"There is not much doubt about the sapping influence of culture. It seems that narrowness of range means intensity of emotion. This is seen in the savage, the child, and uncultivated men as well as other animals. I might even go farther and say we see it in such titans as Balzac and Wagner, who seek to compress all the arts into their own particular art. The mind that finds many outlets generally overflows in dissipation of energy instead of digging a deep single channel of its own. And yet to focus our feelings to one point may be a dangerous accomplishment. For instance, the fulminating fire of Swinburne's radium rhymes, while harmless to himself, may become dangerous through me or some other 'conductor.' Unfortunately, the inability to foretell the ultimate effect of any given idea produces that form of inhibition called conservatism, and to this vice people of so-called culture are especially prone. It takes recklessness to be a social experimentalist or really to get in touch with humanity. Our careful humanitarians, our charitable ones, never do, for they stick to their conservatism. How we do fashion our own fetters, from chains to corsets, and from gods to governments. Oh, how I wish I were a fine lean satirist!--with a great black-snake whip of sarcasm to scourge the smug and genial ones, the self-righteous, charitable, and respectable ones! How I would lay the lash on corpulent content and fat faith with folds in its belly; chin and hands[3]; those who try to beat their breast-bone through layers of fat! Oh, this rotund reverence of morality! 'Meagre minds,' mutters George Moore, and my gorge rises in stuttering rage to get action on them. Verily such morality as your ordinary conservative person professes has an organic basis: it has its seat in those vestiges of muscles that would still wag our abortive tails, and often do wag our abortive tongues. "To arouse such fat ones to any onward flight it may take the tremendous impact of a revolution. It may take many upheavals of the seismic soul of man before the hobgoblins of authority are finally laid in the valley. "How many free spirits have been caught and hampered in the quagmire of conservatism. Yet they have the homing instinct of all winged things: they return to the soul and seek to throw off the fat and heavy flesh of social stupidity. Many great free spirits there have been who possess this orientation of the race and have brought us tidings of the promised land. How many thundering spirits have commanded us to march by the tongued and livid lightning of their prophetic souls, but how few of us have done so! Why, to me, this world is a halting hell of hitching-posts and of truculent troughs for belching swineherds. The universe has no goal that we know of unless Eternity be the aim; let us then have the modesty of the Cosmos, and no other modesty, and be content to know our course, and be sure to run it.