acquired the ascendant; this was
coincident with the rise of humanism, when life became increasingly
secular. During the post-Renaissance, or scientific period, of which
the war probably marks the close, there has been a confusion of
tongues; architecture has spoken only alien or dead languages, learned
by rote.

But in so far as it is anything at all, aesthetically, our architecture
is Arranged, so if only by the operation of the law of opposites, or
alternation, we might reasonably expect the next manifestation to
be Organic. There are other and better reasons, however, for such
expectancy.

Organic architecture is ever a flower of the religious spirit. When
the soul draws near to the surface of life, as it did in the two
mystic centuries of the Middle Ages, it _organizes_ life; and
architecture, along, with the other arts becomes truly creative. The
informing force comes not so much _from_ man as _through_ him. After
the war that spirit of brotherhood, born in the camps--as Christ was
born in a manger--and bred on the battlefields and in the trenches of
Europe, is likely to take on all the attributes of a new religion of
humanity, prompting men to such heroisms and renunciations, exciting
in them such psychic sublimations, as have characterized the great
religious renewals of time past.

If this happens it is bound to write itself on space in an
architecture beautiful and new; one which "takes its shape and
sun-color" not from the niggardly mind, but from the opulent heart.
This architecture will of necessity be organic, the product not of
self-assertive personalities, but the work of the "Patient Daemon"
organizing the nation into a spiritual democracy.

The author is aware that in this point of view there is little of
the "scientific spirit"; but science fails to reckon with the soul.
Science advances facing backward, so what prevision can it have of a
miraculous and divinely inspired future--or for the matter of that,
of any future at all? The old methods and categories will no longer
answer; the orderly course of evolution has been violently interrupted
by the earthquake of the war; igneous action has superseded aqueous
action. The casements of the human mind look out no longer upon
familiar hills and valleys, but on a stark, strange, devastated
landscape, the ploughed land of some future harvest of the years.
It is the end of the Age, the _Kali Yuga_--the completion of a major
cycle; but all cycles follow