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There is a certain narcissism in nations, and this is due precisely to the fact that patriotism as a feeling and impulse necessarily lacks in the group consciousness the mechanisms for externalization, except indeed in war. War is an escape, for a people, from a kind of subjectivism, from the evils of a self-love to perhaps the greater evils of self-assertion.
His was not the genuine Lutheranism of Luther, but the modified Lutheranism, then advocated in Europe and Germany generally, notably in Halle and the circles of the Pietists, a Lutheranism inoculated with legalism, subjectivism, indifferentism, and unionism.
It opens up boundless possibilities of subjectivism in a man who was apparently only too matter-of-fact. There was a time in his career when Ritschl was popular with both conservatives and liberals. There were long years in which he was bitterly denounced by both. Yet there was something in the man and in his teaching which went beyond all the antagonisms of the schools.
Transcendentalism proper, like romanticism, is not any particular set of dogmas about what things exist; it is not a system of the universe regarded as a fact, or as a collection of facts. It is a method, a point of view, from which any world, no matter what it might contain, could be approached by a self-conscious observer. Transcendentalism is systematic subjectivism.
An imagined potentiality that holds together the episodes which are actual in consciousness is the very definition of an object or thing. Nature is the sum total of things potentially observable, some observed actually, others interpolated hypothetically; and common-sense is right as against Kant's subjectivism in regarding nature as the condition of mind and not mind as the condition of nature.
But by what process, apart from faith and practical postulates and regulative ideas, can subjectivism pass to belief in other free agencies outside the thinking and all-creating self?
In short, practical individualism, or struggle for greater freedom of thought in action, was translated into philosophic subjectivism. Individual Mind as the Agent of Reorganization. It should be obvious that this philosophic movement misconceived the significance of the practical movement. Instead of being its transcript, it was a perversion.
The present war more than any other, and more than any other event in history, represents an escape on the part of nations from their subjectivism, and a beginning, it may be, of the realization of a more mature, or shall we say more normal conception of the world. Nations have played at being great and have really produced but little true greatness. Now, let us say, their dream is over.
Lastly, the subjectivism of Newman and the Modernists is fatal to that exclusiveness which is the corner-stone of Catholic policy.
I think, too, that Christianity fails to make its characteristic appeal through the Church, owing to two prevalent "isms" ecclesiasticism and subjectivism both of which may be said to be the being primarily occupied in religion with something other than God. I doubt whether any Church-party advantage can be scored by any one in this matter.
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