Here is license
in conduct and romanticism in expression going hand in hand with
this all but exclusive emphasis upon relativity in thought. Here is
disorder, erected as a universal concept; the world conceived of as
a vast and impenetrable veil which is hiding nothing; an intricacy
without pattern. Obviously so ungoverned and fluid a universe
justifies uncritical and irresponsible thinking and living.
We have tried thus to sketch that declension into paganism on the
part of much of the present world, of which we spoke earlier in the
chapter. It denies or ignores the humanistic law with its exacting
moral and aesthetic standards; it openly flouts the attitude of
obedience and humility before religious mandates, and, so far as
opportunity offers or prudence permits, goes its own insolently wanton
way. Our world is full of dilettanti in the colleges, anarchists in
the state, atheists in the church, bohemians in art, sybarites in
conduct and ineffably silly women in society, who have felt, and
occasionally studied the scientific and naturalistic movement just far
enough and superficially enough to grasp the idea of relativity and
to exalt it as sufficient and complete in itself. Many of them are
incapable of realizing the implications for conduct and belief which
it entails. Others of them, who are of the lesser sort, pulled by
the imperious hungers of the flesh, the untutored instincts of a
restless spirit, hating Hellenic discipline no less than Christian
renunciation, having no stomach either for self-control or
self-surrender, look out on the mass of endlessly opposing
complexities of the modern world and gladly use that vision as an
excuse for abandoning what is indeed the ever failing but also the
ever necessary struggle to achieve order, unity, yes, even perfection.
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