swatting every venerable
head that showed itself, beating the dust out of ancient delusions.
You would like all your life to be that kind of lark; but you may not
find it so, and perhaps you will suffer disillusionment and vexation.

I have known hundreds of young radicals in my life; they have nearly
all been gallant and honest, but they have not all been wise, and
therefore not so happy as they might have been. In the course of time
I have formulated to myself the peril to which young radicals are
exposed. We see so much that is wrong in ancient things, it gets to be
a habit with us to reject them. We have only to know that a thing is
old to feel an impulse of impatient scorn; on the other hand, we are
tempted to welcome anything which can prove itself to be
unprecedented. There is a common type of radical whose aim in life is
to be several jumps ahead of mankind; whose criterion of conduct is
that it shocks the bourgeois. If you do not know that type, you may
find him--and her--in the newest of the Bohemian cafes, drinking the
newest red chemicals, smoking the newest brand of cigarettes, and
discussing the newest form of #psycopathia sexualis#. After you have
watched them a while, you realize that these ultra-new people have
fallen victim to the oldest form of logical fallacy, the non sequitur,
and likewise to the oldest form of slavery, which is self-indulgence.

If it is true that much in the old moral codes is based upon
ignorance, and cultivated by greed, it is also true that much in the
old moral codes is based upon facts which will not change so long as
man is what he is--a creature of impulses, good and bad, wise and
foolish, selfish and generous, and compelled to make choice between
these impulses; so long as he is a material body and a personal
consciousness, obliged to live in society and adjust himself to the
rights of others. What I would like to say to young radicals--if there
is any way to say it without seeming a prig--is that in choosing their
own path through life, they will need not merely enthusiasm and
radical fervor, but wisdom and judgment and hard study.

It is our fundamental demand that society shall cease to repeat over
and over the blunders of the past, the blunders of tyranny and
slavery, of luxury and poverty, which wrecked the ancient societies;
and surely it is a poor way to begin by repeating in our own persons
the most ancient blunders of the moral life. To light the fires of
lust