THE phrases of the street are not only forcible

but subtle: for a figure of speech can often get

into a crack too small for a definition. Phrases

like "put out" or "off colour" might have been

coined by Mr. Henry James in an agony of

verbal precision. And there is no more subtle

truth than that of the everyday phrase about a

man having "his heart in the right place." It

involves the idea of normal proportion; not only

does a certain function exist, but it is rightly

related to other functions. Indeed, the negation

of this phrase would describe with peculiar

accuracy the somewhat morbid mercy and

perverse tenderness of the most representative

moderns. If, for instance, I had to describe with

fairness the character of Mr. Bernard Shaw, I

could not express myself more exactly than by

saying that he has a heroically large and

generous heart; but not a heart in the right place.

And this is so of the typical society of our time.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the

modern world is far too good. It is full of wild

and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is

shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the

Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are

let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and

they wander and do damage. But the virtues are

let loose also; and the virtues wander more

wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage.

The modern world is full of the old Christian

virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad

because they have been isolated from each other

and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists

care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus

some humanitarians only care for pity; and their

pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For

example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity

because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the

merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of

charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it

easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no

sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an

early Christian, he is the only early Christian

who ought really to have been eaten by lions.

For in his case the pagan accusation is really

true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy. He

really is the enemy of the human race -- because

he is so human. As the other extreme, we may

take the acrid realist, who has deliberately killed

in himself all human pleasure in happy tales or in

the healing of the heart. Torquemada tortured

people physically for the sake of moral truth.

Zola tortured people morally for the sake of

physical truth. But in Torquemada's time there

was at least a system that could to some extent

make righteousness and peace kiss each other.

Now they do not even bow. But a much

stronger case than these two of truth and pity can

be found in the remarkable case of the

dislocation of humility.

It is only with one aspect of humility that we are

here concerned. Humility was largely meant as a

restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the

appetite of man. He was always outstripping his

mercies with his own newly invented needs. His

very power of enjoyment destroyed half his

joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief

pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise.

Hence it became evident that if a man would

make his world large, he must be always making

himself small. Even the haughty visions, the tall

cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the

creations of humility. Giants that tread down

forests like grass are the creations of humility.

Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest

star are the creations of humility. For towers are

not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are

not giants unless they are larger than we. All this

gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the

mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom

entirely humble. It is impossible without

humility to enjoy anything -- even pride.

But what we suffer from to-day is humility in

the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the

organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the

organ of conviction; where it was never meant to

be. A man was meant to be doubtful about

himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has

been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a

man that a man does assert is exactly the part he

ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is

exactly the part he ought not to doubt -- the

Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility

content to learn from Nature. But the new

sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can

even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had

said hastily that there is no humility typical of

our time. The truth is that there is a real humility

typical of our time; but it so happens that it is

practically a more poisonous humility than the

wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old

humility was a spur that prevented a man from

stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented

him from going on. For the old humility made a

man doubtful about his efforts, which might

make him work harder. But the new humility

makes a man doubtful about his aims, which

will make him stop working altogether.

At any street corner we may meet a man who

utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that

he may be wrong. Every day one comes across

somebody who says that of course his view may

not be the right one. Of course his view must be

the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the

road to producing a race of men too mentally

modest to believe in the multiplication table. We

are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt

the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their

own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be

convinced; but these are too humble to be

convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the

modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their

inheritance. It is exactly this intellectual

helplessness which is our second problem.

The last chapter has been concerned only with a

fact of observation: that what peril of morbidity

there is for man comes rather from his reason

than his imagination. It was not meant to attack

the authority of reason; rather it is the ultimate

purpose to defend it. For it needs defence. The

whole modern world is at war with reason; and

the tower already reels.

The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to

the riddle of religion. But the trouble with our

sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is

that they cannot even see the riddle. They are

like children so stupid as to notice nothing

paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door is

not a door. The modern latitudinarians speak,

for instance, about authority in religion not only

as if there were no reason in it, but as if there

had never been any reason for it. Apart from

seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even

see its historical cause. Religious authority has

often, doubtless, been oppressive or

unreasonable; just as every legal system (and

especially our present one) has been callous and

full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the

police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics

of religious authority are like men who should

attack the police without ever having heard of

burglars. For there is a great and possible peril

to the human mind: a peril as practical as

burglary. Against it religious authority was

reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And

against it something certainly must be reared as a

barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to

destroy itself. Just as one generation could

prevent the very existence of the next generation,

by all entering a monastery or jumping into the

sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree

prevent further thinking by teaching the next

generation that there is no validity in any human

thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative

of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of

faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our

thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you

are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later

ask yourself the question, "Why should

anything go right; even observation and

deduction? Why should not good logic be as

misleading as bad logic? They are both

movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?"

