hey cannot be connected. It need
hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily
forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it.
Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite
different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in
terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all
chairs."

Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we
alter the test instead of trying to pass the test. We often hear it
said, for instance, "What is right in one age is wrong in another." This
is quite reasonable, if it means that there is a fixed aim, and that
certain methods attain at certain times and not at other times. If
women, say, desire to be elegant, it may be that they are improved at
one time by growing fatter and at another time by growing thinner. But
you cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant
and beginning to wish to be oblong. If the standard changes, how can
there be improvement, which implies a standard? Nietzsche started a
nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil;
if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of
them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction? You
cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable
than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing
whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.

It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object
or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the
change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be
sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily
with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress. It is worth
remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak
manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he
instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He
wrote--

"Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change."

He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is.
Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get
into.

The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental
alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought about
the past or future simply impossib