Transcript

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A friend of mine happened to be made the chairman of a club of graduate students, most of them graduate students of history in a famous university. And he was good enough to invite me to meet his friends. So I went down. And during the evening, they talked of their doctors' theses. And 22 out of 25 future historians considered the writing of their theses as a chore. They said, in so many words, that they really were bored.

Bored by history? I did not trust my ears. As you know, we in this course have started on the assumption that there is indeed a -- kind of escape from history, among the ordinary people. And we have accepted this fact. The man in the street shrugs off history as dry bones. Only if he's polite, he may put the -- dry bones in a -- into a beautiful museum. But now I have to accept a second lesson. The experts themselves are typical escapists from history. Indifference on both sides of the counter threatens history with meaninglessness. Once such a chill has killed the flowering of the historical sentiment, argument will never do. An allergy is an allergy. I well know that our public feeds on historical fiction, on biographies. But two-thirds of these books are pure fiction. And these substitutes therefore can never give this -- experiences, which I feel in the face of true history.

Therefore, I do not recommend any doping by novels. I retreat. If I read Pandit Nehru's Glimpses of World History, I here see a very good man, and an honest man who gazes into the thousands of years behind us, and is hardly finding one interesting episode every 500 years; just glimpses into the dark, in an ocean of meaninglessness. And then I can understand all the haters of history. They see too many histories, and never and nowhere one history. I could only have respect myself for one single, whole, universal history of the human race. Until this universal history can be read again, I'm not going to sell history to anybody. Don't expect today any argument in favor of history. No, I intend to find out for myself what history is, always has been, and will have to be again before it should be taught in any school of the land.

I shall put two signposts on the portals through which we now are going to descend into the hell of history. One of the signposts relates to the fact; the other refers to the form. That is, one speaks of the events in history; and the other speaks of the people who tell the facts, or write them down, the men we call historians. The first signpost, about the content of history, has been varied often. I do not know which variation may have reached your ear already. I shall quote in it -- in its oldest form, by an Italian, Beccaria -- 200 years back, who said, "Happy the nation without a history." Could it be that there already we have the

explanation, why little enthusiasm is felt among graduate students of history? Happy we are without history. "Happy the people whose annals are blank in history," Carlyle has said. And the great German-American Carl Schurz has said, "Happy the people without history," and, added he, "We have even too much of it."

He who craves happiness, then, must not turn towards history. If the pursuit of happiness is a man's right, and a man's main theme, the pursuit of history can never be history. Not his wa- -- this way, happiness. Proud Arthur Schopenhauer, this greatest educator of the middle classes, closed his rema- -- work with the remark, "Ninety-nine percent of the people assume that life is given them for their own benefit and satisfaction. To those," he said, "I have nothing to offer." To those who pursue happiness, history also offers nothing. They are then justified in shouting, "Down with history!"

The next shingle which I shall hang out concerns the form of history. How do you or I come to know history, to witness history? The answer given by a man like Carlyle is rather startling. And it probably again repels 99 percent of the ordinary, professional historians. Carlyle said, "In a certain sense, all men are historians." My 22 bored friends of Harvard would certainly resent this dictum. Here they go out to become experts in history. And Carlyle s- -- tells them that it isn't necessary. Everyone can do just the same. They wanted at least to become the experts to whom the laymen have to come, and whom they have to hire to learn anything about history. If we all are historians, much of the luster of the professional historian will vanish. Perhaps with this luster, the boredom too might vanish. But it is not an insipid idea that these monumental -- monuments of -- but is this not an insipid idea that these monuments of erudition, of historical literature, these volumes should be built on the quicksand of a universal priesthood of all the believers in history? The professional historian must shudder and see all his authority crumble.

Here we have then two equally terrifying warnings. Right at the start of our descent into history. The contents of history are not meant for the happiness of the many. The form of history is not meant for the respect of the few.

Hush, hush, then. Let us inspect very privately now this monstrous dynamis- -- -mite to the -- happiness of the public, the thinner of the paint and {woad} of all professional pride. What is history? We now may be blunt about it as we have to pay now not to pay any regards to the happy many or the proud few. And we already know now two things: hestor- -- history -- and we now already know two things: history if it exists at all, must be going on in humanity without regard to your or my individual happiness. And historians--that is, people conscious of history, we all may be without an academic degree. Obvious-

ly, there is also a third fact about history which is known: it is not nature in its state of everyday recurrence. history brings in changes, newness. History then does not recur, but it occurs. It makes nobody particularly happy, but we all can testify to it. From these three points, perhaps the riddle of the Sphinx becomes soluble.

Let's be blunt. History is the story of how new qualities in the human race are created and handed over from generation to generation. It is the inheritance of acquired qualities, the transmission of new qualities. It's the bettering of the times, as Shakespeare's sonnets call it. It is the great story how you, for example, have become Americans. Three hundred years ago, there were no Americans. And now we speak of "red-blood Americans." Now you take this for granted. But obviously, this is a story. How did it come about that there was a nation and is a nation on the globe that one time never existed? History would have to contain, for example, the story of how being an American could ever enter the scene. History is the story of the creation of new qualities. How can any American deny that there is -- such a story? You can be spotted anywhere in the world. History tells us of the unbelievable creation of new events, because not only is it new, but it is unbelievable too before it is has happened.

Our mind, our brain tries to deduce or reduce logically everything to its causes. Therefore really, for the brain, nothing new can ever enter the world. You can always explain the Americans from their European roots. But can you? Obviously, there is some queer thing in America which forces us to say, "No. These people are Americans."

It is impossible by reason to prove that anything new ever can happen. The Greeks and the Jews said that Christ could not have been born. And really, for the mind, it will always be un- -- impossible that a new thing can enter this tight system of forces, and energies, and masses, and quantities. Everybody has said that people will not fly until Orville Wright did fly. Then, of course, they came and said, "We knew it all the time. It is so simple."

This is the firm tradition in human behavior. First, when a new thing happens, they say it cannot happen, it is impossible. And they prove this logically. Then, the second thing, when they can't deny that it has happened, they say something else discovered it. And -- not the Wright brothers, for example. And the third thing we always find in history is that the people at the end say, "We knew it all the time." That is, today everybody believes that the Americans are just another race on the earth. Yesterday, they said, "These European emigr‚s into North America are really nothing new, and they are no good." And before, they said, "There is no New World." The people at home in Spain said to Christopher Columbus there could not be another world -- a western way to India. And

when they discovered it, they said, "Somebody else had discovered it." And as you know, they took all the honor from him and put him into chains. And Amerigo Vespucci got the name and the honor for his non-discovery of America. And so we call it America, instead of Columbia.

But by now, everybody has settled down and we say, "The people knew it all the time." And they even prove this. And they find on Cape Cod forged Viking runes, and so we say, "Everybody knew it all the time." That is the story of everything new that happens in history.

When Christ and His martyrs had just been killed in Palestine, there arose a famous sorcerer, Simon Magus, who said, "We don't need Jesus, and we don't need the Apostles. And we don't need any events in history. We have our brain. We have gnosis. The same wisdom, just on our own. Not -- no event like the Crucifixion is necessary for our salvation."

People will always act like this man Simon. They will not believe that even at this moment something new is happening in the world, because their logic says, "It cannot." A and B must lead to C, but then C is after all not independent, and therefore it is just the effect of two causes, and not very interesting in itself. But history, cer- -- a certain instinct in all of us tells us that C must not be reduced to A and B. Christ must not be reduced to Judaism and Greek philosophy. America must not be reduced to the Chinese coolies and the Irish workmen who met in 1865 in the middle of the continent, when they finished the railroad. And a flight by Orville Wright cannot be reduced to the flight of the swallow or the flight of a kite. It is something new, one thing that has never been done before. You could have a glider before, and you could have a kite. But the ingenious idea of heavier than air, through movement, had to be hatched.

So this is the difficulty of history. History is no science, and shall never be a science, because science tells you how one thing follows out of the other. But this strange thing: history tells us how one thing came into light, despite all the reasons why it shouldn't. All the others therefore, all the reasonable people s- -- always deny the new event before it happens. They state it, "It can never happen." And so we have this number of books, It Can Happen Here, sounding a warning that history is just the sequence of things that can happen here, because you do not expect them to happen.

The result is, we now know history is the story of the unheard-of things. And science is the story of the deducible things. History then is the story of new creations, or it is nothing. If you could reduce Hamlet to nothingness, to all the plays that were written before, then it wouldn't be worthwhile mentioning Hamlet. We mention history, only the names that stand out and must be remem-

bered for their own sake, because they cannot be reduced to names that existed before.

Take a very simple example. At Gettysburg, Mr. Everett from Harvard spoke for three hours. And he made an excellent speech, because he was a very famous orator. He represented Boston, and he tal- -- talked so well that his speech today is forgotten. And it is forgotten, because you can analyze this speech into Harvard, into Massachusetts, into oratory, into the 19th century, into professors, into Aristotelian rhetorics. You can reduce it to all the bel- -- elements that went into the making of this fine man and his three-hour speech. And that is all there is to this speech today. And once you have analyzed this speech, you can write it yourself, and you perhaps improve on it. And then, however, there was, as you well know, a three-minute speech at the same occasion, the Gettysburg Address, which was thrown into the wastepaper basket after it had been delivered.

Now not one of us could either think up, or compose, or reduce to logic, or rhetoric, or any such thing this speech. It is something unheard-of. And that is the reason why we commemorate the address by Lincoln, and why we have forgotten Mr. Everett. And why Mr. Everett had the greatness of heart to defy his own brain, and to write to the president after both had spoken; and he said, he could only hope that his three-hour speech had not failed completely to convey some of the ideas which Mr. Lincoln had so masterfully conveyed in a few minutes. This I call "greatness of heart" because this man recognized that something new had occurred.

Do you begin to understand that history can only consist of the things that cannot be rationally analyzed and deduced? Because otherwise there -- we would have no reason to speak of history. We would only speak of the laws of nature and their eternal recurrence. If you think of chemistry, then you want to reduce the elements, or you want to reduce the mixture to its elements, and the elements to electrons. But if you could reduce the -- Gettysburg Address to the 272 words out of which it is composed, and 172 of them are monosyllabic, then it would not be the Gettysburg Address.

That is, once you can reduce something great in life to something else, it ceases to be a topic of history. Anything that can be reduced to something else is historically -- nonexistent. So if you can reduce the Declaration of Independence to the vested interests of the landowning class in this country, then you -- nobody any longer has any reason to learn the Declaration of Independence by heart. And perhaps this is a help to understand our present-day plight. There are, of course, a number of plush orations and of flag-waving memories which could be forgotten, and which are not historical. And many efforts of our present-day

historians are very valuable, because they invalidate certain claims -- to be historical, to be monumental, to be memorable, and say, "No, this is not memorable, because it is just the poor digestion, or the financial interest, or the vanity of some little person, and he should not be remembered." But the tendency, which has been prevailing, to identify this kind of sifting process with history itself cannot be successful, because if you sift everything out of the sand and say, "There -- is no gold to be found in the sand," the gold-washing will stop.

