he mob takes on some of the authority and
inspiration of the mob itself, and that he is thus free to set himself
up as a soothsayer, so long as he does not venture beyond the aforesaid
bounds--in brief, that one man's opinion, provided it observe the
current decorum, is as good as any other man's.

Practically, of course, this is simply an invitation to quackery. The
man of genuine ideas is hedged in by taboos; the quack finds an audience
already agape. The reply to the invitation, in the domain of applied
ethics, is the revived and reinforced _Sklavenmoral_ that besets all of
us of English speech--the huggermugger morality of timorous, whining,
unintelligent and unimaginative men--envy turned into law, cowardice
sanctified, stupidity made noble, Puritanism. And in the theoretical
field there is an even more luxuriant crop of bosh. Mountebanks almost
innumerable tell us what we should believe and practice, in politics,
religion, philosophy and the arts. England and the United States,
between them, house more creeds than all the rest of the world together,
and they are more absurd. They rise, they flame, they fall and go out,
but always there are new ones, always the latest is worse than the last.
What modern civilization save this of ours could have produced Christian
Science, or the New Thought, or Billy Sundayism? What other could have
yielded up the mawkish bumptiousness of the Uplift? What other could
accept gravely the astounding imbecilities of English philanthropy and
American law? The native output of fallacy and sentimentality, in fact,
is not enough to satisfy the stupendous craving of the mob unleashed;
there must needs be a constant importation of the aberrant fancies of
other peoples. Let a new messiah leap up with a new message in any part
of the world, and at once there is a response from the two great free
nations. Once it was Tolstoi with a mouldy asceticism made of catacomb
Christianity and senile soul-sickness; again it was Bergson, with a
perfumed quasi-philosophy for the boudoirs of the faubourgs; yet again
came Rudolf Eucken and Pastor Wagner, with their middle-class beeriness
and banality. The list need go no further. It begins with preposterous
Indian swamis and yoghis (most of them, to do them justice, diligent
Jews from Grand street or the bagnios of Constantinople), and it ends
with the fabulous Ibsen of the symbols (no more the real Ibsen than
Christ was a prohibitionist), the Ellen Key of the