It is a temptation which a certain kind of clever
man always has to face, and it only assumes a serious aspect when it
leads the unthinking to mistake it for a new and formidable element of
opposition to things which he has counted sacred.
The whole method is not so very subtle after all. Pick out a vice or a
deformity. Do not trouble to acquaint yourself too intimately with the
history of morals in the past, but boldly canonise your vice or your
deformity with ritual of epigram and paradox. Proclaim loudly and
eloquently that this is your faith, and give it a pathetic aspect by
dwelling tenderly upon any trouble which it may be likely to cost those
who venture to adopt it. It is not perhaps a very admirable way to deal
with such subjects. The whole world of tradition and the whole
constitution of human nature are against you. Men have wrestled with
these things for thousands of years, and they have come to certain
conclusions which the experience of all time has enforced upon them. By
a dash of bold imagination you may discount all that laborious past, and
leave an irrevocable stain upon the purity of the mind of a generation.
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