ing it out in square inches. Now, one school
of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a way of renewing
the pagan health of the world. They see that reason destroys;
but Will, they say, creates. The ultimate authority, they say,
is in will, not in reason. The supreme point is not why
a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it.
I have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of Will.
It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something
that is called egoism. That, indeed, was simpleminded enough;
for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it. To preach
anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life a war
without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to
drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism.
But however it began, the view is common enough in current literature.
The main defence of these thinkers is that they are not thinkers;
they are makers. They say that choice is itself the divine thing.
Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw has attacked the old idea that men's acts
are to be judged by the standard of the desire of happiness.
He says that a man does not act for his happiness, but from his will.
He does not say, "Jam will make me happy," but "I want jam."
And in all this others follow him with yet greater enthusiasm.
Mr. John Davidson, a remarkable poet, is so passionately excited
about it that he is obliged to write prose. He publishes a short
play with several long prefaces. This is natural enough in Mr. Shaw,
for all his plays are prefaces: Mr. Shaw is (I suspect) the only man
on earth who has never written any poetry. But that Mr. Davidson (who
can write excellent poetry) should write instead laborious metaphysics
in defence of this doctrine of will, does show that the doctrine
of will has taken hold of men. Even Mr. H.G.Wells has half spoken
in its language; saying that one should test acts not like a thinker,
but like an artist, saying, "I FEEL this curve is right," or "that
line SHALL go thus." They are all excited; and well they may be.
For by this doctrine of the divine authority of will, they think they
can break out of the doomed fortress of rationalism. They think they
can escape.

But they cannot escape. This pure praise of volition ends
in the same break up and blank as the mere pursuit of logic.
Exactly as complete free thought involves the doubting of thought itself,
so the acceptation of mere "willing