Mankind thinks naturally in extremes or else reconciles by a patchwork and compromise.
Whether he makes a fetish of moderation or surrenders himself to the enthusiasm of the single idea the human being misses always truth of vision and the right pitch of action because instead of seeing, feeling and becoming in obedience to his nature like other animate existences he tries always to measure things by a standard he has set up in his intelligence. But it is the character of his intelligence that it finds it an easy task to distinguish and separate but is clumsy in combining. When it combines, it tends to artificialise and falsify. Oftenest it makes an incongruous patchwork rather than a harmony. All human action as all human thought suffers from this light the attention is only seized by a few conspicuous landmarks, the evolution and end of Athenian democracy, the transition from the Roman republic to the empire, the emergence of feudal Europe out of the ruins of Rome, the Christianisation of Europe, the Reformation and Renascence together preparing a new society, the French Revolution, the present rapid movement towards a socialistic state and the replacing of competition by organized cooperation.