a world that, in spite of all the warnings of the past, has allowed itself to be caught once more in the terrible naturalistic trap.  The dissolution of civilisation with which we are threatened is likely to be worse in some respects than that of Greece or Rome, in view of the success that has been obtained in ‘perfecting the mystery of murder.’  Various traditional agencies are indeed still doing much to chain up the beast in man.  Of these the chief is no doubt the Church.  But the leadership of the Occident is no longer here.  The leaders have succumbed in greater or less degree to naturalism, and so have been tampering with the moral law.  That the brutal imperialist who brooks no obstacle to his lust for domination has been tampering with this law goes without saying, but the humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own soul, has been tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way, for the very reason that it is less obvious.  This tampering with the moral law, or, what amounts to the same thing, this overriding of the veto power in man, has been largely a result, though not a necessary result, of the rupture with the traditional forms of wisdom.  The Baconian naturalist repudiated the past because he wished to be more positive and critical, to plant himself on the facts.  But the veto power is itself a fact—­the weightiest with which man has to reckon.  The Rousseauistic naturalist threw off traditional control because he wished to be more imaginative.  Yet without the veto power imagination falls into sheer anarchy.  Both Baconian and Rousseauist were very impatient of any outer authority that seemed to stand between them and their own perceptions.  Yet the veto power is nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on hearsay, but is very immediate.  The naturalistic leaders may be proved wrong without going beyond their own principles, and their wrongness is of a kind to wreck civilisation.’

We find it impossible to refuse our assent to the main counts of this indictment.  The deanthropocentrised universe of science is not the universe in which man has to live.  That universe is at once smaller and larger than the universe of science:  smaller in material extent, larger in spiritual possibility.  Therefore to allow the perspective of science seriously to influence, much less control, our human values, is an invitation to disaster.  Humanism must reassert itself, for even we can see that Shakespeares are better than Hamlets.  The reassertion of humanism involves the re-creation of a practical ideal of human life and conduct, and a strict subordination of the impulses of the individual to this ideal.  There must now be a period of critical and humanistic positivism in regard to ethics and to art.  We may say frankly that it is not to our elders that we think of applying for its rudiments.  We regard them as no less misguided and a good deal less honest than ourselves, It is among our anarchists that we shall look most hopefully for our new traditionalists, if only because, in literature at least, they are more keenly aware of the nature of the abyss on the brink of which they are trembling.