ffect
they aimed at. Something happens; something has happened to Germany as
the result of Bismarck's wilfulness; but it is not what he willed. The
wilful hero is a cause in that he acts; but the effect is not what he
designed, and so he seems to himself, and to the world, only a link in
an unending chain of cause and effect; and as for his sense of will, it
is nothing but the illusion that he is all cause and not at all effect.

_Quem Deus vult perdere dementat prius._ That old tag puts a truth
wrongly. God does not interfere to afflict the wilful man with madness,
but he has never thrown himself open to the wisdom of God. His mind is
like a machine that acts with increasing speed and fury because there is
less and less material for it to act upon. One act leads to another in a
blind chain of cause and effect; he does this merely because he has done
that, and seems to be driven by fate on and on to his own ruin. So it
was with Napoleon in his later years. He had lost the sense of any
reality whatever except his own action; he saw the world as a passive
object to be acted upon by himself. And that is how the Germans saw it
two years ago. They could not understand that it was possible for the
world to react against them. It was merely something that they were
going to remake, to work their will upon. The war, at its beginning, was
not to them a conflict between human beings; it was a process by which
they would make of things what they willed. There was no reality except
in themselves and their own will; for, in their worship of action, they
had lost the sense of external reality, they had come to believe that
there was nothing to learn from it except what a craftsman learns from
his material by working in it. It is by making that he learns; and they
thought that there was no learning except by making.

But that is the mistake of the whole Western world, though we have none
of us carried it so far as Germany. Other men are to us still men, they
still have some reality to us; but we see external reality as a material
for us to work in; we are to ourselves entirely active and not at all
passive beings. Even among all the evil and sorrow of the war we still
took a pride in the enormous power of our instruments of destruction, as
if we were children playing with big, dangerous toys. But these toys are
themselves the product of a society that must always be making and never
thinking or feeling. They express the will for actio