10 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



created the universal fame of the Darwinian con- 

 ception. It was rather the half-informed pagan 

 mind of our civilization. For centuries the Western 

 pagan had struggled with the ideals of a religion 

 of subordination and renunciation coming to him 

 from the past. For centuries he had been bored 

 almost beyond endurance with ideals of the world 

 presented to him by the Churches of Christendom. 

 He had stiffly bowed his armoured back to them, 

 but mostly without inward comprehension. But 

 here was a conception of life which stirred to its 

 depths the inheritance in him from past epochs of 

 time. This was the world which the master of 

 force comprehended. The pagan heart of the 

 West sang within itself again in atavistic joy. Its 

 Schopenhauers, its Omar Khayyams, its Haeckels, 

 its Nietzsches, its Weinigers, its Wagners became 

 the prophets and interpreters of a meaning in the 

 world which it drank in with understanding. 



There can be no more remarkable experience in 

 store for the observer than that which comes to him 

 if, in any of the leading countries of the West, he 

 sets himself to compare at any of the centres of 

 higher learning the questions being set a few years 

 ago to students of the social and political sciences 

 and those which were set in the same subjects but 

 half a century before. The trained understanding 



