You Can't Be Too Careful

I. “Tewler” to “Sapiens”

That completes all that is essential in the life of Edward Albert Tewler, his Deeds and Significant Sayings. But before this specimen human being can be put definitively into its place, in space, in time, among the stars, and Finis written to this book, a few possibly exasperating comments have still to be made on the nature of the universe and the wisdom of the ages. The reader was warned of this in the penultimate paragraph of the Introduction (q.v.).

Certain types of Homo Tewler, functioning under the designations of philosophers, theologians, teachers and the like, are still regarded with an excessive awe and far too readily accepted at their own valuation by the great majority of our race. They are like business, firms, competing among themselves for a monopoly, but agreed in selling God, Truth and Righteousness into the Tewler soul precisely as the proprietary medicine sellers sold their bottlefuls into Mrs Richard Tewler’s body. Not too confidently. Most of them betray a doubt of their own reality by dressing up in strange apologetic garments, gowns, hoods, robes, the oddest tiaras, mitres, petticoats and the like, shaving their heads, growing vast unclean beards, as who should say, “I am peculiar. I am not a man but a divine medium.”

I ask you; a medium for what?

For philosophy? But can there be more than one single philosophy for sane humanity? And can that philosophy be so outside the limits of the human understanding that it is necessary to dress up like a Gold Coast witch-doctor to expound that high hokey-pokey? Since poor rambling Homo sub-sapiens began to put facts together and ask questions about them, he has been accumulating a vast disorder of answers, right, wrong and oblique. Mostly they are oblique. His so-called “thinkers” were overtaken either by death or a conviction of indisputable Tightness, before they had thought anything out. The history of human thought is essentially a history of human error, of a midden that has never been thoroughly cleaned. Accumulation is the word for it. Never in all recorded time down to this last syllable, has that mass been submitted to an honest, sustained, digestive process. Its unassimilated chunks become “classics .” The student of philosophy doing “Greats” or whatever pompous name is given to this stale resurrection pie, is introduced to a jumble of incompatible ideas, a mixture of bits from different jig-saw puzzles; incoherence as wisdom. Our story of Edward Albert has shown reason why we still wait for a comprehensive clean-up. The little beast by the million blocks the way. But that clean-up has to come, if the transition to sapiens is ever to be attained.

And as with philosophy, so with religion. Religion is the binding system of ideas and practices which holds a community together. Obviously then, a healthy community can have only one religion, and now that distance has been abolished and mankind has become an interdependent world-wide community, there can be only one religion in the world. There can be no “religious toleration” in a sane world community. Your community needs to be bound by a common understanding, and you cannot allow organisations of priestly kidnappers to attack the social solidarity because they have a Church to sell.

The religion a world community needs is a very simple one. It cannot hold together without a dogmatic assertion of the supreme duty of outspoken truth, of the common ownership of the earth and the equal rights of man. So long, as people accept these fundamental dogmas, for dogmas they are, albeit vitally necessary dogmas, there is nothing to prevent folks elaborating whatever novel or antiquarian ceremonies or mythologies they have a mind for, or discussing in adult freedom any seditious ideas that occur to them. In a reasonably educated world, there would be no justification for suppressing the private sessions of the Jewish Khans or a Hell Fire Club or adult baptism, or Hitler’s astrologer or a celebration of the mass or a spiritualistic séance. So long as those who indulged in these oddities did not organise a propaganda of them and sell them to impair the general mental balance of the human community. But to tamper with the trustful minds of the young or the informative organisation of the world, is quite a different matter.

So we come to the problem of world teaching. This is certainly the most formidable problem ahead of us. For that old slattern, our Mother Nature, who has let one thing lead to another until we are now in a single world community, has neglected to give us any individual or collective drive for an education that will reconcile us to that conscious adaptation our situation demands. She has failed to mitigate our obstinate indisposition to learn. Homo Tewler may yet perish miserably en masse because of his fear of a plunge into reality. He holds on to his sinking ship; he looks at the dark waters and runs back to lock himself in his mental cabin with the sedatives the clerical salesman has persuaded him to trust. Yet time and again men of exceptional penetration have attempted to launch a recognition of universal brotherhood, of a new generosity and a co-operative life upon the world, as the only possible salvation for our species. It is not a new realisation. Now, indeed, it is finally urgent, but it has been plainly necessary to men of clear vision for scores of centuries. Nineteen centuries ago, Jesus of Nazareth, last, most indignant and most revolutionary of the Hebrew prophets, beating the money-changers and cursing the barren fig tree, was, so far as we can disinter his doctrine from subsequent accretions, preaching the gospel of human solidarity as his “Kingdom of Heaven”, and the socialist movement, before Marx undermined it, was an equally disinterested drive towards a sane salvation of our Tewler world.

There is-much to be learnt about the psychology of the animal we are, from the fate of these two initiatives. They were caught and crippled and destroyed by the sub-conscious malice of their first generation of disciples. Paul took possession of Jesus and smothered him in doctrinal Christianity, and in a little while that noble beginning had sunken to the wangling of the “Fathers.” It was not the Galilean who triumphed over the pagan stoicism of Julian. It was Paul who conquered. It was the fundamental Tewlerism of mankind that asserted itself against a precocious stirring of Homo sapiens. In the same way Marx imposed an orthodoxy upon the socialist impulse, and infected it with his own conceit, jealousy and arrogance.

Corruptio optima, pessima. To-day the most evil thing in the whole world is the Roman Catholic Church, whose shameless symbol is Jesus the Son of Man, drooping, crucified and done for. Wherever the Catholic priest prevails, among the decadent pious French generals of the surrender, in Croatia, in Japan, in Spain, in that spite-slum, Eire, in Italy, in South America, in Australia, there you find malicious mischief afoot against the enlightenment of mankind. People have called Catholicism a cancer of the human mind. But it is no such neoplasm; it is congenital; it is the organised front of that base heritage of the Tewlers, from which we are seeking Escape. It had no revelation; to claim a revelation is priestly impudence; it is the most natural religion possible, mean and muddle-witted, human to the dregs, pretending to be divine.

