his views displease his congregation; a member of Parliament loses his seat if he is not sufficiently supple or sufficiently stupid to follow or share all the turns and twists of public opinion.  In every walk of life, independence of mind is punished by failure, more and more as economic organizations grow larger and more rigid.  Is it surprising that men become increasingly docile, increasingly ready to submit to dictation and to forego the right of thinking for themselves?  Yet along such lines civilization can only sink into a Byzantine immobility.

Fear of destitution is not a motive out of which a free creative life can grow, yet it is the chief motive which inspires the daily work of most wage-earners.  The hope of possessing more wealth and power than any man ought to have, which is the corresponding motive of the rich, is quite as bad in its effects; it compels men to close their minds against justice, and to prevent themselves from thinking honestly on social questions while in the depths of their hearts they uneasily feel that their pleasures are bought by the miseries of others.  The injustices of destitution and wealth alike ought to be rendered impossible.  Then a great fear would be removed from the lives of the many, and hope would have to take on a better form in the lives of the few.

But security and liberty are only the negative conditions for good political institutions.  When they have been won, we need also the positive condition:  encouragement of creative energy.  Security alone might produce a smug and stationary society; it demands creativeness as its counterpart, in order to keep alive the adventure and interest of life, and the movement toward perpetually new and better things.  There can be no final goal for human institutions; the best are those that most encourage progress toward others still better.  Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good.  It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

It is a sad evidence of the weariness mankind has suffered from excessive toil that his heavens have usually been places where nothing ever happened or changed.  Fatigue produces the illusion that only rest is needed for happiness; but when men have rested for a time, boredom drives them to renewed activity.  For this reason, a happy life must be one in which there is activity.  If it is also to be a useful life, the activity ought to be as far as possible creative, not merely predatory or defensive.  But creative activity requires imagination and originality, which are apt to be subversive of the status quo.  At present, those who have power dread a disturbance of the status quo, lest their unjust privileges should be taken away.  In combination with the instinct for conventionality,[1] which man shares with the other gregarious animals, those who profit by the existing order have established a system which