he should be conscious of the fact that he is one. Such is the
belief that has been growing upon us for fifty years or more with many
strange effects. It has not destroyed our sense of pity, but has
confused and exasperated it. We pity and love still, but with
desperation, not like Christians assured that these things are according
to the order of the universe, but fearing that they are wilful
exceptions to that order, costly luxuries that we indulge in at our own
peril. We seem to ourselves lonely in our pity and love; the supreme
process knows nothing of them; the God, who is love, does not exist.

In the past wars have happened with the consent of mankind; but this war
did not happen so. Even in Germany there was something hysterical in the
praise of war, as if it were the worship of an idol both hated and
feared. We must praise war, the German worshippers of force seem to say,
so that we may survive. We must forgo the past hopes of man so that we
may find something real to hope for. We must habituate ourselves to the
universe as it is, and break ourselves and all mankind in to the bitter
truth. They praised war as we used in England to praise industry.
Labour, we believed, when all the labour of the poor had been made
joyless by the industrial revolution, was the result of the curse laid
upon man by God. Therefore, man must labour without joy and never dream
of happy work. And so now the very worshippers of war believe that it is
a curse laid upon man by the nature of things. They may not believe in
the fall of man, but they do believe that he can never rise, since he is
himself part of a process which is always war; and, if he tries to
escape from it, he will become extinct. So they exhort us to consent to
that process even with our conscience; the more completely we consent
to it, the more we shall succeed in it. But all the while they are doing
violence to our natures and to their own. They try to think like
machines, like the slaves of a process; but thought itself is
inconsistent with their effort; their very praises of the heroism of
their victims are inconsistent with it. There is a gaping incongruity
between the obsolete German romanticism and the new German atheism which
exploited it, between their talk about Siegfried and their talk about
the struggle for life. And there is the same incongruity between the
cubist effort to see the visible world as a mechanical process and art
itself. The cubist seems to for