- 
 dards and end. And thus imperfect philo- 
 sophies can be replaced by philosophies more 
 adequate as theories of the actual realities of 
 life which, after all, are the sole true data of 
 philosophy. Thus Hegel rightly supplanted 
 Kant in the question of the Good Will as never 
 simply a form but as always also related to 
 other already extant realities and goods. And 
 in its conception of the State, Hegelianism 
 wanted little more than the corrections intro- 
 duced by the English Hegelians to be of a 
 grand adequacy. But Hegel himself, indeed 
 the entire Idealist succession, is (as regards 
 the theory of knowledge and the philosophy 
 of religion) now, after the dreary reaction of 
 MateriaUsm, such as that of the later Feuer- 
 bach and of Haeckel, in process of supplanta- 
 
GERMAN RELIGIOUS HOPES 209 
 
 tion by a sober critical Realism, represented 
 by such men as Dr. Frischeisen-Kohler and 
 Professors Windelband and Kiilpe. Professor 
 Troeltsch too can be assigned his place here, 
 at least as regards a keen sense of the inade- 
 quacies of Kant and Hegel in face of the 
 central facts of religion. Philosophies that 
 leave no room for Prayer, Adoration, Sin, 
 Forgiveness, Redemption, may be excellent 
 in many other directions, and also ^s criticisms 
 and stimulants of religious thought; but, 
 as would-be adequate theories of religion, 
 they cannot fail more or less to misconceive 
 and to explain away facts of inexhaustible 
 vitality. 
 
 And the artisan classes, hitherto the strong- 
 hold of a largely materialistic Socialism, are 
 not played out, as future centres and vehicles 
 of truly religious apprehension. In England 
 symptoms of the awakening of the religious 
 sense within these classes are increasing; and 
 as to Germany, we have the conviction of so 
 well-informed and cautious an observer as 
 Professor Troeltsch that the greater part of 
 the German Socialist movement will, not long 
 hence, seek spiritual shelter and sustenance 
 in some such small Christian communities as 
 the Herrnhuters or the Moravian Brethren. 
 
210 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 Let me conclude with a renewed insistence 
 upon vision, as profoundly congenial to, and 
 immensely powerful within, the German soul. 
 The point is important, for it is plain that men 
 can escape the evils of a false theory, either by 
 attaining to distrust of all theories, or by the 
 substitution of a more adequate theory for 
 that false one. Were Englishmen ever capable 
 of such obsession by a false theory, they would 
 assuredly be cured in the first way, not the 
 second. But Germans, I submit, will have to 
 be cured, doubtless, they also, on occasion of 
 certain facts new to themselves, yet sub- 
 stantially by means of a new, wider, more 
 adequate and more nobly German, vision of 
 their own. Paul Heyse in one of his stories 
 (always so exquisite in form yet mostly so 
 frivolous in moral temper) presents an occur- 
 rence as real, which I take to be typical of the 
 manner in which Germans — the shock from 
 outside having been given them — will alone 
 fully recover their own souls. A young married 
 woman of Cologne longs to bear a child so 
 spiritually fair that men's mere sight of it 
 shall perennially win them to the love of the 
 Invisible ; yet how to help on this consumma- 
 tion she has no idea at all. But daily, in shine 
 and shower, she prays before an altar in the 
 
THE LARGER GERMAN VISION 211 
 
 great cathedral, and looks up in rapt absorp- 
 tion at an angel's countenance, gazing serenely- 
 down upon her from out of the stained-glass 
 window above. She prays thus, ever longing, 
 absorbed and wondering, from spring to 
 winter. And in the physical winter she experi- 
 ences a deep spiritual spring : for she now bears 
 a daughter; and behold — the angel face. And 
 this daughter, henceforward to the end, wins 
 men to the upward life by her very look — 
 more by what she is than by any single act 
 she does. Somewhat thus, I submit, will 
 Germany reform her soul and its acts, not 
 directly by self-criticism or by the dropping 
 of all dreams, good or bad; but by absorption 
 in another, a nobler and more adequate, 
 vision, by one truly expressive of her own 
 noblest self. She will perceive the German 
 race and state as indeed a permanently essen- 
 tial, most important, constituent of mankind; 
 yet this on condition that, whilst respecting 
 these her own self-expressions, she also respects 
 and nourishes the other different complexes 
 within her own borders; that she recognises 
 this German state and race as but one amongst 
 many others, all variously necessary to each 
 other ; and, above all, that she vividly appre- 
 hends the spiritual, eternal, other-world life 
 
