154 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



organizations of finance, feel themselves to be 

 envisaged with conditions wherein the past has 

 ceased to be a guide to them. Absorbed in the 

 seething struggle of the time they know by a sure 

 instinct of their life that the emotion of the ideal 

 in the general mind is a cause of the first magnitude 

 to be reckoned with in the future. But the fact 

 which has to be noticed, standing out above other 

 phenomena, is that the interests which have 

 hitherto ruled in the West do not understand the 

 function of the emotion of the ideal, and are 

 proving themselves unable to reckon with it. They 

 are like organisms in an environment to which 

 they have no developed organs of correspondence. 

 In the marshalling of forces in the present con- 

 ditions of the West it may be observed that the 

 stake for which nearly all the desperately in earnest 

 combatants are playing in the last resort is to win 

 to their side and to organize in their interests the 

 emotion of the ideal in the general mind. Yet 

 there is nothing within the range of human ex- 

 perience to compare with the actual fact of the 

 failure throughout the West to employ in the cause 

 of civilization the emotion of the ideal in any of its 

 forms. The American writer already quoted re- 

 garded the attempt made to direct the mind of the 

 German people for two generations to support the 



