It is suspicion, above all, that is needed wherever we turn in our modern storehouse of ideals and panaceas--suspicion coupled with the conviction that man is desperately weary in body and soul. Now there is a state of weariness and apathy in which things that have become out of gear are no longer readjusted or repaired, but deliberately and ruthlessly destroyed. Each of us can picture in our mind’s eye, the behaviour of the nervous invalid who, too exhausted to repair a persistently clanging bell, tears down the whole fitting, wires and all, so that the disturbing sound may cease for ever. Such an act is typical of exhaustion. It amounts to a deep-seated surrender of the power of repair. Brain and body tissues that are not themselves regularly repaired or recreated can hardly be expected to devise the means of repairing or recreating other things. Thus we should expect the modern and exhausted mind to proceed in its corrective lust, not by means of readjustment, but by amputation, not by therapeutic art, but by extirpation. There are thousands of bells clanging discordantly in the house of civilisation to-day. The temptation of the modern man is therefore to tear them down, wires and all. Whenever anything goes wrong--and things cannot always work smoothly in society, particularly in vast and complex communities like those of Western Europe--it is [p30] natural for a certain large element in the population to proceed by means of suppression and amputation, by lopping off some creation of the past, and advancing the most convincing arguments for so doing.