philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark
Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was
just in time to see it set. If any frightened curate still says
that it will be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread,
we can only answer him in the high and powerful words of Mr. Belloc,
"Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces
already in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night:
it is already morning." We have no more questions left to ask.
We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the
wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found.
It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking
for answers.

But one more word must be added. At the beginning of this
preliminary negative sketch I said that our mental ruin has
been wrought by wild reason, not by wild imagination. A man
does not go mad because he makes a statue a mile high, but he
may go mad by thinking it out in square inches. Now, one school
of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a way of renewing
the pagan health of the world. They see that reason destroys;
but Will, they say, creates. The ultimate authority, they say,
is in will, not in reason. The supreme point is not why
a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it.
I have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of Will.
It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something
that is called egoism. That, indeed, was simpleminded enough;
for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it. To preach
anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life a war
without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to
drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism.