The Fruits of Former Civilizations and the Blossoms of the Contemporary

“But in addition to this, the contemporary beings of that community Germany have become very skillful also in inventing those sciences, thanks to which the said specific disease there of wiseacring has been very widely spread among other of your favorites; and during the process of this disease in them, many of them semiconsciously or even quite automatically chance to notice some small detail of the common cosmic process which actualizes Everything Existing, and afterwards, informing others of it, they together use it for some of their, as they are called, new inventions, thereby adding to the num- ber of those ‘new means,’ of which during the last two of their centuries so many have accumulated there, that their total effect has now already become, what is called, the ‘resultant-decomposing-force,’ in contradistinction to what is called the ‘resultant-creative-force’ of Nature.

“And indeed, my boy, owing merely to the sciences invented by the beings of the contemporary Germany, other three-brained beings of your planet belonging both to that same community and to other communities have now acquired the possibility of inventing, and now they almost every day invent here and there, some such new invention or new means and, employing them in the process of their existence, have now already brought it about that poor Nature there—already enfeebled without this through no fault of her own—is scarcely able to actualize what are called her ‘evolutionary’ and ‘involutionary’ processes.

“For your clear representation and better understand- ing how these contemporary direct heirs have surpassed their ‘legators,’ I must now explain to you also about certain widely used means existing there at the present time, which owe their existence exclusively to these ‘Nature- helping’ direct heirs of ancient Greece.