Western civilisation needs a complete overhaul or it will fall apart one day or another. It has realised the most complete perversion of any rational order of things. Reign of matter, of gold, of machine, of number, it no longer possesses breath, or liberty, or light. The West has lost the sense of command and obedience. It has lost the sense of Action and of Contemplation. It has lost the sense of hierarchy, of spiritual power, of man-gods. It no longer knows nature. It is no longer, for Western man, a living body made of symbols, of gods and ritual gestures – a splendid cosmos, in which man moves freely, like a microcosm within the macrocosm: it has on the contrary decayed to an opaque and fatal exteriority, the mystery of which profane sciences seek to ignore by means of their little laws and their little hypotheses. The West no longer knows Wisdom: it no longer knows the majestic silence of those who have mastered themselves, the bright calm of the seers, the superb solar reality of those in whom the idea has become blood, life and power. Wisdom has been supplanted by the rhetoric of ‘philosophy’ and ‘culture’, the reign of teachers, of journalists, of sportsmen; of plans, of programs and of proclamations. It has succumbed to sentimental, religious, humanitarian contamination, and the race of men of fine words who run around madly exalting ‘Becoming’ and ‘experience’, because silence and contemplation frighten them.