igion is endemic in
India among specially exalted imaginative and philosophic intellects;
why it blooms out so wonderfully and so grandly in the Middle Ages,
in an oppressive society, amongst new languages and literature; why
it develops again in the sixteenth century with a new character and an
heroic enthusiasm, at the time of an universal renaissance and at the
awakening of the Germanic races; why it swarms out in so many bizarre
sects in the rude democracy of America and under the bureaucratic
despotism of Russia; why, in fine, it is seen spreading out in the
Europe of to-day in such different proportions and with such special
traits, according to such differences of race and of civilizations.
And so for every kind of human production, for letters, music, the
arts of design, philosophy, the sciences, state industries, and
the rest. Each has some moral tendency for its direct cause, or a
concurrence of moral tendencies; given the cause, it appears; the
cause withdrawn, it disappears; the weakness or intensity of the cause
is the measure of its own weakness or intensity. It is bound to
that like any physical phenomenon to its condition, like dew to the
chilliness of a surrounding atmosphere, like dilatation to heat.
Couples exist in the moral world as they exist in the physical world,
as rigorously linked together and as universally diffused. Whatever
in one case produces, alters, or suppresses the first term, produces,
alters, and suppresses the second term as a necessary consequence.
Whatever cools the surrounding atmosphere causes the fall of dew.
Whatever develops credulity, along with poetic conceptions of the
universe, engenders religion. Thus have things come about, and
thus will they continue to come about. As soon as the adequate and
necessary condition of one of these vast apparitions becomes known to
us our mind has a hold on the future as well as on the past. We can
confidently state under what circumstances it will reappear, foretell
without rashness many portions of its future history, and sketch with
precaution some of the traits of its ulterior development.

VIII

History has reached this point at the present day, or rather it is
nearly there, on the threshold of this inquest. The question as now
stated is this: Given a literature, a philosophy, a society, an art,
a certain group of arts, what is the moral state of things which
produces it? And what are the conditions of race, epoch, and
env