because education is artificial and constraining, society
is exhorted to return to the easy course of nature; metaphysics must be
swept away, because the {3} metaphysics of some time or school has
outlived its usefulness; and morality, because it is hard or tiresome,
must give way to the freedom and romance of no morality. Such blind
and irresponsible agitation is a perpetual menace to the balance of
impressionable and unsteady minds, if not indeed to the work of
civilization.

Now it is safe to say that these venerable institutions have arisen in
answer to fixed needs; needs implied in life as a general and constant
situation. There is no other way of accounting for them. They have
been tolerated only because they yield a steady return. Their loss
would be a catastrophe which mankind, obedient to the necessities of
life, would fall at once to repairing. Institutions are the very body
of civilization; and while they may grow and change without limit, if
they be abruptly destroyed civilization must suffer paralysis in some
vital part. At once the most direct and striking proof of this lies in
the fact that the revolutionist, whether he be propagandist or man of
action, invariably commits himself, and ends by executing the very
function he denied. At the moment when he comes to close quarters, and
actually engages the object of his attack, he is swept into some
current of endeavor that has from the most ancient times been pressing
steadily toward the solution of a problem that lies in the centre of
{4} the path of life. He straightway commences himself to govern,
educate, speculate, or moralize. And the more patiently he labors, the
greater his respect for the vested wisdom of his time. Whereas he
first sought utterly to demolish, he is now content to make his little
difference and hand on the work. In the end every purely destructive
programme is inevitably futile, because it goes against the grain. For
all conduct is constructive in motive, and forward in direction. But
how wasteful is the momentary fury--wasteful of high passion and
distinguished capacity, and how mystifying to the lay intelligence!

It may, of course, be said that there is method in this madness; since
man's twofold blindness, his dogmatism and his scepticism, his
immobility and his wantonness, tend in the long run to neutralize one
another. But with the perspective required for such consolation,
neither the agencies of destruction nor