In Praise of Idleness

„What people who say such things forget is that what a man earns he usually spends, and in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income, he puts just as much bread into people’s mouths in spending as he takes out of other people’s mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point of view, is the man who saves. If he merely puts his savings in a stocking, like the proverbial French peasant, it is obvious that they do not give employment. If he invests his savings, the matter is less obvious, and different cases arise.”

„I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of WORK, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”

„The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”

„The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by manaping to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity.”

„The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will be bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things, 'there is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.”

„The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.”

„The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.”

„Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: secinj^ cinemas, walching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they liad more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.”

„Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism. The method of a hereditary leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers. “At present, the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product. This is a great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks. University life is so different from life in the world at large that men who live in an academic milieu tend to be unaware of the preoccupations and problems of ordinary men and women; moreover their ways of expressing themselves are usually such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they ought to have upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where everyone outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.”

„Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modem methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for the others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.”

„The main motive of the renaissance was mental delight, the restoration of a certain richness and freedom in art and speculation which had been lost while ignorance and superstition kept the mind’s eye in blinkers.”

„Throughout the last hundred and fifty years, men have questioned more and more vigorously the value of “useless’’ knowledge, and have come increasingly to believe that the only knowledge worth having is that which is applicable to some part of the economic life of the community.”

„Knowledge, everywhere, is coming to be regarded not as a good in itself, or as a means of creating a broad and humane outlook on life in general, but as merely an ingredient in technical skill.”

„We do not like to think of anyone lazily enjoying life, however refined may be the quality of his enjoyment. We feel that everybody ought to be doing something to help on the great cause (whatever it may be), the more so as so many bad men are working against it and ought to be stopped. We have not leisure of mind, therefore, to acquire any knowledge except such as will help us in the fight for whatever it may happen to be that we think important.”

„Modern languages and history are preferable, from every point of view, to Latin and Greek. They are not only more useful, but they give much more culture in much less time.”

„When conscious activity is wholly concentrated on some one definite purpose, the ultimate result, for most people, is lack of balance accompanied by some form of nervous disorder. “The men who directed German policy during the war made mistakes, for example, as regards the submarine campaign which brought America on to the side of the Allies, which any person coming fresh to the subject could have seen to be unwise, but which they could not judge sanely owing to mental concentration and lack of holidays. The same sort of thing may be seen whereever bodies of men attempt tasks which put a prolonged strain upon spontaneous impulses. Japanese imperialists, Russian Communists, and German Nazis all have a kind of tense fanaticism which comes of living too exclusively in the mental world of certain tasks to be accomplished. When the tasks are as important and as feasible as the fanatics suppose, the result may be magnificent; but in most cases narrowness of outlook has caused oblivion of some powerful counteracting force, or has made all such forces seem the work of the devil, to be met by punishment and terror. Men as well as children have need of play, that is to say, of periods of activity having no purpose beyond present enjoyment. But if play is to serve its purpose, it must be possible to find pleasure and interest in matters not connected with work. The amusements of modern urban populations tend more and more to be passive and collective, and to consist of inactive observation of the skilled activities of others. Undoubtedly such amusements are much better than none, but they are not as good as would be those of a population which had, through education, a wider range of intelligent interests not connected with work. Better economic organization, allowing mankind to benefit by the productivity of machines, should lead to a very great increase of leisure, and much leisure is apt to be tedious except to those who have considerable intelligent activities and interests. If a leisured population is to be happy, it must be an educated population, and must be educated with a view to mental enjoyment as well as to the direct usefulness of technical knowledge. The cultural element in the acquisition of knowledge, when it is successfully assimilated, forms the character of a man’s thoughts and desires, making them concern themselves, in part at least, with large impersonal objects, not only with matters of immediate importance to himself. It has been too readily assumed that, when a man has acquired certain capacities by means of knowledge, he will use them in ways that are socially beneficial. The narrowly utilitarian conception of education ignores the necessity of training a man’s purposes as well as his skill. There is in untrained human nature a very considerable element of cruelty, which shows itself in many ways, great and small. Boys at school tend to be unkind to a new boy, or to one whose clothes are not quite conventional. Many women (and not a few men) inflict as much pain as they can by means of malicious gossip. The Spaniards enjoy bull-fights; the British enjoy hunting and shooting. The same cruel impulses teike more serious forms in the hunting of Jews in Germany and kulaks in Russia. All imperialism affords scope for them, and in war they become sanctified as the highest form of public duty. Now while it must be admitted that highly educated people are sometimes cruel, I think there can be no doubt that they are less often so than people whose minds have lain fallow. The bully in a school is seldom a boy whose proficiency in learning is up to the average. When a lynching takes place, the ringleaders are almost invariably very ignorant men. This is not because mental cultivation produces positive humanitarian feelings, though it may do so; it is rather because it gives other interests than the ill-treatment of neighbours, and other sources of self-respect than the assertion of domination. The two things most universally desired are power and admiration. Ignorant men can, as a rule, only achieve either by brutal means, involving the acquisition of physical mastery. Culture gives a man less harmful forms of power and more deserving ways of making himself admired. Galileo did more than any monarch has done to change the world, and his power immeasurably exceeded that of his persecutors. He had therefore no need to aim at becoming a persecutor in his turn. Perhaps the most important advantage of “useless”

„For my part, I think action is best when it emerges from a profound apprehension of the universe and human destiny, not from some wildly passionate impulse of romantic but disproportioned self-assertion. A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than in action is a safeguard against unwisdom 2ind excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries. A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable. A contemplative habit of mind has advantages ranging from the most trivial to the most profound. To begin with minor vexations, such as fleas, missing trains, or cantankerous business associates.”

„Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant.”

„But while the trivial pleasures of culture have their place as a relief from the trivial worries of practical life, the more important merits of contemplation are in relation to the greater evils of life, death and pain and cruelty, and the blind march of nations into unnecessary disaster.”

„It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs. Life, at all times full of pain, is more painful in our time than in the two centuries that preceded it. The attempt to escape from pain drives men to triviality, to self-deception, to the invention of vast collective myths. But these momentary alleviations do but increase the sources of suffering in the long run. Both private and public misfortune can only be mastered by a process in which will and intelligence interact: the part of will is to refuse to shirk the evil or accept an unreal solution, while the part of intelligence is to understand it, to find a cure if it is curable, and, if not, to make it bearable by seeing it in its relations, accepting it as unavoidable, and remembering what lies outside it in other regions, other ages, and the abysses of interstellar space.”

„Architecture, from the earliest times, has had two purposes: on the one hand, the purely utilitarian one of affording warmth and shelter; on the other, the political one of impressing an idea upon mankind by means of the splendour of its expression in stone.”

„The evils for the mother are also very serious. She has to combine the duties of nurse, cook, and housemaid, for none of which she has been trained; almost inevitably she performs them all badly; she is always tired, and finds her children a bother instead of a source of happiness; her husband is at leisure when his work stops, but she never has leisure; in the end, almost inevitably, she becomes irritable, narrow-minded, and full of envy.”

„The tendency of industrialism has been, from the first, to lay too much stress on production, and too little on consumption and ordinary living; this has been a result of emphasis on profits, which are associated only with production. The result is that the factory has become scientific, and has carried division of labour to the farthest possible point, while the home has remained unscientific, and still heaps the most diverse labours upon the head of the over-burdened mother. It is a natural result of the domination of the profitmaking motive that the most haphazard, unorganized, and altogether unsatisfactory departments of human activity are those from which no pecuniary profit is to be expected. It must be admitted, however, that the most powerful obstacles to such an architectural reform as I have been suggesting are to be found in the psychology of the wage-earners themselves. However they may quarrel, people like the privacy of the “home,”

„Hideousness, as much as worry and poverty, is part of the price we pay for our slavery to the motive of private profit.”

„When a country exports more than it imports, it is said to have a favourable balance of trade; in the contrary case, the balance is said to be unfavourable.”

„The plain fact is that the governing classes of the world are too ignorant and stupid to be able to think through such a problem, and too conceited to ask advice of those who might help them.”

„If an individual gets his clothes for nothing, he does not spend his time making clothes. But nations think that they ought to produce everything that they need, except where there is some natural obstacle such as climate. If nations had sense, they would arrange, by international agreement, which nation was to produce what, and would no more attempt to produce everything than individuals do. No individual tries to make his own clothes, his own shoes, his own food, his own house, and so on; he knows quite well that, if he did, he would have to be content with a very low level of comfort. But nations do not yet understand the principle of division of labour. If they did, they could have let Germany pay in certain classes of goods, which they would have ceased to make themselves. The men who would have been thrown out of work could have been taught another trade at the public expense. But this would have required organization of production, which is contrary to business orthodoxy. Superstitions about gold are curiously deepseated, not only in those who profit by them, but even in those to whom they bring misfortune.”

„Of all reputedly useful occupations, about the most absurd is gold- mining. Gold is dug out of the earth in South Africa, and is conveyed, with infinite precautions against theft and accident, to London or Paris or New York, where it is again placed underground in the vaults of banks. It might just as well have been left underground in South Africa.”

„If I say I will put by £100 against a rainy day, I may be wise. But if I say that, however poor I may become, I will not spend the £100, it ceases to be an effective part of my fortune, and I might just as well have given it away”

„All the European countries that took part in the late war depreciated their currencies, and in so doing repudiated a part of their debts.”

„The fact is that Governments, like other people, pay their debts if it is to their interest to do so, but not otherwise.”

„The security is poor, but cannot be made better until there is an international Government.”

„There is therefore only one way of securing a stable currency, and that is to have, in fact if not in form, a single world Government, possessed of the sole effective armed forces. Such a Government would have an interest in a stable currency, and could decree a currency with a constant purchasing power in terms of the average of commodities. This is the only true stability, and gold does not possess it. Nor will sovereign nations adhere even to gold in times of stress. The argument that gold secures a stable currency is therefore from every point of view fallacious.”

„We regard our buying as unimportant in comparison with our selling. The only exceptions are cases in which the supply is limited.”

