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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses

CHAPTER III: THE HEIGHT OF THE TIMES

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Two centuries later there were not in the whole Empire sufficient men of Italian birth with courage equal to filling the places of the centurions, and it was found necessary to hire for this post first Dalmatians, and afterwards Barbarians from the Danube and the Rhine. In the meantime the women were becoming barren, and Italy was depopulated.  Let us now turn to another kind of epoch which enjoys a vital sentiment, seemingly the most opposed to the last. We have here a very curious phenomenon which it is most important should be defined. When not more than thirty years ago politicians used to perorate before the crowds, it was their custom to condemn such and such a Government measure, some excess or other on its part, by saying that it was unworthy of the advanced times. It is curious to recall that we find the same phrase employed by Trajan in his famous letter to Pliny, advising him not to persecute the Christians on the strength of anonymous accusations: nec nostri saeculi est. There have been, then, various periods in history which have felt themselves as having attained a full, definitive height, periods in which it is thought that the end of a journey has been reached, a long-felt desire obtained, a hope completely fulfilled. This is "the plenitude of the time," the full ripening of historic life. And, in fact, thirty years ago, the European believed that human life had come to be what it ought to be, what for generations previous it had been desiring to be, what it was henceforward always bound to be. These epochs of plenitude always regard themselves as the result of many other preparatory periods, of other times lacking in plenitude, inferior to their own, above which this time of full-flower has risen. Seen from this height, those preparatory periods give the impression that during them life was an affair of mere longing and illusion unrealised, of unsatisfied desire, of eager precursors, a time of "not yet," of painful contrast between the definite aspiration and the reality which does not correspond to it. Thus the XIXth Century looks upon the Middle Ages. At length, the day arrives on which that old, sometimes agelong, desire seems to be fully attained, reality accepts it and submits to it. We have arrived at the heights we had in view, the goal to which we had looked forward, the summit of time. To "not yee, has succeeded "at last."  This was the feeling with regard to their own time held by our fathers and all their century. Let it not be forgotten; our time is a time which follows on a period of plenitude. Hence it is that, inevitably, the man living on the other bank, the man of that plenary epoch just past, who sees everything from his own view-point, will suffer from the optical illusion of regarding our age as a fall from plenitude, as a decadent period.

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