l
world than that in which men doubt if there is a world. It might
certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had
not been feebly hampered by the application of indefensible laws of
blasphemy or by the absurd pretence that modern England is Christian.
But it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow. Militant atheists are
still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are an old minority
than because they are a new one. Free thought has exhausted its own
freedom. It is weary of its own success. If any eager freethinker now
hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark
Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just
in time to see it set. If any frightened curate still says that it will
be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread, we can only
answer him in the high and powerful words of Mr. Belloc, "Do not, I
beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in
dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night: it is already
morning." We have no more questions left to ask. We have looked for
questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks. We have found
all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for
questions and began looking for answers.

But one more word must be added. At the beginning of this preliminary
negative sketch I said that our mental ruin has been wrought by wild
reason, not by wild imagination. A man does not go mad because he makes
a statue a mile high, but he may go mad by thinking it out in square
inches. Now, one school of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a
way of renewing the pagan health of the world. They see that reason
destroys; but Will, they say, creates. The ultimate authority, they say,
is in will, not in reason. The supreme point is not why a man demands a
thing, but the fact that he does demand it. I have no space to trace or
expound this philosophy of Will. It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche,
who preached something that is called egoism. That, indeed, was
simple-minded enough; for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching
it. To preach anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life
a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to
drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism. But
however it began, the view is common enough in current literature. The
main defence of these thinkers is tha