ure. Our modern prophetic idealism
is narrow because it has undergone a persistent process of elimination.
We must ask for new things because we are not allowed to ask for old
things. The whole position is based on this idea that we have got all
the good that can be got out of the ideas of the past. But we have not
got all the good out of them, perhaps at this moment not any of the
good out of them. And the need here is a need of complete freedom for
restoration as well as revolution.

We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel
attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not
really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any
more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous
man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions
fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose
intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares
as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for
what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this
abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of
the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern
assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one
metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying,
"You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You
can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by
the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a
piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has
ever existed.

There is another proverb, "As you have made your bed, so you must lie on
it"; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable,
please God I will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the
stage coaches if we chose. It might take some time to do, and it might
be very inadvisable to do it; but certainly it is not impossible as
bringing back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first
freedom that I claim: the freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose
as a solution the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan, if that
should seem to eliminate the largest number of evils. It certainly would
eliminate some evils; for instance, the unnatural sense of obeying cold
and harsh strangers, mere bureaucrats and policemen. I claim the r