¶25Outside, in front of the old grey church, engines were soon started. The sun had set. Venus and Jupiter shone close together in the twilight. It seemed that those bright spheres could never be theatres of war. Yet what if this earth should after all be the first world to throw off this primeval strife?
¶29The old grey church stood quiet as ever. Its spire dimly soared into grey sky. Its clock tolled the hour deliberately, ringing through the noise of war. The aloofness of the church seemed a symbol of that consciousness of all humanity which sometimes flashes on the mind to make war ridiculous. The quiet church declared peace ultimate, war merely a stage.
¶35Some say that peace can be established only by a passion of goodwill. But may it not be that some are called to that work here and some there? While there is the chance of serving those who nobly suffer through humanity's error we cannot stay at home. Toward these patient, courageous, cheerful, and no doubt misguided fellow-men we extend our "passion of goodwill." Because of our oneness with humanity we dare not hold ourselves apart from the calamity. War is indeed strife of the right hand with the left; it is heart-splitting discord; yet under the shadow of our old grey church, and under the light of the stars, war itself may help a man to a new knowledge of the communion of all men.
¶36The spirit that is mankind is mad to-day perhaps; but out of the madness she will come purified wondrously. We, her tiny members, need to be purified with her. That is why we are here.
¶39COLUMBUS FOUND A NEW WORLD; but Francis Galton found a new humanity. The former discovery has given us gold and enterprise; from the latter we may hope for gentlemen, even heroes. It was long after the voyage of Columbus that the new world began to be used by the old. So also it will be long after the first probing of the subject that mankind will begin to profit by the science of heredity. After the work of Mendel, Weismann, Galton, and others, our conception of humanity must be fundamentally altered. To the ancient the human type was a rock, created fixed for evermore. To the man of the last century it was a cloud, ever changing but unalterable. To us it must be a virgin continent, to be cultivated and civilised. Darwin showed that man is the result of evolution. Others have shown that he may direct his evolution. Hitherto we have sought progress with social and political contrivances; but soon we shall bring to bear what may be a far more potent method. Mankind is like a child that has been patiently gathering apples as they fall, when suddenly he has the glorious idea of climbing the tree. Hitherto he has been stinted, but now there opens a vision of plenty to be realised by pluck and skill. For mankind the apples are health and strength, intellect and virtue.
¶40Already lives have been spent in building up the science of heredity. But not till a wide-spread interest has been aroused can that science be applied to the art of eugenics. There must be a general acquaintance with the wonderful results of statistical investigation and experiment. Most biologists agree that man is the expression of a multiplicity of inherited characteristics, which environment can affect directly only during the life of the individual. They believe that characteristics acquired during the lifetime of the parent are not heritable. But some deny this. It is right that we should all know something of this controversy since its importance to eugenics is very great. If the nature, far more than the nurture, of the parent determines the character of the child, the unwholesomeness of these days may not seriously affect our descendants. But it is allowed by all that a bad habit, or evil surroundings, through weakening the system, may cause the offspring to be stunted. Whatever be the final result of this controversy, much can be done for the improvement of the race. It seems clear that physical, mental, and moral characters are governed by the same broad laws of inheritance. In time it may be as possible to breed good men as it is now possible to breed fast horses. This is the goal at which we should aim. Meanwhile we may improve the standard of mankind by wisely restricting undesirable marriages. Thus we may eradicate not only the liability to special diseases, insanity, and crime, but also general weakness and general incompetence.
¶41The application of the knowledge which has been already acquired is still hampered by universal prejudice. Not till this has been destroyed can we hope to realise the schemes of Galton for the "Improvement of the Human Breed." He suggested that records should be kept of the history of every family, that every man might know something of his hereditary capabilities and liabilities. In this way he hoped that there would arise a true pride of birth. No one of clean pedigree would be likely to marry into a tainted family. There would be a real aristocracy of birth. The poorer specimens would be continually dying out, since it would be hard for them to marry. He also points out that it cannot be held cruel to allow undesirables to die out in this way. The individuals may still live happy and useful lives. For them celibacy is self-denial for the good of the community. But nothing can be done till the interest in these things is universal. The homage paid to riches and "nobility" must be replaced by a more honest homage to pure birth, the true nobility.