The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think

for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete

sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for

myself. I have no right to think at all."

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the

only thought that ought to be stopped. That is

the ultimate evil against which all religious

authority was aimed. It only appears at the end

of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr.

H. G. Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he

has written a delicate piece of scepticism called

"Doubts of the Instrument." In this he questions

the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all

reality from all his own assertions, past, present,

and to come. But it was against this remote ruin

that all the military systems in religion were

originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the

crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible

persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly

said, for the suppression of reason. They were

organized for the difficult defence of reason.

Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once

things were wildly questioned, reason could be

questioned first. The authority of priests to

absolve, the authority of popes to define the

authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these

were all only dark defences erected round one

central authority, more undemonstrable, more

supernatural than all -- the authority of a man to

think. We know now that this is so; we have no

excuse for not knowing it. For we can hear

scepticism crashing through the old ring of

authorities, and at the same moment we can see

reason swaying upon her throne. In so far as

religion is gone, reason is going. For they are

both of the same primary and authoritative kind.

They are both methods of proof which cannot

themselves be proved. And in the act of

destroying the idea of Divine authority we have

largely destroyed the idea of that human

authority by which we do a long-division sum.

With a long and sustained tug we have attempted

to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head

has come off with it.

Lest this should be called loose assertion, it is

perhaps desirable, though dull, to run rapidly

through the chief modern fashions of thought

which have this effect of stopping thought itself.

Materialism and the view of everything as a

personal illusion have some such effect; for if

the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very

exciting, and if the cosmos is unreal, there is

nothing to think about. But in these cases the

effect is indirect and doubtful. In some cases it is

direct and clear; notably in the case of what is

generally called evolution.

Evolution is a good example of that modern

intelligence which, if it destroys anything,

destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent

scientific description of how certain earthly

things came about; or, if it is anything more than

this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If

evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy

religion but rationalism. If evolution simply

means that a positive thing called an ape turned

very slowly into a positive thing called a man,

then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a

personal God might just as well do things

slowly as quickly, especially if, like the

Christian God, he were outside time. But if it

means anything more, it means that there is no

such thing as an ape to change, and no such

thing as a man for him to change into. It means

that there is no such thing as a thing. At best,

there is only one thing, and that is a flux of

everything and anything. This is an attack not

upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot

think if there are no things to think about. You

cannot think if you are not separate from the

subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think;

therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist

reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I

am not; therefore I cannot think."

Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that

urged by Mr. H. G. Wells when he insists that

every separate thing is "unique," and there are

no categories at all. This also is merely

destructive. Thinking means connecting things,

and stops if they cannot be connected. It need

hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding

thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot

open his mouth without contradicting it. Thus

when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere),

"All chairs are quite different," he utters not

merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in

terms. If all chairs were quite different, you

could not call them "all chairs."

Akin to these is the false theory of progress,

which maintains that we alter the test instead of

trying to pass the test. We often hear it said, for

instance, "What is right in one age is wrong in

another." This is quite reasonable, if it means

that there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods

attain at certain times and not at other times. If

women, say, desire to be elegant, it may be that

they are improved at one time by growing fatter

and at another time by growing thinner. But you

cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to

wish to be elegant and beginning to wish to be

oblong. If the standard changes, how can there

be improvement, which implies a standard?

Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had

once sought as good what we now call evil; if it

were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even

falling short of them. How can you overtake

Jones if you walk in the other direction? You

cannot discuss whether one people has

succeeded more in being miserable than another

succeeded in being happy. It would be like

discussing whether Milton was more puritanical

than a pig is fat.

It is true that a man (a silly man) might make

change itself his object or ideal. But as an ideal,

change itself becomes unchangeable. If the

change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own

progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of

change; he must not begin to flirt gaily with the

ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot

progress. It is worth remark, in passing, that

when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak

manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration

in society, he instinctively took a metaphor

which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He wrote

--

"Let the great world spin for

ever down the ringing grooves

of change."

He thought of change itself as an unchangeable

groove; and so it is. Change is about the

narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get

into.

The main point here, however, is that this idea

of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one

of the things that make thought about the past or

future simply impossible. The theory of a

complete change of standards in human history

does not merely deprive us of the pleasure of

honouring our fathers; it deprives us even of the

more modern and aristocratic pleasure of

despising them.

