sion of the thinker. To
Nicolai, the paroxysm he contemplates seems the last flicker of the
torch. Just as, he declares, horse-racing and yachting are undergoing
their fullest development in our own day, when horses and sails are
ceasing to have any practical use, so likewise patriotism has become a
fanatical cult at the very moment when it has ceased to be a factor in
civilisation. It is the fate of the Epigoni. In remote ages it was good,
it was needful, that individual egoism should be broken by the grouping
of human beings in tribes and clans. The patriotism of the towns was
justified when it victoriously resisted the egoism of the robber barons.
The patriotism of the state was justified when it concentrated all the
energies of a nation. The national conflicts of the nineteenth century
had useful work to do. But to-day the work of the national states is
done. New tasks call us. Patriotism is no longer a suitable aim for
humanity; its influence is retrograde. But the retrogressive efforts of
patriotism are fruitless. No one can arrest the progress of evolution,
and people are merely committing suicide by throwing themselves beneath
the iron wheels of the chariot. The sage is unperturbed by the frenzied
resistance of the forces of the past, for he knows them to be the forces
of despair. He leaves the dead to bury their dead; and, looking forward,
he already contemplates the living unity of mankind that is to be. Among
the trials and disasters of the present, he realises within himself the
serene harmony of the "great body" whereof all men are members, as in
the profound saying of Seneca: Membra sumus corporis magni.

In a subsequent article we shall learn how Nicolai describes this corpus
magnum and the mens magna which animates it, the Weltorganismus, the
organism of universal humanity, whose coming is already heralded to-day.

_October 1, 1917._

"demain," Geneva, October, 1917.

II

We have seen with how much energy G. F. Nicolai condemns the absurdity
of war and the sophisms which serve for its support. Nevertheless the
sinister madness triumphs for the time. In 1914, reason went bankrupt.
Spreading from nation to nation, this bankruptcy, this madness,
subsequently involved all the peoples of the world. There was no lack of
established ethical systems and established religions which, had they
done their duty, would have opposed a barrier to this contagion of
murder and folly. But all the ethical systems, al