for silence,
and pours out his plays. Sometimes he is philosophic enough to treat his
fellows amusedly; sometimes he is serious and exacerbated, in which case
he is tiresome. But at heart he is always provoked and astonished at men
for the way they fend off the millennium, when it's right at their side.

He may have inherited this attitude from those economists, who
flourished, or attempted to flourish, in the generation before
him--those who built with such confidence on rationalism in human
affairs. Man was a reasonable being, they said and believed; and all
would be well with him, therefore, when he once saw the light. To
discover the light might be difficult, but they would do all that for
us, and then it would surely be no trouble to man to accept it. They
proceeded to discover the light in finance, trade, and matters of
government; and Shaw, coming after them, extended the field into
marriage, and explained to us the rational thing to do in social
relations. These numerous doses of what was confidently recommended as
reason were faithfully swallowed by all of us; and yet we're not
changed. The dose was as pure as these doctors were able to make it.
But--reason needs admixtures of other things to be a good dose. Men have
learned that without these confirmings it's not to be trusted.

The turn that psychology has taken during the last twenty years has
naturally been unlucky for Shaw as a leader, or influence. He appears
now as the culminating figure of an old school of thinkers, instead of
the founder of a new. And that old school is dead. It was so fascinated
by reason or what it believed to be such (for we should not assume that
its conceptions, even of reason, were right), that it never properly
studied or faced human nature.

Civilization is a process, not a trick to be learned overnight. It is a
way of behavior which we super-animals adopt bit by bit. The surprising
and hopeful thing is that we adopt it at all. Civilization is the slow
modification of our old feral qualities, the slow growth of others,
which we test, then discard or retain. An occasional invention seems to
hasten things, but chiefly externally; for the internal change in men's
natures is slower than glaciers, and it is upon the sum of men's natures
that civilization depends. While this testing and churning and gradual
molding goes on, some fellow is always holding up a hasty lamp he calls
reason, and beckoning the glacier one side, like a wi