¶44We are told not to interfere with the divine caprice of love. Surely this is unreasonable. We lament when a friend marries into a social class lower than his own. We should have more reason to deplore his marriage into a family tainted with disease or moral weakness. Love is capricious; but even now it is confined within certain limits. It is held wicked to indulge it beyond them; and such is the force of public opinion that it seldom occurs beyond them. A marriage in which husband and wife bear some particular taint may well produce children some of whom are seriously deformed in mind or body. Such marriages should be regarded as a kind of incest. In time they will be prevented by public opinion, which should be aided by legislation. At first, no doubt, there will be many tragedies of revolt against custom and law. It may be held that love exists not merely for the perpetuation of the race, but is an end in itself, the spiritual union and beatitude of individual men and women. The noble type of love which can claim to be a spiritual end in itself has evolved from something less noble. If it be wisely controlled now, in time humanity may be capable of an emotion far more intense and far more divine.
¶46As yet we are very far from this. But, having stumbled for a long time in the valleys, at last we have arrived at an eminence from which the right way can be seen leading upwards into the mists. It may be that after much labour and many catastrophes in time there will arise a splendid race of men, far wiser than we can hope to be, and far greater hearted.
¶51For the modem kind of religious experience, or if it be preferred the modem substitute for religious experience, is itself the unexpected outcome of disillusion. Only by way of despair and a subsequent detachment can we attain this experience in its purity, and distinguish it from the mere conviction that the heavens care for us. Only when we have countenanced the defeat and even ridicule of the whole enterprise of life upon this planet can we discover that unique splendour and perfection of existence which is more admirable even than life's victory. And because this discovery, coming as it does in the very trough of our disillusion, cannot be assimilated by a pessimistic view, it should perplex us, and should indeed start a ferment of the whole mind.
¶59One poet of the movement is Meredith, with his devotion to the Spirit of Earth. And he also links it both with earlier romanticism and with a later classicism. He admired nature less for her appearance, as Wordsworth did, than for her vitality. And man he admired less for his individuality, as Browning did, than for being Earth's self-conscious intelligence. But Meredith is more than an apostle of the faith in Earth and Man. His Comic Spirit gropes towards the mood of detachment which I shall presently describe. Meanwhile we may note in Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells the same dualism of good and evil grounded in the dynamic nature of life, the same fervent championship, the same sense that man's real importance lies not in his individuality but in his instrumentality to the achievement of a goal which he himself has not yet clearly conceived. These writers have contributed to the faith which inspires militant "Labour" today, which distinguishes so sharply between the elect and the damned, which claims from the individual a puritanical loyalty to a certain social ideal or formula, which in fact is the modem, popular, and social-democratic form of Calvinism. Shaw, like Meredith, is saved by humour from rigid sectarianism, and gropes sometimes beyond the moral view; but Wells is more strictly confined within his faith. Bertrand Russell in his social writings, and in spite of his professed ethical scepticism, sometimes assumes the mood of righteous indignation; but though he renders allegiance to the ideal of cultural development he is also detached, and capable of dispassionate salutation.
¶60The movement of moral zeal, then, which directs itself now in worship of a Life Force, now in loyalty to the awakening consciousness of man himself, has many sources and many expressions; and sometimes it has seemed to promise a widespread though new-fangled "religious revival." Indeed for many persons it is in fact to-day a living religion. But it is not distinctive of the modern spirit, and its original minds belong to yesterday rather than to-day. Not that it is outworn; on the contrary it should make an extremely important contribution to the culture of to-morrow. Shame to us if we evade that whole- hearted obligation to the advancement of mentality on this planet. But there is also another and more difficult lesson to learn, a lesson which in our day at least, it is seldom possible to grasp at all save through complete disillusion from all our most cherished ends.
