lieve that there is nothing to be learnt.
They consume all their mental energy in anger and the expression of it;
and in doing so they grow more and more like those with whom they are
angry. Wisdom always goes contrary to what our passions tell us,
especially when they take the form of righteous indignation. The
creative power of the mind begins with refusal of all those tempting
fierce delights which the passions offer to it. Wisdom must be cold
before it can become warm; it must suppress the comforting heat of the
flesh before it can kindle with the pure fire of the spirit. Above all,
when we say that we are not as other men, as the Germans, for instance,
it must insist that we are, and that we shall avoid the German crime
only by recognizing our likeness to those who have committed it.

The Germans have committed the great crime; but they have been born and
nurtured in an atmosphere which made that crime possible; and we live in
the same atmosphere. Their error, though they carried it to an extreme
in theory and in practice with the native extravagance of their race, is
the error of the whole Western world; and we shall not understand what
it is unless we are aware of it in ourselves as well as in them. For it
is a world-error and one against which men have been warned for ages;
but in their pride they will not listen to the warning. Many of the old
warnings, in the Gospels and elsewhere, sound like platitudes to us; we
expect the clergyman to repeat them in church; but we should never think
of applying them to this great, successful, progressive Western world of
ours. If we are not happy; if we do not even see the way to happiness;
if all our power merely helps us to destroy each other, or to make the
rich more vulgarly rich and the poor more squalidly poor; if the great
energy of Germany has hurried her to her own ruin; still we do not ask
whether we may not have made some fundamental mistake about our own
nature and the nature of the universe, and whether Germany has not
merely made it more systematically and more philosophically than the
rest of us.

But the German, because he is systematic and philosophical, may reveal
to us what that error is in us as well as in himself. We do not state it
as if it were a splendid truth; we merely act upon it. He stated it for
us with such histrionic and towering absurdity that we can laugh at his
statement of it; but we must not laugh at him without learning to laugh
at ourse