The Communist Party is the identical twin of Catholicism. It is its little left brother, psychologically the same. Inevitably the two work together for the same general frustration of human hope. They gratify the same resentful craving of the inferiority complex that we have traced throughout the life of our particular specimen. They arc; the same sort of animal as he. Never shall life be better than my life! they insist.

In view of these two great betrayals, we may reasonably doubt the possibility of a world-wide common education that will raise and keep Homo Tewler above himself. Whatever a few far-seeing people may attempt, it will surely be undermined and defeated by those who will come in and be brought into the great work. “You can’t expect humanity to pull itself up by its own shoe-straps,” tee-hees Mr Chamble Pewter triumphantly. “Forgive my sense of humour.”

But obstinate rebels exist who will not accept that. They argue, for instance, that already there has been at least one drive in this Tewler world, the onset of what it is customary nowadays to call Science with a capital S, which has so far evaded priestcraft or any sort of authoritarian suffocation. This Science has revolutionised the material conditions of human life, and it behoves us to examine how it sprang up and what exactly it is. No miracle begot it. It had no Founder. It began in a natural Adlerian revolt against the overbearing religious dogmatisms of the Middle Ages. Against their exasperating self-confidence, the recalcitrants, unable to take it meekly any longer, and casting about for some means of self-assertion, discovered to their delight certain incompatibilities between the teaching and facts, and summoned a new arbitrator, experimental verification, to justify their revolt. It is absurd to ennoble the driving force of that new movement. We cannot afford to sentimentalise Science; Roger Bacon, so far as our knowledge of him goes, never said, “I love truth,” or “What noble thing can I do for my fellow-men?” or in a state of pious helpfulness, “Let me discover something for the greater glory of God.” He did nothing of the sort; and anyhow the essential thing about him was something quite different; he lost his temper. He endured the philosophical assurance about him as long as he could, and then flung himself at a weak point, abusively and violently, and made the most of it. There was really no essential difference between the motives of Roger Bacon when he put out his tongue at the medieval Aristotle and young Master Edward Albert Tewler when he put out his tongue at the serene self-satisfaction of the lion in the Zoo.

Galileo again, was no visitant from a higher sphere; he was as human as any of us. But the complacent finality of the Church about everything in heaven and earth was too much for him. He published his forbidden book to make those who were set in authority over him realise just what damned fools they were. He could not keep quiet. They argued with him, they made him recant and keep a civil tongue in his bead, but they knew and he knew that they knew. “All the same, it moves,” he jeered at their dignified efforts to nail the earth down again, the earth that Copernicus and he had dislodged and sent spinning off round the sun for ever.

It is very important for our purpose here to recall this essential resentful Tewlerism of the scientific initiative, because then we can realise that great truths can and do emerge and increase without the agency of great minds, exalted discoverers or the like, Through a quite ignoble recalcitrance. It was Tewler insubordinate against Tewler in authority. Scientific progress oozes out of the general substance of Tewlerism, and its outstanding personalities, so liable to deification, are a hindrance rather than a help.

But this does not explain why these new expansions of the human outlook were not presently seized upon and exploited and betrayed by some creed-maker like St Paul, followed up by the usually inevitable priesthood. For that we must account in some other way. It is not so very difficult to do that. Science began differently. It began less as a public teaching than as a hobby. And it did not invade more than a limited part of the field of modern life and thought, and that was a part of the field remote from the primordial scuffle for pride and power. It began completely out of politics, and it raised no objections to current religious and social life. The Royal Society, like the Academia dei Lincei, was a society of gentlemen amateurs who met unobtrusively and exchanged their sceptical observations, their entertaining Centuries of Inventions and so forth, and published their Philosophical Transactions more or less privately. In those days they did not use the word “Science.” It was Natural Philosophy and Natural History they talked about.

The Royal Society was a toy for Charles II, and it was only as the nineteenth century unfolded that mankind realised that this pet tiger cub was growing into a rather formidable monster. It stuck its claws through the gaiters of Bishop Wilberforce with great effect, when he launched a Tewleresque kick at it. It was that memorable encounter of “Soapy Sam” and Grandfather Huxley at the British Association meeting which made the “Conflict of Religion and Science” a fighting issue. Then it was that the great vested interest of Anglicanism, which, in spite of the resistances of nonconformity and dissent, had been selling the Hanoverian Church—and-State system to the variegated population of the British Empire very successfully, took alarm, and the competing nostrum-sellers of Roman Catholicism and the Bible-reading sects, made common cause with it. This young tiger was biting mouthfuls out of the Creator! A Creator was an integral asset in their common equipment; they could not have him eroded and damaged; they could not do without him.

It is plausible to liken Science to a young tiger in this way, but that comparison needs to be qualified. Science may claw or bite upon occasion, but essentially it is the product of a protean anonymous power, and if in certain circumstances it took on the appearance of a dangerous assailant, it eluded any definitive suppression by its extraordinary lack of centralised organisation. It had no head to strike off, no sanctum to burn. There were no consolidated funds to be seized. It arose from the world-wide natural recalcitrance of the human mind. It was here. It was there. Like a dawn. And wherever it spread, the critical spirit in man was stimulated and encouraged to further insubordination.

So the struggle against Science is not so much an attempt to uproot and end something tangible and uprootable, as a world-wide disposition on the part of the great vested interests that overshadow our lives and sell us God, government and war to-day, to prevent an undesired and unexpected illumination reaching die general mass of mankind.

