omniscience of the human intellect is one of the commonest
assumptions in the world. Although when you state the belief as I have,
it sounds absurdly pretentious, yet the boastfulness is closer to the
child's who stretches out its hand for the moon than the romantic
egotist's who thinks he has created the moon and all the stars. Whole
systems of philosophy have claimed such an eternal and absolute validity;
the nineteenth century produced a bumper crop of so-called atheists,
materialists and determinists who believed in all sincerity that
"Science" was capable of a complete truth and unfailing prediction. If
you want to see this faith in all its naivete go into those quaint
rationalist circles where Herbert Spencer's ghost announces the "laws of
life," with only a few inessential details omitted.

Now, of course, no philosophy of this sort has ever realized such hopes.
Mankind has certainly come nearer to justifying Mr. Chesterton's
observation that one of its favorite games is called "Cheat the
Prophet."... "The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all
that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next
generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and
bury them nicely. They then go and do something else." Now this weakness
is not, as Mr. Chesterton would like to believe, confined to the clever
men. But it is a weakness, and many people have speculated about it. Why
in the face of hundreds of philosophies wrecked on the rocks of the
unexpected do men continue to believe that the intellect can transcend
the vicissitudes of experience?

For they certainly do believe it, and generally the more parochial their
outlook, the more cosmic their pretensions. All of us at times yearn for
the comfort of an absolute philosophy. We try to believe that, however
finite we may be, our intellect is something apart from the cycle of our
life, capable by an Olympian detachment from human interests of a divine
thoroughness. Even our evolutionist philosophy, as Bergson shows, "begins
by showing us in the intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame,
perhaps accidental, which lights up the coming and going of living things
in the narrow passage open to their action; and lo! forgetting what it
has just told us, makes of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun
which can illuminate the world."

This is what most of us do in our search for a philosophy of politics. We
forget that the bi