feted and flattered Oscar Wilde because he preached such an attitude,
and then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out.
It may be a question which of the two methods was the more cruel;
there can be no kind of question which was the more ludicrous.
The age of the Inquisition has not at least the disgrace of having
produced a society which made an idol of the very same man for preaching
the very same things which it made him a convict for practising.

Now, in our time, philosophy or religion, our theory, that is,
about ultimate things, has been driven out, more or less simultaneously,
from two fields which it used to occupy. General ideals used
to dominate literature. They have been driven out by the cry
of "art for art's sake." General ideals used to dominate politics.
They have been driven out by the cry of "efficiency," which
may roughly be translated as "politics for politics' sake."
Persistently for the last twenty years the ideals of order or liberty
have dwindled in our books; the ambitions of wit and eloquence
have dwindled in our parliaments. Literature has purposely become
less political; politics have purposely become less literary.
General theories of the relation of things have thus been extruded
from both; and we are in a position to ask, "What have we gained
or lost by this extrusion? Is literature better, is politics better,
for having discarded the moralist and the philosopher?"

When everything about a people is for the time growing weak
and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. So it is that when a
man's body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health.
Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims.
There cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency of a man
than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the world.