infected by diseases.

In short, the rational human faith must armor itself with prejudice in
an age of prejudices, just as it armoured itself with logic in an age of
logic. But the difference between the two mental methods is marked and
unmistakable. The essential of the difference is this: that prejudices
are divergent, whereas creeds are always in collision. Believers bump
into each other; whereas bigots keep out of each other's way. A creed
is a collective thing, and even its sins are sociable. A prejudice is a
private thing, and even its tolerance is misanthropic. So it is with our
existing divisions. They keep out of each other's way; the Tory paper
and the Radical paper do not answer each other; they ignore each other.
Genuine controversy, fair cut and thrust before a common audience, has
become in our special epoch very rare. For the sincere controversialist
is above all things a good listener. The really burning enthusiast never
interrupts; he listens to the enemy's arguments as eagerly as a spy
would listen to the enemy's arrangements. But if you attempt an actual
argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that no
medium is admitted between violence and evasion. You will have no answer
except slanging or silence. A modern editor must not have that eager ear
that goes with the honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that is
called dignity. Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing
journalism. In neither case is there any controversy; for the whole
object of modern party combatants is to charge out of earshot.

The only logical cure for all this is the assertion of a human ideal.
In dealing with this, I will try to be as little transcendental as is
consistent with reason; it is enough to say that unless we have some
doctrine of a divine man, all abuses may be excused, since evolution
may turn them into uses. It will be easy for the scientific plutocrat to
maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now
consider evil. The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants
will invoke the future evolution has produced the snail and the owl;
evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail,
and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a
Kaffir to work underground; he will soon become an underground animal,
like a mole. He need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in the
deep seas; he will soon be a deep-se