212 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 as the moderator, here already, of her ever 
 proximate tendency to vehemence and excess. 
 Such a procedure will be very un-English, but 
 it will be thoroughly characteristic of, it will 
 but resume, the noblest traditions and teach- 
 ings with which the human race at large has 
 been stimulated and supplied by that essen- 
 tially rich and large, but of late " heady " 
 and hardened, spirit — the German Soul. 
 
INDEX 
 
 A n asterisk indicates pages devoted to direct quotaHons or 
 discussions. 
 
 Acts of the Apostles, the, on 
 
 ■- War, 41, 42 
 
 Allies, the, where they can 
 help to produce, and where 
 they can hope to see, 
 changes in now dominant 
 German outlook, * 194-207 
 
 America, its theory and its 
 practice as to natural equal- 
 ity of all races, 100, loi; 
 intense Industrialism of, 
 its invasion of Germany, 
 180, 187; the chief Puritan 
 training-school towards In- 
 dustrialism, 18 1 -184; its 
 share of responsibility for 
 European Materialism, 187, 
 188; England's regret for 
 her attempted coercion of 
 her colonies in, 167, 168 
 
 Amphibious character essen- 
 tial toman, 115, 205 
 
 Andreae, Johannes, the canon- 
 ist, on the State as a 
 Persona Ficta, 46 
 
 Anti-Germanism, direct, to 
 be avoided, 191 -193 
 
 Antonine, the, Roman Em- 
 perors, 17 
 
 Apostolic Christian times, 
 their attitude towards State 
 and War, 41-43 
 
 Aquinas, 45, 161; see Thomas 
 Aquinas, St. 
 
 Artisan classes, the, their 
 awakening to spiritual life, 
 206, 309 
 
 Assyrian State and the Jewish 
 nation, 95, 102 
 
 Augustine, St., endorses 
 Cicero's definition of the 
 State, 43, 44; his leading 
 religious categories. Sin and 
 Redemption, 161, 166; and 
 Givenness of religion, 171 
 
 Author, the, racial antece- 
 dents and affinities of, 
 ♦121-125; his articles on 
 Professor E. Troeltsch's 
 religious works, 12, 13 
 
 Babylonian State and Jewish 
 nation, 102 
 
 Battenberg, Prince Louis of, 
 192 
 
 Becket, St. Thomas, igg 
 
 Belloc, Hilaire, his definition 
 of War, 47, 48 
 
 Bentham, Jeremy, teaches 
 man's sacred right to ever- 
 increasing creature-com- 
 forts, 187, 18S 
 
 Bernhardi, General von, 96 
 
 Bevan, Edwyn, 14 
 
 Bickell, Rev. Dr. Gustav, 124 
 
 Bismarck, Prince Otto von, 
 his statesmanship moral 
 according to Professor 
 Troeltsch, 91, 92; a moral 
 statesman, not in his means 
 but in his ends, 186, 187; 
 his Memoirs contrasted 
 with Prince Bulow's book. 
 119; holds German race to 
 
 213 
 
214 
 
 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 be non-political, 139; dis- 
 trusts ambitious colonial 
 policy, for Germany, all his 
 life, 197; and the Kultur- 
 kampf, 141 
 
 Bitterness, German, against 
 England, its double root, 
 *I43-I45 
 
 Bosanquet, Prof. Bernard, 
 The Philosophical Theory 
 of the State, 19 10, 12 
 
 Botha, General Louis, 193 
 
 Boutroux, Emile, his articles 
 on the War, 1 1 
 
 Biichner, Louis, 185 
 
 Bulgaria, 196 
 
 Bulow, Prince Bernhard von, 
 his Imperial Germany con- 
 trasted with Prince Bis- 
 marck's Memoirs, 119, 187; 
 on Germans as a non-politi- 
 cal race, 139; Lord Cromer 
 on the book, *8i, 82 
 
