philosophical
recluse of Trinity and the phrases and tradition-worship of my political
associates. None of these things were half alive, and I wanted life to
be intensely alive and awake. I wanted thought like an edge of steel and
desire like a flame. The real work before mankind now, I realised once
and for all, is the enlargement of human expression, the release and
intensification of human thought, the vivider utilisation of experience
and the invigoration of research--and whatever one does in human affairs
has or lacks value as it helps or hinders that.

With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as I
was concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life of
politics at which I could most subserve these ends. I was still against
the muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to their
essential form. The jerry-built slums, the roads that went nowhere,
the tarred fences, litigious notice-boards and barbed wire fencing, the
litter and the heaps of dump, were only the outward appearances whose
ultimate realities were jerry-built conclusions, hasty purposes, aimless
habits of thought, and imbecile bars and prohibitions in the thoughts
and souls of men. How are we through politics to get at that confusion?

We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. We want to create a
sustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all educational
organisations towards classicalism, secondary issues, and the evasion of
life.

We want to stimulate the expression of life through art and literature,
and its exploration through research.

We want to make the best and finest thought accessible to every one,
and more particularly to create and sustain an enormous free criticism,
without which art, literature, and research alike degenerate into
tradition or imposture.

Then all the other problems which are now so insoluble, destitution,
disease, the difficulty of maintaining international peace, the scarcely
faced possibility of making life generally and continually beautiful,
become--EASY....

It was clear to me that the most vital activities in which I could
engage would be those which most directly affected the Church, public
habits of thought, education, organised research, literature, and the
channels of general discussion. I had to ask myself how my position
as Liberal member for Kinghamstead squared with and conduced to this
essential work.

CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ SEEKIN