The discipline of experience has left a somewhat different residue of habits of thought embedded in their institutional equipment and effective as axiomatic premises in their further apprehension of what is worth while, and why.
It is not that the difference between these two contrasted strains of the Western civilisation is either profound or very pronounced; it is perhaps rather to be stated as a difference of degree than of kind; a retardation of spiritual growth, in respect of the prevalent and controlling habits of thought on certain heads, in the one case as against the other.

Therefore any attempt to speak with sufficient definition, so as to bring out this national difference of animus in any convincing way, will unavoidably have an appearance of overstatement, if not also of bias.

And in any case, of course, it is not to be expected that the national difference here spoken for can be brought home to the apprehension of any unspoiled son of the Fatherland, since it does not lie within that perspective.
It is not of the nature of a divergence, but rather a differential in point of cultural maturity, due to a differential in the rate of progression through that sequence of institutional phases through which the civilised peoples of Europe, jointly and severally, have been led by force of circumstance.

In this movement out of the Dark Ages and onward, circumstances have fallen out differently for those Europeans that chanced to live within the confines of the Fatherland, different with such effect as to have in the present placed these others at a farther remove from the point of departure, leaving them furnished with less of that archaic frame of mind that is here in question.

Possessed of less, but by no means shorn of all--perhaps not of the major part--of that barbaric heritage.
Circumstances have so fallen out that these--typically the French and the English-speaking peoples--have left behind and partly forgotten that institutional phase in which the people of Imperial Germany now live and move and have their being.