¶75There are times in the lives of most men when they wake from the game of private living, and even from the more enthralling intricacy of public service, to see themselves and the whole race of men as dust in a far mightier sport. Some, perhaps, are wholly exempt from such moments; while others, when the blue or grey sky of their world is ripped away like a tent, bury their heads. But some, even while they resent and fear the star's sudden intrusion, are stung into a strange clarity of mind. Even while they see their comforts and defences scattered, and their most admired ends snuffed into irrelevance, even while perhaps they are dissolved in fright, they are thrust into a new and splendid view of things; so that if they were not all the while paralysed with terror they could shout in the zest of amazed admiration. Unlike hares, they crouch before the serpent of eternity not in horror merely, but in ecstasy. After cursing the universe for its seeming mental deficiency, suddenly they recognise that the gods are playing a game very different from man's game, and playing it brilliantly.
¶76Not that they merely swing from pessimism to optimism about their private fortune or their nation's welfare or the future of man; for it must be insisted that this unique enlightenment may occur in the very agony of private defeat or public calamity, even in the terror of death, even in pain, even while they watch the sufferings of their beloveds, or the downfall of their society. Not that their agony is diminished or evaded, but rather that its very intensity wakens them to an aspect hitherto ignored. Not that with the mystics they pierce the veil of sorry phantoms and stand face to face with reality itself in all its reputed benignity. No, they see the very same world that they saw before, but they unexpectedly exult in it. They judge it to be, in some sense which cannot yet be defined, intrinsically excellent or "worthwhile." Having long lived in intimacy with the world, and having ever condemned it for not conforming to their ideal, they suddenly fall in love with it, fall into worship of it, admire in it a severity incomparably more desirable than the sweetness they had demanded of it. And as an actor may enter into the hopes and strivings of his part the more sympathetically just because he appreciates to the full the aesthetic character of the drama, so they now champion the more earnestly the very causes from which they now hold themselves spiritually aloof.
¶77Indeed, so well schooled are they in detachment from all that they take most seriously, that their reaction even to the inhuman excellence of the cosmos is not incompatible with laughter. In mere disillusion we laugh at the hollowness of fallen idols; and our laughter is bitter. But in this other mood, so well have we learned the virtue of laughter, that humour is surprisingly infused throughout our admiration. Without bitterness, and with no need for shame, we can deride the thing we most adore.
¶78Sometimes in this mood man is regarded as a mere irrelevance; but in a shrewder vision we seem to see that man, sensitive dust that he is, has also his part to play, though not the part he thought. For even the dust is in the picture. When the bright vision is past, and we try to think out its significance, it seems indeed that the office of the human mind must be to strive toward ever clearer percipience, and to master and enrich its own imperfect nature always for the end which our fathers called worship; so that we, tiny and ineffectual players in the gods' game, may at least enter intelligently into the spirit of the game, and admire it not merely so far as it favours the ends of man, but for its own character. But we must not claim that man's discerning admiration and participation is necessary to the full achievement of the cosmos; for man's part after all may be finally tragic, and he may never fulfill his supreme office of worship. But in such experiences of dispassionate appreciation as we already know it does seem to be implied that, if man has any cosmical function whatever, it is at least to strive towards ever finer knowledge and will, whether victoriously or toward the doomed failure which is tragedy. For in this mood, though certainly we have no evidence that man will thus flower, we have strange but sure conviction that, whatever the issue, it will be the right issue, in the eyes of the gods.
