ll sorts of combinations.

There have been other periods of revolution. Heresy is just a few hours
younger than orthodoxy. Disobedience is certainly not the discovery of
the nineteenth century. But the quality of it is. I believe Chesterton
has hold of an essential truth when he says that this is the first time
men have boasted of their heresy. The older rebels claimed to be more
orthodox than the Church, to have gone back to the true authorities. The
radicals of recent times proclaim that there is no orthodoxy, no doctrine
that men must accept without question.

Without doubt they deceive themselves mightily. They have their invisible
popes, called Art, Nature, Science, with regalia and ritual and a
catechism. But they don't mean to have them. They mean to be
self-governing in their spiritual lives. And this intention is the
half-perceived current which runs through our age and galvanizes so many
queer revolts. It would be interesting to trace out the forms it has
taken, the abortive cults it has tried and abandoned. In another
connection I pointed to autonomy as the hope of syndicalism. It would not
be difficult to find a similar assertion in the feminist agitation. From
Mrs. Gilman's profound objections against a "man-made" world to the lady
who would like to vote about her taxes, there is a feeling that woman
must be something more than a passive creature. Walter Pater might be
quoted in his conclusion to the effect that "the theory or idea or system
which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of experience, in
consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some
abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only
conventional, has no real claim upon us." The desire for self-direction
has made a thousand philosophies as contradictory as the temperaments of
the thinkers. A storehouse of illustration is at hand: Nietzsche advising
the creative man to bite off the head of the serpent which is choking him
and become "a transfigured being, a light-surrounded being, that
_laughed_!" One might point to Stirner's absolute individualism or turn
to Whitman's wholehearted acceptance of every man with his catalogue of
defects and virtues. Some of these men have cursed each other roundly:
Georges Sorel, for example, who urges workingmen to accept none of the
bourgeois morality, and becomes most eloquent when he attacks other
revolutionists.

I do not wish to suggest too much unanimity in the