And then starts the one glorious activity of man: the getting himself into a new relationship with a new heaven and a new earth. Oh, if we knew, the earth is everything and the sun is everything that we have missed knowing. But if we persist in our attitude of parasites on the body of earth and sun, the earth and the sun will be mere victims on which we feed our louse-like complacency for a long time yet: we, a myriad myriad little egos, five billion feeding like one. The thing in itself! Why I never yet met a man who was anything but what he had been _told_ to be. Let a man be a man-in-himself, and then he can begin to talk about the _Ding an Sich_. Men may be utterly different from the things they now seem. And then they will behold, to their astonishment, that the sun is absolutely different from the thing they now see, and that they call “sun”. THE NOVEL THE NOVEL Somebody says the novel is doomed. Somebody else says it is the green bay tree getting greener. Everybody says something, so why shouldn’t I! Mr. Santayana sees the modern novel expiring because it is getting so thin; which means, Mr. Santayana is bored. I am rather bored myself. It becomes harder and harder to read the _whole_ of any modern novel. One reads a bit, and knows the rest; or else one doesn’t want to know any more. This is sad. But again, I don’t think it’s the novel’s fault. Rather the novelists’. You can put anything you like in a novel. So why do people _always_ go on putting the same thing? Why is the _vol au vent_ always chicken! Chicken _vol au vents_ may be the rage. But who sickens first shouts first for something else. The novel is a great discovery: far greater than Galileo’s telescope or somebody else’s wireless. The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute. In a novel, everything is relative to everything else, if that novel is art at all. There may be didactic bits, but they aren’t the novel. And the author may have a didactic “purpose” up his sleeve. Indeed most great novelists have, as Tolstoi had his Christian-socialism, and Hardy his pessimism, and Flaubert his intellectual desperation. But even a didactic purpose so wicked as Tolstoi’s or Flaubert’s cannot put to death the novel. You can tell me, Flaubert had a “philosophy”, not a “purpose”. But what is a novelist’s philosophy but a purpose on a rather higher level? And since every novelist who amounts to anything has a philosophy--even Balzac--any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the “purpose” be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration. Vronsky sinned, did he? But also the sinning was a consummation devoutly to be wished. The novel makes that obvious: in spite of old Leo Tolstoi. And the would-be-pious Prince in _Resurrection_ is a muff, with his piety that nobody wants or believes in.