 Burkitt, Professor F. C, 14 
 
 Calvin, John, his great superi- 
 ority to Luther, in concep- 
 tion of the State, 167, 168; 
 helps on, with Puritanism 
 generally, conditions neces- 
 sary for excessive Indus- 
 trialism, * 1 80- 1 84 
 
 Capitalism and the teaching 
 of Jesus, according to Nau- 
 mann, 51,52; and the Puri- 
 tans, * 1 80- 1 84; the Jews, 
 184; the Franco- German 
 War, 1870, 186 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 89, 191 
 
 Categories, the leading reli- 
 gious, in early Christianity, 
 Sin and Redemption, in 
 Scholastic Golden Age, 
 Nature and Supernature, 
 ♦160-163 
 
 Centre-party, the German 
 Catholic, 138, 165, 166 
 
 Character, National, can 
 change, for it has changed 
 in England, France, Ger- 
 many, 1 99 
 
 Charles II., King of England, 
 199 
 
 China, German Militarist 
 " f rightfulness " in, 99, 100 
 
 Chivalry, Mediaeval, 109 
 
 Christian position as to State 
 and War derives its appar- 
 ent hesitation partly from 
 its nobly realist insight into 
 essentially amphibious na- 
 ture of man's life here 
 below, *i 1 3-1 17 
 
 Church, the, the specifically 
 religious complex, *I09-II2; 
 its two chief functions, * 1 1 2, 
 113; its roots in the teach- 
 ing of Jesus, *39-4i ; cannot 
 be straightaway conceived 
 as built up from below, 
 47, *iii, 112 
 
 Church and State, the great 
 complexes respectively of 
 Supernatural and of Na- 
 tural Morality, *i62, 163 
 
 Cicero, M. T., his definition of 
 the State, 43, 44 
 
 Colonial rule, Germans with- 
 out the gifts necessary for 
 successful, *i 38-1 39; why 
 Germans think they possess 
 these gifts, * 139 -143; bru- 
 tality of Germans, 169; 
 megalomania as to. opposed 
 by Bismarck, 186, 187; 
 what it might become for 
 Germans, 197 
 
 Commercialism, boundless, is 
 vulgarising us all, 188 
 
 Conservatism, its present- 
 day troubles, according to 
 Troeltsch, 96 
 
 Cramb, J. A., his Germany 
 and England, 1914, deeply 
 
INDEX 
 
 2IS 
 
 infected with outlook it 
 
 describes, 189, 190 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 6j, 92, 
 
 190, 191, 199 
 Cruelty, appaxently greater 
 
 German than English, 
 
 probable causes of, *I45- 
 
 153 
 Culture, German, excessive 
 claims made for it by Ger- 
 mans: by a present-day 
 scholar, 7, 8; by J. G. 
 Fichte, 97, 98; *I7S-I77 
 
 Dante, on Nature and Super- 
 nature, 161; his Divina 
 Commedia, 177 
 
 Darwin, Charles, escapes from 
 his own life, into that 
 of an earth-worm, 71; his 
 Origin of Species, 1859, 
 pressed by German materi- 
 alists into service of aggres- 
 sive Monism, 185, 186 
 
 Darwinism, the crude, of 
 F. Naumann critically ex- 
 amined, * 59-64 
 
 Democracy, present-day, its 
 hypocrisy according to 
 Prof. Troeltsch, 77, 96 
 
 Denmark, Prussia's war with, 
 1864, 188 
 
 Denzinger, H., his Enchiri- 
 dion Syrabolorum et De- 
 clarationum de Rebus Fidei 
 et Morum, ed, 191 3, 47 
 
