And in the second half of the nineteenth century, an age essentially
unphilosophical and technical, dominated by a myopic specialism and by
historical materialism, this ideal took a practical form, not so much in
the popularization as in the vulgarization of science--or, rather, of
pseudo-science--venting itself in a flood of cheap, popular, and
propagandist literature. Science sought to popularize itself as if it
were its function to come down to the people and subserve their
passions, and not the duty of the people to rise to science and through
science to rise to higher heights, to new and profounder aspirations.
All this led Brunetiere to proclaim the bankruptcy of science, and this
science--if you like to call it science--did in effect become bankrupt.
And as it failed to satisfy, men continued their quest for happiness,
but without finding it, either in wealth, or in knowledge, or in power,
or in pleasure, or in resignation, or in a good conscience, or in
culture. And the result was pessimism.
Neither did the gospel of progress satisfy. What end did progress serve?
Man would not accommodate himself to rationalism; the _Kulturkampf_ did
not suffice him; he sought to give a final finality to life, and what I
call the final finality is the real _hontos hon_. And the famous _maladie
du siecle_, which announced itself in Rousseau and was exhibited more
plainly in Senancour's _Obermann_ than in any other character, neither
was nor is anything else but the loss of faith in the immortality of the
soul, in the human finality of the Universe.
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