¶83But whatever be the truth of these matters, this kind of experiencing, the deliverance of which certainly appears to many modem minds as the supreme good, calls for close attention to-day. For surely it is significant that though the dominant mood of our time is disillusion, our disillusion is strangely flecked with this other, seemingly contradictory, mood of admiration. In times of optimistic faith disinterested admiration is blended with, and indistinguishable from, gratitude toward a divine benefactor; but in times of disillusion it stands out sharply from its background. Thus we may conceive it not as doubtful evidence that "God is on our side," that the universe is after all kindly disposed to us, but as a spontaneous salutation. Our task, then, is to single it out from all that has hitherto confused it, and to recognise that, whatever its true intellectual significance, it is itself an intuition of a value which eclipses all other values. Certainly we must criticise it by bringing to bear on it all the material and instruments of modem knowledge. Certainly we must disentangle it from all the fair myths that have been woven round it. Certainly we must recognise that it offers no comfort, no hope, to our more primitive human longings. But also, in criticising it, we must develop the experience itself. For to-day there are many who, though they reject all the consolations of the churches as either unbelievable or trite, cannot but recognise in this unique act of the spirit the very essence of religion, and in the deliverance of this experience something indestructible and splendid, something in the light of which all other experience should be interpreted.
¶90But further, we have our clever biologists and our bold eugenists. They want to control man's inborn nature, too. Already they have learnt a few surprising tricks, and probably within a century or two they will have learnt many more.
¶95The general direction of desirable changes I would summarise in this way. They should afford me a richer, wider, deeper, more subtle, more accurate experience of this amazing world. Further, they should help me to see more clearly what is really desirable. Finally, they should enable me, in every kind of situation, to take all relevant facts into account, and behave always with supreme tact, intelligence, insight, foresight, so that always the best possible results may follow. That I should be remade, or you, is impossible. But do we not desire that a race of beings far happier and more vital than ourselves should some day occur? I for one hope that the creation of such a race will become in time the constant policy of all mankind. And though this radical remaking of man is not practical politics to-day, already some of the preliminary steps need no longer be dismissed as fantasy.
¶210DURING THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN, when it seemed likely that the Nazis would conquer this island, we used to wonder seriously whether our typical English society was really to cease for ever. And because of its new precariousness, we began to cherish it more poignantly, instead of taking it for granted. That dangerous corner was turned. And later, when the German war was obviously won, we realised with thankfulness that, after all, things would go on. Later still came the dropping of the first atomic bomb. When I heard the announcement on the radio, I was flung back into that sense of the precariousness of all good things. This time the prospect was not simply the ending of the English way of life but the ending of civilisation, perhaps the final ruin of mankind. Surely this discovery of titanic might had come too soon. Man was not yet fit to be trusted with it. Moreover, the manner in which the bombs were used seemed to me shocking and irresponsible. No doubt, by hastening the end of the war, they probably reduced the total number of Allied and Enemy casualties; but how easily a demonstration of their power could have been given without dropping the very first one on a city.
¶211J. B. S. Haldane recently made an interesting suggestion. There might, he said, be a general law of nature that any intelligent species which learned to use atomic power before it had unified its world must destroy itself. I should put the matter rather differently. To avoid self-destruction, I should say, any species that wins atomic power must have a firmer grasp of true values and, therefore, a stronger will for world-community, than mankind has to-day. Our only hope is that, just as the Battle of Britain wakened the inhabitants of this island to a more vivid communal feeling, so the hideous danger of the prostitution of atomic power may force mankind to will world-community more earnestly than before. The hope may be slender, but one thing encourages it. Never before has so grim a danger threatened the human race as a whole. We are all in the same boat together, and we all know it. In an atomic war the victors, if there are any, will suffer almost as much as the vanquished. In face of this unique common danger perhaps the peoples of the world will at last be forced to co-operate.