„The ultimate psychological source of our preference for selling over buying is that we prefer power to pleasure. This is not a universal characteristic: there are spendthrifts, who like a short life and a merry one. But it is a characteristic of the energetic, successful individuals who give the tone to a competitive age. When most wealth was inherited, the psychology of the producer was less dominant than it is now. It is the psychology of the producer that makes men more anxious to sell than to buy, and that causes Governments to engage in the laughable attempt to create a world in which every nation sells and no nation buys. The psychology of the producer is complicated by a circumstance which distinguishes economic relations from most others. If you produce and sell some commodity, there are two classes of mankind who are specially important to you, namely, your competitors and your customers. Your competitors harm you, and your customers benefit you. Your competitors are obvious and comparatively few, whereas your customers are diffused and for the most part unknown. You tend, therefore, to be more conscious of your competitors than of your customers.”

„The ordinary citizen is struck dumb with awe when he is told about gold reserves, note issues, inflation, deflation, reflation, and all the rest of the jargon. He feels that anyone who can converse glibly about such matters must be very wise, and he does not dare to question what he is told. He does not realize what a small part gold really plays in modem transactions, though he would be quite at a loss to explain what its functions are. He feels vaguely that his country is likely to be safer if it contains a great deal of gold, so that he is glad when the gold reserve increases and sorry when it diminishes.”

„Finance, like war, suffers from the fact that almost all those who have technical competence also have a bias which is contrary to the interest of the community.”

„To understand the present age, therefore, it is necessary to go back to a considerably earlier time.”

„I think that what we mean in practice by reason can be defined by three characteristics. In the first place, it relies upon persuasion rather than force; in the second place, it seeks to persuade by means of arguments which the man who uses them believes to be completely valid; and in the third place, in forming opinions, it uses observation and induction as much as possible and intuition as little as possible.”

„Rationalism and antirationalism have existed side by side since the beginning of Greek civilization, and each, when it has seemed likely to become completely dominant, has always led, by reaction, to a new outburst of its opposite.”

„Fichte needed a doctrine which would make him feel superior to Napoleon; Carlyle and Nietzsche had infirmities for which they sought compensation in the world of imagination; British imperialism of Rudyard Kipling’s epoch was due to shame at having lost industrial supremacy; and the Hitlerite madness of our time is a mantle of myth in which the German ego keeps itself warm against the cold blasts of Versailles. No man thinks sanely when his self-esteem has suffered a mortal wound, and those who deliberately humiliate a nation have only themselves to thank if it becomes a nation of lunatics.”

„Until the deep conflicts of nations and classes which infect our world have been resolved, it is hardly to be expected that mankind will return to a rational habit of mind. The difficulty is that, so long as unreason prevails, a solution of our troubles can only be reached by chance; for while reason, being impersonal, makes universal co-operation possible, unreason, since it represents private passions, makes strife inevitable. It is for this reason that rationality, in the sense of an appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance to the well-being of the human species, not only in ages in which it easily prevails, but also, and even more, in those less fortunate times in which it is despised and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the virility to kill where they cannot agree.”

„It is dangerous to regard any one man as infallible; the consequence is necessarily an oversimplification. The tradition of the verbal inspiration of the Bible has made men too ready to look for a Sacred Book. But this worship of authority is contrary to the scientific spirit.”

„Communism restricts liberty, particularly intellectual liberty, more than any other system except Fascism. The complete unification of both economic and political power produces a terrifying engine of oppression, in which there are no loopholes for exceptions. Under such a system progress would soon become impossible, since it is the nature of bureaucrats to object to all change except increase in their own power. All serious innovation is only rendered possible by some accident enabling unpopular persons to survive. Kepler lived by astrology, Darwin by inherited wealth, Marx by Engels’s “exploitation”

„Politically immature nations are not the best guides as to the political future.”

„The root objection to Fascism is its selection of a portion of mankind as alone important.”

„I do not think that England and America are likely to adopt Fascism, because the tradition of representative government is too strong in both countries to permit such a development. The ordinary citizen has a feeling that public affairs concern him, and would not wish to lose the right of expressing his political opinions. General Elections and Presidential Elections are sporting events, like the Derby, and life would seem duller without them. Of France it is impossible to feel quite so confident. But I shall be surprised if France adopts Fascism, except perhaps temporarily during a war. There are some objections—and these, to my mind, the most conclusive— ^which apply to Communism and Fascism equally. Both are attempts by a minority to mould a population forcibly in accordance with a preconceived pattern. They regard a population as a man regards the materials out of which he intends to construct a machine: the materials undergo much alteration, but in accordance with his purposes, not with any law of development inherent in them. Where living beings are concerned, and most of all in the case of human beings, spontaneous growth tends to produce certain results, and others can only be produced by means of a certain stress and strain. Embryologists may produce beasts with two heads, or with a nose where a toe should be; but such monstrosities do not find life very pleasant. Similarly Fascists and Communists, having in their minds a picture of society as a whole, distort individuals so as to make them fit into a pattern; those who cannot be adequately distorted are killed or placed in concentration camps. I do not think an outlook of this sort, which totally ignores the spontaneous impulses of the individual, is ethically justifiable, or can, in the long run, be polidcally successful. It is possible to cut shrubs into the shape of peacocks, and by a similar violence a similar distortion can be inflicted upon human beings. But the shrub remains passive, while the man, whatever the dictator may desire, remains active, if not in one sphere then in another. The shrub cannot pass on the lesson in the use of the shears which the gardener has been teaching, but the distorted human being can always find humbler human beings upon whom he can wield smaller shesirs. The inevitable effects of artificial moulding upon the individual are to produce either cruelty or listlessness, perhaps both in alternation. And from a population with these characteristics no good thing is to be expected.”

