It is significant that we have no real interest in what is valuable in the past. Its great spiritual achievements are mechanically registered, but we do not let ourselves be touched by them. Still less do we accept them as a heritage; nothing has any value for us except what can be squared with our plans, passions, feelings, and æsthetic moods of to-day. With these we live ourselves by lies into the past, and then assert with unshaken assurance that we have our roots in it. This is the character of the reverence we pay to history. Blinded by what we consider or declare to be past and done with, we lose all sense for what is to happen, so that of nothing can we say: “It is finished,” nothing now gets accomplished. Again and again we let what is past rise up artificially in what is present, and endow bygone facts with a persistence of being which makes wholly impossible the normal development of our peoples. Just as our sense of reality makes us lose ourselves in [pg 048] present-day events, so does our historical compel us to do the same in those of the past. * * * * * From these two things, our sense of reality and our historical sense, is born the nationalism to which we must refer the external catastrophe in which the decadence of our civilization finds its completion. What is nationalism? It is an ignoble patriotism, exaggerated till it has lost all meaning, which bears the same relation to the noble and healthy kind as the fixed idea of an imbecile does to normal conviction. How does it develop among us?