what we should discover in other great countries. Those who
have seen in modern industrialism dangers of coming disaster, or who
now look back upon it as a genuine cause of the war were probably not
mistaken. Industrialism has been producing rapidly, and in an intense
form, what we may call the mood of the city, and this mood of the city
contains all the conditions and all the emotions that tend to bring to
the surface the deep-lying motives of the social life that we are
trying to point out. There are both the joy of the abundant life, the
craving for new experiences, and the sense of reality, and also the
disorganization of interests and motives, the stress and fatigue and
monotony which prepare the mind for culmination in dramatic events.
There is, in a word, a deep stirring of all the forces that make for
progress and expansion, and also conditions that disorganize the
individual and the social life. Lamprecht (59) of all German writers
seems to have appreciated this. He has written before the war,
describing a condition in Germany which he says began in the seventies
of the preceding century--a change of German life in which there is a
great increase of the activities of the cities, with haste and
anxiety, unscrupulous individual energy, general nervous excitement, a
condition of neuro-muscular weakness (and he might have added as
another sign, over-stimulation of the mind by a great flood of morbid
literature).

In Lamprecht's opinion, this period of excitement, this strong tendency
to the enjoyment of excitation in general, is a form of socio-psychic
dissociation. It is a period of relative disorganization, when the
individual is subjected to a great variety of new experiences, when
outside influences prevail over the inner impulses of the individual,
in which the individual is unsettled and there is a tendency toward
pessimism and melancholia. Lamprecht thinks of this state as something
transitory, and already as he writes (in 1905) nearing an end. This
state of continuous excitement, with its shallow pathos of the
individual and its constant and superficial happiness, its worship of
the novel and the extraordinary, the suggestibility and the receptivity
of the masses, automatic action of the will and the emotions--all this
Lamprecht thinks will pass. It is a stage in the process of a new
formation. The very elements of dissociation are positively charged, so
to speak, and contain creative power. A new system o