German this war was part of a process, the historical process of the
triumph of Germany, and it did not matter how many Germans were killed
in furthering it. If they were all killed Germany would still have
asserted her faithless faith in process and would have reduced it to a
glorious absurdity.

So, if we fought for anything beyond ourselves, we fought for the belief
in person as against the belief in process. Indeed, it is the chief
glory of England, among her many follies and crimes, that she has always
believed in person rather than in process; and that is what we mean when
we say that we refuse to sacrifice facts to theories. Men themselves
are to us facts, and we distrust theories that empty them of content. If
we act like brutes, we would rather do so because the brute has mastered
us for the moment than because we believe that humanity is inconsistent
with the process that dominates the world. We ourselves had rather be
inconsistent than empty ourselves of all reality for the sake of a
theory. And there is an intellectual as well as a moral basis to this
inconsistency of ours. For if you believe that person, not process, is
the ultimate reality, you must offer some defiance to the material facts
of life. There is evidently a conflict between person and process; and
in that conflict the process, which you perceive with your intelligence,
will be less real to you than the person of whom you are aware with all
your faculties. So you will trust in this union of all the faculties
rather than in the exercise of the pure intelligence; for to you the
pure intelligence will be part of the person and will share in the
person's universal imperfection. In fact it will not be pure
intelligence at all, but rather a faculty that may be obsequious to all
the lower passions. Nothing will free you from them, except the respect
for persons, except, in fact, loving your neighbour as yourself. There
is no way to consistency but through that, and no way to the exercise of
the pure intelligence. Never sacrifice a person to a process and you
will never sacrifice a person to your own lower passions. But, if you
believe in process rather than in person, you will see your passions as
part of the process and glorify them when you think you are glorifying
the nature of the universe.

Cubism and all those new methods of art which subject facts to the
tyranny of a process may be good satire, but they will never, I think,
produce an independ