ips upon all its vast old world
of a body, so the whole universe would perish if man and beast and
herb were not always putting forth a newness: the toad taking a
vivider color, spreading his hands a little more gently, developing a
more ruse intelligence, the birds adding a new note to their speech
and song, a new sharp swerve to their flight, a new nicety to their
nests; and man, making new worlds, new civilizations. If it were not
for this striving into new creation on the part of living individuals,
the universe would go dead, gradually, gradually and fall asunder.
Like a tree that ceases to put forth new green tips, and to advance
out a little further.

But each new tip arises out of the apparent death of the old, the
preceding one. Old leaves have got to fall, old forms must die. And if
men must at certain periods fall into death in millions, why, so must
the leaves fall every single autumn. And dead leaves make good mold.
And so dead men. Even dead men's souls.

So if death has to be the goal for a great number, then let it be so.
If America must invent this poison-gas, let her. When death is our
goal of goals we shall invent the means of death, let our professions
of benevolence be what they will.

But this time, it seems to me, we have consciously and responsibly to
carry ourselves through the winter-period, the period of death and
denudation: that is, some of us have, some _nation_ even must. For
there are not now, as in the Roman times, any great reservoirs of
energetic barbaric life. Goths, Gauls, Germans, Slavs, Tartars. The
world is very full of people, but all fixed in civilizations of their
own, and they all have all our vices, all our mechanisms, and all our
means of destruction. This time, the leading civilization cannot die
out as Greece, Rome, Persia died. It must suffer a great collapse,
maybe. But it must carry through all the collapse the living clue to
the next civilization. It's no good thinking we can leave it to China
or Japan or India or Africa--any of the great swarms.

And here we are, we don't look much like carrying through to a new
era. What have we got that will carry through? The latest craze is Mr.
Einstein's Relativity Theory. Curious that everybody catches fire at
the word Relativity. There must be something in the mere suggestion,
which we have been waiting for. But what? As far as I can see,
Relativity means, for the common amateur mind, that there is no one
absolute force in