Has civilization
over-reached itself? Has the machine run away with its maker?" The
imagination is staggered. We are too much in the storm to see across
the storm.

When the War began, it was over our minds as a dark cloud. It was the
last conscious thought as we went to sleep at night, and the first to
which we awakened in the morning: wakening with a dumb sense of
something wrong, as if we had suffered a personal tragedy, and then as
we came to clear consciousness we said, "O yes, the War!" The days have
passed into weeks, the weeks into months and years: inevitably we become
benumbed to the long continued disaster. It is impossible to think
deaths and mutilations in terms of millions. Even those who stand in
the immediate presence of it and suffer most terribly become calloused
to it: much more must we who stood so long apart and have not yet felt
the brunt of it. Even our entrance into the whirling vortex, drawing
ever nearer our shores, has failed to waken us to a realizing sense of
it. Nevertheless, these years through which we are now living are the
most important in the entire history of the world. It is probable that
the future will look back upon them as the years determining the destiny
of mankind for ages to come.

How this terrible fact of War falls across all philosophies! Complacent
optimisms, so widely current recently, are put out of court by it. The
pleasant interpretations mediocrity formulates of the universe are torn
to tatters. There is at least the refreshment of standing face to face
with brute actuality, though it crash all our "little systems" to the
ground. Philosophy must wait. The interpretations cannot be hastened,
while the facts are multiplying with such bewildering rapidity. The one
certainty is that an entirely new world is being born--_what_ it will
be, no one knows.

Nevertheless, we have gone far enough to recognize that all our thinking
will be transformed under the influence of the struggle. It will be
impossible for us, after the War, to do what we have done so widely
hitherto: proclaim one range of ethical ideals and standards, and live
to something widely different in practice. Either we shall have to
abandon the standards, or bring our conduct measurably into harmony with
them. We shall be unable longer to hold unconsciously in solution
Christianity and the gospel of brute force. One or the other must be
rejected, or both consciously reconstructed. The effec