no obstacle to his lust for dominion has been tampering with this law
goes without saying; but the humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood
and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own soul, has been
tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way for the very
reason that it is less obvious. This tampering with the moral law, or
what amounts to the same thing, this overriding of the veto power in
man, has been largely a result, though not a necessary result, of the
rupture with the traditional forms of wisdom. The Baconian naturalist
repudiated the past because he wished to be more positive and critical,
to plant himself upon the facts. Yet the veto power is itself a
fact,--the weightiest with which man has to reckon. The Rousseauistic
naturalist threw off traditional control because he wished to be more
imaginative. Yet without the veto power the imagination falls into
sheer anarchy. Both Baconian and Rousseauist were very impatient of
any outer authority that seemed to stand between them and their own
perceptions. Yet the veto power is nothing abstract, nothing that one
needs to take on hearsay, but is very immediate. The naturalistic
leaders may be proved wrong without going beyond their own principles,
and their wrongness is of a kind to wreck civilization.
I have no quarrel, it is scarcely necessary to add, either with the man
of science or the romanticist when they keep in their proper place.
As soon however as they try, whether separately or in unison, to set
up some substitute for humanism or religion, they should be at once
attacked, the man of science for not being sufficiently positive and
critical, the romanticist for not being rightly imaginative.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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