It is just because we thus renounce the indefeasible rights of the individual that our race can neither produce new ideas nor make current ones serviceable for new objects; its only experience is that prevailing ideas obtain more and more authority, take on a more and more one-sided development, and live on till they have produced their last and most dangerous consequences. Thus we have entered on a new mediæval period. [pg 031] The general determination of society has put freedom of thought out of fashion, because the majority renounce the privilege of thinking as free personalities, and let themselves be guided in everything by those who belong to the various groups and cliques. Spiritual freedom, then, we shall recover only when the majority of individuals become once more spiritually independent and self-reliant, and discover their natural and proper relation to those organizations in which their souls have been entangled. But liberation from the Middle Ages of to-day will be a much more difficult process than that which freed the peoples of Europe from the first Middle Ages. The struggle then was against external authority established in the course of history. To-day the task is to get the mass of individuals to work themselves out of the condition of spiritual weakness and dependence to which they have brought themselves. Could there be a harder task? Moreover, no one as yet clearly perceives what a condition of spiritual poverty is ours to-day. Every year the spread of opinions which have no thought behind them is carried further by the masses, and the methods of this process have been so perfected, and have met with such a ready welcome, that our [pg 032] confidence in being able to raise to the dignity of public opinion the silliest of statements, wherever it seems necessary to get them currently accepted, has no need to justify itself before acting. During the war the control of thought was made complete. Propaganda definitely took the place of truth. With independence of thought thrown overboard, we have, as was inevitable, lost our faith in truth. Our spiritual life is disorganized, for the over-organization of our external environment leads to the organization of our absence of thought. Not only in the intellectual sphere, but in the moral also, the relation between the individual and the community has been upset. With the surrender of his own personal opinion the modern man surrenders also his personal moral judgment. In order that he may find good what the mass declares to be such, whether in word or deed, and may condemn what it declares to be bad, he suppresses the scruples which stir in him. He does not allow them to find utterance either with others or with himself. There are no stumbling-blocks which his feeling of unity with the herd does not enable him to surmount, and thus he loses his judgment in that of the mass, and his own morality in theirs.