ompare the
disillusioned realism of our present war and post-war pictures and poems
with the nineteenth-century war pictures at Versailles and Berlin, and
the war poems of Campbell, and Berenger, and Tennyson, to realise how
far we now are from exaggerating human rationality.

It is my second point, which, in the world as the war has left it, is
most important. There is no longer much danger that we shall assume that
man always and automatically thinks of ends and calculates means. The
danger is that we may be too tired or too hopeless to undertake the
conscious effort by which alone we can think of ends and calculate
means.

The great mechanical inventions of the nineteenth century have given us
an opportunity of choosing for ourselves our way of living such as men
have never had before. Up to our own time the vast majority of mankind
have had enough to do to keep themselves alive, and to satisfy the blind
instinct which impels them to hand on life to another generation. An
effective choice has only been given to a tiny class of hereditary
property owners, or a few organisers of other men's labour. Even when,
as in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, nature offered whole populations
three hundred free days in the year if they would devote two months to
ploughing and harvest, all but a fraction still spent themselves in
unwilling toil, building tombs or palaces, or equipping armies, for a
native monarch or a foreign conqueror. The monarch could choose his
life, but his choice was poor enough. 'There is,' says Aristotle, 'a way
of living so brutish that it is only worth notice because many of those
who can live any life they like make no better choice than did
Sardanapalus.'

The Greek thinkers started modern civilisation, because they insisted
that the trading populations of their walled cities should force
themselves to think out an answer to the question, what kind of life is
good. 'The origin of the city-state,' says Aristotle, 'is that it
enables us to live; its justification is that it enables us to live
well.'

Before the war, there were in London and New York, and Berlin, thousands
of rich men and women as free to choose their way of life as was
Sardanapalus, and as dissatisfied with their own choice. Many of the
sons and daughters of the owners of railways and coal mines and rubber
plantations were 'fed up' with motoring or bridge, or even with the
hunting and fishing which meant a frank resumption of palaeolithi