The reason, I fancy, is
not so much that man is a hopeless fool, as that Time, so far as he is
concerned, has, as we know, only just begun: it being, of course,
conceivable that the creation of a perfect society of men, as the first
requisite to a _regime_ of culture, must nick to itself a longer loop
of time than the making of, say, a stratum of coal. A loquacious
person--he is one of your cherished "novel"-writers, by the way, if
that be indeed a Novel in which there is nowhere any pretence at
novelty--once assured me that he could never reflect without swelling
on the greatness of the age in which he lived, an age the mighty
civilisation of which he likened to the Augustan and Periclean. A
certain stony gaze of anthropological interest with which I regarded
his frontal bone seemed to strike the poor man dumb, and he took a
hurried departure. Could he have been ignorant that ours is, in
general, greater than the Periclean for the very reason that the
Divinity is neither the devil nor a bungler; that three thousand years
of human consciousness is not nothing; that a whole is greater than its
part, and a butterfly than a chrysalis? But it was the assumption that
it was therefore in any way great in the abstract that occasioned my
profound astonishment, and indeed contempt.
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