in principle—thereby it won an authority that could make itself heard over against accidents of feeling, passion, and the moment; it lay in the responsibility of the families concerned for the selection of the marriage partners—the whole presupposing a lasting organization of society itself, under whose protection and guarantees the family-process could go on. But in these modern days, with idiosyncrasies, thoughts of momentary pleasure rampant, marriage is losing its meaning—hence its tendency to disappear. The objection, however, is not to marriage, but to modernity.[1] It is but an instance. All along the line tradition is attacked—tradition which is the condition of the possibility of a continuity of valuations and policies over long stretches of time. The whole Western world lacks the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows. Among former means for producing continuity in the generations have been inalienable ownership of land and reverence for ancestors: our tendencies are in an opposite direction—land becomes an individual possession and is sold according to individual pleasure; it is one more exhibition of our ruling idea of each man for himself, and even for the mood of the moment.[2]
Along with this egoistic, momentary life goes a variety of lesser traits characteristic of the time. There is a feverish haste, an aimlessness (easy turning from one aim to another), an over-stimulation of the head and senses (the peasant himself being drawn into the cities and their whirl), a growth of nervous diseases and insanity, an increase of alcoholism, vice, crime, celibacy, libertinism, pessimism, anarchism (they are all classed together by Nietzsche), an inability to resist impulse and yet a need for resistance (itself a "formula for decadence," since, when life is moving upward, happiness and instinct coincide).[3] This does not mean that there is not fairly good order in modern society—the business classes, the enjoying classes, and the general comfort require it. Indeed, there is almost too much order. "The streets so clean, the police so superabundant, manners so peaceable, events so small, so pre-
