Winds of Doctrine | Page 3

vague and accommodating, when
even war is a vast impersonal business, nationality seems to have
slipped into the place of honour. It has become the one eloquent, public,
intrepid illusion. Illusion, I mean, when it is taken for an ultimate good
or a mystical essence, for of course nationality is a fact. People speak
some particular language and are very uncomfortable where another is
spoken or where their own is spoken differently. They have habits,
judgments, assumptions to which they are wedded, and a society where
all this is unheard of shocks them and puts them at a galling
disadvantage. To ignorant people the foreigner as such is ridiculous,

unless he is superior to them in numbers or prestige, when he becomes
hateful. It is natural for a man to like to live at home, and to live long
elsewhere without a sense of exile is not good for his moral integrity. It
is right to feel a greater kinship and affection for what lies nearest to
oneself. But this necessary fact and even duty of nationality is
accidental; like age or sex it is a physical fatality which can be made
the basis of specific and comely virtues; but it is not an end to pursue or
a flag to flaunt or a privilege not balanced by a thousand incapacities.
Yet of this distinction our contemporaries tend to make an idol, perhaps
because it is the only distinction they feel they have left.
Anomalies of this sort will never be properly understood until people
accustom themselves to a theory to which they have always turned a
deaf ear, because, though simple and true, it is materialistic: namely,
that mind is not the cause of our actions but an effect, collateral with
our actions, of bodily growth and organisation. It may therefore easily
come about that the thoughts of men, tested by the principles that seem
to rule their conduct, may be belated, or irrelevant, or premonitory; for
the living organism has many strata, on any of which, at a given
moment, activities may exist perfect enough to involve consciousness,
yet too weak and isolated to control the organs of outer expression; so
that (to speak geologically) our practice may be historic, our manners
glacial, and our religion palæozoic. The ideals of the nineteenth century
may be said to have been all belated; the age still yearned with
Rousseau or speculated with Kant, while it moved with Darwin,
Bismarck, and Nietzsche: and to-day, in the half-educated classes,
among the religious or revolutionary sects, we may observe quite
modern methods of work allied with a somewhat antiquated mentality.
The whole nineteenth century might well cry with Faust: "Two souls,
alas, dwell in my bosom!" The revolutions it witnessed filled it with
horror and made it fall in love romantically with the past and dote on
ruins, because they were ruins; and the best learning and fiction of the
time were historical, inspired by an unprecedented effort to understand
remote forms of life and feeling, to appreciate exotic arts and religions,
and to rethink the blameless thoughts of savages and criminals. This
sympathetic labour and retrospect, however, was far from being merely
sentimental; for the other half of this divided soul was looking ahead.

Those same revolutions, often so destructive, stupid, and bloody, filled
it with pride, and prompted it to invent several incompatible theories
concerning a steady and inevitable progress in the world. In the study
of the past, side by side with romantic sympathy, there was a sort of
realistic, scholarly intelligence and an adventurous love of truth;
kindness too was often mingled with dramatic curiosity. The
pathologists were usually healers, the philosophers of evolution were
inventors or humanitarians or at least idealists: the historians of art
(though optimism was impossible here) were also guides to taste,
quickeners of moral sensibility, like Ruskin, or enthusiasts for the
irresponsibly beautiful, like Pater and Oscar Wilde. Everywhere in the
nineteenth century we find a double preoccupation with the past and
with the future, a longing to know what all experience might have been
hitherto, and on the other hand to hasten to some wholly different
experience, to be contrived immediately with a beating heart and with
flying banners. The imagination of the age was intent on history; its
conscience was intent on reform.
Reform! This magic word itself covers a great equivocation. To reform
means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of
the act are not always equally intended nor equally successful. Usually
the movement starts from the mere sense of oppression, and people
break down some established form, without any qualms about the
capacity of their freed instincts to generate the new forms that may be
needed. So the Reformation, in destroying the traditional order,
intended to