As we should expect, there have been departures lately. There is Mr. Walter Lippmann,[70] as able a cartographer of the Kingdom of Whirl as Mr. Krutch. He sees clearly that the bell-tent of civilisation is in collapse because society has no common human aim, no hold, that is, on a center-pole capable of raising the whole structure. “The effect of modernity, then,” he says in _A Preface to Morals_ (1929), “is to specialise and to intensify our separated activities. Once all things were phases of a single destiny: the church, the state, the family, the school were means to the same end; the rights and duties of the individual in society, the rules of morality, the themes of art, and the teachings of science were all of them ways of revealing, of celebrating, of applying the laws laid down in the divine constitution of the universe. In the modern world institutions are more or less independent, each serving its own proximate purpose, and our culture is really a collection of separate interests each sovereign within its own realm.”[71] And the remedy he proposes, who can quarrel with it? The “good life,” he says, is an _acquired_ disposition,--surely an advance over the implication of the other critics we have mentioned that somehow the “good life” would _naturally_ come to pass, if one could only eliminate puritanic inhibitions and flow with one’s desires. No, says Mr. Lippmann, we must develop “detachment, understanding, and disinterestedness in the presence of reality itself.” We must enter into a new asceticism--who would have anticipated five years ago such a phrase from our new critics?--defined as “an effort to overcome immaturity.” This is excellent in that it perceives the problem and the goal of the clear-insighted modern man, but does not Mr. Lippmann underestimate the enormous psychological difficulties that block the passage from unregenerate to regenerate man? One has the feeling that his is a paper solution, and one is appalled to read of his hopes for psycho-analysis as a technique for achieving the re-education of desire. The aim of psycho-analysis is adjustment to reality, and Mr. Lippmann adopts the dangerous phrase. It is dangerous: for what does “adjustment” in practice mean but taking the position of maximum comfort, the following of the path of least resistance? Continual adjustments by beings to an environment progressively unfavourable mean the progressive deterioration of a species: ultimately adjustment means extinction. Perhaps the dinosaurs can give us a lesson in the fallacy of adjustment. It is farcical for this critic to patronise Pythagoras, for instance, who “could not have known any tested method either of equipping his followers to appreciate science or anything besides a crude asceticism as a means of moral discipline,” as long as we can contrast the ancient perception of the human necessity of surmounting the environment with the contemporary belief in the value of adjusting (merely reacting) to it.