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at work in these natural sciences, whose success transforms the en–
vironment and the resources of humanity, seizes on partial aspects
and on abstractions of reality.
It
owes both its marvels and its limita–
tions to the method it employs, to the analytical truth that it estab–
lishes . Another method of reasoning is necessary to understand the
human world in perpetual evolution, the concrete history in which
the elite man must act.
The Revolt of the Masses
It
is the revolt of the masses that distinguishes our era - a
revolution more a result of the decline of the elite than the intention
of mass man himself. By turns, the philosopher sometimes insists on
the greater number, sometimes on the abdication or the blindness of
the smaller number. "The characteristic of the moment," he writes,
"is that the mediocre sou l, knowing its mediocrity, dares to affirm
the ri ghts of this mediocrity and often imposes them." But in another
passage, he notes that the "distinguished society" is also in harmony
with its time: "I have often thought about the memory of that charm–
ing young woman, the brightest star at the zodiac of Madridian
elegance, who confided in me that she would not suffer through a
ball
to
which fewer than eight hundred people had been invited.
This proved to me to what extent the style of the masses, its tastes,
triumphs today in all vital areas and imposes itself in the last vestiges
of society which until recently seemed reserved for the
happy few."
The taste for number, for the colossal is the visible sign of the domi–
nation by the masses.
Ortega's words would have aroused a French audience, or what
is called the
"mouvements divers"
in parliamentary vocabulary . Isn't it
almost indecent to underrate the people, the masses, and to demand
that some conscious and worthy elites take on their mission? In fact,
Ortega is a pessimist. Contrary to what many believe he thought, he
does not cease to praise the rise of the historical level in our time, the
cause of everything good and bad that the present and the im–
mediate future hold.
The historical level relates in part to numbers. In the nine–
teenth century the European population more than doubled from
180 million in 1800 to 400 million in 1914. Thanks to the technical
developments of the last century, amenities once reserved for a small
minority became accessible to the majority . The masses have desires
and needs that formerly qualified as refinements because they were
the privileges of the few . The improvement of material life coincided
with improvement in the judicial or moral one. The rights of man at
