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Updated: June 10, 2025
It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.
Institutions change as history shows; but their change, the rise and fall of states, is the work of the "world-spirit." Individuals, save the great "heroes" who are the chosen organs of the world-spirit, have no share or lot in it. In the later nineteenth century, this type of idealism was amalgamated with the doctrine of biological evolution.
But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.
The world, in that case, would be very clumsily contrived would proceed to its goal with waste of power and by circuitous paths. Rather, mighty World-Spirit, hadst thou taken from us this freedom, which, only with difficulty and by a different arrangement, thou canst fit to thy plans, and compelled us at once to act as those plans required!
The "dying to live" of the Christian, as well as "the rising above one's body" of the Platonist, have their part there. Ascetism itself, with all its degrees of passionate or philosophical purity, is as much an evocation of the world-spirit of the essential nature of the System of Things as is the other. It is, of course, ultimately, quite a mad hope to desire to convert "the Spirit that Denies."
A modern nation had arisen out of the old world-state and world-spirit. In the England of Edward III., Chaucer, and Wycliffe, we have reached the consummation of the movement whose first beginnings we have traced in the early storms of the reign of Henry III. It is in the development of this tendency that the period from 1216 to 1377 possesses such unity as it has.
If we go on to cast a look at the fate of these world-historical persons, whose vocation it was to be the agents of the World-Spirit, we shall find it to have been no happy one. They attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labor and trouble; their whole nature was naught else but their master-passion. When their object is attained they fall off like empty husks from the kernel.
Socialism, also, though some may call it a mistaken and confused dream, is yet a manifestation of Democracy and as such will have its voice along with other forms of the great world-spirit. It has made considerable advance in America, where there have recently been Socialist mayors in some cities, and even Socialist Congressmen. But its main progress has been in Europe.
There was a touch of this worldly spirit even in Thomas, when he said, "Except I see in His hand the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I will not believe"; and in so far as the world-spirit is permitted to hold sway within us, our powers of spiritual perception will be blunted, and become infected with the tendency to make our intellect or imagination our sole means of apprehending Divine truth.
II. CHRIST AND HIS DISCIPLES HAVE A COMMON CONFLICT. It is inevitable that there should be collision, and therefore conflict, and as a result tribulation. The world-spirit will not brook our disagreement with its plans and aims, and therefore they who persist in living godly lives in this present evil world must suffer persecution. Conflict about the use of power and prerogative.
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