¶218Of course, we might use atomic power to abolish work altogether, but this would be a mistake. Men need work as much as leisure; but the right sort of work, and not too much of it. They need, for their own personal fulfilment, to be called on to play a part in the great common venture. But each must have work suited to his particular capacity, and it must be neither too boring nor too exacting. Moreover, each must be able to take pride in his contribution to the general good. Atomic power affords the opportunity of transforming the whole work of the world to suit the needs of the worker. Hitherto there was always an excuse for planning jobs solely for the maximum output in relation to the power used; but when power becomes almost as plentiful as water, nothing should stand in the way of planning jobs primarily for the welfare of the worker. And since our aim must be to turn all workers into aristocrats, jobs must be planned for the needs of aristocrats. All work unsuited to aristocrats must be done by the universal slave, atomic power. The whole population of the world-wide aristocratic democracy will be engaged on innumerable forms of skilled work, manual, intellectual, artistic, social, and so on. The first impact of machinery was to destroy the old crafts, and increase the demand for unskilled workers. Atomic power, if it is wisely used, will gradually abolish all soul-destroying labour, and create a vast number of new skills and crafts. Very soon the problem will be to find enough skill.
¶223What would be the use, it may be asked, of these wild ventures? Are we not better off as we are? The only right answer is a religious answer, though not one that is religious in the orthodox sense. Little by little, more and more of us are realising that the true way of life, for the individual and for the race as a whole, is to live for something other than the individual, and, in a sense, even other than the race. Only if we regard ourselves and our human species as instruments for the fulfilling of the spiritual potentiality of this planet, can we find real peace. We have to develop our capacity, but not simply for our own satisfaction. Always we must keep that sense of instrumentality which used to be expressed in the old phrase "for the glory of God." Since the word "God" is so ambiguous, I should prefer to say "for the glory of the spirit" which is experienced as the very essence of each of us, and yet so much more than all of us together.
¶225Finally, lest these considerations should seem to point to a complacent humanism, let us remember the littleness of man, and the immensity and mystery of the physical and the spiritual reality that lies beyond him.
¶230Each of these two peoples, let us admit, is the custodian of a very important truth, or rather half-truth; but neither is at present capable of appreciating the equally important half-truth of the other.
¶246This "liberal communism" is impossible unless we solve our religious conflict. For no society can be wholesome unless it is orientated to something more than man, or something in addition to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of existing human individuals. This goal, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, we must of course seek; but in the last resort the greatest happiness is to be found only in service of the spirit. Christians might say that no society can be healthy that is not theocratic. Metaphorically, but not literally, this is true. The "God" to whom we give allegiance must be no universal power or person, about whom we know nothing, but the spirit that invades and conquers our own hearts. It comes we know not whence; but it comes with manifest right, to possess us.
¶250At night we may sometimes raise our eyes to the stars, and imagine also, far beyond the limits of unaided vision, hosts of other stellar systems. Who knows what worlds, what intelligent races live out their lives around us in the depths of space! Whether they be few or many, we may, I think, be sure that they too, like us, must be concerned fundamentally with the spirit. Hail! Oh unseen, inaccessible, unimaginable comrades! But beyond those flashing suns, those distant galaxies, what is there? There, or rather no-where and no-when, or everywhere and all-when, we are confronted by the unspeakable, the inconceivable, to which we have no clue at all; unless perhaps, after all, the one clue may be the spirit that so imperiously in our own hearts demands allegiance. Perhaps! But perhaps this too is no clue at all to ultimate truth about the universe. Well, what matter? The spirit itself alone, whatever its cosmical status, gives meaning to our lives.
¶264After a while we came to a great white building of concrete and glass. At the door a notice said, "PALACE OF NEW KNOWLEDGE, Admission 6d." Some of us who had money to spare crowded through the turnstile, confident that we should gather useful information to help us on our way. Inside we were shown many amazing, many terrible, many beautiful things; and much that was tiresome, because we could not understand it. We looked down microscopes and into spectroscopes. We praised the delicate forms of diatoms, the crystalline fibre of rocks, the intricate thought-secreting tissues of brains. We learned all the mechanisms of human and animal bodies, from diagrams and from specimens in glass jars, and from living specimens with their inner organs displayed and working before our eyes. The interior life of the atom, that minutest dance-figure, that rippled pool, was brilliantly expounded to us, with its ultimate paradox that defeats intelligence. We saw, too, working models of the solar system, and of the galaxy; and symbols, obscure but pregnant, of the whole cosmos of galaxies. And when we contrasted the reputed size of the cosmos with the ultra-microscopic electron, we were filled with awe, which some of us mistook for worship. We were shown also, in parables, the human mind itself, dissected into its component mechanisms, according to the very latest theories. The intellectual surgery, also, of the most modern logic was displayed before us. We admired the use of verbal scalpels and probes, by which the hidden aberrations of thought are laid bare and excised. We were amazed, too, by the practical applications of the new knowledge, by the many mechanical inventions and innumerable specimens of synthetic products; the foods, textile fibres, new metals, plastics, architectural materials, with which, it was said, a synthetic new world was being rapidly built. In one well-guarded cellar (we were told) they were experimenting with a new secret power that could shatter the planet or give all men the bliss of gods. When we shuddered that so momentous a choice should be opened to man, the exponents declared that circumstances would in the end compel the right choice. But we feared still, knowing the folly, the madness lurking in our own hearts, and in all men's.
¶287"There is no satisfactory life," he continued, "but the double life. You cannot be adequately a townsman unless you are also on the hills. For without the hill life we all succumb to fear and hate and blind partisanship. And in the long run this poisons the Revolution. Yet, to live on the hills without maintaining at the same time your town life, is loathsome egotism, leading to spiritual impoverishment and damnation. Live your two lives thoroughly, and in constant mutual intercourse. When you are in the factory or the office or the political meeting or facing the firing squad, you will also see the hills. Your thoughts and feelings will be sharpened by the mountain air, and your conduct will be sane. Yet also when you are contemplating the whole of things from some high ridge, you will be shoulder to shoulder with your fellow townsmen in the Underground, the cinema, the office, the workshop, the mine; or on the barricades, or wherever your affairs take you."
¶289"At first," he said, "it really is rather difficult; but if you persevere you will gradually find that you are maintaining two separate but mentally contiguous existences. Spend a few days alternately in the town and in the country. While you are in the town, keep the country always firmly in mind; and while you are in the country, the town. Continue with this exercise until you find you have fully duplicated both your mind and your body. But I must warn you," he said with sudden urgency in his voice, "if you stumble into premature death in one of your lives, you will simultaneously die also in the other. So in the double life the chances of death are doubled."
¶368But to be coldly aware is not in itself enough. I will also right appraisement: to loathe where loathing is indeed due, to love where love is due, to worship where it is right to worship. I loathe the urchin's cruelty to the cat, but I will not loathe the urchin. I loathe Hitler's mass-torturing, but not Hitler; and the money-man's heartlessness, but not the man. I love the swallow's flight, and I love the swallow; the urchin's gleam of tenderness, and the urchin. And I, the true I, will constantly to worship what for short I call the Spirit, fountain of all clear awareness, all love, and all brave creating. But also I will, I must, salute without rebelliousness the dread Other who seemingly is behind the hugeness and the intricacy of the cosmos, behind the star-streams and the facets of a bee's eye, behind the vast finitude of space and the mystery of the electron's leap; that most alien Other, who seemingly has spawned both light and darkness, both the Spirit and its enemy.
¶369Yet even with this perplexed salutation in my heart I will to strike for the Spirit only, and with all my strength, however feebly.
¶370The great reality that confronts me is formidable and veiled. Its heart is not laid bare in the electron, nor is its form displayed in the huge dance of the galaxies. But there is one experience which seems, oh seems, to bring me near to it, and give insight into it. In love I seem, I seem, to touch it; and to have assurance that even the dark, the alien Other is at heart spirit. Telescopes and microscopes and tomes of sociology tell much, but superficially. Only in community with another living individual do I make an inner contact. For our relatedness is internal. Each is to the other an envoy from remote reality welcomed within the citadel of the self. Each is to the other the perceived angel of an ever inaccessible God. Or so it seems, it seems. I must not positively believe it, for to do so would be to betray intellect's integrity; but equally I must be true to the sharp, the insistent feeling that in loving I come near to the heart of things.
