The future of an illusion

· 1939

When one has lived for long within a particular culture[1] and has often striven to discover its origins and the path of its development, one feels for once the temptation to turn one’s attention in the other direction and to ask what further fate awaits this culture and what transformations it is destined to undergo. But one soon finds that the value of such an enquiry is diminished from the outset by several considerations. Above all, by the fact that there are only a few people who can survey human activity in all its ramifications. Most people have been compelled to restrict themselves to a single, or to a few, spheres of interest; but the less a man knows of the past and the present the…

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