lves. All this talk about the iron will, about set teeth and
ruthlessness, what does it mean except that the German chose to glorify
openly and to carry to a logical extreme the peculiar error of the whole
Western world--the belief that the highest function of man is to work
his will upon people and things outside him, that he can change the
world without changing himself?

The Christian doctrine, preached so long in vain and now almost
forgotten, is the opposite of this. It insists that man is by nature a
passive, an experiencing creature, and that he can do nothing well in
action unless he has first learned a right passivity. Only by that
passivity can he enrich himself; and when he has enriched himself he
will act rightly. Man has a will; but he must apply it at the right
point, or it will seem to him merely a blind impulse. He must apply it
to the manner in which he experiences things; he must free himself from
his "will to live" or his "will to power," and see all men and things
not as they are of material use to him, but with the object of loving
whatever there is of beauty or virtue in them. His will, in fact, must
be the will to love, which is the will to experience in a certain way;
and out of that will to love right action will naturally ensue. Is this
a platitude? If it is, it is flatly contradicted by the German doctrine
of wilfulness. For the Germanic hero exercises his will always upon
other men and things, not upon himself; and we all admire this Germanic
hero, when he is not an obvious danger to us all, and when he is not
made ridiculous by the German presentment of him. We all believe that
the will is to be exercised first of all in action, that it is the
function of the great man to change the world, not to change himself.
To us the great man is one who does work a change upon the world, no
matter what that change may be. He may change it only as an explosion
changes things, and at the end he may be left among the ruins he has
made; but still we admire him. We compare him to the forces of nature,
we say that there is "something elemental" in him, even though he has
been merely an elemental nuisance. We value force in itself, and do not
ask what it can find to value in itself when it has exhausted itself
upon the world. But out of this worship of wilfulness there comes,
sooner or later, a profound scepticism and discouragement. For while
these wilful heroes do produce some violent effect, it is not the e