„Preoccupation with machines has produced what may be called the manipulator’s fallacy, which consists in treating individuals and societies as if they were inanimate, and manipulators as if they were divine beings. Human beings change under treatment, and the operators themselves change as a result of the effect which the operations have upon them. Social dynamics is therefore a very difficult science, about which less is known than is necessary to warrant a dictatorship. In the typical manipulator, all feeling for natural growth in his patient is atrophied; the result is not, as he hopes, passive adaptation to a place in the preconceived pattern, but morbid and distorted growth, leading to a pattern which is grotesque and macabre. The ultimate psychological argument for democracy and for patience is that an element of free growth, of go-as-you-please and untrained natural living, is essential if men are not to become misshapen monsters. In any case, believing, as I do, that Communist and Fascist dictatorships are alike undesirable, I deplore the tendency to view them as the only alternatives, and to treat democracy as obsolete. If men think them the only alternatives, they will become so; if men think otherwise, they will not.”

„I am persuaded that, if Socialist propaganda were conducted with less hate and bitterness, appealing not to envy but to the obvious need of economic organization, the task of persuasion would be enormously facilitated, and the need for force correspondingly diminished. I deprecate the appeal to force, except in defence of what, through persuasion, has become legally established, because (a) it is likely to fail, (i) the struggle must be disastrously destructive, and (c) the victors, after an obstinate fight, are likely to have forgotten their original objects, and to institute something quite different, probably a military tyranny. I presuppose, therefore, as a condition for successful Socialism, the peaceful persuasion of a majority to acceptance of its doctrines.”

„In the present state of the world, not only are many people destitute, but the majority of those who are not are haunted by a perfectly reasonable fear that they may become so at any moment.”

„In all classes, from the lowest to almost the highest, economic fear governs men’s thoughts by day and their dreams at night, making their work nervewracking and their leisure unrefreshing. This everpresent terror is, I think, the main cause of the mood of madness which has swept over great parts of the civilized world. The desire for wealth is, in most cases, due to a desire for security. Men save money and invest it, in the hope of having something to live on when they become old and infirm, and of being able to prevent their children from sinking in the social scale. In former days, this hope was rational, since there were such things as safe investments. But now security has become unattainable: the largest businesses fail. States go bankrupt, and whatever still stands is liable to be swept away in the next war. The result, except for those who continue to live in a fool’s paradise, is a mood of unhappy recklessness, which makes a sane consideration of possible remedies very difficult. Economic security would do more to increase the happiness of civilized communities than any other change that can be imagined, except the prevention of war. Work—to the extent that may be socially necessary—should be legally obligatory for all healthy adults, but their income should depend only upon their willingness to work, and should not cease when, for some reason, their services are temporarily unnecessary.”

„How literature suffers from the commercial motive, every writer knows: almost all vigorous writing offends some group, and therefore makes sales less. It is difficult for writers not to measure their own merit by their royalties, and when bad work brings great pecuniary rewards it requires unusual firmness of character to produce good work and remain poor.”

„Books at present exceed in quantity as much as they fall short in quality.”

„The world is in the condition of a drunkard anxious to reform, but surrounded by kind friends offering him drinks, and therefore perpetually relapsing. In this case, the kind friend are men who make money out of his unfortunate propensity, and the first step in his reformatioi must be to remove them. It is only in this sense that modern capitalism can be regarded as a cause of war: it is not the whole cause, but it provides ai essential stimulus to the other causes.”

„In place of the pursuit of profits as the guiding motive in industry, there will be Government planning. While the Government may miscalculate, it is less likely to do so than a private individual, because it will have fuller knowledge. When the price of rubber was high, everybody who could planted rubber trees, with the result that, after a few years, the price fell disastrously, and it was found necessary to make an agreement restricting the output of rubber. A central authority, which possesses all the statistics, can prevent this sort of miscalculation.”

„Socialism, I repeat, is not a doctrine for the proletariat only. By preventing economic insecurity, it is calculated to increase the happiness of all but a handful of the richest people; and if, as I firmly believe, it can prevent first-class wars, it will immeasurably increase the well-being of the whole world—for the belief of certain industrial magnates that they could profit by another Great War, in spite of the economic argument by which their view can be made to seem plausible, is an insane delusion of megalomaniacs.”

„Whoever weakens the respect for democratic government is, intentionally or unintentionally, increasing the likelihood, not of Socialism or Communism, but of Fascism.”

„To see one’s own civilization in a true perspective is by no means easy. There are three obvious means to this end, namely travel, history, and anthropology, and what I shall have to say is suggested by all three; but no one of the three is as great a help to objectivity as it appears to be. The traveller sees only what interests him; for example, Marco Polo never noticed Chinese women’s small feet. The historian arranges events in patterns derived from his preoccupations : the decay of Rome has been variously ascribed to imperialism, Christianity, malaria, divorce, and immigration—the last two being the favourites in America with parsons and politicians respectively. The anthropologist selects and interprets facts according to the prevailing prejudices of his day.”

„We may then define civilization as: A manner of life due to the combination of knowledge and forethought.”

