ived entirely as action. The
artist is as wilful as the Germanic hero; the will to make excludes in
him the will to experience. The painter cannot look at the visible world
without considering at once what kind of picture he will make of it. It
is to him mere passive material for his artistic will, not an
independent reality to enrich his mind so that it will give out its
riches in the form of art. And as he is always willing to make pictures
so he must will the kind of pictures he will make, as the Germans willed
the kind of world they would make. But this willing of his is a kind of
theorizing to justify his own action; and it changes incessantly because
he never can be satisfied with his own poverty of experience. But still
he will do anything rather than try to enrich that poverty.

And that is the secret of all our restlessness, the restlessness that
forced the Germans into the folly and crime of war. We are always
dissatisfied with our poverty of experience; and we try to get rid of
our dissatisfaction in more blind activity, throwing up new theories all
the while as reasons why we should act. We fidget about the earth as if
we were children, that could not read, left in a library; and, like
them, we do mischief. And that is just what we are: children that have
not learnt to read let loose upon the library of the universe; and all
that we can do is to pull the books about and play games with them and
scribble on their pages. Everywhere the earth is defaced with our
meaningless scribbling, and we tell ourselves that it means something
because we want to scribble. Or sometimes we tell ourselves that there
is no meaning in anything, no more in the books than in our scribble.

The only remedy is that we should learn to read; and for this we need
above all things humility; not merely the personal humility of a man who
knows that other men excel him, but a generic humility which
acknowledges in the universe a greater wisdom, power, righteousness than
his own. That is formally acknowledged by our religion, but it is not
practically acknowledged in our way of life, in our conduct or our
thought. We think and feel and behave as if we were the best and wisest
creatures in the universe, as if it existed only for us to make use of
it; and in so far as we learn from it at all, we learn only to make use
of it. That is our idea of knowledge and wisdom; more and more it is our
idea of science; and as for philosophy, we pay no hee