 Descartes, Ren6, inadequate 
 starting-point of his philo- 
 sophy, ♦84, 8$ 
 
 Dilthey, Wilhelm, his Jugend- 
 geschichte Hegels, 1905, 
 utilised, ♦133-135 
 
 Dog and Man, Man and God, 
 305, 206 
 
 Donaldson, Principal Sir 
 James, his address in Octo- 
 ber 1914, 193 
 
 Duhm, Prof. Bernhard, his 
 Jesaiah, 124 
 
 East End of London, looting 
 of German shops in, 192 
 
 Encyclical, the Papal, Im- 
 mortale Dei, 1885, 13, 46, 
 164 
 
 English, the, compared with 
 the German as to need of 
 theory, * 125 -128; indi- 
 vidual self-consciousness, 
 ♦146-149; pitch and cost 
 of psychic life, 149; egotism 
 and egoism, 1 56 ; are capable 
 of panic, 192; unfanatical 
 in long run, 192, 193; 
 colonising gift and test, 
 80-83 
 
 Eucken, Prof. Rudolf, 124, 
 171 
 
 Europeanism, Ranke's intense, 
 approved by Troeltsch, 98, 
 99; criticised, 100, loi 
 
 Eusebius, his Ecclesiastical 
 History quoted, 41 
 
 Evolution and Epigenesis dis- 
 tinguished, 62 
 
 Fenelon, Archbishop, and 
 " nerves," " nervousness," 
 149 
 
 Ferrero, Guilielmo, on last 
 days of July 1914, 11 
 
 Feuerbach, Ludwig, and Ger- 
 man theoretical bent, 132, 
 208 
 
 Fichte, J. G., on the State, 
 91; his Reden an die 
 deutsche Nation, 1808, their 
 Chauvinism, 97, 98 ; quoted 
 as to new education, ♦173- 
 175; as to prerogative of 
 Germanic peoples that re- 
 tain Germanic speech, ♦175- 
 177 
 
 Fieschi, Sinibaldo de, the 
 
2l6 
 
 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 canonist, first uses the 
 term Persona Ficta, 46, 164 
 
 Figgis, Rev. J. N., Studies in 
 Political Thought, 1907, 11, 
 112 
 
 France recovers from the 
 dreams of Louis XIV. and 
 Napoleon I., 66, 199; Eng- 
 land regrets her Hundred 
 Years' War against, 67 
 
 Frederick II., King of Prussia, 
 his unscrupulous war 
 against the Empress Maria 
 Theresa, 104, 105, 137; 
 how referred to by the 
 young Hegel, 134; his life- 
 work required romantic 
 drapery if it was to gain 
 Germans generally, 135, 136 
 
 French Yellow Book on causes 
 and preliminaries of Great 
 War, 118 
 
 Frischeisen-Kohler, Dr. Max, 
 a critically Realist philo- 
 sopher, 209 
 
 George II., King of England, 
 
 199 
 George V., King of England, 
 
 199 
 
 German, the: his urgent need 
 of theory, *i25-i28; 
 strength and weakness ac- 
 cruing thence, * 128- 132; 
 his tendency to Mythology, 
 Pantheism, Force, Worship, 
 ♦132-138; his bitterness 
 against England, its double 
 cause, ♦143-145; is perhaps 
 by nature not specially cruel, 
 but is without individual 
 self-consciousness or loose- 
 knitted mind, ♦145-153; is 
 strongly visionary, 156, 174, 
 ♦210-212 
 
 German and English com- 
 pared: as to theoretical 
 
 bent, * 1 25-1 28; self -con- 
 sciousness, ♦146-149; pitch 
 of the psychic life, ♦149, 
 150; generally, ♦154-157 
 German, Scotch, and English 
 compared, 123, 125, 132, 
 
 155 
 
 German, Italian, French, and 
 English compared, as to 
 need of system, ♦125-127 
 
 German, the, his three quali- 
 ties, according to Prof. 
 Troeltsch, as compared with 
 the West European, 89 
 
 German groups, four, speci- 
 ally studied: the Roman 
 Catholics,   1 5 9- 1 66 ; the 
 Protestants, ♦167-172; the 
 Idealists, ♦172-179; the 
 Materialists, ♦179-188; War 
 Book, the, 118, 119 
 
 German race, the, not political, 
 
 ♦138-143 
 
 Germany, why so formidable 
 in war, ♦194-197 
 
 Gierke, Prof. Otto, his Althu- 
 sius, ed. 191 3, quoted, *45; 
 his Das deutsche Genossen- 
 schaftsrecht, vol. 3, 188 1, 11; 
 his general position, 112, 
 124, 130, 198 
 
