is full--priggishness, a crude piety, a
silly sin, a weak but continual attempt at the heroic, in a word,
melodrama. And if we wish to lay a firm basis for any efforts to help
the poor, we must not become realistic and see them from the outside.
We must become melodramatic, and see them from the inside. The novelist
must not take out his notebook and say, "I am an expert." No; he must
imitate the workman in the Adelphi play. He must slap himself on the
chest and say, "I am a man."

XX. Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy

Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little
discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social
philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated.
But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that there has been in the
past, or will be in the future, such a thing as a growth or improvement
of the human mind itself, there still remains a very sharp objection to
be raised against the modern version of that improvement. The vice of
the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something
concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the
casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth,
it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into
more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to
conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear
of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having
almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of
a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too
strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the
fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and
many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an
apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he
piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the
formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is,
in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable,
becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another
in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system,
when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he
disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God,
holding no form of creed but contemplating al