I
THE PATH OF VISION
WEAK and oppressed nations are fundamentally
spiritual; strong nations
are, as a rule, chiefly materialistic. The
one, cherishing religious ideals, soars to
certain spiritual heights and now and then
produces a seer to justify its languor and
indolence; the other, seeking material
things, bores into the earth for its treasures
and keeps going down, down till its dynamic
forces reach an impenetrable sterility
and explode in a sudden, terrible reaction.
The life of such a nation is symptomatic of
a diseased state of the soul. The life of the
other undermines, to say the least, its physical
strength. The dwarfing tendency is
equally potent in both. But a nation without
a soul is more grotesque, more hideous than
a nation of ascetics.
It is not my purpose to startle and provoke the reader with sweeping generalities, or to bamboozle him with dogmas old in garments new. The foregoing paragraph imposes, therefore, the necessity of a little
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