. . . We know that this stuff is not sewn without us, but that is not the object of us, not our commission, not the lesson set us to learn, but the consequence of the complex reciprocal bond that links all existing things by their ends and beginnings, causes and effects.
And that is not alclass="underline" we can change the pattern of the carpet.
There is no master craftsman, no design, only a foundation, and we are quite, quite alone, too. The earlier weavers of fate, all those Vulcans and Neptunes, have taken leave of this world.
Their executors conceal their testament from us-but the deceased bequeathed us their power.
'But if on the one hand you give a man's fate to him to do as he likes with, and on the other you deprive him of responsibility, then, if he accepts your teaching, he will fold his arms and do absolutely nothing at all.'
Then will people not stop eating and drinking, loving and are doing, basing ourselves on the permanence of certain laws and phenomena, but admitting the possibility of their infringement. \Ye see a man of thirty, and we have ewry right to suppose that a fter another thirty years he will be grey-haired or bald, somewhn t stoop<'d. and so on.
This does not mean that it is ordained that he shall go grey or bald. or stoop-that this is his destiny. If he dies at thirty-nine, he will not go grey, but will turn 'to clay,' as Hamlet says, or into a salad .
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producing children, delighting in music and the beauty of women, when they find out that they eat and listen, love and enjoy, for themselves alone, not for the fulfilment of higher designs, and not for the soonest possible attainment of an endless progress towards perfection?
If religion with its crushing fatalism, and doctrinairism with its chilly cheerlessness, have not made people fold their arms, then there is no reason to fear that this may be done. by a view which rids them of these slabs of stone. A mere sniff of life and of its inconsistency was enough to rescue the Hebrew people from religious pranks like asceticism and quietism, which had constantly existed only in \•.:ord and not in deed: is it possible that reason and consciousness will turn out to be feebler?
Moreover, a realistic view has a secret of its own; he who folds his arms in the face of it will not apprehend or embrace it; he belongs still to a different age of brain ; he still needs spurs: the devil with his black tail on one side and on the other the angel with a white lily.
Men's aspiration towards a more harmonious way of living is perfectly natural; it cannot be stopped by anything, as hunger and thirst cannot be stopped. That is why we are not in the least afraid that people will fold their arms as a result of any teaching whatever. ·whether, if better conditions of life are discovered, man will be successful in them, or will in one place go astray and in another commit follies, that is a different question. In saying that man will never get rid of hunger we are not saying whether there will always be victuals for everybody, and wholesome ones, too.
There are men who are content with little, who have meagre needs, narrow views and limited desires. There are also peoples with a small horizon and strange notions, who are content to be indigent, false and sometimes even vulgar. The Chinese and Japanese are \vithout doubt two peoples who have found the most suitable social form for their way of living. That is why they remain so unalterably the same.
Europe, it seems to us, is also close to 'sa turation' and aspires, tired as she is, to settle, to crystallise out, finding her stable social position in a petty, mean mode of life. She is prevented from composing herself at her ease by monarchico-feudal relics and the principle of conquest. A petit bourgeois system offers enormous improvement in comparison with the oligarchicomilitary-there is no doubt of that-but for Europe, and specially for Anglo-Germanic Europe, it offers improvement not only enormous but also sufficient. Holland is ahead: she was the
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first to become quiescent, before the interruption of history. The interruption of growth is the beginning of maturity. The life of a student is more full of incidents and proceeds much more stormily than the sober, workman-like life of the father of a family. If England were not weighed down by the leaden shield of feudal landlordship, if she did not, like Ugolino, constantly tread on her children who are dying of hunger, if, like Holland, she could achieve for everyone the prosperity of small shopkeepers and of patrons of moderate means, she would settle down quietly in her pettiness. And along with that the level of intelligence, breadth of view and aesthetic taste would fall still lower, and a life without incidents, sometimes diverted by external impulses, would be reduced to a uniform rotation, to a faintly varying semper idem. Parliament would assemble, the budget would be presented, capable speeches delivered, forms improved
. . . and the next year it would be the same, and the same ten years later; it would be the comfortable rut of a grown-up man, his routine business days. Even in natural phenomena we see how eccentric the beginnings are, and the settled continuation goes noiselessly on; not like a tempestuous comet, its tresses dishevelled, describing its unknown path, but like a tranquil planet with its satellites like lamps, gliding along its beaten track ; small divagations attest even more the general order .
. . . The spring is somewhat \Vetter or somewhat drier, but after every spring comes summer; but before every spring comes winter.
'For goodness' sake! This means that the whole of humanity will get as far as a system of pettiness and there get stuck?'
Not the whole of it, I think, but certain parts of it for sure.
The word 'humanity' is most repugnant; it expresses nothing definite and only adds to the confusion of all the remaining concepts a sort of piebald demi-god. What sort of unit is understood by the word 'humanity'J Is it what we understand by any other collective denomination, like caviare, and so on? Who in the world would dare say that there is any form of order that would satisfy in an identical manner Iroquois and Irish, Arab and Magyar, Kaffir and Slav? We may say only that to certain peoples a petty order is repellent, and others are as much at home in it as fish in water. The Spaniards and Poles, and in part the Italians and Russians, contain very few petty elements; the social order in which they would be well off is higher than that which pettiness can give them. But it in no way follows from this that they will attain this higher state or that they will not turn aside on to the bourgeois road. Aspiration alone ensures
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nothing; \Ye are fearfully emphatic about the difference between the possible and the inevitable. It is not enough to know that such and such an order is repellent to us: we must know what order we want and whether its realisation is possible. There are many possibilities ahead: the bourgeois peoples may fly a quite different pitch ; the most poetic peoples may turn shopkeepers.
Every man is supported by a huge genealogical tree whose roots go back almost to the paradise of Adam; at our backs, as behind the wave on the shore, is felt the pressure of the whole ocean-of the history of all the world; the thought of all the centuries is in our brain at this minute; there is no thought except in the brain, and with that thought we can be a power.