the hands of the clock." Now man might return to the stage-coach if that
seemed to him the supreme goal of all his effort, just as anyone can
follow Chesterton's advice to turn back the hands of the clock if he
pleases. But nobody can recover his yesterdays no matter how much he
abuses the clock, and no man can expunge the memory of railroads though
all the stations and engines were dismantled.

"From this survival of the past," says Bergson, "it follows that
consciousness cannot go through the same state twice." This is the real
necessity that makes any return to the imagined glories of other days an
idle dream. Graham Wallas remarks that those who have eaten of the tree
of knowledge cannot forget--"Mr. Chesterton cries out, like the Cyclops
in the play, against those who complicate the life of man, and tells us
to eat 'caviare on impulse,' instead of 'grapenuts on principle.' But
since we cannot unlearn our knowledge, Mr. Chesterton is only telling us
to eat caviare on principle." The binding fact we must face in all our
calculations, and so in politics too, is that you cannot recover what is
passed. That is why educated people are not to be pressed into the
customs of their ignorance, why women who have reached out for more than
"Kirche, Kinder und Kueche" can never again be entirely domestic and
private in their lives. Once people have questioned an authority their
faith has lost its naivete. Once men have tasted inventions like the
trust they have learned something which cannot be annihilated. I know of
one reformer who devotes a good deal of his time to intimate talks with
powerful conservatives. He explains them to themselves: never after do
they exercise their power with the same unquestioning ruthlessness.

Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never
be a repetition of the past. This insight we owe to Bergson. The
application of it to politics is not difficult because politics is one of
the interests of life. We can learn from him in what sense we are bound.
"The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the
nature of the artist, by colors spread out on the palette; but even with
the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could
have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it would
have been to produce it before it was produced...." The future is
explained by the economic and social institutions which were present at
its