so much so that it is incapable of finding language for itself, clumsy in all that demands thought, and shiftless to the point of fatalism. Cosmopolitanism is literature and remains literature, very strong in reasons, very weak in defending them otherwise than with more reasons, in defending them with the blood.
All the more, then, this minority of far superior intellect chooses the intellectual weapon, and all the more is it able to do so as the world cities are pure intellect, rootless, and by very hypothesis the common property of the civilization. The born world-citizens, world-pacifists, and world-reconcilers — alike in the China of the "Contending States," in Buddhist India, in the Hellenistic age, and in the Western world to-day — are the spiritual leaders of fellaheen. "Panem et circenses" is only another formula for pacifism. In the history of all Cultures there is an anti-national element, whether we have evidences of it or not. Pure self-directed thinking was ever alien to life, and therefore alien to history, unwarlike, raceless. Consider our Humanism and Classicism, the Sophists of Athens, Buddha and Lao-tze — not to mention the passionate contempt of all nationalisms displayed by the great champions of the ecclesiastical and the philosophical world-view. However the cases differ amongst themselves otherwise, they are alike in this, that the world-feeling of race; the political (and therefore national) instinct for fact ("my country, right or wrong!"); the resolve to be the subject and not the object of evolution (for one or the other it has to be) — in a word, the will-to-power — has to retreat and make room for a tendency of which the standard-bearers are most often men without original impulse, but all the more set upon their logic; men at home in a world of truths, ideals, and Utopias; bookmen who believe that they can replace the actual by the logical, the might of facts by an abstract justice, Destiny by Reason. It begins with the everlastingly fearful who withdraw themselves out of actuality into cells and study-chambers and spiritual communities, and proclaim the nullity of the world's doings, and it ends in every Culture with the apostles of world-peace. Every people has such (historically speaking) waste-products. Even their heads constitute physiognomically a group by themselves. In the "history of intellect" they stand high — and many illustrious names are numbered amongst them — but regarded from the point of view of actual history, they are inefficients.
The Destiny of a nation plunged in the events of its world depends upon how far its race-quality is successful in making these events historically ineffective against it. It could perhaps be demonstrated even now that in the Chinese world of states the realm of Tsin won through (250 B.C) because it alone had kept itself free from Taoist sentiments. Be this as it may, the Roman people prevailed over the rest of the Classical world because it was able to insulate its conduct of policy from the fellah-instincts of Hellenism.
A nation is humanity brought into living form. The practical result of world-improving theories is consistently a formless and therefore historyless mass.
