The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century Volume II

First published in German as "Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" in 1899, this book is an intellectual tour de force which juxtaposes European Christian civilization-under the leadership of the Teutonic, or Germanic peoples, against the Semitic world. Volume 2 starts with an outline of how the author views Christianity as an integral part of European civilization and distancing it from Judaism. It then moves on to a discussion of the development of the European state from the time of the end of the Roman Empire. The central thesis of Volume 2 is that all of modern European civilization is a product of the Teutonic people. This theme is then developed in detail in the second part of the book, in a discussion of the history of discovery, science, industry, politics, economy, the church, philosophy and art. "We have seen that nothing is more characteristic of our Teutonic culture than the fact that the impulse to discover and the impulse to fashion go hand in hand. Contrary to the teaching of our historians we hold that our art and science have never rested; had they done so, we should have ceased to be Teutons. Indeed we see that the one is dependent upon the other; the source of all our inventive talent, of all our genius, even of the whole originality of our civilisation, is nature; yet our philosophers and natural scientists have agreed with Goethe when he said: 'The worthiest interpreter of nature is art.' The Foundations was a best-seller which went into eight editions and sold more than a quarter of a million copies by 1938. This new edition is not a facsimile, but has been fully reset and contains the complete original text.