„The one prominent distinctive contribution of the Greeks to civilization was deductive reasoning and pure mathematics.”

„The Roman conception of devotion to the State has been an essential element in the production of stable government in the West.”

„From Jewish moral fervour came the ethical precepts of Christianity; from the Greek love of deductive reasoning came theology; from the example of Roman imperialism and jurisprudence came the centralized government of the Church and the body of Canon Law.”

„It is customary in our age to find economic causes for everything, but explanations based upon this practice tend to be unduly facile. Economic causes alone will not, for example, explain the decay of Spain, which is attributable rather to intolerance and stupidity. Nor will economic causes explain the rise of science. The general rule is that civilizations decay except when they come in contact with an alien civilization superior to their own. There have been only a few very rare periods in human history, and a few very sparse regions, in which spontaneous progress has occurred. There must have been spontaneous progress in Egypt and Babylonia when they developed writing and agriculture; there was spontaneous progress in Greece for about 200 years; and there has been spontaneous progress in Western Europe since the renaissance. But I do not think there has been anything in the general social conditions at these periods and places to distinguish them from various other periods and places in which no progress has occurred. I cannot escape from the conclusion that the great ages of progress have depended upon a small number of individuals of transcendent ability. Various social and political conditions were of course necessary for their effectiveness, but not sufficient^ for the conditions have often existed without the individuals, and in such cases progress has not occurred. If Kepler, Galileo, and Newton had died in infancy, the world in which we live would be vastly less different than it is from the world of the sixteenth century. This carries with it the moral that we cannot regard progress as assured: if the supply of eminent individuals should happen to fail, we should no doubt lapse into a condition of Byzantine immobility.”

„The rate of change in ways of life has become very much more rapid than in any previous period: the world has changed more in the last one hundred and fifty years than in the previous four thousand. If Peter the Great could have had a conversation with Hammurabi they would have understood each other fairly well; but neither of them could have understood a modern financial or industrial magnate. It is a curious fact that the new ideas of modern times have almost all been technical or scientific.”

„The average man is willing to sacrifice his life to patriotism, and feels this moral obligation so imperative that no revolt appears to him possible.”

„I am afraid Europe, however intelligent, has always been rather horrid, except in the brief period between 1848 and 1914. Now, unfortunately, Europeans are reverting to type.”

„Measureable progress is necessarily in unimportant things, such as the number of motor-cars made, or the number of peanuts consumed. The really importsuit things are not measureable and are therefore not suitable for the methods of the booster. Moreover, many modern inventions tend to make people silly. I might instance the radio, the talkies, and poison gas. Shakespeare measured the excellence of an age by its style in poetry (see Sonnet xxxu), but this mode of measurement is out of date.”

„A prominent citizen of a small city State, such as Athens or Florence, could without difficulty feel himself important. The earth was the centre of the Universe, man was the purpose of creation, his own city showed man at his best, and he himself was among the best in his own city. In such circumstances Aeschylus or Dante could take his own joys or sorrows seriously. He could feel that the emotions of the individual matter, and that tragic occurrences deserve to be celebrated in immortal verse. But the modern man, when misfortune assails him, is conscious of himself as a unit in a statistical total; the past and the future stretch before him in a dreary procession of trivial defeats. Man himself appears as a somewhat ridiculous strutting animal, shouting and fussing during a brief interlude between infinite silences. “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal,”

„When Spinoza believed anything, he considered that he was enjoying the intellectual love of God. The modem man believes either with Mane that he is swayed by economic motives, or with Freud that some sexual motive underlies his belief in the exponential theorem or in the distribution of fauna in the Red Sea. In neither case can he enjoy Spinoza’s exaltation.”

„Belief, however, as modem psychologists are never weary of telling us, is seldom determined by rational motives, and the same is true of disbelief, though sceptics often overlook this fact. The causes of any widespread scepticism are likely to be sociological rather than intellectual. The main cause always is comfort without power. The holders of power are not cynical, since they are able to enforce their ideals. Victims of oppression are not cynical, since they are filled with hate, and hate, like any other strong passion, brings with it a train of attendant beliefs. Until the advent of education, democracy, and mass production, intellectuals had everywhere a considerable influence upon the march of affairs, which was by no means diminished if their heads were cut off. The modem intellectual finds himself in a quite different situation. It is by no means difiicult for him to obtain a fat job and a good income provided he is willing to sell his services to the stupid rich either as propagandist or as Court jester. The effect of mass production and elementary education is that stupidity is more firmly entrenched than at any other time since the rise of civilization.”

„modern cynicism cannot be cured merely by preaching, or by putting better ideals before the young than those that their pastors and masters fish out from the rusty armoury of outworn superstitions. The cure will only come when intellectuals can find a career that embodies their creative impulses. I do not see any prescription except the old one advocated by Disraeli: “Educate our masters.”

„How pleasant a world would be in which no man was allowed to operate on the Stock Exchange unless he could pass an examination in economics and Greek poetry, and in which politicians were obliged to have a competent knowledge of history and modern novels! “Imagine a magnate confi-onted with the question: “If you were to make a comer in wheat, what effect would this have upon German poetry?”

