PDF-file (The same edition. Another cover. 2.2 Mb)

The Coming of the Subjective Age 31large and powerful mastery on its province. Often they describedthe malady of Life rather than its health and power, or theriot and revolt of its cravings, vehement and therefore impotentand unsatisfied, rather than its dynamis of self-expression andself-possession. But to this movement which reached its highestcreative power in Russia, there succeeded a turn towards a moretruly psychological art, music and literature, mental, intuitional,psychic rather than vitalistic, departing in fact from a superficialvitalism as much as its predecessors departed from the objectivemind of the past. This new movement aimed like the new philosophicIntuitionalism at a real rending of the veil, the seizure bythe human mind of that which does not overtly express itself, thetouch and penetration into the hidden soul of things. Much ofit was still infirm, unsubstantial in its grasp on what it pursued,rudimentary in its forms, but it initiated a decisive departure ofthe human mind from its old moorings and pointed the directionin which it is being piloted on a momentous voyage of discovery,the discovery of a new world within which must eventually bringabout the creation of a new world without in life and society.Art and literature seem definitely to have taken a turn towardsa subjective search into what may be called the hidden insideof things and away from the rational and objective canon ormotive.Already in the practical dealing with life there are advancedprogressive tendencies which take their inspiration from thisprofounder subjectivism. Nothing indeed has yet been firmlyaccomplished, all is as yet tentative initiation and the first feelingout towards a material shape for this new spirit. The dominantactivities of the world, the great recent events such as the enormousclash of nations in Europe and the stirrings and changeswithin the nations which preceded and followed it, were ratherthe result of a confused half struggle half effort at accommodationbetween the old intellectual and materialistic and the newstill superficial subjective and vitalistic impulses in the West.The latter unenlightened by a true inner growth of the soul werenecessarily impelled to seize upon the former and utilise themfor their unbridled demand upon life; the world was moving