realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.
Until we see the background of darkness we cannot admire the light
as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness,
all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine.
Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God,
and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war.
It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothing
until we know nothing,

Now this is, I say deliberately, the only defect in the greatness
of Mr. Shaw, the only answer to his claim to be a great man,
that he is not easily pleased. He is an almost solitary exception to
the general and essential maxim, that little things please great minds.
And from this absence of that most uproarious of all things, humility,
comes incidentally the peculiar insistence on the Superman.
After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for
being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense,
that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two
legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether
humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased,
would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity.
Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity
with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake.
If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress,
Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind
of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter
food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was
not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food,
but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.
Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable