terpret life, but not merely in
terms of the intellect. He needed to see and feel in order to think.
And he expressed himself in a style too intellectual for lovers of
poetry, too metaphorical for lovers of philosophy. His Public,
therefore, though devoted, was limited; but we, in our society, always
listened to him with an interest that was rather enhanced than
diminished by an element of perplexity. I have found it hard to
reproduce his manner, in which it was clear that he took a conscious
and artistic pleasure. Still less can I give the impression of his
lean and fine-cut face, and the distinction of his whole personality.
He stood up straight and tall against the whitening sky, and delivered
himself as follows:

"Man is in the making; but henceforth he must make himself. To that
point Nature has led him, out of the primeval slime. She has given him
limbs, she has given him brain, she has given him the rudiment of a
soul. Now it is for him to make or mar that splendid torso. Let him
look no more to her for aid; for it is her will to create one who has
the power to create himself. If he fail, she fails; back goes the
metal to the pot; and the great process begins anew. If he succeeds,
he succeeds alone. His fate is in his own hands.

"Of that fate, did he but know it, brain is the lord, to fashion a
palace fit for the soul to inhabit. Yet still, after centuries of
stumbling, reason is no more than the furtive accomplice of habit and
force. Force creates, habit perpetuates, reason the sycophant
sanctions. And so he drifts, not up but down, and Nature watches in
anguish, self-forbidden to intervene, unless it be to annihilate. If
he is to drive, and drive straight, reason must seize the reins; and
the art of her driving is the art of Politics. Of that art, the aim is
perfection, the method selection. Science is its minister, ethics its
lord. It spares no prejudice, respects no habit, honours no tradition.
Institutions are stubble in the fire it kindles. The present and the
past it throws without remorse into the jaws of the future. It is the
angel with the flaming sword swift to dispossess the crone that sits on
her money-bags at Westminster.

"Or, shall I say, it is Hercules with the Augean stable to cleanse, of
which every city is a stall, heaped with the dung of a century; with
the Hydra to slay, whose hundred writhing heads of false belief, from
old truth rotted into lies, spring inexhaustibl