 Givenness, the, of the facts 
 and the faith in religion 
 generally, 1 10; in Christian- 
 ity in Our Lord's teaching, 
 ♦39-41; in the Christian 
 Church, ♦110-112; in the 
 Roman Catholic system, 47; 
 acutely realised by St. 
 Paul and St. Augustine, 
 also by Luther, 170, 171 
 
 Gnosticism, no, in teaching of 
 Jesus, ♦40,41; 113, 114 
 
 Goethe, W. von, his inter- 
 national outlook, 98, 199 
 
 Golden Rule, the, included, as 
 prerequisite, within Sermon 
 
INDEX 
 
 317 
 
 on the Mount, 71; State 
 and Church, the respective 
 guardians of the Rule and 
 the Sermon, 109, 162, 163 
 
 Greece, Rome conquers 
 Greece, significance of the 
 fact, 102, 103 ; present 
 day, 196 
 
 Grey, Sir Edward, his dis- 
 patches during last negotia- 
 tions before the War, 118 
 
 Grimm, Jacob, 136 
 
 Gunkel, Hermann, his Genesis, 
 124, 129 
 
 Haeckel, Professor Ernst, and 
 German need of theory, 132; 
 his World-Riddle (1899), a 
 preponderantly materialis- 
 tic Monism, 185, 186 
 
 Hague, the. Conferences and 
 Conventions, 109, 204 
 
 Haldane, Lord, 192 
 
 Hegel, G. W., his early anti- 
 pathy to, and later admira- 
 tion for Prussia, *i 34-1 36 ; 
 greatness of his Logic, 129, 
 130; unconscious mytho- 
 logy in, 133; the wide 
 stretches of magnificent in- 
 sight furnished by the Phe- 
 nomenology and the Philo- 
 sophy of Right, 173, 174; 
 improves upon Kant's 
 merely formal Good Will, 
 208; deficiencies of his 
 philosophy of religion, *2o8, 
 209; three points in his 
 teaching that make for in- 
 flation, *178, 179 
 
 Hegelians, English, 8, 12, 208 
 
 Henry VIII., King of Eng- 
 land, 199 
 
 Hermhuter, the, religious 
 body, 209 
 
 Heyse, Paul, one of his short 
 stories utilised, 210, 21 r 
 
 Hindoos, 10 1 
 
 Hindoo Swami, a, on M)rsti- 
 cism as the very life of 
 Indians, 125 
 
 Holtzmann, H. J., his Neutes- 
 tamentliche Theologie, 1897. 
 1911, 124, 129 
 
 Hopes, best, for Germany: 
 German Roman Catholic 
 Church, when re-become 
 non-Chauvinist, 207, 208 ; 
 German Philosophy, when 
 become a critical Realism, 
 208, 209; the German 
 artisan classes, when they 
 acquire the religious sense, 
 209 
 
 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, his 
 international spirit, 199 
 
 Hypocrisy, specially charged 
 against Allies by Professor 
 Troeltsch, 76-78, 89; dis- 
 covered by South-German 
 lady in all Anglican clerics, 
 ♦146-149; why it is always 
 chargeable against men and 
 States in proportion as they 
 put up a standard of living, 
 *200, 201 
 
 Idealism, German, accepted, 
 upon the whole, by 
 Troeltsch, 90, 91; studied 
 in Fichte's Reden, * 172- 179 
 
 Immanence and Transcend- 
 ence, both essential to 
 Christianity, no; pure, its 
 attraction for our times, 
 207; recognised by Nau- 
 mann as insufficient, 74 
 
 Imperialism, of Material- 
 ist type, condemned by 
 Troeltsch, 95, 96 
 
 Individual, the, and the State 
 according to Kant, 90, 91 ; 
 Fichte, 91; Troeltsch, 92; 
 Author, 201-303 
 
2l8 
 
 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 Industrialism, excessive, its 
 first invasion of Germany. 
 1 80 ; Puritan and American 
 share of responsibility in its 
 incubation, * 180- 184, 187; 
 English contribution to, 
 187, 188 
 
 International Morality accord- 
 ing to Troeltsch, yy, 78, 93, 
 106, 107; insisted on, *20o- 
 204 
 
