have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the application of indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd pretence that modern England is Christian.  But it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow.  Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are an old minority than because they are a new one.  Free thought has exhausted its own freedom.  It is weary of its own success.  If any eager freethinker now hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set.  If any frightened curate still says that it will be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread, we can only answer him in the high and powerful words of Mr. Belloc, “Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution.  You have mistaken the hour of the night:  it is already morning.”  We have no more questions left to ask.  We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks.  We have found all the questions that can be found.  It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers.

But one more word must be added.  At the beginning of this preliminary negative sketch I said that our mental ruin has been wrought by wild reason, not by wild imagination.  A man does not go mad because he makes a statue a mile high, but he may go mad by thinking it out in square inches.  Now, one school of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a way of renewing the pagan health of the world.  They see that reason destroys; but Will, they say, creates.  The ultimate authority, they say, is in will, not in reason.  The supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it.  I have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of Will.  It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something that is called egoism.  That, indeed, was simple-minded enough; for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it.  To preach anything is to give it away.  First, the egoist calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war.  To preach egoism is to practise altruism.  But however it began, the view is common enough in current literature.  The main defence of these thinkers is that they are not thinkers; they are makers.  They say that choice is itself the divine thing.  Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw has attacked the old idea that men’s acts are to be judged by the standard of the desire of happiness.  He says that a man does not act for his happiness, but from his will.  He does not say, “Jam will make me happy,” but “I want jam.”  And in all this others follow him with yet greater enthusiasm.  Mr. John Davidson, a remarkable poet, is so passionately excited about it that he is obliged to write prose.  He publishes a short play with several long prefaces.