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Lament. It is perhaps the advantages of our times that bring with them a decline and occasional underestimation of the vita contemplativa. But one must admit to himself that our age is poor in great moralists, that Pascal, Epictetus, Seneca, and Plutarch are now read but little, that work and industry (formerly attending the great goddess Health) sometimes seem to rage like a disease. Because there is no time for thinking, and no rest in thinking, we no longer weigh divergent views: we are content to hate them. With the tremendous acceleration of life, we grow accustomed to using our mind and eye for seeing and judging incompletely or incorrectly, and all men are like travelers who get to know a land and its people from the train. An independent and cautious scientific attitude is almost thought to be a kind of madness: the free spirit is brought into disrepute, particularly by scholars who miss their own thoroughness and antlike industry in his talent for observation, and would gladly confine him to a single corner of science; while he has the quite different and higher task of commanding the entire arrière-ban³¹ of scientific and learned men from his remote outpost, and showing them the ways and ends of culture.
A lament like this one just sung-will probably have its day and, at some time when the genius of meditation makes a powerful return, cease of itself.