no obstacle to his lust for domination has been tampering with this
law goes without saying, but the humanitarian, all adrip with
brotherhood and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own
soul, has been tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way,
for the very reason that it is less obvious. This tampering with
the moral law, or, what amounts to the same thing, this overriding
of the veto power in man, has been largely a result, though not a
necessary result, of the rupture with the traditional forms of
wisdom. The Baconian naturalist repudiated the past because he
wished to be more positive and critical, to plant himself on the
facts. But the veto power is itself a fact--the weightiest with
which man has to reckon. The Rousseauistic naturalist threw off
traditional control because he wished to be more imaginative. Yet
without the veto power imagination falls into sheer anarchy. Both
Baconian and Rousseauist were very impatient of any outer authority
that seemed to stand between them and their own perceptions. Yet the
veto power is nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on
hearsay, but is very immediate. The naturalistic leaders may be
proved wrong without going beyond their own principles, and their
wrongness is of a kind to wreck civilisation.'

We find it impossible to refuse our assent to the main counts of this
indictment. The deanthropocentrised universe of science is not the
universe in which man has to live. That universe is at once smaller and
larger than the universe of science: smaller in material extent, larger
in spiritual possibility. Therefore to allow the perspective of science
seriously to influence, much less control, our human values, is an
invitation to disaster. Humanism must reassert itself, for even we can
see that Shakespeares are better than Hamlets. The reassertion of
humanism involves the re-creation of a practical ideal of human life and
conduct, and a strict subordination of the impulses of the individual
to this ideal. There must now be a period of critical and humanistic
positivism in regard to ethics and to art. We may say frankly that it is
not to our elders that we think of applying for its rudiments. We regard
them as no less misguided and a good deal less honest than ourselves, It
is among our anarchists that we shall look most hopefully for our new
traditionalists, if only because, in