Its brilliant literature
springs from division of labor; life has become so complex that each man
cannot comprehend it all--so one takes the department of thought,
another of action. The man of thought tries to bring back that courage
and virtue which he sees are departing, by singing beautiful songs in
their praise; while the man of action, feeling their waning power in
himself, makes up, by repeating these praises, the lack of a heroic
life.
The next is the mechanical age of society, which life has so outgrown
the mind that the man cannot attend to both his own affairs and the
state, which latter, therefore, he gladly yields to others. This is the
age of standing armies, hired to protect a people too careless to
protect themselves. This is the age of tyrants, as the lesser Caesars or
Philip of Macedon. This is the age which ushers in the last period of
the nation, a mechanical state of the individual, when thought has so
departed that the man is not able to attend even to his own life, and,
like a passive machine, the state is impelled and directed in even the
least things by one tyranny from without. It is hardly necessary to add
that Alexander in Greece, Elagabalus in Rome, Louis XVI in France, were
followed by a destruction as certain as the fact that God meant the
earth to be inhabited by men and not machines.
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