All attempts at civilization hitherto have been a matter of processes in which the forces of progress were at work in almost every department of life. Great achievements in art, architecture, administration, economics, industry, commerce, and colonization succeeded each other with a spiritual impetus which produced a higher conception of the universe. Any ebb of the tide of civilization made itself felt in the material sphere as well as in the ethical and spiritual, earlier, as a rule, in the former than in the latter. Thus in Greek civilization there set in as early as the time of Aristotle an incomprehensible arrest of science and political achievement, whereas the ethical movement only reached its completion in the following centuries in that great work of education which was undertaken in the ancient [pg 040] world by the Stoic philosophy. In the Chinese, Indian and Jewish civilizations ability in dealing with material things was from the start, and always remained, at a lower level than the spiritual and ethical efforts of these races. In the movement of civilization which began with the Renaissance, there were both material and spiritual-ethical forces of progress at work side by side, as though in rivalry with each other, and this continued down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then, however, something unprecedented happened: man’s ethical energy died away, while the conquests achieved by his spirit in the material sphere increased by leaps and bounds. Thus for several decades our civilization enjoyed the great advantages of its material progress while as yet it hardly felt the consequences of the dying down of the ethical movement. People lived on in the conditions produced. By that movement without seeing clearly that their position was no longer a tenable one and preparing to face the storm that was brewing in the relations between the nations and within the nations themselves. In this way our own age, having never taken the trouble to reflect, arrived at the opinion that civilization consists primarily in scientific, technical and artistic achievements, and that it can reach its goal without ethics, or, at any rate, with a minimum of them. [pg 041] Public opinion bowed down before this merely external conception of civilization because it was exclusively represented by persons whose position in society and scientific culture seemed to show them to be competent to judge in matters of the spiritual life. * * * * *