Mr. Belloc is completely justified in devoting much more than half his
commentary to these fundamental issues and dealing with my account of
the appearance of Christianity and the story of the Church much more
compactly. It is this difference at the very roots of our minds which
matters to us, and it is the vital question we have to put before
the world. The rest is detail. I do believe and assert that a new
attitude to life, a new and different vision of the world, a new moral
atmosphere and a different spirit of conduct, is coming into human
affairs, as a result of the scientific analysis of the past hundred
years. It is only now reaching such a clearness of definition that it
can be recognised for what it is and pointed out.
The essential distinction of the newer thought in the world is in its
denial of the permanence of the self and in its realisation of the
self’s comparative unimportance. Even in our individual lives we are
increasingly interested in common and generalised things. The older
commoner life, the religious life just as much as the most worldly
life, seems to us excessively self-conscious. The religious life, its
perpetual self-examination for sin and sinful motives, its straining
search after personal perfection, appears in the new light as being
scarcely less egotistical than a dandy’s. And this new way of living
and thinking is directly linked on to the idea of progress, which
makes life in general far more interesting than any individual life
can be, just as the self-centred life, whether it be religious and
austere or vain or self-indulgent, is directly connected with the old
delusions of permanence which rob life in general of any sustained
interest. When one is really persuaded that there is nothing new under
the sun, then there is nothing worth living for whatever outside the
personal adventure, the dance between permanent individual beatitude or
permanent individual damnation.
As this modern conception of life as a process of progressive change
in which individuality of our order can be sometimes excessively
exaggerated as it has been in the past and sometimes minimised as is
happening now--as this conception establishes itself, it changes the
spirit of living and the values of our general ideas about living
profoundly. Lit only by a very bright light held low, an ordinary road
becomes a tangle of vivid surfaces and black shadows, and you cannot
tell a puddle or a gutter from a ditch or a precipice. But in diffused
daylight you can see the proportions of every irregularity. So too with
changing illumination our world alters its aspects, and things that
once seemed monstrous and final are seen to be mere undulations in a
practicable progress. We can realise now, as no one in the past was
ever able to realise it, that man is a creature changing very rapidly
from the life of a rare and solitary great ape to the life of a social
and economic animal. He has traversed most of this tremendous change
of phase in something in the nature of a million years. His whole
being, mind and body alike, betrays the transition. We can trace the
mitigations of his egotism through the development of religious and
customary restraints. The recent work of the psycho-analyst enables us
to understand something of the intricate system of suppressions and
inhibitions that this adaptation to a more and more complex social
life has involved. We begin to realise how man has symbolised and
personified his difficulties, and to comprehend the mechanisms of his
uncongenial but necessary self-restraint.