I can more readily conceive the existence of a central committee elected
for the purpose of regulating the marriages of a community, than of a
community satisfied with such a committee. There is no logic in social
events. The world persists in not taking the next step, and what to the
social scout looked a dusty bypath may prove to be the highway of
progress for the hoboing millions. Side issues are constantly cropping
up to knock out the main issues of the stump orator; so let us be
humble. For this reason I refuse to discuss possibilities in infinity.
You and I cannot have become products of an environment which is not in
existence. It is safe to suppose that our needs are like those of the
race and that in us nothing is vestigial that is active in others. You
cannot have become too rational to love. The device has not yet been
formed.
You think I should take your word for it? But why? Have you never found
yourself in the wrong, never disobeyed your best promptings never meant
to take the good and grasped the bad? Is it not possible that you are
not yet awake, or, God pity you, that you are hidebound in the dogmatism
of your bit of thinking.
It is for the second point of your letter that I called you equivocal.
Earlier in our discussion, I remember, you laid stress on the fact that
love is an instinct common to all forms of life; now you go to great
lengths in order to show that it is artificial.
How do you differentiate between the artificial and nature? Surely a
development is not artificial because it is recent! Surely man is as
integral to life as his progenitors! When we come to civilisation, we
are face to face with the largest and subtlest thing in life, and the
civilisation of human society is not artificial. It is the fulfilment of
the nature of man, the promise made good, the career established, the
influence sent out. A universe of mind-stuff and a civilising force
constantly causing change, for change is growth, constantly compelling
expression of that change--to conceive it is to conceive infinitude. And
the purpose? Development, always development. To that end the individual
perishes, to that end the race is conserved, to that end the peril and
the sacrifice, and the agony of triumph in the overcharged heart at its
last bound. And what is this refining of the type, this goal for which
we all make with such tragic directness, but the gaining in the power to
love? We begin with love to end with greater love, and that is progress.
To write the epic of civilisation is a task for some giant artist who
shall combine in himself Homer and Shakespeare, and the work will be a
love story.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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