The New Thought and the Old
Mr. Belloc is completely justified in devoting much more than half his commentary to these fundamental issues and dealing with my account of the appearance of Christianity and the story of the Church much more compactly. It is this difference at the very roots of our minds which matters to us, and it is the vital question we have to put before the world. The rest is detail. I do believe and assert that a new attitude to life, a new and different vision of the world, a new moral atmosphere and a different spirit of conduct, is coming into human affairs, as a result of the scientific analysis of the past hundred years. It is only now reaching such a clearness of definition that it can be recognised for what it is and pointed out.
The essential distinction of the newer thought in the world is in its denial of the permanence of the self and in its realisation of the self’s comparative unimportance. Even in our individual lives we are increasingly interested in common and generalised things. The older commoner life, the religious life just as much as the most worldly life, seems to us excessively self-conscious. The religious life, its perpetual self-examination for sin and sinful motives, its straining search after personal perfection, appears in the new light as being scarcely less egotistical than a dandy’s. And this new way of living and thinking is directly linked on to the idea of progress, which makes life in general far more interesting than any individual life can be, just as the self-centred life, whether it be religious and austere or vain or self-indulgent, is directly connected with the old delusions of permanence which rob life in general of any sustained interest. When one is really persuaded that there is nothing new under the sun, then there is nothing worth living for whatever outside the personal adventure, the dance between permanent individual beatitude or permanent individual damnation.
As this modern conception of life as a process of progressive change in which individuality of our order can be sometimes excessively exaggerated as it has been in the past and sometimes minimised as is happening now—as this conception establishes itself, it changes the spirit of living and the values of our general ideas about living profoundly. Lit only by a very bright light held low, an ordinary road becomes a tangle of vivid surfaces and black shadows, and you cannot tell a puddle or a gutter from a ditch or a precipice. But in diffused daylight you can see the proportions of every irregularity. So too with changing illumination our world alters its aspects, and things that once seemed monstrous and final are seen to be mere undulations in a practicable progress. We can realise now, as no one in the past was ever able to realise it, that man is a creature changing very rapidly from the life of a rare and solitary great ape to the life of a social and economic animal. He has traversed most of this tremendous change of phase in something in the nature of a million years. His whole being, mind and body alike, betrays the transition. We can trace the mitigations of his egotism through the development of religious and customary restraints. The recent work of the psycho-analyst enables us to understand something of the intricate system of suppressions and inhibitions that this adaptation to a more and more complex social life has involved. We begin to realise how man has symbolised and personified his difficulties, and to comprehend the mechanisms of his uncongenial but necessary self-restraint.