He is the creature of a few fundamental impulses.He begins in blind imitation of the life about him.He lusts and takes a wife, he hungers and tills a field or toils in some other way to earn a living, a mere aimless living, he fears and so he does not wander, he is jealous and stays by his wife and his job, is fiercely yet often stupidly and injuriously defensive of his children and his possessions, and so until he wearies.Then he dies and needs a cemetery.He needs a cemetery because he is so afraid of dissolution that even when he has ceased to be, he still wants a place and a grave to hold him together and prevent his returning to the All that made him.Our chief impression of long ages of mankind comes from its cemeteries.And this is the life of man, as the common man conceives and lives it.Beyond that he does not go, he never comprehends himself collectively at all, the state happens about him; his passion for security, his gregarious self-defensiveness, makes him accumulate upon himself until he congests in cities that have no sense of citizenship and states that have no structure; the clumsy, inconsecutive lying and chatter of his newspapers, his hoardings and music-halls gives the measure of his congested intelligences, the confusion of ugly, half empty churches and chapels and meeting-halls gauge the intensity of his congested souls, the tricks and slow blundering dishonesties of Diet and Congress and Parliament are his statecraft and his wisdom....
"I do not care if this instant I am stricken dead for pride.I say here now to you and to High Heaven that THIS LIFE IS NOT GOOD ENOUGHFOR ME.I know there is a better life than this muddle about us, a better life possible now.I know it.A better individual life and a better public life.If I had no other assurances, if I were blind to the glorious intimations of art, to the perpetually widening promise of science, to the mysterious beckonings of beauty in form and colour and the inaccessible mockery of the stars, I should still know this from the insurgent spirit within me....
"Now this better life is what I mean when I talk of Aristocracy.
This idea of a life breaking away from the common life to something better, is the consuming idea in my mind.
"Constantly, recurrently, struggling out of the life of the farm and the shop, the inn and the market, the street and the crowd, is something that is not of the common life.Its way of thinking is Science, its dreaming is Art, its will is the purpose of mankind.
It is not the common thing.But also it is not an unnatural thing.
It is not as common as a rat, but it is no less natural than a panther.
"For it is as natural to be an explorer as it is to be a potato grower, it is rarer but it is as natural; it is as natural to seek explanations and arrange facts as it is to make love, or adorn a hut, or show kindness to a child.It is a folly I will not even dispute about, that man's only natural implement is the spade.
Imagination, pride, exalted desire are just as much Man, as are hunger and thirst and sexual curiosities and the panic dread of unknown things....
"Now you see better what I mean about choice.Now you see what I am driving at.We have to choose each one for himself and also each one for the race, whether we will accept the muddle of the common life, whether we ourselves will be muddled, weakly nothings, children of luck, steering our artful courses for mean success and tawdry honours, or whether we will be aristocrats, for that is what it amounts to, each one in the measure of his personal quality an aristocrat, refusing to be restrained by fear, refusing to be restrained by pain, resolved to know and understand up to the hilt of his understanding, resolved to sacrifice all the common stuff of his life to the perfection of his peculiar gift, a purged man, a trained, selected, artificial man, not simply free, but lordly free, filled and sustained by pride.Whether you or I make that choice and whether you or I succeed in realizing ourselves, though a great matter to ourselves, is, I admit, a small matter to the world.But the great matter is this, that THE CHOICE IS BEING MADE, that it will continue to be made, and that all around us, so that it can never be arrested and darkened again, is the dawn of human possibility...."(White could also see his dead friend's face with its enthusiastic paleness, its disordered hair and the glowing darknesses in the eyes.On such occasions Benham always had an expression of ESCAPE.
Temporary escape.And thus would his hand have clutched the reading-desk; thus would his long fingers have rustled these dry papers.)"Man has reached a point when a new life opens before him....
"The old habitual life of man is breaking up all about us, and for the new life our minds, our imaginations, our habits and customs are all unprepared....
"It is only now, after some years of study and living, that I begin to realize what this tremendous beginning we call Science means to mankind.Every condition that once justified the rules and imperatives, the manners and customs, the sentiments, the morality, the laws and limitations which make up the common life, has been or is being destroyed....Two or three hundred years more and all that life will be as much a thing past and done with as the life that was lived in the age of unpolished stone....
"Man is leaving his ancestral shelters and going out upon the greatest adventure that ever was in space or time, he is doing it now, he is doing it in us as I stand here and read to you."
