While the will-to-progress remains an amazed spectator of events, respect for what is historical recovers itself, though it seemed to have been banished for ever. In religion, in art, and in law, men begin, though at first only quite shyly, to look again with other eyes on the traditional. It is no longer reckoned as merely something which is to be replaced, but men venture to admit to themselves that it conceals within itself original values. The forces of reality, which had been taken by surprise, now begin everywhere to act on the defensive, and a guerilla warfare develops against the will-to-progress. The various religious bodies revoke the abdications which they had made before the religion of reason. The law which has grown up in the course of time begins to set itself in opposition to the law laid down by reason. In the atmosphere of passion produced by the Napoleonic wars, [pg 103] national thought takes on a new character, directing on itself, and beginning to absorb, the universal enthusiasm for ideals. The struggles carried on no longer by chancelleries but by whole nations are fatal to the ideals of cosmopolitanism and national brotherhood, and by this awakening of national thought a whole series of political problems affecting the whole of Europe are rendered insoluble. Just as the organization of Austria as a unified modern State has now become impossible, so also has the civilizing of Russia, and the destiny of Europe, viz. to be shipwrecked over these territories which are in it but not of it, begins to reveal itself. At the close of the Napoleonic era the whole of Europe is in a condition of misery. Far-seeing ideas of reform can be neither thought out nor worked out; only extemporized palliative measures suit the time. The will-to-progress is therefore unable to recover its former vigour. It is fatally affected, too, by the fact that everybody with any capacity for independent thought feels himself attracted by this new valuation of things and facts, and thereby drawn on to irritation at the one-sided, doctrinaire character of the rationalist way of looking at life. Nevertheless, the position of the will-to-progress is far from being a critical one. The first attacks are made by Romanticism and the feeling for reality, but are mere outpost-skirmishes, and for a long time yet the will-to-progress remains master of the field. Bentham remains still the great authority. Alexander II. of Russia, Tsar from 1801 to 1825, instructs the legislative commission which he sets up to obtain on all doubtful points the opinion of the great Englishman. Madame de Staël expresses the opinion that the fateful period she has lived through will one day be called by posterity not the Napoleonic age but the Benthamite._(_37_)_