f morals, a new
philosophy, new religion begin to emerge. There is a strong effort to
reach a new dominant.

This is Lamprecht's psychological interpretation of recent German
history. This view and the various aspects of the condition which
Lamprecht describes, the relation of the materialism, the pessimism
and the melancholy of such a time to the optimistic trends and the
deep forward movement need a closer study than we can here give it,
but may we not see in it the truth that such conditions as these are
prone to cause wars as a phase of the process of the inner adjustment
of national life? Wars occur as forms of expression of those impulses
which appear in the individual life in times of rapid growth and
relative dissociation as outbreaks of intemperance and passion--a
culmination, according to our view and terminology, of the
intoxication motive. Industrialism itself is perhaps but one
manifestation of deep impulses in the life of nations; it is at once
an intensification and a formalizing of life. Hence perhaps its
paradoxical appearance as an increase of both joy and distress. There
is nothing in it that is wholly satisfying.

Germany, says Lamprecht, was seeking, in this transition period, a new
dominant, a new religion and a new philosophy. But Germany, let us
help Lamprecht to say, since he does not himself draw this conclusion,
has failed to emerge upon the level of an exalted ecstasy, failed to
produce the philosophical, the moral and religious fruit of its new
impulses, _failed, in a word, to find its dominant on a high level_,
precisely as often the promising individual fails and has expressed
his truly great nature in low forms of activity. So Germany, and the
world, dominated by industrialism and all the desires and forces that
the rapid development of industrialism has brought into action, has
come to a culmination of its efforts in an outbreak unparalleled in
history. On the side of Germany we see a nation governed by a mood of
war in which the chief modes of thought and action represented are the
pseudo-mystical and religious longings for new empire, romantic love
of the past, militarism, and all the motives of the new industrialism
and the new science. The best motives of the old feudalism and the new
industrialism tried to unite, as we might say, into a new and very
great civilization--_and they failed_. What has happened is that the
material powers and the cynical moods of industrialism have comb