Thus the motive passion of adventure gradually gave way to the soft enjoyment of comfort, the passion of conquest to the ideal of the impersonal mechanism, of the automatic distributor of pleasures devoid of risk or of excess, regular and constant, derived from the machine and from fixed income. Once a civilization has become used to the way of this unhuman ease, it no longer creates in order to give rise to new creations, but its very creations produce ever greater quiet and inertia. Thus the substitution of speculative profit for industrial profit, and of the values of comfort for the values of creation, has gradually dethroned the individualistic ideal and opened the way to the spirit which we call bourgeois because of its origin and which seems to us to be the exact antithesis of all spirituality. It took hold first of the upper classes but gradually descended to all classes, even the humblest. For money separates.
Money separates man from struggle with natural forces, for it levels all resistance.
It separates men from each other, for it has commercialized all exchange and has falsified both speech and conduct. We are indeed far from the hero. The rich man of the classical period is himself fast disappearing. He has lost the true sense of being, he moves only among things, and things that are practical and that have been denuded of their mystery. He is a man without love, a Christian without conscience, an unbeliever without passion.