Humanity must not go over in a body to
Mr. Micawber.
Anything may happen? No! We are not characters in a fairy tale, but men
of reason, inhabiting a world which reveals to us at every point of our
investigation one certain and unalterable fact--an unbroken uniformity
of natural law. We must not dream; we must act, and, before we act, we
must think. Human nature does not change very greatly. Bergson is apt to
encourage easy optimism, to leave the door open for credulity,
superstition, idle expectation; and he is disposed to set instinct above
reason, "a very dangerous doctrine, at any rate for _this_ generation."
What is wrong with this generation? It is a generation that refuses to
accept the rule and discipline of reason, which thinks it can reach
millennium by a short cut, or jump to the moon in an excess of emotional
fervour. It is a generation which becomes a crowd, and "individuals are
occasionally guided by reason, crowds never." It is a generation which
lives by catchwords, which plays tricks, which attempts to cut knots,
which counts heads.
What is wrong with this generation? Public opinion is "a vulgar,
impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for
anyone who is not content to be the average man." Democracy means "a
victory of sentiment over reason"; it is the triumph of the unfit, the
ascendancy of the second-rate, the conquest of quality by quantity, the
smothering of the hard and true under the feather-bed of the soft and
the false.
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