Take the Kinsey Report. Do you think that it is a new invention of Mr. Kinsey to prove that most of our efforts to love are abortive? That is the case since Adam and Eve. That is why we are not in paradise. Of course. All the animals are much better off. They have a certain time in which to mate. They kill their rivals. But we can mate all the year around, and we can't kill all our rivals, so are very unhappy. We don't -- never know when it is time to love. You may laugh, but please accept this as true. It makes true love all the more miraculous. The Kinsey Report proves that marriage is a sacrament, because sacrament means always a free miracle by the grace of God. And it is all against the Kinsey Report's probabilities. Therefore, every marriage is really an unbelievable story, and it deserves to be told. Any courtship -- your parents have to tell you, or have to testify to the fact that they actually got married. And everybody gets married in his own way. This is not just one story. But each courtship is an original story. Every marriage that is really a marriage is wrested from the statistics of the Kinsey Report as a miracle, as something absolutely unpredictable.

So then we now know that history is the record of the unheard-of, the improbable, the paradoxical, the thing that otherwise cannot be believed. History is the sum of the unbelievable things that become believable because they are told. That two people should have emerged from the quagmire of mere sensuousness, and mere fear, and embarrassment, from their own prison--everybody knows how troublesome this prison is--that is miraculous. Your presence here, in this classroom, proves that long before you had the trouble yourself, your parents got out of trouble. And you are their legitimate offspring, and you make them forget all their troubles and sacrifices.

Once you understand that history should be sifted, and nothing -- contain nothing but the unbelievable facts, you will also understand the second dogma of history, that it is rather short.

This may come as a -- quite a shock to you. We have lengthened history in nature to 900 million years, or perhaps a little more. My answer is that when you sift the important events, the story of the past should never be much longer than the true promise of our own future. If you want to control the validity of any historical outlook, please check the balance between the length of its future and

the length of its past. And then you will find who understands much of history and who doesn't. Because if you take the modern physicist, he has the shortest future and the longest past. Let him have his privilege to go back into millions of years. He has no relation to the future, and he has no relation to history, to tell you the truth. Only to recurrent nature.

Our two inscriptions on the portals into the gold mine of history read, "No happiness, this way," and "Everybody is an historian." Now you can understand easily why this must be so. New qualities for the human race have nothing to do with your or my private happiness. They go down through thousands of years as new qualities, and we inherit them. And this is the content of history. And the other thing is: an unbelievable event, as we now know history to contain, an unbelievable event has the compulsion, the force to make us speak. An unbelievable story can only be known because it is told. "Love had ripened into speech," William {Harnay} once wrote. Very beautiful line. A declaration of love is part of the love itself. A love story is no love story if the lover never tells the loved one that he loves her.

Therefore history itself produces its tellers, its tale-tellers. Somebody must be so impressed by the event that he cannot remain silent. And it has been said that a great event is great because it compels somebody to speak of it.

So we have bridged the gap, I think now, between the historian and the common people who want to be happy, and the real story of the acquir- -- -isition of new qualities. But I have to warn you against one more error. The world is not divided into natural facts and historical facts, so that we leave one field to the physicist, and the other field to the historian. It is much more subtle. The same sun is new and is old. And the same sunrise therefore is a theme for the physicist and a theme for the historian. If you look at the sunrise as repetitive and old, you go to the astronomer. If you look at it as unique, this Easter Sunday morning sunrise, then you go to the historian so that he may record it.

So we learn that history is an outlook on life, an approach to life, in which we take a fact and say, "It has never happened before. It is new." We may treat the trite recurrences as surprises that are sprung on us today for the first time, as long as you say, "I did not think that this would happen, before I have -- had read it." That long, this story can become an event that is worthwhile to be remembered.

History then is an aspect. We can treat the founding fathers of this country, for example, not as caused by self-interest, but as causes that could be not deduced from the past. And therefore history is the encroachment of the free and creative future into the past. We look it -- into the past that it was at one time not

there, and look to people as -- much as future as you and I now stare into the future and do not know what to expect. Of this strange expectation of a different future, there are the clear vestiges in the past of our race. Men have already acted as free agents before us. And these traces of our own freedom, which we can trace in the past, we call "history." History then is that very spotty path backwards which we try to find, because we have to go forward creatively ourselves. And there -- that's the reason why history always corresponds to the future. You have no more history -- genuine history of the past as you have fa- -- not faith in the future.

