“It gives you an opportunity of annoying a number of people you don’t like.”
“If I offend, it is their fault!” said Boon hotly. “Criticism can have no friendships. If they like to take it ill…. My criticism is absolutely, honest…. Some of them are my dearest friends.”
“They won’t be,” said Wilkins, “when all this comes out…. But, anyhow, your whole case, your justification, your thesis is that there is this Mind of the Race, overriding, dominating—— And that you are its Prophet.”
“Because a man confesses a belief, Wilkins, that doesn’t make him a Prophet. I don’t set up—I express.”
“Your Mind of the Race theory has an elegance, a plausibility, I admit,” said Wilkins.
Dodd’s expression indicated that it didn’t take him in. He compressed his lips. Not a bit of it.
“But is this in reality true? Is this what exists and goes on? We people who sit in studies and put in whole hours of our days thinking and joining things together do get a kind of coherence into our ideas about the world. Just because there is leisure and time for us to think. But are you sure that is the Race at all? That is my point. Aren’t we intellectually just a by-product? If you went back to the time of Plato, you would say that the idea of his “Republic” was what was going on in the Mind of the Race then. But I object that that was only the futile fancy of a gentleman of leisure. What was really going on was the gathering up of the Macedonian power to smash through Greece, and then make Greece conquer Asia. Your literature and philosophy are really just the private entertainment of old gentlemen out of the hurly-burly and ambitious young men too delicate to hunt or shoot. Thought is nothing in the world until it begins to operate in will and act, and the history of mankind doesn’t show now, and it never has shown, any consecutive relation to human thinking. The real Mind of the Race is, I submit, something not literary at all, not consecutive, but like the inconsecutive incoherences of an idiot——”
“No,” said Boon, “of a child.”
“You have wars, you have great waves of religious excitement, you have patriotic and imperial delusions, you have ill-conceived and surprising economic changes——”
“As if humanity as a whole were a mere creature of chance and instinct,” said Boon.