The liberal is inspired by the ambition of the would-be great man who does not want to take the lower seat, the anxiety of the inadequate person to m… - Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

The English always talked of freedom. They always sought their own freedom at the expense of everyone else's. They early developed a peculiar mode of thought based on a confusion of ideas, which gave precedence not to a cause for its own sake but to the advantage they themselves derived from it. There was no hypocrisy in this: though it looked like hypocrisy. It was merely an incredible naivete combined with a natural brutality of approach. The English were perfectly unconscious of these things. Their trump card was their stupidity, and in their stupidity lay their highest shrewdness.

The materialist outlook is anthropomorphic. It does not lift man metaphysically above and beyond himself, but rationalistically drags him down to what it conceives to be his real self. It was the rationalist age of enlightenment that saw the birth of this philosophy. Up to that time man's thought had always been cosmic; it had found its justification in the divine justice and the divine holiness. It was conscious of a spiritual immanence. The rationalist's pride was to see only the animal in man. The humanist had stressed the mystic tie that binds the creature to the Creator. The rationalist created l'homme machine, a living automaton, a miracle of mud. Creation was explained not through the Creator but through the creature, and the creature was reduced to the sum of the matter of which he was composed and on which he was nourished. Rousseau's vegetative ideal, which aimed at being philanthropic, only added a sentimental touch. The French Revolution put these theories politically to the test and demanded " rights" for the enlightened man, expressly based on his "physical needs."<p>German thought rebelled against this degradation of man. German minds took heed of the spiritual as well as the bodily needs of man and evolved the conception of the "Education of the Human Race," by which all that had been lost might be re-won. Their interpretation of universal history had nothing to do with a mechanical "Progress," but passionately sought to recapture for man the ideals he had abandoned. Our escape from rationalism to idealism was signalized by the attention's being directed not to human rights but to human dignity.

The reactionary's reading of history is as superficial as the conservative's is profound. The reactionary sees the world as he has known it; the conservative sees it as it has been and will always be. He distinguishes the transitory from the eternal. Exactly what has been, can never be again. But what the world has once brought forth she can bring forth again.