But now Boon and Wilkins were fairly launched upon a vital and
entirely inconclusive controversy. Was the thought process of the
world growing, spreading, progressing, or was it going to pieces? The
one produced a hundred instances of the enlarging and quickening of
men's minds, the other replied by instancing vulgarities, distortions,
wide acceptance of nonsense. Did public advertisements make a more
intelligent or less intelligent appeal now than they used to do? For
half an afternoon they fought over the alleged degeneration of the
_Times_, multiplying instances, comparing the "Parnellism and Crime"
pamphlet with Lord Northcliffe's war indiscretions, and discussing the
comparative merits of Mr. Moberly Bell's campaign to sell the
twenty-year-old "Encyclopaedia Britannica" and found a "Book Club" that
should abolish booksellers, with the displayed and illustrated
advertisements of the new period.
The talk, you see, went high and low and came to no conclusion; but I
think that on the whole Wilkins did succeed in shaking Boon's
half-mystical confidence in the inevitableness of human wisdom. The
honours, I think, lay with Wilkins. Boon did seem to establish that in
physical science there had been, and was still, a great and growing
process; but he was not able to prove, he could only express his
faith, that the empire of sanity was spreading to greater and more
human issues. He had to fall back upon prophecy. Presently there would
be another big lunge forward, and so forth. But Wilkins, on his side,
was able to make a case for a steady rotting in political life, an
increase in loudness, emptiness, and violence in the last twenty
years: he instanced Carsonism, the methods of Tariff Reform, the
vehement Feminist movement, the malignant silliness of the "rebel"
Labour Press, the rankness of German "patriotism."...
"But there are young people thinking," said Boon at last. "It isn't
just these matured showings. Where one youth thought thirty years ago,
fifty are thinking now. These wild, loud things are just an irruption.
Just an irruption...."
The mocker was distressed.
The idea of active intellectual wrongness distressed him so much that
he cast aside all his detachment from Hallery, and showed plainly that
to this imaginary Hallery's idea of a secular growth of wisdom in
mankind he himself was quite passionately clinging....