sult and gratify their
immediate will, their nearest choices, their instantaneous desires,
than conform the moment to some regulated and considerate, some
comprehensive scheme of life and action. The life of unreason is their
desire; the experience whose bent is determined by every whim, the
expression which has no rational connection with the past and no
serious consideration for the future. This is of the very essence of
lawlessness because it is revolt against the normal sequence of law
and effect, in mind and conduct, in favor of untrammeled adventure.

Now this is naturalism or paganism as we often call it. Naturalism
is a perversion of that high instinct in mankind which issues in the
old concept of supernaturalism. The supernaturalist, of a former and
discredited type, believed that God violates the order of nature
for sublime ends; that He "breaks into" His own world, so to speak,
"revealing" Himself in prodigious, inexplicable, arbitrary ways. By a
sort of degradation of this notion, a perversion of this instinct, the
naturalist assumes that he can violate both the human and the divine
law for personal ends, and express himself in fantastic or indecent
or impious ways. The older supernaturalism exalts the individualism
of the Creator; naturalism the egotism of the creature. I make the
contrast not merely to excoriate naturalism, but to point out the
interdependence between man's apparently far-separated expressions
of his spirit, and how subtly misleading are our highly prized
distinctions, how dangerous sometimes that secondary mental power
which multiplies them. It sobers and clarifies human thinking a
little, perhaps, to reflect on how thin a line separates the sublime
and the ridiculous, the saint and the sensualist, the martyr and the
fool, the genius and the freak.

Now, with this selfish individualism which we call naturalism we shall
have much to do, for it plays an increasing role in the modern
world; it is the neo-paganism which we may see spreading about us.
Sophistries of all kinds become the powerful allies of this sort of
moral and aesthetic anarchy. Its votaries are those sorts of
rebels who invariably make their minds not their friends but their
accomplices. They are ingenious in the art of letting themselves go
and at the same time thinking themselves controlled and praiseworthy.
The naturalist, then, ignores the group; he flaunts impartially
both the classic and the religious law. He is equa