Professor Babbitt would have us back to Aristotle, or back to our senses, which is roughly the same thing.  At all events, it is certain that in Aristotle the present generation would find the beginnings of a remedy for that fatal confusion of categories which has overcome the world.  It is the confusion between existence and value.  That strange malady of the mind by which in the nineteenth century material progress was supposed to create, ipso facto, a concomitant moral progress, and which so plunged the world into catastrophe, has its counterpart in a literature of objective realism.  One of the most admired of contemporary works of fiction opens with an infant’s memory of a mackintosh sheet, pleasantly warmed with its own water; another, of almost equal popularity among the cultivated, abounds with such reminiscences of the heroine as the paste of bread with which she filled her decaying teeth while she ate her breakfast.  Yet the young writers who abuse their talents so unspeakably have right on their side when they refuse to listen to the condemnation pronounced by an older generation.  What right, indeed, have these to condemn the logical outcome of an anarchic individualism which they themselves so jealously cherished?  They may not like the bastard progeny of the various mistresses they adored—­of a Science which they enthroned above instead of subordinating to humanistic values, of a brutal Imperialism which the so-called Conservatives among them set up in place of the truly humane devotion of which man is capable, of the sickening humanitarianism which appears in retrospect to have been merely an excuse for absolute indolence—­but they certainly have forfeited the right to censure it.  Let those who are so eager to cast the first stone at the aesthetic and moral anarchy of the present day consider Professor Babbitt’s indictment of themselves and decide whether they have no sin:—­

’"If I am to judge by myself,” said an eighteenth-century Frenchman, “man is a stupid animal.”  Man is not only a stupid animal, in spite of his conceit of his own cleverness, but we are here at the source of his stupidity.  The source is the moral indolence that Buddha, with his almost infallible sagacity, defined long ago.  In spite of the fact that his spiritual and, in the long run, his material success, hinge on his ethical effort, man persists in dodging this effort, in seeking to follow the line of least or lesser resistance.  An energetic material working does not mend, but aggravate the failure to work ethically, and is therefore especially stupid.  Just this combination has in fact led to the crowning stupidity of the ages—­the Great War.  No more delirious spectacle has ever been witnessed than that of hundreds of millions of human beings using a vast machinery of scientific efficiency to turn life into a hell for one another.  It is hard to avoid concluding that we are living in a world which has gone wrong on first principles,