brilliant,but you know one can take everything as a joke. I am, perhaps,
jesting against the grain. Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions;
answer them for me. You, for instance, want to cure men of their old
habits and reform their will in accordance with science and good sense.
But how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also that it is
DESIRABLE to reform man in that way? And what leads you to the conclusion
that man's inclinations NEED reforming? In short, how do you know
that such a reformation will be a benefit to man? And to go to the root of
the matter, why are you so positively convinced that not to act against his
real normal interests guaranteed by the conclusions of reason and arithmetic
is certainly always advantageous for man and must always be a law
for mankind? So far, you know, this is only your supposition. It may be
the law of logic, but not the law of humanity. You think, gentlemen,
perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to defend myself. I agree that man is
pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an
object and to engage in engineering--that is, incessantly and eternally to
make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants
sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make
the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical
man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road
almost always does lead SOMEWHERE, and that the destination it leads to is
less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to
save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving
way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the
vices. Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute.
But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also? Tell
me that! But on that point I want to say a couple of words myself. May it
not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that
he does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining
his object and completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows,