ot go to any of the great
philosophers even for the outlines of a statecraft which shall be fairly
complete, and relevant to American life. I returned to the sophomore
mood: "Each of these thinkers has contributed something, has had some
wisdom about events. Looked at in bulk the philosophers can't all be
right or all wrong."

But like so many theoretical riddles, this one rested on a very simple
piece of ignorance. The trouble was that without realizing it I too had
been in search of the philosopher's stone. I too was looking for
something that could not be found. That happened in this case to be
nothing less than an absolutely true philosophy of politics. It was the
old indolence of hoping that somebody had done the world's thinking once
and for all. I had conjured up the fantasy of a system which would
contain the whole of life, be as reliable as a table of logarithms,
foresee all possible emergencies and offer entirely trustworthy rules of
action. When it seemed that no such system had ever been produced, I was
on the point of damning the entire tribe of theorists from Plato to Marx.

This is what one may call the naivete of the intellect. Its hope is that
some man living at one place on the globe in a particular epoch will,
through the miracle of genius, be able to generalize his experience for
all time and all space. It says in effect that there is never anything
essentially new under the sun, that any moment of experience sufficiently
understood would be seen to contain all history and all destiny--that the
intellect reasoning on one piece of experience could know what all the
rest of experience was like. Looked at more closely this philosophy means
that novelty is an illusion of ignorance, that life is an endless
repetition, that when you know one revolution of it, you know all the
rest. In a very real sense the world has no history and no future, the
race has no career. At any moment everything is given: our reason could
know that moment so thoroughly that all the rest of life would be like
the commuter's who travels back and forth on the same line every day.
There would be no inventions and no discoveries, for in the instant that
reason had found the key of experience everything would be unfolded. The
present would not be the womb of the future: nothing would be embryonic,
nothing would _grow_. Experience would cease to be an adventure in order
to become the monotonous fulfilment of a perfect prophecy.

This