There are two spirits abroad in the world,--the spirit of
Caution, the spirit of Dare, the spirit of Quiescence, the spirit
of Unrest; the spirit of Immobility, the spirit of Change;
the spirit of Hold-fast-to-that-which-you-have, the spirit of
Let-go-and-fly-to-that-which-you-have-not; the spirit of the slow
and steady builder, careful of its labors, loath to part with any
of its achievements, wishful to keep, and unable to discriminate
between what is worth keeping and what is better cast aside, and
the spirit of the inspirational destroyer, fertile in creative
fancies, volatile, careless in its luxuriance of effort, inclined
to cast away the good together with the bad.
Society is a quivering balance, eternally struck afresh, between these
two. Those who look upon Man, as most Anarchists do, as a link in the
chain of evolution, see in these two social tendencies the sum of the
tendencies of individual men, which in common with the tendencies of all
organic life are the result of the action and counteraction of
inheritance and adaptation. Inheritance, continually tending to repeat
what has been, long, long after it is outgrown; adaptation continually
tending to break down forms. The same tendencies under other names are
observed in the inorganic world as well, and anyone who is possessed by
the modern scientific mania for Monism can easily follow out the line
to the vanishing point of human knowledge.
There has been, in fact, a strong inclination to do this among a portion
of the more educated Anarchists, who having been working men first and
Anarchists by reason of their instinctive hatred to the boss, later
became students and, swept away by their undigested science, immediately
conceived that it was necessary to fit their Anarchism to the
revelations of the microscope, else the theory might as well be given
up. I remember with considerable amusement a heated discussion some five
or six years since, wherein doctors and embryo doctors sought for a
justification of Anarchism in the development of the amoeba, while a
fledgling engineer searched for it in mathematical quantities.
Myself at one time asserted very stoutly that no one could be an
Anarchist and believe in God at the same time. Others assert as stoutly
that one cannot accept the spiritualist philosophy and be an Anarchist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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