would be to ask you to look back upon a similar complex,  
               namely the French Revolution.                
 
                                                            
 
 
The French Revolution was in large measure the translation into the field   
of politics of a system of ideas which philosophers and scientists had   
developed over the whole of the previous century. It was the outcome of the  
 rationalist individualism of Locke~and Rousseau, of Voltaire and Franklin,   
a revolt against religious and political traditionalism and authoritarianism  
, an assertion of the right of the individual to think, say and do as he   
liked, and of the equal rights of all individuals in that respect. In the   
course of the actual revolution violence grew, gangsters and fanatical   
theorists got the upper hand, and every kind of appalling atrocity was   
committed. Finally the intensified national momentum generated by the   
revolution was turned by Napoleon into the channel of those aggressive   
military ambitions which had dominated French policy for nearly a century.   
Napoleon had cleared out the gangsters, and had to be got rid of in turn   
as a menace to the peace of Europe. But in the end, a great deal of the   
underlying thought of the revolution, .purged of its more extreme features,   
became the commonplace of European Liberalism, and indeed corresponded   
very largely to, while it also influenced, the Liberalism of this country   
                 and of the United States.                  
 
                                                            
 
 
Germany also has gone through a revolution, a particular version of a world-  
wide movement which, like the underlying ideas of the French Revmlution, has  
 been based on the philosophic and scientific thought of the last century,   
and has taken its peculiar shape in the German-setting. In the particular   
case of Germany, Hitler and his associates have doubled the role of   
Napoleon on the one hand, and men like Robespierre and Marat on the other.   
Also the general underlying' thought of the revolution has been heavily   
coloured by the particular militarist tradition of Prussia, and by the   
theory preached for a couple of generations, of the peculiar claims of the   
n race to pre-eminence and mastery over inferior Slavs and L
 
                                                            
 
 
But to come back to the underlying ideas of the German or I would rather   
say Continental revolution. The whole thought of the Nineteenth Century,   
beginning with the conception of ev. olution, the approach to problems on   
the biological side, the more careful study of history, have all shaken   
     the conception of the purely rational individual.      
 
                                                            
 
 
They have taught us that man is inevitably a creature of instincts and   
tradition, and these in their turn are particular to his particular   
national and racial environment. They ho~ve taught us that man is not a   
wholly self-contained individual, but part of some community which is in   
itself in a measure a