¶384Dread, and to us unintelligible are the dark ways of the dark Other.
¶410Do not fear that I shall urge you to seek God and save your soul, or preach a crusade against contraception or false teeth. Probably in your enlightenment you are as happily ignorant of these two latter clumsy but merciful dodges as you are emancipated from soul-saving and from the obsession with God. If not, for God's sake, sir, damn your soul and have done with it,-if you suppose yourself to have one; and so see the world more clearly, and enjoy it more shrewdly, and be more inclined to save it. For it is the world, and not his soul, that claims a man's attention and his care. It is this world of lands and seas, cornfields and cities, of jelly-fish and flies and chickweed, of pigs in their sties and roving gulls, of miners and profiteers and thinkers and screaming babies, of armies, trade unions, colleges, prisons, and panic-stricken nations, of electrons and multitudinous streams of suns, of applied maths and aesthetic and moral experience. What need to seek heaven for the ghost that a man supposes himself to be, when all these vivid and needy realities clamour around him?
¶411Did I so far lack humour as to preach to you, I think I should exhort you to a radical Worldliness. I should urge, not pietism, but a whole-hearted devotion to the world, yes and to the flesh and the devil; but especially to the flesh, which bears all our spiritual sky-scrapers on its back as a soldier bears lice, but also to the devil since he is in reality.
¶445You, looking back on my time with a certain aloofness, may smile when you learn that very many even of us are still enthralled so securely to the value of the experient ego, and so dismayed at the "injustice" of its fate on earth, that they cling to the belief in its immortality, claiming that if souls die the universe must be evil. And though even in your day you may not be entirely free from the primitive wish that your beloveds might live for ever you must I think see with a clearness impossible to us that such cravings are foolish, if not immoral. For even I, blindly groping toward that wider view of existence which I trust you have attained, begin to understand that the experient soul, though indeed it is a great intrinsic good, is also but a tone in a more excellent music, which would be marred were its individual sounds not to follow one another into silence.
¶447But these moments perhaps lie.
¶454There is indeed an attitude sometimes confused with otherworldliness which is not egoistical. The truly religious consciousness might be described as a vague surmise that beyond the world of common sense, beyond the needs of our neighbours and the needs of the awakening social whole of mankind, lie higher cosmical needs which man cannot yet clearly apprehend though he must keep his heart open to feel them. And to this account of the religious spirit we should perhaps add the even vaguer sense that behind the apparent distinction of good and evil lies the truth that reality, just as it is, is perfect. Whether or not these obscure cognitions be true, this attitude of mind is a response as it were to a half-heard, half imagined knocking at the outer doors of the personality; it is an enthusiastic readiness to adopt whatever in fact is the appropriate attitude to the real as a whole, but this should not be called otherworldliness, for it does not, like otherworldliness, despise and fear the world of everyday. It seeks only to know more of it and admire it more justly, and serve it more shrewdly.
¶460The attitude which is more conventionally called "worldliness" is a care for certain things in this world at the expense of others. It is a care for sensory pleasures and personal triumph, and when it loves, it admires in the beloved, and seeks to enhance in the beloved, only these minor goods. "Otherworldliness" is an excessive revulsion from these goods called worldly and a yearning for a world utterly different in which they have no part whatever. It is a kind of nausea brought on by an over-indulgence in things good in themselves but not the only good. Gorged to the point of vomiting we may long for a world in which food has no part whatever. Nauseated with the cruder values, we long for a sphere of "pure spirit," and seek to withdraw ourselves from this foundering world as rats from a sinking ship. This surely is the great treason. The advance from worldliness (in the conventional sense) is not to unworldliness but to a more thorough worldliness, a care not only for the cruder values revealed in this world but also for all its finer excellences which we foolishly supposed could constitute a world apart.