„Uniformity in the physical apparatus of life would be no grave matter, but uniformity in matters of thought and opinion is much more dangerous. It is, however, a quite inevitable result of modem inventions. Production is cheaper when it is unified and on a large scale than when it is divided into a number of small units. This applies quite as much to the production of opinions as to the production of pins. The principal sources of opinion in the present day are the schools, the Churches, the Press, the cinema, and the radio. The teaching in the elementary schools must inevitably become more and more standardized as more use is made of apparatus. It may, I think, be assumed that bpth the cinema and the radio will play a rapidly increasing part in school education in the near future. This will mean that the lessons will be produced at a centre and will be precisely the same wherever the material prepared at this centre is used. Some Churches, I am told, send out every week a model sermon to all the less educated of their clergy, who, if they are governed by the ordinary laws of human nature, are no doubt grateful for being saved the trouble of composing a sermon of their own. This model sermon, of course, deals with some burning topic of the moment, and aims at arousing a given mass emotion throughout the length and breadth of the land. The same thing applies in a higher degree to the Press, which receives everywhere the same telegraphic news and is syndicated on a large scale. Reviews of my books, I find, are, except in the best newspapers, verbally the same from New York to San Francisco, and from Maine to Texas, except that they become shorter as one travels from the north- east to the south-west. Perhaps the greatest of all forces for uniformity in the modern world is the cinema, since its influence is not confined to America but penetrates to all parts of the world, except the Soviet Union, which, however, has its own different uniformity. The cinema embodies, broadly speaking, Hollywood’s opinion of what is liked in the Middle West. Our emotions in regard to love and marriage, birth and death are becoming standardized according to this recipe. To the young of all lands Hollywood represents the last word in modernity, displaying both the pleasures of the rich and the methods to be adopted for acquiring riches. I suppose the talkies will lead before long to the adoption of a universal language, which will be that of Hollywood. It is not only among the comparatively ignorant that there is uniformity in America. The same thing applies, though in a slightly less degree, to culture. I visited book shops in every part of the country, and found everywhere the same best- sellers prominently displayed. So far as I could judge, the cultured ladies of America buy every year about a dozen books, the same dozen everywhere. To an author this is a very satisfactory state of affairs, provided he is one of the dozen. But it certainly does mark a difference from Europe, where there are many books with small sales rather than a few with large sales. It must not be supposed that the tendency towards uniformity is either wholly good or wholly bad. It has great advantages and also great disadvantages; its chief advantage is, of course, that it produces a population capable of peaceable co- operation; its great disadvantage is that it produces a population prone to persecution of minorities. This latter defect is probably temporary, since it may be assumed that before long there will be no minorities. A great deal depends, of course, on how the uniformity is achieved.”

„good qualities are easier to destroy than bad ones, and therefore uniformity is most easily achieved by lowering all standards”

„Arguments from history are dangerous to apply to the present and the future, because of the complete change that science has introduced.”

„We are accustomed to being the Lords of Creation; we no longer have occasion, like the cave men, to fear lions and tigers, mammoths and wild boars. Except against each other, we feel ourselves safe. But while big animals no longer threaten our existence, it is otherwise with small animals. Once before in the history of life on this planet, large animals gave place to small ones. For many ages dinosaurs ranged unconcerned through swamp and forest, fearing nothing but each other, not doubting the absoluteness of their empire. But they disappeared, to give place to tiny mammals—mice, small hedgehogs, miniature horses no bigger than rats, and such-like. Why the dinosaurs died out is not known, but it is supposed to be because they had minute brains and devoted themselves to the growth of weapons of offence in the shape of numerous horns. However that may be, it was not through their line that life developed. The mammals, having become supreme, proceeded to grow big. But the biggest on land, the mammoth, is extinct, and the other large animals have grown rare, except man and those that he has domesticated. Man, by his intelligence, has succeeded in finding nourishment for a large population, in spite of his size. He is safe, except from the little creatures— the insects and the micro-organisms.”

„The more we know, the more harm we can do each other. If human beings, in their rage against each other, invoke the aid of insects and micro- organisms, as they certainly will do if there is another big war, it is by no means unlikely that the insects will remain the sole ultimate victors. Perhaps, from a cosmic point of view, this is not to be regretted; but as a human being I cannot help heaving a sigh over my own species.”

„Any serious educational theory must consist of two parts: a conception of the ends of life, and a science of psychological dynamics, i.e. of the laws of mental change. Two men who differ as to the ends of life cannot hope to agree about education. The educational machine, throughout Western civilization, is dominated by two ethical theories: that of Christianity, and that of nationalism. These two, when taken seriously, are incompatible, as is becoming evident in Germany. For my part, I hold that, where they differ, Christianity is preferable, but where they agree, both are mistaken. The conception which I should substitute as the purpose of education is civilization, a term which, as I mean it, has a definition which is partly individual, partly social. It consists, in the individual, of both intellectual and moral qualities: intellectually, a certain minimum of general knowledge, technical skill in one’s own profession, and a habit of forming opinions on evidence; morally, of impartiality, kindliness, and a modicum of self-control. I should add a quality which is neither moral nor intellectual, but perhaps physiological: zest and joy of life.”

„Education, viewed from a social standpoint, must be something more positive than a mere opportunity for growth. It must, of course, provide this, but it must also provide a mental and moral equipment which children cannot acquire entirely for themselves.”

