Epilogue
I. Hellenes and Hebrews
The spiritual views of a man, of whatever religion or race, are the products of his particular environment. But the roots of these conceptions, as well as those of social life in general, lie in the great web of organic life with which the social life is closely and inseparably connected; just as organic life itself is connected with the next life sphere, the cosmic.
There is no absolute line of demarcation between these three life spheres, just as there is DO difference between the material and the spiritual life. The three life spheres do, however, form sharply defined grades or epochs within the unified and indivisible universal life. And just as in each individual life sphere, so also in the totality of the universal life, every step toward a higher grade of life must have its antecedents in the lower grade. Compared with the higher order of life, the organic, the cosmic life sphere appears lifeless, especially on the border line which leads from the life of the cosmic bodies to that of the organisms. Here, on the surface of the already cooled-off and stiffened cosmic bodies, we see only the dead residue of the cosmic life sphere, out of which the higher organic life sphere developed. But if we observe the life of the cosmic sphere where it is still being generated and developed in universal space, we cannot deny to it attributes of the divine life-the life that is so beautifully described in our literature in the Words: "Last in creation, first in thought." The remarkable phenomena which were observed in the modern period, such as the splitting and other changes going on in the double comets of Bielasch and Liais, the solidifying of the cosmic dust, its assumption of the spheroid form and spiral movement, and finally the grouping of these bodies into sidereal and planetary systems, these and other similar phenomena are life processes which can be as little explained by an external and one-sided mechanical gravitation theory, as the process of the division of the embryonic cell or the grouping of the organs in an organism.
Similarly, the human, the social life sphere, rises infinitely higher than the organic, but is in nowise different from it; just as organic life does not differ essentially from the cosmic. Here, also, we meet, on the border-line which leads from the organic into the social life sphere, the natural organic race which, compared with the higher humanitarian life, is spiritless. But in spite of this appearance of spiritlessness, the race is the root of the social life sphere, just as the cosmic bodies were the soil out of which the organisms grew.
Social life is, first of all, a product of the life of definite races, composed of different folk-tribes, each of which has formed its life course in a typical way, In the course of historical development, the typical views of life of the various races came in conflict with one another. From the friction of those antithetical forces were generated the first sparks of the spirit, which contain the germs, out of which higher and more harmonious forms of life will spring forth.
The unity of the human genus is a conception developed in the course of ages through historical activity, and not an original, natural idea, inherent in the human soul. It is not an immediate datum of organic life, but a product of the social historical development process. It has the variety of the primitive racial tribes as its antecedent, their struggle as its conditions, and their final harmonious cooperation as its aim.
The thus conceived unity of mankind presupposes a plan of the history of humanity, namely, that the multiple phenomena of social life will finally unite and cooperate in a not less harmonious manner than the varied and different phenomena of organic and cosmic life. This unified, divine plan of history is, at present, apparently in its last stage of historical development. But in antiquity, when the nations were still in the grip of natural life, it was only one people, the people of Israel, which, thanks to its particular genius, was able to perceive the workings of the divine plan in the history of humanity, as well as in the organic and cosmic spheres of life.