The causeless facts are selected to form backward an avenue that looks as though it could start today.

You can only understand any of the great founders of this country if you have the same free notion of your own future. Well, you will say that you don't know anything of this kind of consideration, that your future is not very important to you. You live in the present. Don't be mistaken. There is a kind of superstition about this word "present." In nature, there is no present. It's as short as a razor-blade's edge, this present. There is only past and future, if you observe it from the outside. The present exists only in your own heart if you have this freedom to look at future things as though you could expect them as old, and if you look at old things as when they were new. This sounds rather complicated, but is it?

Present is a kind of knot of two conflicting pressures on yourself. You expect from the future that you must fulfill your duty, that you will have children, that you will be successful. And that's why you prepare at this moment for your future life. And you have certain obligations towards the past. You have to be loyal to the school to which you belong, or to your parents. And this has to unfold and roll off. And as long as there is such a conflict between your background and your own aims, you have a present filled with problems, filled with work, filled with time. The present then is the creation of a sound relationship between the future and the past.

You are here in this present hour. Why? Because you want to prepare yourself for life. Therefore your life, your real future has created this present. It is a compromise between your past and your future. That's why you put in these four years in college. And most of you treat these four years just as an in-between, or an appendix to your youth. And then they are wasting it. But if you analyze this simple fact, which we express by the strange term, "preparation for life," you will admit that nobody can put the little syllable "pre" before an act, if he does not already begin by its completion, and date backwards the steps that shall lead up to this goal. And first therefore, you must know that there is a "post"

before "pre" makes any sense. How can anybody prepare unless the future is anticipated, believed in, certain? The present is then the conflict between our anticipated, or believed-in future and the experienced past.

For example, the four years of college l- -- are cut out of future, and the past. The past is arranging your present life financially, and -- by its regulations. Still, this arrangement makes only sense if already you have a future and if you are filling in these four years with all the dreams and visions and promises of your own fulfillment. Otherwise, all the money invested in our educational process would be wasted. We would just bring up parrots.

So the present is a very wonderful creation. Com- -- take a worker and compare him to a student. Such a worker has a very short-lived present. He may be told Friday afternoon that he is not to come back Monday. From this, you see how the worker's moment has shrunk. Two days' work, or two weeks' work, until he gets the next pay envelope. Therefore this man has no time to prepare. On Friday, he goes home, he tells -- or doesn't tell his wife, and he tries to find work on Saturday, which is a very bad day to find work indeed. But if he doesn't, he will begin a terrible existence the next Monday, by seconds, and minutes, and hours, because on Monday, he will have no job, and he had no time to look, and prepare, and learn a new trade -- as you all have at this moment. And therefore, this man has less future, and no background, and so he's tossed around from second to second. And he has no present. He's rushed.

The insane person has no present. Anybody who's panicky lacks the present. The person whom you put in the straitjacket, the person who jumps out of a window, who is alone in a desert and breaks down among the sun's ra- -- and the cacti, the person who is alone, well, they all go mad. Panic is a feeling that we have no time, that we have lost all time, that we are even a minus in time, that time has gone overboard. We can lose time, and we can gain time. And the sense of time can be destroyed, or it can be cultivated. He has plenty of time who knows that innumerable generations already have prepared his future. And he has plenty of time who knows that the future has to be created freely and will not come about from outside, automatically.

I have experienced in my own life the fact of panic. I was on the Verdun front in the First World War. And perhaps it's worthwhile to tell you this story to expand on this unbelieved fact that the present has something to do with our sense of history.

I had to conduct a column of horses under fire into the front line. We carried ammunition. I was leading the column, therefore had no time to be nervous. But my men were very nervous indeed. And I had to fight this. We did

quite well. We got several horses killed, a man wounded, and we returned in relatively good order. But there was one man whom I had to court-martial, and there were some horses that shied. So I put down a panic. And that day, I think my people regarded me as a model of tranquility.

