It was through this fatal paradox in the nature of things that all these
modern adventurers come at last to a sort of tedium and acquiescence.
They desired strength; and to them to desire strength was to
admire strength; to admire strength was simply to admire the statu quo.
They thought that he who wished to be strong ought to respect the strong.
They did not realize the obvious verity that he who wishes to be
strong must despise the strong. They sought to be everything,
to have the whole force of the cosmos behind them, to have an energy
that would drive the stars. But they did not realize the two
great facts--first, that in the attempt to be everything the first
and most difficult step is to be something; second, that the moment
a man is something, he is essentially defying everything.
The lower animals, say the men of science, fought their way up
with a blind selfishness. If this be so, the only real moral of it
is that our unselfishness, if it is to triumph, must be equally blind.
The mammoth did not put his head on one side and wonder whether
mammoths were a little out of date. Mammoths were at least
as much up to date as that individual mammoth could make them.
The great elk did not say, "Cloven hoofs are very much worn now."
He polished his own weapons for his own use. But in the reasoning
animal there has arisen a more horrible danger, that he may fail
through perceiving his own failure. When modern sociologists talk
of the necessity of accommodating one's self to the trend of the time,
they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely
of people who will not accommodate themselves to anything.
At its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creatures
all accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there.
And that is becoming more and more the situation of modern England.
Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion,