Today the average inhabitant of the western hemisphere knows a little of everything. He has the newspaper on his breakfast table and wireless within reach. For the evening there is the film, cards, or a meeting to complete a day spent in the office or factory where nothing that is essential has been learnt. With slight variation this picture of a low cultural average holds good over the entire range from factory-hand of clerk to manager or director. Only the personal will to culture, in whatever field and however pursued raises modern man above this level.

Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.

Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.

All seemingly profound thinking which passes for realism, because it conveniently does away with all troublesome principles, has agreat attraction for the adolescent mind.

The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

If, then, this civilization is to be saved, if it is not to be submerged by centuries of barbarism, but to secure the treasures ofits inheritance on new and more stable foundations, there is indeed need for those now living fully to realize how far the decay has already progressed.