 Israelitish- Jewish beliefs as to 
 War, their three stages, 
 
 31-33 
 Italian, the, more theoretical 
 than the English, 125, 126; 
 politics swaying between 
 Machiavelli and Mazzini 
 currents, 9, 10 
 
 Japanese, the, 10 1 
 
 Jesus Christ, His direct teach- 
 ing as to State and War, 
 37, 38; Kingdom of God, 
 *34. 35 1 39-41; His Second 
 Coming, *40, 41; ultimate 
 character of His teaching, 
 *39-4i, ♦11 3-1 17; HimseliE 
 uses force, 38, 39 ! 
 
 Jews, the, parties amongst, in | 
 Our Lord's day, 33; His | 
 attitude towards them, 37, | 
 ^8; and Industrialism, I 
 ♦184 i 
 
 Joan of Arc, 67 ! 
 
 John the Baptist, St., and \ 
 War. 33 
 
 Junkers, the Prussian, 96, 138, 
 197; Bismarck watched 
 against their full triumph, 
 186 
 
 Kant, Immanuel, on the 
 Individual and the State, 
 90, 91 ; on Good Will, as 
 merely formal, 208; his 
 pedantry — the Gelehrie and 
 
 the rearing of infants, 1 30, 
 131; influence of Scotch 
 Calvinism traceable in, 172; 
 free from Chauvinism, 199 
 
 Keane, Dr. A. H., on German 
 Soul, 146 
 
 Kingdom of God, in teaching 
 of Jesus, 34, 35; the four 
 qualities of its advent, in 
 that teaching, 40, 41; in 
 teaching of Roman Catho- 
 lic Church, 47; and the 
 Church, *iTO-ii3, *ii3- 
 117 
 
 Klopstock, F. G., his Messias, 
 177 
 
 Kiilpe, Professor Oswald, a 
 critically Realist philoso- 
 pher, 209 
 
 Leibniz, G. W. von, his inter- 
 national spirit, 98 
 
 Le Play, Frederic, his views 
 on the working men of 
 Europe and the social re- 
 forms required, 187 
 
 Lessing, G. E., his confession 
 of Pantheism, 134 
 
 Louis XIV., King of France, 
 his unscrupulous invasion 
 of Germany, 136, 137; 
 modern Frenchmen have 
 abandoned his dreams, 199 
 
 Luther, Martin, influenced 
 throughout by his Occam- 
 ist philosophical training, 
 166; loses perception, 
 clearly attained in second 
 Catholic stage, of two kinds 
 of morality, 167; requires 
 absolute certainty of his 
 full salvation, 105. 169, 170; 
 retains more than Calvin of 
 Catholic mystical depth, 
 but much less satisfactory 
 than Calvin as concerns 
 State Morality, 167-169; 
 
INDEX 
 
 219 
 
 his reckless teacliing as to 
 relations between the sexes 
 and his brutality towards 
 peasantry, 168, 169; in- 
 tense subtlety of his central 
 current — traffic between 
 sense and spirit to move 
 only from spirit to sense, 
 170; doubtless partly deter- 
 mined by deep religious 
 motive, but effect segrega- 
 tive, * I 70- I 72 
 
 Machiavelli, Niccolo, one of the 
 two poles of Italian political 
 instinct, 10; his policy 
 adopted by Prussia, 119; 
 Hegel's early fascination 
 
 by. i34> 13s 
 Maitland, F. W., his Intro- 
 duction to von Gierke's 
 Political Theories of the 
 Middle Ages, 191 3, 1 1,44,45; 
 quoted on State as Persona 
 in Roman jurisprudence, 
 44, 45; on " national con- 
 science," " national sins," 
 46; his general position, 
 
 112 
 
 Materialism, four stages of 
 German: intense industrial- 
 ism, 180; misapplication 
 of Natural Science, 184-186; 
 the too rapid, tangible 
 success of the war of 1870, 
 186,187; the megalomania 
 rampant since Bismarck's 
 fall, 187; America and 
 England share in responsi- 
 bility, 180-183, 187, 188 
 
 Mathematico-Physical Science 
 and Political Science, ac- 
 cording to Spinoza, 66, 67; 
 misused for furtherance of 
 Materialism in Germany, 
 184-186 
 