In this they have succeeded to a disconcerting extent. You have been told how a sample young Englishman, fifty years after Darwin, could dispose of his relationship to Tarsius and the apes with an oafish guffaw, still believing that he and all things were made, as one might mould clay, by a personal God rather resembling Mr Myame but with a whiter and woollier beard, a little muddled in his identity with an extremely mawkish Saviour who was also his Son, a phosphorescent pigeon intervening. (“Mystery of the Holy Trinity,” comes an echo from Edward Albert. “ ‘Ands off sacred things! ’Oly! ’Oly! ’Oly! People won’t tol’rate you saying things like that, and if God was anything like what he used to be, you’d be struck dead for it instanter”)

Which belated outbreak of Edward Albert’s is exactly why I write with ruthless precision here. The words I have used describe Christian doctrine unconventionally but exactly as it is presented by the Church and Christian art. If my phrases shock the reader, that only shows it is high time.he or she was shocked. The doctrine of the Trinity is, I repeat, atrocious nonsense. Yet all over the English-speaking world, children’s minds are still being paralysed by the injection of this same atrocious nonsense. You can hear the bland voices of the parsons in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Children’s Hour, telling the old Bible stories as truth, telling of real angels and real miracles, of resurrections and marvels of the utmost absurdity, lying deliberately to earn their livings.

“You talk like the Village Atheist,” protests Bishop Tewler, being as upper-class and socially subtle as he knows how. “All that, we understand quite as well as you do, is just a series of time-honoured stories, dear bewtiful old symbols.” The village atheist was often the salt of the village; and I am proud to rank with him. I had rather jest with him at the public house than dine at the Bishop’s Palace and be lubricated. Have the common people been told that these tales are just symbols? And what do they understand them to symbolise?

When we think of readapting mankind to a world of unity and co-operation, we have to consider that practically all the educational machinery on earth, is still in the hands of God-selling or Marx-selling combines. Everywhere in close co-operation with our nationalist governments, the oil and steel interests, our drug salesmanship and so forth, the hirelings of these huge religious concerns, with more or less [allegiance?] and loyalty, are selling destruction to mankind.

To those italics I will return after a paragraph or so. Plainly if the mind of the world needs urgently to be reconditioned, this is on the face of it a very dismaying state of affairs. And it is not even a practicable suggestion merely to utter the magic word “Science .” Is it really Science we have in mind when we think of a reorganised and mentally reconditioned world? Or are we taking the advancement of Science merely as the sample of the process of sustained free rationalisation, a process capable of a much wider extension to human affairs in general?

Science, as we know it now, gathers prestige as its scope extends, and as the need for experimental teamwork and rapid interchanges increases, it seems to be losing much of its early immunity from interference and perversion. It does not hold power but it creates it now in enormous volume. It has completely revolutionised war, but it has not abolished it. A hundred years ago and scientific research was still mainly a free private activity and science could get along as. that, Now it cannot do so. Now it is open and exposed and continually more vulnerable, and every salesman in the world is trying to attach it and profit by it. But he still finds a difficulty in its essentially protean quality.

The attitude of militant Germany to Science is peculiarly interesting. The bulk of the German people has been disciplined to acquiescence for centuries. That rebellious factor which breaks out in new discoveries and creative inventions has been well nigh drilled out of them. On the other hand, as part of their disposition to subservience, they have a greater respect for scientific achievement than any other people, with the possible exception of the new Russians. They want to capture it and make it their own. So that they will follow up and do more with suggestions and leading ideas that come to them from abroad than almost any other people The theory of National Socialism, and especially its intense racialism, is pseudo-scientific. Homo Tewler var. Germanicus is far less hostile on principle to knowledge and new ideas than are the pluto-Christian democracies.

The group of adventurers, bored by inferiority, who, with such remarkable success, have been selling the world death by unending totalitarian Var, and incidentally having a glorious time, have no use for the religious appeal. They find it a dead appeal. They get better results by producing pseudo-scientific generalisations. Relativity is taboo in Germany, possibly because Hess and Hitler, the joint authors of Man Kampf, were unfitted to understand it, and so were embittered by it, but mainly because its main exponent was a Jew, It was, they declared, not “Nordic.” And in the place of it we were presented with genuine “Nordic” physics. In Hess-Hitler-land Nordic archaeology, Nordic biology and so forth are replacing real archaeology, real biology, etc. In Russia the left priesthood of Communism is attempting a similar strangulation of intellectual life by selling cheap substitutes. Prolet-art, we hear of, and Proletarian chemistry. And a biological worker finds himself driven into exile, to avoid a harsher fate, because “Darwinism” is represented as infringing in some way upon that sacred mystery, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

So far from extending itself into the realms of government and general creative direction, Science as such may be already shrinking back into a subservient position. The continuance of the present scientific process is by no means secure from without or from within. We have seen it assailed and appropriated from without. Within, the specialist, with the mentality of a Greek slave, develops an increasing hostility to the irritating, autocratic-spirited outsider who exasperates him by the broader sweep of his views. He will extinguish him if he can. He will block his interrogative intervention in research organisation. He will take refuge under the wing of authority. The doors of the Royal Society in the days when it was dominated by free-thinking, free-speaking gentlemen have stood open to disturbing ideas, but with the increase in specialisation, there is an increasing disposition for the new sort of scientific worker to appropriate and canalise for hit own satisfaction the prestige accumulated by the old.

Plainly Science as we know it and so far as it is represented by societies, endowments, chairs, honours, titles, museum collections and the like, can be subjugated and replaced by a parody of itself, and it holds out little promise in itself of fresh and vigorous initiatives in the present human riddle. But the question takes on an entirely different complexion if it is realised that, as I have already been hinting, what we call Science, with its bundle of “ologies”, is merely the first harvest of a much wider system of mental motivations which still remains protean, elusive, in the face of systematic opposition, and capable now of rapid destructive processes among our staggering and obsolescent institutions, destruction that will in itself lay bare the broader realities upon which alone world reconstruction can be based. Or to put it in other phrases, there is reason to hope that that same proteus of insubordination which liberated Science, may give us—not a further extension of Science and fresh “ologies”, but something greater, a kindred thing, para-science, the next stage of human liberation, world understanding and world revolution, the dawn of sapiens.

This new thrust of the rebellious proteus may be expected to seek and find its own implements and methods in the replacement of the world muddle of Homo Tewler by the awakening will of sapiens. One thing towards which it is moving even now is the renascence of law upon a world scale. Like medical practice, the legal organisation has been corrupted by the protective professionalism of the old order of things, yet law, even bad, old-fashioned law, rigidly enforced, is an instrument for liberty. The man under law is a man protected from arbitrary violence; he knows clearly beforehand what he may do and what he may not do, and the advance of freedom wherever it has existed in the world has gone on concurrently with the declaration and maintenance of rights. Even our Edward Albert and his Evangeline struggled to express something they called their “rights” of the case, and it is a hopeful augury of revolution that there should be even now a formulated Declaration of Rights approved of by a growing number of intelligent and resentful people, and resisted, actively or passively, by every existing government on earth. For governing gangs and classes everywhere know what that Declaration means for them. It offers a fundamental law for a touted and reciviiised world, into which their pomps and pretensions will be dissolved, and as the old order of things becomes more and more plainly an intolerable confusion of enslavement and frustration, it will be the sole means of uniting and implementing a thousand storms of resentment. What possible rival can it have? Fraudulent imitations and falsifications may help the diffusion of its suggestions rather than Binder its establishment. Given only a few desperate men, sick with disgust at the tediums and pretences of the Tewler life, and bored to fury by the vistas of aimless, incessant and finally suicidal bloodshed ahead of them, in which they personally can expect no gratification, and there is no reason now why they by the measure of any previous human experience should not put a new face upon reality very rapidly indeed. They need not be idealists nor devotees nor anything of that sort. If they belong to the school of Mr F.’s aunt in David Copperfield it is enough. “I hate a fool,” said the old lady.

The collaboration of these exasperated men will find infinitely more powerful means of ousting old ideas by new ones than any previous revolutionaries. The Acts of the Apostles were vocal, pedestrian and storm-tossed, and Christianity seeped and changed about the Roman world through a long and confusing adolescence and was one thing here and another there; it took centuries to penetrate the countryside (pagani) or reach the frontiers; even the Marxist propaganda was an affair of books, periodicals, smuggled leaflets, slogans, small lecturing nuclei; but modern mechanism now, as it has developed in the last third of a century, gives all that is needed for a simultaneous diffusion of the same essential ideas and the immediate correction of differences, from end to end of the earth. Even an opposition suggestion spreads at lightning speed, as the German propaganda shows, and quite a small number of men in earnest and in unison could wrench the whole world into acquiescence with a unifying fundamental law.

And when we think of reconditioning the mind of mankind, we need not be dismayed by a vision of ill-lit stuffy classrooms and millions of half-trained teachers struggling with blackboard and tattered text-book to “teach” scores of millions of children. In a world of plenty all that will be different, and modern apparatus—radio, screen, gramophone and the like—affords the possibility of an enormous economy of teaching ability. One skilful teacher or demonstrator can teach from pole to pole, just as Toscanini can conduct Brahms for all the world to hear, and at the same time go on record for our children’s children. All this “canned teaching” will provoke Mr Chamble Pewter’s rich sense of humour. I doubt if that will deter those angry rebels who have got their hands upon the levers, and are determined to let the children see and hear and know and hope. Not in any mood of love or that sort of thing, but because they hate the pomp and glories of incapable authority.

And hard upon the revolt in teaching and the sweeping-away of the irritating private localised and nationalised controls of universal interests, may come the establishment of a great framework of ordered and recorded knowledge throughout the world. At present such encyclopaedias as our world possesses are in the hands of unscrupulous salesmen, they are a century and a half antiquated and blinkered in outlook, but the facilities afforded by microphotography, modern methods of multiplication, modern methods of documentation, open up the clear possibility of putting all the knowledge in the world, brought right up to date, within easy reach of every man everywhere on earth, within a couple of days. That is no fantastic dream; it is a plain and calculable enterprise now to throw that net of living consciousness over all our planet. (Here in the most untimely fashion Edward Albert Tewler intervenes with raucous screams of “Bawls! I tell you. Bawls.”) Once the new plant has struck root it will be very difficult to be#t it down again. It will give far more satisfaction to the elementary needs of Homo Tewler than the old stuff, which was not only inadequate and frustrating but humiliating. It will be like horse-radish, which grows again from any torn shred wherever it has once been grown.

It may be that we want a new word for a system of knowledge-distribution that alms only to inform and put everything that is known within the reach of every individual man, Mr H.D. Jennings White would sweep away the word “education” altogether, as a tainted word, and have us talk of Eutrophy, good nourishment of body and mind, and then let free men decide. A Eutrophic world from which priest and pedagogue have been swept as unnecessary evils is quite within the range of human possibility.

Moreover, when we canvass the possibilities of a break towards the light and “sapiens”, there is another important factor in the process of mental liberation that must be brought into our accounting, and that is revolt from within. These Tewler priesthoods, the more they dominate, the more they must awaken the spirit of insubordination in those whose role is mainly acquiescence.

The Catholic priesthood has never sat lightly and easily upon the lives of common men, and wherever the level of education has risen to a general elementary literacy, there has been revolt. Catholicism has produced the bloodiest revolts in history. Wherever the Catholic Church has been in complete control of education, the final outcome has been a revolution at once bloodthirsty and blasphemous. The lands have risen in a state of infuriated ingratitude to hunt priests and desecrate and burn churches. Mrs Nesta Webster ascribes this to the direct activity of Satan, and possibly she is right. Perhaps he does not exert himself so much in Protestant and Pagan countries because they can be considered damned already. But this reaction has been so invariable in the past, it has occurred in so many countries, that it seems for instance a fairly safe bet that in quite a short time the faithful in Ireland, bored to death by a too intimate control of their minds, their morals and their economic life, may be shooting their priests exactly as they used to shoot their landlords, and through practically the same wholesome exasperation of their inferiority complex.

But it seems probable that this lack of submissiveness is not peculiar to the flock. The shepherds also must feel the stirring of Satan in their souls. Much of this is hidden from the enquiring outsider. What his fellow-cardinals think of the encyclicals of the current Pope, for instance, is wrapped in the darkness of their discretion, but up and down the body of the Church there is and always has been a certain restiveness, and in this time of universal mental stress there is likely to be more. The chief critical attacks that have strained and broken the solidarity of the Great Imposition in the past have come from Churchmen.