„There is another consideration to which some advocates of freedom attach too little importance. In a community of children which is left without adult interference there is a tyranny of the stronger, which is likely to be far more brutal than most adult tyranny. If two children of two or three years old are left to play together, they will, after a few fights, discover which is bound to be the victor, and the other will then become a slave. Where the number of children is larger, one or two acquire complete mastery, and the others have far less liberty than they would have if the adults interfered to protect the weaker and less pugnacious.”

„What is wanted is neither submissiveness nor rebellion, but good nature, and general friendliness both to people and to new ideas. These qualities are due in part to physical causes, to which oldfashioned educators paid too little attention; but they are due still more to freedom from the feeling of baffled impotence which arises when vital impulses are thwarted. If the young are to grow into friendly adults, it is necessary, in most cases, that they should feel their environment friendly. This requires that there should be a certain sympathy with the child’s important desires, and not merely an attempt to use him for some abstract end such as the glory of God or the greatness of one’s country. And, in teaching, every attempt should be made to cause the pupil to feel that it is worth his while to know what is being taught^—at least when this is true. When the pupil co-operates willingly, he learns twice as fast and with half the fatigue. All these are valid reasons for a very great degree of freedom.”

„Consideration for others does not, with most children, arise spontaneously, but has to be taught, and can hardly be taught except by the exercise of authority. This is perhaps the most important argument against the abdication of the adults.”

„I think modern educational theorists are inclined to attach too much importance to the negative virtue of not interfering with children, and too little to the positive merit of enjoying their company, If you have the sort of liking for children that many people have for horses or dogs, they will be apt to respond to your suggestions, and to accept prohibitions, perhaps with some goodhumoured grumbling, but without resentment. It is no use to have the sort of liking that consists in regarding them as a field for valuable social endeavour, or—^what amounts to the same thing— as an outlet for power-impulses. No child will be grateful for an interest in him that springs from the thought that he will have a vote to be secured for your party or a body to be sacrificed to king and country. The desirable sort of interest is that which consists in spontaneous pleasure in the presence of children, without any ulterior purpose. Teachers who have this quality will seldom need to interfere with children’s freedom, but will be able to do so, when necessary, without causing psychological damage.”

„The society of the young is fatiguing, especially when strict discipline is avoided. Fatigue, in the end, produces irritation, which is likely to express itself somehow, whatever theories the harassed teacher may have taught himself or herself to believe. The necessary friendliness cannot be preserved by self-control alone. But where it exists, it should be unnecessary to have rules in advance as to how “naughty’* children are to be treated, since impulse is likely to lead to the right decision, and almost any decision will be right if the child feels that you like him. No rules, however wise, are a substitute for affection and tact.”

„We must therefore seek to establish some attitude towards death other than that of merely ignoring it. The practice of brooding continually on death is at least equally harmful. It is a mistake to think too exclusively about any one subject, more particularly when our thinking cannot issue in action. We can, of course, act so as to postpone our own death, and within limits every normal person does so. But we cannot prevent ourselves from dying ultimately; this is, therefore, a profitless subject of meditation. Moreover, it tends to diminish a man’s interest in other people and events, and it is only objective interests that can preserve mental health. Fear of death makes a man feel himself the slave of external forces, and from a slave mentality no good result can follow. If, by meditation, a man could genuinely cure himself of the fear of death, he would cease to meditate on the subject; so long as it absorbs his thoughts, that proves that he has not ceased to fear it. This method, therefore, is no better than the other.”

„The late F. W. H. Myers used to tell how he asked a man at a dinner table what he thought would happen to him when he died. The man tried to ignore the question, but, on being pressed, replied: ‘‘Oh well, I suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn’t talk about such unpleasant subjects.”

„The adult should think little about death, either his own or that of people whom he loves, not because he deliberately turns his thoughts to other things, for that is a useless exercise which never really succeeds, but because of the multiplicity of his interests and activities. When he does think of death, it is best to think with a certain stoicism, deliberately and calmly, not attempting to minimize its importance, but feeling a certain pride in rising above it. The principle is the same as in the case of any other terror: resolute contemplation of the terrifying object is the only possible treatment. One must say to oneself: “Well, yes, that might happen, but what of it?’* People achieve this in such a case as death in battle, because they are then firmly persuaded of the importance of the cause to which they have given their life, or the life of someone dear to them. Something of this way of feeling is desirable at all times. At all times, a man should feel that there are matters of importance for which he lives, and that his death, or the death of wife or child, does not put an end to all that interests him in the world. If this attitude is to be genuine and profound in adult life, it is necessary that, in adolescence, a youth should be fired with generous enthusiasms, and that he should build his life and career about them. Adolescence is the period of generosity, and it should be utilized for the formation of generous habits.”

„The place of stoicism in life has, perhaps, been somewhat underestimated in recent times, particularly by progressive educationists. When misfortune threatens, there are two ways of dealing with the situation: we may try to avoid the misfortune, or we may decide that we will meet it with fortitude. The former method is admirable where it is available without cowardice; but the latter is necessary, sooner or later, for anyone who is not prepared to be the slave of fear. This attitude constitutes stoicism.”

