reason, after vainly supposing that it ruled the world, should
abdicate as gracefully as possible, when the world is so obviously the
sport of cruder powers--vested interests, tribal passions, stock
sentiments, and chance majorities. Having no responsibility laid upon
it, reason has become irresponsible. Many critics and philosophers
seem to conceive that thinking aloud is itself literature. Sometimes
reason tries to lend some moral authority to its present masters, by
proving how superior they are to itself; it worships evolution,
instinct, novelty, action, as it does in modernism, pragmatism, and
the philosophy of M. Bergson. At other times it retires into the
freehold of those temperaments whom this world has ostracised, the
region of the non-existent, and comforts itself with its indubitable
conquests there. This happened earlier to the romanticists (in a way
which I have tried to describe in the subjoined paper on Shelley)
although their poetic and political illusions did not suffer them to
perceive it. It is happening now, after disillusion, to some radicals
and mathematicians like Mr. Bertrand Russell, and to others of us who,
perhaps without being mathematicians or even radicals, feel that the
sphere of what happens to exist is too alien and accidental to absorb
all the play of a free mind, whose function, after it has come to
clearness and made its peace with things, is to touch them with its
own moral and intellectual light, and to exist for its own sake.

These are but gusts of doctrine; yet they prove that the spirit is not
dead in the lull between its seasons of steady blowing. Who knows
which of them may not gather force presently and carry the mind of the
coming age steadily before it?