t all, that it is
impossible in this world to arrive, under any circumstances, at any
kind of truth.

Persons who repeat this sceptical dogma are simply refusing to
acknowledge the evidence of their own experience. However rare
our high rhythmic moments may be, some sort of approximation
to them, quite sufficient to destroy the validity of this absolute
scepticism, must, if a person honestly confesses the truth, and does
not dissimulate out of intellectual pride, have entered into the
experience of every human being.

Let us, however, consider the kind of dogmatic language which
these sceptics use. They speak of "life" as a thing which so
perpetually changes, expands, diminishes, undulates, advances,
recedes, evolves, revolves, explodes, precipitates, lightens,
darkens, thins, thickens, hardens, softens, over-brims, concentrates,
grows shallow, grows deep, that it were ridiculous even to attempt
to create an equilibrium, or rhythmic "parting-of-the-ways,"
out of such evasive and treacherous material.

My answer to this sceptical protest is a simple one. It is an appeal
to human experience. I maintain that this modern tendency to talk
dogmatically and vaguely about "the evasive fluidity of life" is
nothing more than a crafty pathological retreat from the
formidable challenge of life. It is indeed a kind of mental drug or
spiritual opiate by the use of which many unheroic souls hide
themselves from the sardonic stare of the eternal Sphinx. It is a
weakness comparable to the weakness of many premature religious
syntheses; and it has the same soothing and disintegrating effect
upon the creative energy of the mind.

What, as a matter of fact, hurts us all, much more than any
tendency of life to be over-fluid and over-evasive, is the atrocious
tendency of life to be inflexible, rigorous, implacable, harshly
immobile. This vague dogmatic sentiment about "the fluidity of
life," is one of the instinctive ways by which we try to pretend that
our prison-walls are not walls at all, but only friendly and flowing
vapour. None of the great works of art and poetry, the austere
beauty of which reflects the real nature of the universe, could
continue to exercise their magical power upon us, could continue
to sustain us and comfort us, if those tragic ultimate realities were
not ultimate realities.

The sublime ritual of art, which at its noblest has the character of
religion, could not exist for a moment in a world as softly
flu