But the process of uprooting went further still. After the age of “enlightenment” had dethroned reason and dispossessed that power of thought which grasps the whole in one comprehensive view, to replace it by the power which pursues detail and difference, the interior economy of man, his spiritual unity, broke up into a mere juxtaposition of powers and functions. Men spoke now not of their souls, but of psychic processes. The consciousness of being a personal agent, the creative organ of living powers, became increasingly foreign to the educated. And after Kant and his school had made the transcendental subject the autonomous lawgiver of the objective world and even of the empirical consciousness itself, after man instead of holding to the objectivity of the thing and of his own self began to speak of an objectivity which possessed none but a purely logical validity, and of a purely logical subject, then the whole consciousness of reality became afflicted with an unhealthy paralysis. The “As If” philosophy here, and solipsism there, like vampires, suck all the blood out of resolution and action.[6] The autonomous man, cut off from God, and the solitary man cut off from the society of his fellow-men, isolated from the community, is now severed also from his own empirical self. He becomes a merely provisional creature, and therefore sterile and unfruitful, corroded by the spirit of “criticism,” estranged from reality, a man of mere negation.

This bloodless, sterile man of mere negation cannot ultimately live. For man cannot live by mere negation. The impulse to live is strong within him; and that impulse is stronger than any unnatural, gray philosophy. Man cries for life, for full, whole, personal life. He is sated with negation and desires to affirm. For only in decisive affirmation and strong resolution lie action and life.