„The fear of death is only one of many that are best dealt with by stoicism. There is the fear of poverty, the fear of physical pain, the fear of childbirth which is common among well-to-do women. All such fears are weakening and more or less contemptible. But if we take the line that people ought not to mind such things, we shall tend also to take the line that nothing need be done to mitigate evils. For a long time, it was thought that women ought not to have anaesthetics in childbirth; , in Japan, this opinion persists to the present day. Male doctors held that anaesthetics would be harmful; there was no reason for this view, which was doubtless due to unconscious sadism. But the more the pains of childbirth have been mitigated, the less willing rich women have become to endure them: their courage has diminished faster than the need of it. Evidently there must be a balance. It is impossible to make the whole of life soft and pleasant, and therefore human beings must be capable of an attitude suitable to the unpleasant portions; but we must try to bring this about with as little encouragement to cruelty as possible.”

„Painful things, when they have to be mentioned, should be treated truthfully and unemotionally, except when a death occurs in the family, in which case it would be unnatural to conceal sorrow. The adults should display in their own conduct a certain gay courage, which the young will unconsciously acquire from their example. In adolescence, large impersonal interests should be set before the young, and education should be so conducted as to give them the idea (by suggestion, not by explicit exhortation) of living for purposes outside themselves. They should be taught to endure misfortune, when it comes, by remembering that there are still things to live for; but they should not brood on possible misfortunes, even for the purpose of being prepared to meet them. Those whose business it is to deal with the young must keep a close watch upon themselves to see that they do not derive a sadistic pleasure from the necessary element of discipline in education; the motive for discipline must always be the development of character or intelligence. For the intellect, also, requires discipline, without which accuracy will never be achieved. But the discipline of the intellect is a different topic, and lies outside the scope of this essay. I have only one more word to say, and that is, that discipline is best when it springs from an inner impulse. In order that this may be possible, it is necessary that the child or adolescent should feel the ambition to achieve something difficult, and should be willing to make efforts to that end. Such ambition is usually suggested by some person in the environment; thus even self-discipline depends, in the end, upon an educational stimulus.”

„If I were a comet, I should consider the men of our present age a degenerate breed.”

„In our day, it is difficult to imagine a world in which everybody, high and low, educated and uneducated, was preoccupied with comets, and filled with terror whenever one appeared. Most of us have never seen a comet. I have seen two, but they were far less impressive than I had expected them to be. The cause of the change in our attitude is not merely rationalism, but artificial lighting. In the streets of a modem city the night sky is invisible; in rural districts, we move in cars with bright headlights. We have blotted out the heavens, and only a few scientists remain aware of stars and planets, meteorites and comets. The world of our daily life is more man-made than at any previous epoch. In this there is loss as well as gain: Man, in the security of his dominion, is becoming trivial, arrogant, and a little mad. But I do not think a comet would now produce the wholesome moral effect which it produced in Boston in 1662; a stronger medicine would now be needed.”

„The world consists of events, not of things that endure for a long time and have changing properties. Events can be collected into groups by their causal relations. If the causal relations are of one sort, the resulting group of events may be called a physical object, and if the causal relations are of another sort, the resulting group may be called a mind. Any event that occurs inside a man’s head will belong to groups of both kinds; considered as belonging to a group of one kind, it is a constituent of his brain, and considered as belonging to a group of the other kind, it is a constituent of his mind. Thus both mind and matter are merely convenient ways of organizing events. There can be no reason for supposing that either a piece of mind or a piece of matter is immortal. The sun is supposed to be losing matter at the rate of millions of tons a minute. The most essential characteristic of mind is memory, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that the memory associated with a given person survives that person’s death. Indeed there is every reason to think the opposite, for memory is clearly connected with a certain kind of brain structure, and since this structure decays at death, there is every reason to suppose that memory also must cease. Although metaphysical materialism cannot be considered true, yet emotionally the world is pretty much the same as it would be if the materialists were in the right. I think the opponents of materialism have always been actuated by two main desires: the first to prove that the mind is immortal, and the second to prove that the ultimate power in the universe is mental rather than physical. In both these respects, I think the materialists were in the right. Our desires, it is true, have considerable power on the earth’s surface; the greater part of the land on this planet has a quite different aspect from that which it would have if men had not utilized it to extract food and wealth. But our power is very strictly limited. We cannot at present do anything whatever to the sun or moon or even to the interior of the earth, and there is not the faintest reason to suppose that what happens in regions to which our power does not extend has any mental causes. That is to say, to put the matter in a nutshell, there is no reason to think that except on the earth’s surface anything happens because somebody wishes it to happen. And since our power on the earth’s surface is entirely dependent upon the supply of energy which the earth derives from the sun, we are necessarily dependent upon the sun, and could hardly realize any of our wishes if the sun grew cold. It is of course rash to dogmatize as to what science may achieve in the future. We may learn to prolong human existence longer than now seems possible, but if there is any truth in modem physics, more particularly in the second law of thermodynamics, we cannot hope that the human race will continue for ever. Some people may find this conclusion gloomy, but if we are honest with ourselves, we shall have to admit that what is going to happen many millions of years hence has no very great emotional interest for us here and now. And science, while it diminishes our cosmic pretensions, enormously increases our terrestrial comfort. That is why, in spite of the horror of the theologians, science has on the whole been tolerated.”