Even in the days before Constantine the Great, when a definite Credo became a plain necessity to substantiate the bargain between Church and State, Christian controversy was chiefly internecine. There was no definite arraignment of the new teaching from any of the philosophical teachers of the schools of Alexandria or the University of Athens, in spite of the provocative snarls of such Christians as Tertullian. They did not think that there was anything in Christianity worthy of argument. Down the ages the typical source of trouble has been the undistinguished man within the Church reading the Scriptures and irritated by the assumptions and interferences of his superiors. He made trouble because he wanted to make trouble. And to-day now more than ever a collapse behind this formidable facade of Catholicism is possible. The Church may feel a chill of doubt about the future and take to professing liberal and democratic ideals, and that may liberate a number of smouldering recalcitrants grimly determined to make their ecclesiastical superiors mean what they say.

Another thing that may weaken this still arrogant opposition to any release of sapiens may be a great social and monetary storm that will Wash away its financial foundations. Priests out of work can forget their sacred calling and authority with remarkable rapidity. They are, as a class, soft-handed and sedentary, and it is possible that many of the younger ones may be interested and reconditioned for educational work. Throughout the social fabric the work of the essential revolution is not a simple implacable conflict but rather a miscellaneous release and reorientation.

We are dealing here with a number of factors whose force and relative importance are practically incalculable. From them there may or may not emerge a federated world, a common fundamental law, an economically unified planet, an organised and properly implemented world education. But until Homo Tewler has got thus far in the balance and control of his incoherent resistances and egotisms, it is preposterous, it is ridiculous, to call him Homo sapiens. That is simply flattering a disagreeable and suicidally backward animal to its own extermination.

II. Philosophical-Theological

And now for a philosophical-theological interlude. Some sort of promise was made in the Introduction to avoid “Ideers .” In spirit, if not to the letter, this promise has been kept. I have done my best to keep to simple, straightforward description, but one thing has led to another; it was less and less possible to keep the background out of the picture if the story was to remain permanently comprehensible. And even at this point there still remain issues that have been raised without deliberate malice, but which must be dealt with, if this account is to be really complete.

But be it noted that from first to last my method has been descriptive. Not one single “Ideer” of my own has been thrust upon the reader. He has not been put upon. I have observed. I have recorded. Simply.

In the preceding chapter, for example, as part of that description, the declaration comes out simply and necessarily that there can be only one philosophy and only one religion in a civilised world order. There may be readers who will be disposed to regard this as an opinion rather than a statement of fact. They will murmur such names as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, William James, Bergson, Maritain, Santayana, Croce, Pavlov, Russell, the Behaviourists and so forth and so on. They will wave towards a vast literature of commentary, over-elaboration, misrepresentation and the like. But if they will, come and stand a little aloof in an attitude of entirely disrespectful attention, they will begin to realise how much of this cerebration is as superfluous as the caps, gowns, titles, ceremonies and pretensions with which it is associated. Let us blow away what we can of this almost overwhelming froth and s^e whether there really is at bottom more than one philosophical reality for the purposes and within the limitations of Homo sapiens.

People who, like Edward Albert, have grown up in an atmosphere of unqualified partisan monotheism in which God is, so to speak, everything; originating and sustaining everything and accounting for everything, have scarcely a suspicion of the immense unsoundness of this-assumption. It is not even justified by Holy Scripture. Therein it is plainly admitted that the whole religious process arose out of a dual system, -like the Zoroastrian antagonism of Ormazd and his twin brother and undying opponent, Ahriman. Satan confronts God at the outset of the Jewish-Christian story, and has his way with Man, Eden is lost and God’s goodness is defeated. God is exasperated and takes it out of Man. Read your Bible. Only gradually does the story weaken down to a predestinate servitude to an invincible Deity. Islam, Judaism, Christianity, are all, so to speak, apostate dualisms that have taken sides and declared outright for one Supreme Being, and a very large part of the philosophical turmoil of the past two hundred years has been a confused return first to an essential and incurable dualism and then, going further, to a polytheistic universe, after the long predominance of one unlimited god,

Yet from the formulation of the so-called Apostles’ Creed onward, there have been signs of an uneasiness about the soundness of this assertion of omnipotence, betrayals of a feeling on the part of the faithful that perhaps they were professing just a little too much. Throughout the centuries the Church has never desisted completely from explaining the Almighty, just as Stalin for the past score of years has never completely desisted from explaining the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. And for quite parallel reasons any denial of the Dictatorship of God in Christendom or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Russia has been discouraged as strenuously as possible—all the more strenuously because they are fundamentally unsound dogmas and cannot stand examination.

Directly the dispassionate student of theology sets out to rescue the idea of God from the partisan extravagances of the pious, it becomes manifest that the idea of His omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence must be abandoned. These terms are entirely incompatible with the idea of a personal God with whom anyone or anything can have a relationship in time and space, A God who knows everything must be entirely stagnant mentally. How can he think, since everything is there in his mind already? And if he fills all space, then he is fixed for ever. How can he move? He cannot think; he has thought it all; he cannot move; he is there already. And since he is incapable of mental or physical change, then so far from being omnipotent he is powerless, he is fixed rigidly in an everlasting strait-jacket. Theology can only become a science of Godship when it abandons these preposterous absolutes.

But having abandoned these absolutes, the fresh-minded theologian can go on to some very entertaining considerations. According to any intelligent theological teaching, God, in some manner altogether mysterious and incomprehensible, came into Being in time and space, and our universe began. That is beyond understanding. He had withdrawn himself from an inconceivable infinitude in order to have relationships with creatures outside himself. He opened proceedings by saying: *. Let there be light.” And having manifested himself by light, in that moment he must have cast a shadow, coterminous and reciprocal to himself, the anti-God, Satan, his Zoroastrian twin. Before ever he began to knead the red earth into Adam, the opponent was beside him ready to wreck the work. How else could it have been?

Upon this idea Nietzsche seized, and presented the world with a modern version of the Zoroastrian. (He found it more picturesque and impressive to call it in “Old Persian” the the “Zarathustrian” idea.) A lot he knew of Old Persian! Literary artistry, erudition, classical pretentiousness, and a dislike for Jews gave his writing its peculiar qualities. He swallowed Persian dualism uncritically and took the side of Satan, because it was the most emphatic way of repudiatingY the orthodoxies and ungentlemanly beliefs about him. He drew his contrast. God wanted to keep man a naked respectful slave in the Garden of Eden, amidst a great boredom of carnivores and suchlike frustrated creatures. Satan wanted to get him to eat the tree of knowledge and go out into the great world. Eden meant “Safety First”; Satan whispered “Live dangerously.” That was the current of revolt. It was not very original. It followed the drift of the period. There is indeed about one week of clear hard thinking in the whole of the Nietzschean bubble. After that he just blew and blew.

Years before him, Hegel had been developing a philosophy that had a close relationship to that same necessary association of light and shadow. After the manner of philosophers, he exaggerated and universalised his bright idea until he saw the whole universe as a system of copulating contrasts. If a definite thing exists, said he, its opposite exists and struggles to replace it, and out of the conflict comes a synthesis. He spent an industrious life, like Og, King of Bashan, fitting everything to his universal formula.

Schopenhauer, in the same spirit of laborious revolt against established values that had become intolerable to him, insisted that the one thing stirring under the fabric of appearances was Will; the Will to live or the Will for Nirvana. He spun the web of this thread of thought to impressive dimensions, and it lived on in Shaw’s Life Force, Bergson’s Elan Vital and the sustaining spirits of Thomas Hardy. But elsewhere hardly at all.

The revolt of the modern mind against the idea of a professedly benevolent divine autocrat responsible for its infinite confusion, has now gone much further than that sort of thing. William James put up a case for polytheism, and Pavlov and the Behaviourists produced excellent reasons why we should regard the individual man as no more than a still very incompletely assembled bundle of conditioned reflexes.

None of this multitude of thinkers and their satellites brought his thoughts into really conclusive contact with the others. To do it would have been to discover much practical identity and so lose distinction. After their fashion, each bombinated abundantly with only the slightest regard to other bombinators. We cannot be too disrespectful at their stupendous, fussy and often quite disingenuous voluminousness. We who are looking on can perceive that the common effect of this tidal flow is to strip off any conceptions of good or evil from our interpretation of the world. Philosophical synthesis is mainly a process of cancellation and denudation. The net result of the philosophical-theological activities of mankind up to date has been almost entirely destructive; it has been a cleansing and not an accumulation; it has swept away a vast amount of interpretations and imperatives from life, and left it bare for us to do what we like with.

That freedom is the one universal philosophy to which the world is evidently coming. As I have said in the previous chapter, a gathering number of people, stirred by a great variety of motives, are resolved upon a world revolution and a new ordering of the world that will save Homo Tewler from putting an end to himself and carry him on to Homo sapient. But they do that wilfully and dogmatically. And there is no absolute imperative to prevent anyone having a hate of them, deciding to be Satanic to them and opposing them openly or betraying them secretly. You can easily persuade yourself that you prefer destruction and death to life. Many people do nowadays. The thought of happier generations fills you with malicious envy. It may please you to do what you can to destroy not simply human hope but the whole race. It may gratify your craving for power to think you are doing that.

But then it will be will against will. Possibly you may win. But if you lose and the world revolution gets the upper hand of you, there is nothing to prevent it declaring you, quite dogmatically, a criminal or a lunatic. It may try to alter you if that can be arranged. It may have to kill you. Some killing may be absolutely necessary if there are too many implacables. A rationalised world cannot turn sane, good men into warders and asylum attendants for the implacable, Or you may come over to us, for, like yourself, the revolutionaries will be Tewler and you must be stirred by fluctuations and concentrations of motive, closely similar to theirs. They are in no way superior to yourself, only they have had the luck to catch the light and crystallise about a comprehensive, unifying, infectious system of new ideas, sooner than you have done.

III. Tewler as Ever

Edward Albert Tewler is still alive. I am afraid he at least is lost to the revolution. I have told his poor sordid story and that of the people whose lives he helped to spoil; I have mocked at his absurdities and misfortunes and invincible conceit; but all the way along as I wrote it something has protested, “This is not fair. Given a broader education, given air, light and opportunity, would he have been anything like this?”

He is what our civilisation made of him, and this is all it made of him. I have told the complete truth about a contemporary specimen man. This brings me into conflict with my most intimate and trusted critic and with my loyal but anxious publishers. Your hero is detestable, they protest, and there is not really a nice human being in the book Couldn’t you put in some flash of real nobility in him, and can’t you redeem the spectacle by one or two good people, essentially good people, behaving in an exemplary manner, people your readers would like and with whom they could identify themselves and so hold themselves aloof from the harsh veracity of your story? That is exactly what I refuse to do for them. My case is that Edward Albert is not so much detestable as pitiful, and that for the rest I like nearly all my characters as they are—except Mr Chamble Pewter, whom manifestly I loathe. To love without illusions is to be secure against surprise. It is the quintessence of love. I follow in the tradition of Hogarth and Tom Jones and not in the footsteps of Richardson, and I shall count myself wholly damned if I let my friendly advisers induce me to pander to these people for whom reading is nothing better than material far Grandisonian reverie How can there be any “gleams of nobility” in a darkened and ever-darkening world? What light is there to reflect? What I have to say to every reader without exception is this: “This means you. Toil are Tewler. Search your memories sedulously, humble yourself before the truth. You are Tewler and I am Tewler, You and I in this book are not getting together and nudging each other gleefully at the blunders and baseness of a lot of inferior people. They are part of us, they are one body with us, and what they are we are. We perish with them. I am trying to tell you the most hopeful thing in our world and that is that out of our warring spites and meannesses there is the bare possibility of a wilful change in our atmosphere that will revolutionise human life. There is a way out and up, but only a fellowship of resentment and disillusionment can lead to that. We can make no terms with falsehood. Mankind has to be debunked. When Man realises his littleness, his greatness can appear. But not before. The priests, the scribes and pharisees, propitiatory Pilate and compromising Judas, will fight to the last against that release of Cosmopolis and the great brotherhood of sapiens that will ensue.”

How long are we unawakened Cosmopolitans to go on wasting one another and devastating the future? What of the next generation that is straggling about in an evasive world that still lacks the wit to achieve peace? Young Henry—I meant not to tell you—is in jail, and his father has disowned him. He was involved in a labour riot, and he may or may not have been party to the killing of a man. His trial was brief and farcical. He may be young enough to save when the great jail delivery of the world revolution comes, but that will have to be soon for him to profit by it.

Edward Albert married again late last year. Something of the sort was inevitable. He met a widowed lady of independent means in a hydropathic establishment which has reopened in the Peak District. A certain flirtatiousness, small attentions, agreement in casual observations, awakened a mutual interest. They drifted together and kept together like two bits of wood on a stream. They looked for each other at breakfast-time and after dinner they wore not divided. They sat out on the terrace for a long time in silence side by side in the moonlight, and broke into autobiographical reminiscence. They realised they were both creatures of circumstances. “Life,” said Edward Albert, “is one of the most ’strordinary things there is. There’s nothing else quite like it.” (“Nothing,” agreed the lady.)

“Who could have told, you and me would be sitting here like this three weeks ago? It’s just as if it ’ad to be....”

After that, mutuality developed at a headlong pace. They discovered that they were both dreadfully lonely, that they had reciprocal needs, and that one household halves the expense of two.

So they married and snuggled up for mutual comfort and reassurance, and because the price of everything was going up and up. She was a warm embracing woman and a great comfort to Edward Albert. His digestion improved and he ceased to brood on cemeteries and epitaphs.

This marriage widened the breach between father and son. The boy objected to calling the new Mrs Tewler “mother”, and seemed lacking in appreciation of her very generous and abundant blandishments. When she attempted to kiss him, he ducked and hurt her lip with his forehead.

When he got his discharge from the army he stayed only a few weeks at home, devouring books from the public library—he was a glutton for reading—and talking as little as possible to his father and step-mother. “You can’t say a word to him without his flying out at you,” Edward Albert complained.

“I don’t know what’s come over the boy. Nothing’s right for him.” It was to their mutual relief that Henry proclaimed his intention of going to South Wales.

Edward Albert displayed parental solicitude that was ill requited. “ ‘Ave you thought out where you’re going and what you’re going to do?” he asked. “You can’t be too careful, my boy.”

“I’m going to work there.”

“And what work?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

Pretty thing for a son to say to his father!

Then came the dreadful news that them Agitators had got hold of him, and then the tragedy.

It made Edward Albert very unhappy. Constantly he would recur to it.

“What did I ever do that the boy should turn against me? Him and Mary, they seemed to lock their ’earts against me. Mary too.... Locked ’earts.”

“There’s a sort of bitterness in him about you. I wonder sometimes if it isn’t jealousy of that George’s Cross of yours.”

“I don’t like to think that of ’Enery,” considered Edward Albert. “I reely don’t. Even now. Couldn’t *e feel pride in his own father? No. *E*s not so bad as that. It’s these ideers he has, right-down wrong ideers. It’s a sort of disease. I remember a talk I had with him when he thought he might be sent to France to put down them syndicalists. I warned him then.

“That was before you came along, my lady. I remember it as though it was yesterday. My ’ealth wasn’t too good, the posts were all anyhow because of the general strike, and it looked as though he might not find his father when he came back. These ideers of his I told him were all wrong, but I didn’t know then where they would lead him. It’s been ’ard to see the way ’e’s gone and ’arder still to do my duty by King and Country against my own son. Maybe I let Mary spoil ’im and make too much of him. She had a sort of—well, foolishness, for him. I often said she loved him more than she did me.... Often.”

Mrs Tewler III shook her head in agreement and said no more for the time being. She was very punctilious never to say a word, not a single word, against Mary....

IV. Flying Sparks

And now that I am speaking of this widening estrangement of the Tewlers, father and son, I may perhaps go still further beyond this austere limitations I set myself at the beginning and bring the record of several other characters who have figured in this story up-to-date.

You may perhaps want to know about Evangeline Birkenhead who went off with all her belongings in a taxi-cab so precipitately out of this story in Book III, Chapter 19. She jumped out of Edward Albert’s life like a woman who finds herself in the wrong train. She became a respondent, a decree nisi, a decree absolute and that was the end of her for him.

She did have a lover in her mind when she deserted Edward Albert. She was not boasting to Mrs Butter. Her lover was the managing director of the firm of glovers for whom she worked. He was a kindly middle-aged man who had been fascinated by her animation. His first wife had not made him very happy. She was a cold, religious woman, and a short-lived escapade on his part in another direction enabled her to half-divorce him. Only half, because after the decree nisi she was converted to Roman Catholicism and refused to have the decree made absolute, leaving him debarred from any other marriage. So in a state of considerable repression he conceived a very real passion for the bright young Evangeline. He imagined such intelligence into her that almost he evoked it.

He felt too mature and responsible towards her to seduce her, but he showered a devotion upon her that at once delighted and tantalised her. Once or twice they kissed, but he disciplined himself to a sentimental restraint which blinded him to the fact that in a year or so she had grown up very completely. He promoted her to a responsible position in the firm and contrived her trip to Paris to please her. He suffered acutely from her marriage, and, when she sought him out again, he succumbed very readily to her proposals, reinstated her in the business and lived with her as his wife, in a world which is less and less disposed to demand a sight of your marriage lines.

She became extremejy philoprogenitive. She was interested in children; she wanted them. I suppose it was part of her acute sense of children that made her repudiate our unfortunate Henry. She wasn’t going to have a thing made after the fashion of Edward Albert thrust upon her. She resisted every momentary impulse to regard Henry as more than a premature and misbegotten little cuckoo. On the other hand, she elevated Mr Grigson to the highest honours among possible sires. She almost believed the glowing imaginations she wrapped about him. Millie Chaser had to listen at times to revelations about that quiet-seeming, civil-spoken gentleman that threw a languid pallor over the dalliance of Psyche with Cupid. At any rate, the children were healthy, active and good-looking, and Evangeline made, as people say, a remarkably good mother. She had a quick eye for temperatures, symptoms and slackening appetites. Her fourth offspring, the second son, was born a few weeks ago.

