Unfortunately, human enlightenment does not progress by nicer and nicer
adjustments, but by violent corrective reactions which invariably send
us clean over our saddle and would bring us to the ground on the other
side if the next reaction did not send us back again with equally
excessive zeal. Ecclesiasticism and Constitutionalism send us one way,
Protestantism and Anarchism the other; Order rescues us from confusion
and lands us in Tyranny; Liberty then saves the situation and is
presently found to be as great a nuisance as Despotism. A scientifically
balanced application of these forces, theoretically possible, is
practically incompatible with human passion. Besides, we have the same
weakness in morals as in medicine: we cannot be cured of running after
panaceas, or, as they are called in the sphere of morals, ideals. One
generation sets up duty, renunciation, self-sacrifice as a panacea. The
next generation, especially the women, wake up at the age of forty or
thereabouts to the fact that their lives have been wasted in the worship
of this ideal, and, what is still more aggravating, that the elders who
imposed it on them did so in a fit of satiety with their own experiments
in the other direction. Then that defrauded generation foams at the
mouth at the very mention of duty, and sets up the alternative panacea
of love, their deprivation of which seems to them to have been the most
cruel and mischievous feature of their slavery to duty. It is useless to
warn them that this reaction, if prescribed as a panacea, will prove as
great a failure as all the other reactions have done; for they do not
recognize its identity with any reaction that ever occurred before.
Take for instance the hackneyed historic example of the austerity of
the Commonwealth being followed by the licence of the Restoration.
You cannot persuade any moral enthusiast to accept this as a pure
oscillation from action to reaction. If he is a Puritan he looks upon
the Restoration as a national disaster: if he is an artist he regards it
as the salvation of the country from gloom, devil worship and starvation
of the affections. The Puritan is ready to try the Commonwealth again
with a few modern improvements: the Amateur is equally ready to try the
Restoration with modern enlightenments. And so for the present we must
be content to proceed by reactions, hoping that each will establish some
permanently practical and beneficial reform or moral habit that will
survive the correction of its excesses by the next reaction.