 Mazzini, Giuseppe, one of the 
 
 two poles of Italian political 
 
 instinct, 11 
 Mercier, Cardinal, 165 
 Metaphysics and Religion, a 
 
 certain close relatedness, 
 
 *72>. 74 
 
 Meyer, Professor Eduard, his 
 England, 1915, 8, 9; Pro- 
 fessor Troeltsch on, 95 
 
 Moleschott, Jacob, 185 
 
 Moltke, Field-Marshal H. von, 
 141 
 
 Morality, Private and State, 
 their differences, 92, 201, 
 202; their likenesses, 92- 
 94, 203; they both admit 
 exceptions, 201-203; li^® 
 subtly opposed to all sheer 
 deniers of either, 203, 204; 
 three elements essential to, 
 according to Professor 
 Troeltsch, 107 
 
 Moravian Brethren, the, 209 
 
 Murray, Professor Gilbert, on 
 semi-insane suspicions of 
 national disloyalty, 192 
 
 Mussulman charges mono- 
 gamist with hypocrisy, 201 
 
 Mythology, a certain German 
 bent towards, 132, 133; in 
 Hegel, 133 
 
 Napoleon I., Emperor, vul- 
 garity of his court, 104; 
 his unjustifiable return from 
 Elba, 137; his dread of Ger- 
 man "ideologues," 172, 173; 
 modern Frenchmen aban- 
 don his dream of European 
 domination, 199 
 
 Naturalists' Congress at G6t- 
 tingen in 1854, 185 
 
 Nature and Supernature: in 
 our Lord's teaching, 39-41 ; 
 the dominant categories in 
 Catholic second stage, ♦161- 
 163; the most fundamental 
 
220 
 
 THE GERMAN SOUL 
 
 religious principles, *205, 
 206; State and Church, as 
 their respective special com- 
 plexes, 162, 163 
 
 Naumann, Friedrich, his 
 career, 31,48-50; his Brief e 
 iiber Religion, 1910, 6,7, 13; 
 on Christianity of modern 
 individual, *5i-S3; on Jesus 
 and the modern State, *53- 
 57; on Jesus and Militar- 
 ism, ♦57,58; analysed: the 
 three influences at work 
 here, 59, 60; the rough 
 Darwinism, inadequate, 
 ♦61-64; the State, no sheer 
 thing, force or abstraction, 
 ♦64-70 ; Biblical criticism 
 reveals our Lord's teaching 
 as centrally transcendental, 
 yet presupposing the im- 
 manental Golden Rule, ♦70- 
 73 ; metaphysical essence 
 of religion, apprehended 
 also by Naumann, *7^, 74; 
 on persistent influence of 
 religion, 158; his Mittel- 
 Europa, 191 5, 74, 75; cri- 
 tically alluded to by Pro- 
 fessor Troeltsch, 95 
 
 " Nerves " and " nervous- 
 ness," present sense of, 
 recent, 149 
 
 Newman, Cardinal, on con- 
 science and Theism, 127, 128 
 
 Niebuhr, B. G., 136 
 
 Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Ger- 
 man theoretical bent, 132; 
 high pitch and cost of Ger- 
 man psychic life illustrated 
 from their exaggerations in 
 soul of, ♦149-154 
 
 Occam, William, Luther, phi- 
 losophically, is throughout 
 disciple of, 166 
 
 Oldenberg, Professor Her- 
 
 mann, his Buddha, ed. 1897, 
 124 
 Ontology essential to religion, 
 
 73 
 " Origins," the obsession of, 
 
 63 
 
 Pan-Germanism, 187 
 
 Pantheism, the German soul 
 attracted to, 133; of Less- 
 ing, Schelling, Hegel, 133- 
 135. 178, 179; and Machia- 
 vellism support each other 
 here, ♦133-135 
 
 Paul, St., his leading cate- 
 gories, Sin and Redemption, 
 161, 166 
 
 Pella, the first Christian com- 
 munity at Jerusalem retires 
 to, 41 
 
 Penn, William, and Indus- 
 trialism, 180-184 
 
 Persona ficta, the state as a, 
 44-46 
 
 Persona non ficta, the state as 
 a, 41, 44, 46, 47, 98 
 
 Philosophy, mediaeval, of 
 golden age, Realist, 45, 
 ♦161 -1 63; of decline, 
 Nominalist, 166; modem, 
 French, Idealist, 84, 85, 
 208; German, Idealist, 90, 
 91, 97. 104. 172, 173. 178, 
 179, 208, 209; critically 
 Realist, 130, 209; how a 
 more adequate, comes to 
 replace a less adequate, 
 *2o8, 209 
 
 Pitch, high, of German psychic 
 life, illustrated from inter- 
 course between Nietzsche 
 and Rohde, ♦149-153 
 
 Polygamy and monogamy, 
 201, 204 
 
 Practical Rules resulting from 
 truths of the two Moralities 
 and of State and Church as 
 
INDEX 
 
 221 
 
 their several complexes, 
 
 *i07-ii3 
 Prenner, Rev. Dr. Joseph, 124 
 Privy council lorships and 
 
 naturalised British subjects, 
 
 decision concerning, 192, 
 
 193 
 Problem, precise, probed in 
 these studies, * 14-1 7. ♦29- 
 
 31 
 
 Protestantism : Lutheran, 166- 
 172 ; Calvinist, 167, 168, 180- 
 183 ; Puritan generally, 180- 
 183 
 
 Prussia, Hegel's attitude 
 towards, *i 34-1 36; how it 
 gained possession of the 
 German soul, *i 32-1 38 
 
 Quakers, the, and Industrial- 
 ism, 182 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, his Might 
 is Right, 1 9 14, 118 
 
 Ranke, Leopold von, his 
 excessive Europeanism 
 accepted by Professor 
 Troeltsch, 98, 99; criticised, 
 ♦lOO, 10 1 ; his identifica- 
 tion of external power of 
 states with their interior 
 worth criticised, *ioi-i04; 
 and Prussianism, 136; in 
 his Letters, 148 
 
 Realism, the noble, of Chris- 
 tianity, 39, ♦71-73, 114, 207 
 
 Realism, a sober, criticsd 
 Philosophical, growing in 
 Germany. 208, 209 
 
 Real-Politih, term used in un- 
 favourable sense by author, 
 9, 29, 68, 83, 119, 138; 
 used in favourable sense by 
 Professor Troeltsch, 94 
 
 Religion and Givenness, 39- 
 41,47, *iio-ii2, 170, 171; 
 and Metaphysics, 7^, 74; 
 
 Transcendental and Im- 
 manental, 39-41, *70-74; 
 ♦107-117, 161, 163 ;attempts 
 at purely Immanental, 206, 
 207; two kinds of, 162; 
 its attitude to this life 
 and to the Beyond, 71, 
 72, 112 
 
 Religion in Geschichte und 
 Gegenwart, die. 191 3, on F. 
 Naumann, utilised, 50 
 
 Revelation, the, of St. John, 
 on Nations and War, 42, 43 
 
 Reventlow, Count, 96 
 
 Roberts, Field-Marshal Earl, 
 his commendation of 
 Cramb's Germany and Eng- 
 land, 1914, 190 
 
 Rohde, Erwin, his Psyche, 
 1 24, 129; in his intercourse 
 with Nietzsche, 150-153 
 
 Roman Catholic Church, its 
 hierarchical organisation, 
 not a long story of decay 
 or fraud, 1 1 1 ; and Per- 
 sonality of the State, 46, 
 47; has passed through 
 three stages in the matter, 
   1 59-165 ; its future cannot 
 be Chauvinistic, even in 
 Germany, 207, 208 
 
 Roman Conquest of Greece, 
 102, 103 
 
 Roman jurisprudence, its con- 
 ception of the State, 44, 45 
 
 Rumania, 196 
 
 Sadler, Dr. M. E., his Modem 
 
 Germany and the Modern 
 
 World, 1 9 14, 193 
 Schelling, F. W. J. von, his 
 
 early Pantheism, 133, 134; 
 
 his later positions, 172, 
 
 173 
 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 173 
 School and University educa- 
 tion, English, greater con- 
 
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