HISTORY AND IMMORTALITY
35
act, so to speak, as the eternal time-space into which they could all
flow and thus be rid of their mutual conflicts and exclusiveness. This
is what happened to our concept of History, as it happened to our
concept of Nature. In the situation of radical world-alienation,
neither History nor Nature are at all conceivable. This twofold loss
of the world-the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the
widest sense, which would include all history-has left behind it
a society of men who, without a common world which would at
once relate and separate them, live either in desperate lonely separa–
tion or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass society is nothing
more than that kind of organized living which automatically estab–
lishes itself among human beings who are still related to each other,
but have lost the world once common to all of them.