She reads the newspapers and she may even go tearing her way through a book that arouses her curiosity. Through her unquestionably magnifying eyes she sees the ever-increasing disaster of the world in terrifying proportions. She is persistent in her struggle to realise some more satisfactory way of securing a good life for her offspring than that confusion promises, she talks to her husband, she worries all the brains she has, and it may be she will wrench something worth while out of it all. She may get the idea of Eutrophy, and that is a good idea. She may grasp the fact that the fate of every child and the fate of the world are inseparable, so that no child on earth now has much of an outlook unless there is a world revolution. Harsh, clamorous and vain though she is at times, the world revolution may yet get a profit out of her energy. She is less of a resultant and more of a will than anyone else in this story.

So much for Evangeline. Mrs Humbelay, I regret to say, for I have an irrational affection for her, died very suddenly of fatty degeneration of the heart, during a London air raid in 1940. She was saying,” It doesn’t stand to reason,” and then she and her voice faded out altogether amidst the uproar. But then her voice always faded out. They did not realise she was dead until they perceived that her lips moved no longer.

Mrs Thump, another valiant woman, kept the standard of English dressmaking flying among the refugees of Torquay. Torquay became a city of refuge for a multitude of people who were elderly or disposed to consider themselves elderly or otherwise excused from any sort of helpful service for the duration of the struggle. But they felt it their duty to maintain a brave face towards Hitler and remain almost defiantly comfortable. And to grumble incessantly at the conduct of affairs. The more the rationing of clothes restrained them from new costumes, the more they appreciated the ability of Mrs Thump -in making over and modernising the ample wardrobes they already possessed.

Doober’s, having, in the words of Mr Doober, stared ruin in the face at the outset of the war, was incorporated in a billeting scheme and did reasonably well in a rough and tumble fashion. It lost its windows when University College was bombed, and subsequently annexed two adjacent houses which were standing empty. It is now a temporary residence under Schedule 9, .but its grant is nearly a year in arrears.

Gawpy, however, who had seemed chained to the establishment for the rest of her life on account of her money, was a type made for war work. She was out at night on her own initiative during the 1940 raids with three thermos flasks of coffee.

“They’ll be wanting coffee,” said Gawpy. She became the right hand woman of Lady Llewellyn Riglandon in her canteen work in the East End of London. That is to say she did most of the work and Lady Llewellyn bore the brunt of the publicity. She was always ready to stand between Gawpy and the photographers.

Mr Chamble Pewter was attached to the new Ministry of Reconstruction in an advisory capacity. His unfailing sense of humour, I am told, did much to restrain the extravagances of imaginative people, and promoted a natural rebuilding of the East End of London, so far as it has been rebuilt, upon traditional lines.

Nuts MacBryde was flighty commended by a magistrate for working indefatigably for thirty-two hours on end extracting casualties from a row of bombed houses in Pimlico, but afterwards got into trouble for looting salvaged bric—a-brac. Bert Bloxham was killed in Lybia and Horry Budd went down with the Hood.

It is possible to give these few disconnected glimpses of various personalities who have passed across the background of the Tewler scene, but several of those incidental individuals have proved untraceable. I do not know what became of Miss Blame, Evangeline’s rival for Edward Albert’s adolescent affections. But then, I never knew whence she came. She may have given up bleaching her hair and got lost in the brown. I could not pick her out of an identification parade. Molly Brown too disappears again among a swarm of other Cockney young women from whom she is indistinguishable. Miss Pooley I heard of last in the postal censorship. Mr Blake at Southsea went on getting older and bitterer like stewed tea. He was found to be hoarding two bars of gold which he ought to have relinquished to the government long ago; he was fined, but he escaped any further penalties on account of his age and infirmity. He seems to have been killed in the raid on Portsmouth in April 1940, and his book, Professors So-Called, And Performances, if ever it was written, must have perished with him,....

These notes are in the nature of an interim report. This is how these individuals flew this way and that according to their natures,, in this opening phase of an ultimate world revolution which is still only like a fire beginning to-burn, They are the sparks of a whirling torch, leaving traces as they fly. The fire may blaze on or die down. All men are political animal—one cannot hammer that in too persistently—and now their fates are bound together in one. The great wheel of human fate turns, and turns more and more swiftly, either to fling off its human burthen into the void altogether, or, if that human burthen does after all develop sufficient tenacity, to carry it flaring on to a new phase of infinitely more vigorous living.

Let us take our last view of Tewler from the extreme outer rim of that circling wheel of destiny.

V. And After Sapiens?

Suppose, and the facts leave us quite free to suppose it, suppose that the latent sapiens in us succeeds in its urge to rationalise life, suppose we do satisfy our dogmatic demand for freedom, equality, universal abundance, lives of achievement, hope and co-operation throughout this still largely unexplored and undeveloped planet, and find ourselves all the better for having done so. It can be done. It may be done. Suppose it done. Surely that in itself will be good living.

“But,” says that dead end; that human blight, Mr Chamble Pewter, making his point with a squeak in his voice and tears of controversial bitterness in his eyes, “What is the good of it? Will there be any finality in your success?” he asks.

None whatever, is the answer. Why should there be? Yet a vista of innumerable happy generations, an abundance of life at present inconceivable, and at the end, not extinction necessarily, not immortality, but complete uncertainty, is surely sufficient prospect for the present. We are not yet Homo sapiens, but when at last our intermingled and selected offspring, carrying on the life that is now in us, when they, who are indeed ourselves, our heredity of body, thought and will, reassembled and enhanced, have established their claim to that title—can we doubt that they will be facing things at present unimaginable, weighing pros and cons altogether beyond our scope? They will see far and wide in an ever-growing light while we see as in a glass darkly. Things yet unimaginable. They may be good by our current orientation of things; they may be evil. Why should they not be in the nature of our good and much more than our good—“beyond good and evil”?