While, however, the masses, owing to the more precise nature of their demands (always confined to the economic field and never touching upon spiritual needs) and also to the greater volume of their clamour, have succeeded in directing the attention of all would-be reformers upon themselves, the cultivated also, partly hypnotised by the insistence of the proletariat’s outcry, have made the mistake of supposing that in material reforms alone can salvation be found. In the absence of new ideals, sound beliefs, and a great new faith, that would once again knit modern mankind together in a united effort and a common aim, not only the proletariat, but also large numbers of the cultivated classes, have come to the conclusion that it is in economic changes that a recovery of the _joie de vivre_ is to be found. And such ideals as Communism, Socialism, and Bolshevism, which are purely economic (_i.e._, material), in their objects and methods, are now held up as panaceas for the ills of the whole world. To suppose, however, that economic changes alone will make any difference to the present [p163] deep depression of man, is to misunderstand the whole nature of his trouble. If there is anything in the analysis contained in the preceding paragraphs; if the diagnosis of modern pessimism which it offers is not entirely wrong and beside the mark, it is obvious that economic changes, however drastic, can and will do nothing to alleviate the state of distress in which everybody who lives where Western civilisation prevails, now finds himself. Improve the conditions of the indigent how you will, elevate the standard of living as high as you choose, you are nevertheless powerless to reduce even by one gush of tears, the misery and discontent that prevails among all classes in the modern civilised world, unless you understand and can deal with the more profound and more complicated spiritual cause that lies at the root of this misery. Nobody in his senses denies that there is yet room for improvement in the standard of living among large sections of the proletariat; nobody who has studied the question doubts for one instant that the conditions of the indigent are frequently directly conducive to both physical and spiritual disease, and therefore that they require modification; but to suppose that the need for this departmental improvement is sufficiently pressing and promising of good far-reaching results, to justify the upheaval of the whole of the existing system of life, is to confess yourself so completely fascinated and hypnotised by a particular aspect alone of modern unhappiness, as it is manifested in one particular section of society, as to have remained blind [p164] to all other aspects of it which are to be observed in other sections.