Now let me oppose this little incident by the opposite event. It happened the next day. And it may show you how flexible the same person is.

The next morning, I was curious to see more of what was going on around the fortress of Verdun. So I went alone forward into the front lines and wanted to have a panorama. Certainly I did get it. I was out far enough to be in the midst of a tremendous cannonade, which went on there for a month, even a year. At a certain hour, both sides tried to show they were alive, and everybody fired his big gun. Now I was in the midst of it, and I really was panic-stricken. I had to throw myself -- down on the ground, and I couldn't move for five minutes. I seemed to be quite out of my senses.

What's the difference between the two days? After all, this was the same man at 24 hours' difference. I was under orders the first time; I was in history. And I was not under orders the second time. I was covered with the inherited qualities of the race: discipline, obedience, fortitude--the first time. The second time, I was lying naked on the ground, just the animal-man in my- -- within myself. And that I think is the reason why I got panicky. I really was alone the second time. Of course, I had donned my uniform the same way as the day before. But I still was actually alone with my curiosity. Curious people always are alone. Curiosity is the hallmark of the mere individual. An officer who takes his of- -- soldiers to the front line is not alone. He is part of the whole outfit. More than this, he is at this moment creating the whole outfit. He is incorporating the outfit. He embodies it. It is very easy then for officers then to be courageous. If you are a coward, become an officer. Then you will have courage. Privates have to be really courageous, because they have no official reason to be.

The less we are alone, the less we are impressed by the moment, when I looked around the second day, I was all by myself. Poor me. Just me. What was I against a cannonade of thousand or more guns? So my panic is easily explained. If you take this example, you will also find that a man in an expedition on the North Pole, as long as he has one other man waiting for him in his hut, will not grow panicky. He is in the history of the Arctic expeditions, and he knows that he -- will be one step forward in this long sequence of heroic adventures. As soon as this lifeline, however, to the one ma- -- man in the tent would be broken, or -- take another case: as soon as you are at a first ascent in a mountain, and you know that you will never see your fellow again because he fell off, then panic is upon you.

Man has not been allowed to found the times under his own steam. No man has a present all to himself. In the present, we always take part in the march of time through our little selves. Our times then are social creations. The great heresy of our time is that you think that any individual experiences time, and has a present, or a future, or a past. The individual has just -- is just a recurrent event of the past, a little cell, a little amoeba, an animal.

As individuals, we are panicky. But we experience real time--that is, the expectation of a free future, and the memory of a freely created past--only in relation to other people, former generations, future generations to come. Otherwise, we break down. The unsane man -- insane man is the one who is so solipsistic, as it is called, so completely alone that he says, "I have no time."

Our physical, biological organization seems to doom us to failure the moment we are truly alone. That is why a monk in the desert must never be pictured by you as being alone. He is in solitude. But he is in solitude for your salvation. He serves you in the desert to prove that you must not depend on the luxuries of the big cities. Buddha went into solitude in order that others might give up the vain struggle.

The most difficult thing today, therefore, to understand history comes from the fact that we make no distinction between solitude and aloneness, or isolation. Not the physical appearance of aloneness drives a man out of time, out of the present, and out of his mind. It is the actual isolation that he is nothing but an individual which we cannot stand. We have to be inside the stream of history in order to remain sane.

For one instance -- to come back to my story, I had stripped myself of my discipline, of my uniform, of my role, of my duty. And since there was no duty, which made me be there, I found out that I shouldn't be there, that I wa- -- had simply been a fool, asking myself now, "What are you doing here?" The only answer that I could give was, "I shouldn't be here." And that's why I broke down.

In the panicky person, then, there is no time sense. The future, and the past, and the present collapse.

