The work is divided into two main parts, of unequal length. The first, occupying three-fourths of the book, is an attack upon the masters of the hour, war, fatherland, and race; an attack upon the reigning sophisms. It is entitled "The Evolution of War." The criticism of the present, in part one, is followed, in part two, by constructive ideas for the future. This second part is entitled "How War may be abolished." It outlines the coming society; sketches its morality and its faith. So abundant, in this book, are data and ideas, that selection is a difficult matter. Apart from the extraordinary richness of its elements, the work may be considered from two outlooks, specifically German, and universally human, respectively. Straightforwardly, at the outset, Nicolai tells his readers that although, in his opinion, all the nations must share responsibility for the war, he proposes to concern himself with the responsibility of Germany alone. He leaves it to the thinkers of other lands, each in his own country, to settle their country's accounts. "It is not my business," he says, "to know whether others have sinned extra muros, but to prevent people from sinning intra muros." If he chooses his instances from Germany above all, this is not because instances are lacking elsewhere, but because he writes, above all, for Germans. A large proportion of his historical and philosophical criticism deals with Germany ancient and modern. The point is well worthy of special analysis. No one, henceforward, will have any right to speak of the German spirit, unless he has read the profound chapters in which Nicolai, endeavouring to define national individuality, analyses the characteristics of German Kultur, analyses its virtues and its vices, its excessive faculty for adaptation, the struggle which the old Teutonic idealism has waged in its conflict with militarism, and elucidates the manner in which idealism was vanquished by militarism. The unfortunate influence of Kant (for whom, none the less, Nicolai has a great admiration) is stressed by him on account of the part it has played in this crisis of a nation's soul. Or rather, we may say, Nicolai stresses the influence of Kant's dualism of the reasons. This dualism of the pure reason and the practical reason (which Kant, despite the best efforts of his later years, was never able to associate in a satisfactory manner) is a brilliant symbol of the contradictory dualism to which modern Germany has accommodated herself all too easily. For Germany, preserving full liberty in the world of thought, has trampled under foot liberty in the world of action, or at least has surrendered this liberty without ever a regret (Chapter Ten, passim).