n that has ousted
the will to experience; and all the changes which we work on the face of
the earth express that will too. We could not live in the cities we have
made for ourselves if we thought that we had anything to learn from the
beauty of the earth. They are for us merely places in which we learn to
act, in which no one could learn to think or feel. Passive experience is
impossible in them and they do not consider the possibility of it. So
they express in every building, in every object, in the very clothes of
their inhabitants, an utter poverty of passive experience. In what we
make we give out no stored riches of the mind; we make only so that we
may act, never so that we may express ourselves; and we have little art
because our making is entirely wilful. Our attempts at art are
themselves entirely wilful. We will have art, we say; and so we plaster
our utilities with the ornaments of the past, as if we could get the
richness of experience secondhand from our ancestors. And in the same
way we are always finding for our blind activities moral motives, those
motives which are real only when they spring out of right experience. We
rationalize all that we do, but the rationalizing is secondhand ornament
to blind impulse; it is an attempt to persuade ourselves that our
actions spring out of the experience which we lack. There is among us an
incessant activity both of thought and of art; but much of it is
entirely wilful. The thinker makes theories to justify what is done; he,
too, sees all life in terms of action, he is the parasite of action. For
a German professor the whole process of history was but a prelude to the
wilfulness of Germany; he could not experience the past except in terms
of what Germany willed to do; and the aim of his theorizing was to
remove all scrupulous impediments to the action of Germany which she may
have inherited from the past. Think so that you may be stronger to do
what you wish to do; that is the modern notion of thought, and that is
the reason why we throw up theories so easily; for thinking of this kind
needs no experience, it needs merely an activity of the mind, the
activity which collects facts and does with them what it will. And these
theories are eagerly accepted so long as the impulse lasts which they
justify. When that is spent they are forgotten, and new theories take
their place to justify fresh impulses. And so it is with the incessant
new movements in art. Art now is conce