Now, you will say, "How do you prove that these unbelievable events are really free creations? That the future and the past are really basking us, and balancing us in a present time in which we have gained time to fulfill our destiny? That we really are the heirs of freedom?" Well, compare the results of actions which you do under the influence of liquor to true inspiration. Compare the events that are done by hypnotism to the things that are done by genius. You can hypnotize people to do anything. You can make soldiers drunk so that they

attack, and go over the parapet with unheard courage. But you cannot rely on them. It's purely accidental. Somebody else -- the man who so- -- gave the liquor to them is not sure that this fight, this courage, the event produced by this courage will last. The great offensive in 1918 of the German army, the last they made -- near Amiens, trying to reach the British channel, broke down because the first attackers were so famished that they drunk the liquor they found in the front line of the enemy, and out went the fight. They were too exhausted.

This then is to be said: every great event can be imitated mechanically. That which you have done under inspiration and great courage, and heroically, you can imitate because you are made drunk, intoxicated. But this second event, which is mechanical would not figure in the history of mankind. It only becomes interesting if people without the influence of liquor do something extraordinary. That proves something. Because it proves that there is a new quality, an unexpected quality in this man on which we may base now our future expectations. It hadn't been known that people could do such a thing.

We are not very interesting in history as such, as individuals. And therefore we aren't made happy there. But it is interesting that our lives form the link that joins the generations together. I always have asked myself, all my elders, about the unbelievable things of history that happened to them. I think I got quite a sting -- I got my faith from these stories of my elders. They usually were of the third generation backward, that I -- too might do my little bit of unbelievability in my own time.

The chain of history consists of free acts of man. What we call "history" then is a sequence of acts that are freely done by people, and then in the end, miraculously fit together. If everybody acts freely in his own time, the miracle is that the whole makes sense.

Every step in history then is not chained before it happens. It occurs at the full risk of not being done. When you look back, however, all these steps look logical. This is no proof that it looked logical before it was done. And this seems to me the general mistake today, that you think people knew beforehand what you know.

Every one step in the history of the human race has therefore been created by free acts fitting into a logical sequence later. And the next step that must be taken in this generation with regard to the service of this country will have to be a free act. What the function of the United States will have to be in the future, some people have to act out voluntarily. Somebody will have to get the beating, like {Billy} Mitchell, with the Air Force.

One man has foretold the last 50 years of the world's history very clearly. He has said that there would be a tremendous catastrophe, that the blind optimism, and the random thought, that the anarchy of thinking would be judged by a tremendous cataclysm. World wars would destroy the nations for their blind hatred, and for their wild passion of being just one nation or another nation, all by themselves. And he also said that by 2000 there have to be -- would have to be one world, with one faith, and a great, rigid discipline of life. This man believed in what he said. He acted it out, and he exiled himself from his own times. Of course he was scorned and not listened to, just as {Billy} Mitchell was courtmartialed. And the prophecy -- well, why do I dally? It's Friedrich Nietzsche of whom I speak.

In some measure then, we have here a man who, all by himself, voluntarily already lived into the future. Now believe me. Without him, the history of the 19th century would be ex- -- inexplicable. It would look like a blind alley, all -- and everybody dooming themselves to the destruction of the two world wars. This one man who volunteered to anticipate the times after the catastrophe gives us some home that there is still connection with what they have done. Otherwise, we would be very suspicious, and it would have to reject most what the 19th century did, always saying, "But they led us into the catastrophe. Therefore, no good."

And I think therefore that one volunteer, before the historical crisis, like Nietzsche, is more important than 10 million people who read the his- -- history books now on the decline of civilization and say after the event, "Ah, civilizations go down." I therefore think we treat the past in order to enlarge the future.

If you can see the force of past events to make us speak, we all would like to do things that can be remembered, and can be told to our grandchildren. The story of your marriage deserves to be told to your children, and then they'll understand that they form one body, and one unit, and they'll have parents, and they'll look up to you as a generation, and not just as individuals.

Any man then is a natural historian who can testify of one event in his life in which he, and s- -- one other person at least, have formed the link in the chain of new qualities of the human race.