xv PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 267 



is a very strange being. He is in the world, but not of 

 it, residing mainly in a Cloud-cuckoodom of his own 

 invention, which seems to have no relation to the actual 

 facts of life, and makes no difference to anything or any 

 body but the philosopher himself. Its sole function seems 

 to be to make the philosopher himself feel happy and 

 superior to everybody who does not understand his 

 philosophy enough to enter into it, that is, to everybody 

 else in the world. But even so the philosopher is not 

 happy in his paradise of sages. He is terribly worried 

 by all the other philosophers, each of whom is quite as 

 cantankerous and cranky as himself, and wants to carry 

 him off into his own private Nephelococcygia. And as 

 he will not, and indeed cannot, enter into it, they all get 

 very angry. They get so angry that they cannot even 

 laugh at each other. But when they get a little calmer 

 (not that there is really such a thing as calm among 

 philosophers any more than among cirrus clouds only 

 they live so far aloof and aloft that people cannot see 

 how they behave) they fall to criticising. And so when 

 one of them has built himself a nice new Nephelococcygia 

 high up in the clouds, the rest all try to pull to pieces 

 the abode of his soul, and bombard him with buzzing 

 chimeras bottled in vacuum tubes and riddle him with 

 sesquipedalian technicalities. In this they are usually 

 successful, for, though so perverse, they are immensely 

 clever, and their critical acumen is as wonderful as their 

 unconsciousness of their own absurdity. And so, one after 

 the other, each loses his scalp, and is buried in the ruins 

 of his system. 



Or rather he is not; for the burial customs of philosophers 

 are as strange as the rest of their behaviour, and unlike 

 those of any other tribe of men. Among the Scientists, 

 for instance, there are also savage wars, and they practise 

 vivisection. But the Scientists are not head-hunters. They 

 forget the errors of their vanquished warriors and bury their 

 remains, preserving only the memory of the work they 

 did for Science. And thus do they keep clean the face 

 of Science, and every morning wash away every blood- 