This bald summary of the thought-destroying

forces of our time would not be complete

without some reference to pragmatism; for

though I have here used and should everywhere

defend the pragmatist method as a preliminary

guide to truth, there is an extreme application of

it which involves the absence of all truth

whatever. My meaning can be put shortly thus. I

agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective

truth is not the whole matter; that there is an

authoritative need to believe the things that are

necessary to the human mind. But I say that one

of those necessities precisely is a belief in

objective truth. The pragmatist tells a man to

think what he must think and never mind the

Absolute. But precisely one of the things that he

must think is the Absolute. This philosophy,

indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism

is a matter of human needs; and one of the first

of human needs is to be something more than a

pragmatist. Extreme pragmatism is just as

inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully

attacks. The determinist (who, to do him justice,

does not pretend to be a human being) makes

nonsense of the human sense of actual choice.

The pragmatist, who professes to be specially

human, makes nonsense of the human sense of

actual fact.

To sum up our contention so far, we may say

that the most characteristic current philosophies

have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of

suicidal mania. The mere questioner has

knocked his head against the limits of human

thought; and cracked it. This is what makes so

futile the warnings of the orthodox and the

boasts of the advanced about the dangerous

boyhood of free thought. What we are looking at

is not the boyhood of free thought; it is the old

age and ultimate dissolution of free thought. It is

vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss

what dreadful things will happen if wild

scepticism runs its course. It has run its course.

It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great

truths that will be revealed if once we see free

thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no

more questions to ask; it has questioned itself.

You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city

in which men ask themselves if they have any

selves. You cannot fancy a more sceptical world

than that in which men doubt if there is a world.

It might certainly have reached its bankruptcy

more quickly and cleanly if it had not been

feebly hampered by the application of

indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd

pretence that modern England is Christian. But it

would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow.

Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted; but

rather because they are an old minority than

because they are a new one. Free thought has

exhausted its own freedom. It is weary of its

own success. If any eager freethinker now hails

philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like

the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped

in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in

time to see it set. If any frightened curate still

says that it will be awful if the darkness of free

thought should spread, we can only answer him

in the high and powerful words of Mr. Belloc,

"Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the

increase of forces already in dissolution. You

have mistaken the hour of the night: it is already

morning." We have no more questions left to

ask. We have looked for questions in the darkest

corners and on the wildest peaks. We have

found all the questions that can be found. It is

time we gave up looking for questions and

began looking for answers.

But one more word must be added. At the

beginning of this preliminary negative sketch I

said that our mental ruin has been wrought by

wild reason, not by wild imagination. A man

does not go mad because he makes a statue a

mile high, but he may go mad by thinking it out

in square inches. Now, one school of thinkers

has seen this and jumped at it as a way of

renewing the pagan health of the world. They

see that reason destroys; but Will, they say,

creates. The ultimate authority, they say, is in

will, not in reason. The supreme point is not

why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he

does demand it. I have no space to trace or

expound this philosophy of Will. It came, I

suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached

something that is called egoism. That, indeed,

was simpleminded enough; for Nietzsche denied

egoism simply by preaching it. To preach

anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls

life a war without mercy, and then he takes the

greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in

war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism.

But however it began, the view is common

enough in current literature. The main defence of

these thinkers is that they are not thinkers; they

are makers. They say that choice is itself the

divine thing. Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw has

attacked the old idea that men's acts are to be

judged by the standard of the desire of

happiness. He says that a man does not act for

his happiness, but from his will. He does not

say, "Jam will make me happy," but "I want

jam." And in all this others follow him with yet

greater enthusiasm. Mr. John Davidson, a

remarkable poet, is so passionately excited about

it that he is obliged to write prose. He publishes

a short play with several long prefaces. This is

natural enough in Mr. Shaw, for all his plays are

prefaces: Mr. Shaw is (I suspect) the only man

on earth who has never written any poetry. But

that Mr. Davidson (who can write excellent

poetry) should write instead laborious

metaphysics in defence of this doctrine of will,

does show that the doctrine of will has taken

hold of men. Even Mr. H. G. Wells has half

spoken in its language; saying that one should

test acts not like a thinker, but like an artist,

saying, "I feel this curve is right," or "that line

shall go thus." They are all excited; and well

they may be. For by this doctrine of the divine

authority of will, they think they can break out

of the doomed fortress of rationalism. They

think they can escape.

But they cannot escape. This pure praise of

volition ends in the same break up and blank as

the mere pursuit of logic. Exactly as complete

free thought involves the doubting of thought

itself, so the acceptation of mere "willing" really

paralyzes the will. Mr. Bernard Shaw has not

perceived the real difference between the old

utilitarian test of pleasure (clumsy, of course,

and easily misstated) and that which he

propounds. The real difference between the test

of happiness and the test of will is simply that

the test of happiness is a test and the other isn't.

