Section 10
It is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human existence in
which 'politics,' that is to say a partisan interference with the ruling
sanities of the world, will be the dominant interest among serious men.
We seem to have entered upon an entirely new phase in history in which
contention as distinguished from rivalry, has almost abruptly ceased to
be the usual occupation, and has become at most a subdued and hidden
and discredited thing. Contentious professions cease to be an honourable
employment for men. The peace between nations is also a peace between
individuals. We live in a world that comes of age. Man the warrior, man
the lawyer, and all the bickering aspects of life, pass into obscurity;
the grave dreamers, man the curious learner, and man the creative
artist, come forward to replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a
less ignoble adventure.
There is no natural life of man. He is, and always has been, a sheath
of varied and even incompatible possibilities, a palimpsest of inherited
dispositions. It was the habit of many writers in the early twentieth
century to speak of competition and the narrow, private life of trade
and saving and suspicious isolation as though such things were in some
exceptional way proper to the human constitution, and as though openness
of mind and a preference for achievement over possession were abnormal
and rather unsubstantial qualities.
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