ubles and
rapacious instincts but systematic warfare; the second one, excluded
from unity and political ambition on a grand scale by the permanency
of its municipal system, by the cosmopolite situation of its pope and
by the military intervention of neighboring states, and following the
bent of its magnificent and harmonious genius, is wholly carried over
to the worship of voluptuousness and beauty. Finally, at another time,
social conditions have imposed their stamp as, eighteen centuries ago,
by Christianity, and twenty-five centuries ago, by Buddhism, when,
around the Mediterranean as in Hindostan, the extreme effects of Aryan
conquest and organization led to intolerable oppression, the crushing
of the individual, utter despair, the whole world under the ban of a
curse, with the development of metaphysics and visions, until man,
in this dungeon of despondency, feeling his heart melt, conceived
of abnegation, charity, tender love, gentleness, humility, human
brotherhood, here in the idea of universal nothingness and there under
that of the fatherhood of God. Look around at the regulative instincts
and faculties implanted in a race; in brief, the turn of mind
according to which it thinks and acts at the present day; we shall
find most frequently that its work is due to one of these prolonged
situations, to these enveloping circumstances, to these persistent
gigantic pressures brought to bear on a mass of men who, one by
one, and all collectively, from one generation to another, have been
unceasingly bent and fashioned by them, in Spain a crusade of eight
centuries against the Mohammedans, prolonged yet longer even to the
exhaustion of the nation through the expulsion of the Moors,
through the spoliation of the Jews, through the establishment of
the Inquisition, through the Catholic wars; in England, a political
establishment of eight centuries which maintains man erect and
respectful, independent and obedient, all accustomed to struggling
together in a body under the sanction of law; in France, a Latin
organization which, at first imposed on docile barbarians, than
leveled to the ground under the universal demolition, forms itself
anew under the latent workings of national instinct, developing under
hereditary monarchs and ending in a sort of equalized, centralized,
administrative republic under dynasties exposed to revolutions. Such
are the most efficacious among the observable causes which mold the
primitive man; the