You can discuss whether a man's act in jumping

over a cliff was directed towards happiness; you

cannot discuss whether it was derived from will.

Of course it was. You can praise an action by

saying that it is calculated to bring pleasure or

pain to discover truth or to save the soul. But

you cannot praise an action because it shows

will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an

action. By this praise of will you cannot really

choose one course as better than another. And

yet choosing one course as better than another is

the very definition of the will you are praising.

The worship of will is the negation of will. To

admire mere choice is to refuse to choose. If Mr.

Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, "Will

something," that is tantamount to saying, "I do

not mind what you will," and that is tantamount

to saying, "I have no will in the matter." You

cannot admire will in general, because the

essence of will is that it is particular. A brilliant

anarchist like Mr. John Davidson feels an

irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore

he invokes will -- will to anything. He only

wants humanity to want something. But

humanity does want something. It wants

ordinary morality. He rebels against the law and

tells us to will something or anything. But we

have willed something. We have willed the law

against which he rebels.

All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr.

Davidson, are really quite empty of volition.

They cannot will, they can hardly wish. And if

any one wants a proof of this, it can be found

quite easily. It can be found in this fact: that they

always talk of will as something that expands

and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite.

Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To

desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense

every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you

choose anything, you reject everything else.

That objection, which men of this school used to

make to the act of marriage, is really an objection

to every act. Every act is an irrevocable selection

exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman

you give up all the others, so when you take one

course of action you give up all the other

courses. If you become King of England, you

give up the post of Beadle in Brompton. If you

go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life

in Wimbledon. It is the existence of this negative

or limiting side of will that makes most of the

talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better

than nonsense. For instance, Mr. John Davidson

tells us to have nothing to do with "Thou shalt

not"; but it is surely obvious that "Thou shalt

not" is only one of the necessary corollaries of "I

will." "I will go to the Lord Mayor's Show, and

thou shalt not stop me." Anarchism adjures us to

be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or

limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not

care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the

essence of every picture is the frame. If you

draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long

neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold

yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck,

you will really find that you are not free to draw

a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of

facts, you step into a world of limits. You can

free things from alien or accidental laws, but not

from the laws of their own nature. You may, if

you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not

free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of

the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him

from being a camel. Do not go about as a

demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out

of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle

breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a

lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called

"The Loves of the Triangles"; I never read it, but

I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they

were loved for being triangular. This is certainly

the case with all artistic creation, which is in

some ways the most decisive example of pure

will. The artist loves his limitations: they

constitute the thing he is doing. The painter is

glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad

that the clay is colourless.

In case the point is not clear, an historic example

may illustrate it. The French Revolution was

really an heroic and decisive thing, because the

Jacobins willed something definite and limited.

They desired the freedoms of democracy, but

also all the vetoes of democracy. They wished to

have votes and not to have titles. Republicanism

had an ascetic side in Franklin or Robespierre as

well as an expansive side in Danton or Wilkes.

Therefore they have created something with a

solid substance and shape, the square social

equality and peasant wealth of France. But since

then the revolutionary or speculative mind of

Europe has been weakened by shrinking from

any proposal because of the limits of that

proposal. Liberalism has been degraded into

liberality. Men have tried to turn "revolutionise"

from a transitive to an intransitive verb. The

Jacobin could tell you not only the system he

would rebel against, but (what was more

important) the system he would not rebel

against, the system he would trust. But the new

rebel is a Sceptic, and will not entirely trust

anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can

never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that

he doubts everything really gets in his way when

he wants to denounce anything. For all

denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some

kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not

only the institution he denounces, but the

doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he

writes one book complaining that imperial

oppression insults the purity of women, and

then he writes another book (about the sex

problem) in which he insults it himself. He

curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose

their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy

because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry

out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a

philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A

Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for

killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest

philosophical principles that the peasant ought to

have killed himself. A man denounces marriage

as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic

profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a

bauble, and then blames the oppressors of

Poland or Ireland because they take away that

bauble. The man of this school goes first to a

political meeting, where he complains that

savages are treated as if they were beasts; then

he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a

scientific meeting, where he proves that they

practically are beasts. In short, the modern

revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always

engaged in undermining his own mines. In his

book on politics he attacks men for trampling on

morality; in his book on ethics he attacks

morality for trampling on men. Therefore the

modern man in revolt has become practically

useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling

against everything he has lost his right to rebel

against anything.

It may be added that the same blank and

bankruptcy can be observed in all fierce and

terrible types of literature, especially in satire.

Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it

presupposes an admitted superiority in certain

things over others; it presupposes a standard.

When little boys in the street laugh at the fatness

of some distinguished journalist, they are

unconsciously assuming a standard of Greek

sculpture. They are appealing to the marble

Apollo. And the curious disappearance of satire

from our literature is an instance of the fierce

things fading for want of any principle to be

fierce about. Nietzsche had some natural talent

for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could not

laugh; but there is always something bodiless

and without weight in his satire, simply because

it has not any mass of common morality behind

it. He is himself more preposterous than

anything he denounces. But, indeed, Nietzsche

will stand very well as the type of the whole of

this failure of abstract violence. The softening of

the brain which ultimately overtook him was not

a physical accident. If Nietzsche had not ended

in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in

imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride

ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not

have softening of the heart must at last have

softening of the brain.

This last attempt to evade intellectualism ends in

intellectualism, and therefore in death. The sortie

has failed. The wild worship of lawlessness and

the materialist worship of law end in the same

void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but

he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down

beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and

Nirvana. They are both helpless -- one because

he must not grasp anything, and the other

because he must not let go of anything. The

Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct

that all special actions are evil. But the

Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his

view that all special actions are good; for if all

special actions are good, none of them are

special. They stand at the crossroads, and one

hates all the roads and the other likes all the

roads. The result is -- well, some things are not

hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.

Here I end (thank God) the first and dullest

business of this book -- the rough review of

recent thought. After this I begin to sketch a

view of life which may not interest my reader,

but which, at any rate, interests me. In front of

me, as I close this page, is a pile of modern

books that I have been turning over for the

purpose -- a pile of ingenuity, a pile of futility.

By the accident of my present detachment, I can

see the inevitable smash of the philosophies of

Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and

Shaw, as clearly as an inevitable raftway smash

could be seen from a balloon. They are all on the

road to the emptiness of the asylum. For

madness may be defined as using mental activity

so as to reach mental helplessness; and they have

nearly reached it. He who thinks he is made of

glass, thinks to the destruction of thought; for

glass cannot think. So he who wills to reject

nothing, wills the destruction of will; for will is

not only the choice of something, but the

rejection of almost everything. And as I turn and

tumble over the clever, wonderful, tiresome, and

useless modern books, the tide of one of them

rivets my eye. It is called "Jeanne d'Arc," by

Anatole France. I have only glanced at it, but a

glance was enough to remind me of Renan's

"Vie de Jesus." It has the same strange method

of the reverent sceptic. It discredits supernatural

stories that have some foundation, simply by

telling natural stories that have no foundation.

Because we cannot believe in what a saint did,

we are to pretend that we know exactly what he

felt. But I do not mention either book in order to

criticise it, but because the accidental

combination of the names called up two startling

images of Sanity which blasted all the books

before me. Joan of Arc was not stuck at the

cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like

Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche.

She chose a path, and went down it like a

thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I came to think of

her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy

or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either

of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy,

the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain

pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for

the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of

Arc had all that and with this great addition, that

she endured poverty as well as admiring it;

whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat

trying to find out its secret. And then I thought

of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in

poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the

emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of

his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his

hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to

arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again

with this difference, that she did not praise

fighting, but fought. We know that she was not

afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we

know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised

the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only

praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She

beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals;

she was more gentle than the one, more violent

than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical

person who did something, while they are wild

speculators who do nothing. It was impossible

that the thought should not cross my mind that

she and her faith had perhaps some secret of

moral unity and utility that has been lost. And

with that thought came a larger one, and the

colossal figure of her Master had also crossed

the theatre of my thoughts. The same modern

difficulty which darkened the subject-matter of

Anatole France also darkened that of Ernest

Renan. Renan also divided his hero's pity from

his hero's pugnacity. Renan even represented

the righteous anger at Jerusalem as a mere

nervous breakdown after the idyllic expectations

of Galilee. As if there were any inconsistency

between having a love for humanity and having

a hatred for inhumanity! Altruists, with thin,

weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist.

Egoists (with even thinner and weaker voices)

denounce Him as an altruist. In our present

atmosphere such cavils are comprehensible

enough. The love of a hero is more terrible than

the hatred of a tyrant. The hatred of a hero is

more generous than the love of a philanthropist.

There is a huge and heroic sanity of which

moderns can only collect the fragments. There is

a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms

and legs walking about. They have torn the soul

of Christ into silly strips, labelled egoism and

altruism, and they are equally puzzled by His

insane magnificence and His insane meekness.

They have parted His garments among them,

and for His vesture they have cast lots; though

the coat was without seam woven from the top

throughout.

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