The Gothic cathedrals of the “Heart of Europe”—­now the place of Armageddon—­represent the most perfect and powerful incarnation of the Organic spirit in architecture.  After the decadence of mediaeval feudalism—­synchronous with that of monasticism—­the Arranged architecture of the Renaissance acquired the ascendant; this was coincident with the rise of humanism, when life became increasingly secular.  During the post-Renaissance, or scientific period, of which the war probably marks the close, there has been a confusion of tongues; architecture has spoken only alien or dead languages, learned by rote.

But in so far as it is anything at all, aesthetically, our architecture is Arranged, so if only by the operation of the law of opposites, or alternation, we might reasonably expect the next manifestation to be Organic.  There are other and better reasons, however, for such expectancy.

Organic architecture is ever a flower of the religious spirit.  When the soul draws near to the surface of life, as it did in the two mystic centuries of the Middle Ages, it organizes life; and architecture, along, with the other arts becomes truly creative.  The informing force comes not so much from man as through him.  After the war that spirit of brotherhood, born in the camps—­as Christ was born in a manger—­and bred on the battlefields and in the trenches of Europe, is likely to take on all the attributes of a new religion of humanity, prompting men to such heroisms and renunciations, exciting in them such psychic sublimations, as have characterized the great religious renewals of time past.

If this happens it is bound to write itself on space in an architecture beautiful and new; one which “takes its shape and sun-color” not from the niggardly mind, but from the opulent heart.  This architecture will of necessity be organic, the product not of self-assertive personalities, but the work of the “Patient Daemon” organizing the nation into a spiritual democracy.

The author is aware that in this point of view there is little of the “scientific spirit”; but science fails to reckon with the soul.  Science advances facing backward, so what prevision can it have of a miraculous and divinely inspired future—­or for the matter of that, of any future at all?  The old methods and categories will no longer answer; the orderly course of evolution has been violently interrupted by the earthquake of the war; igneous action has superseded aqueous action.  The casements of the human mind look out no longer upon familiar hills and valleys, but on a stark, strange, devastated landscape, the ploughed land of some future harvest of the years.  It is the end of the Age, the Kali Yuga—­the completion of a major cycle; but all cycles follow the same sequence:  after winter, Spring; and after the Iron Age, the Golden.