284 HUMANISM xvi 



convey. It is an appeal on behalf, not merely of the 

 downtrodden and unsuccessful, but also of the degraded 

 and criminal classes, and an indictment of what is, or 

 passes for, justice, human and divine. He defends his 

 clients on the ground, mainly, that they are the helpless 

 victims of heredity and environment, whose brute instincts 

 have been further brutalized by the horrible conditions 

 under which they have been nurtured. And he denies in 

 toto the right of society to condemn and to punish those 

 who could not have been other than they are. 



In other words, Mr. Blatchford (and with him pre 

 sumably the whole party of militant Socialism) is 

 essentially concerned with the old philosophic theme of 

 Freedom and Responsibility, complicated though it is no 

 doubt for modern minds with the problems of atavism, 

 heredity and variation. But he scorns to seek the aid of 

 technical philosophy. He is weary of the learned who 

 darken counsel with technical verbiage. He has no use 

 for useless learning, for &quot; the tangle of Gordian knots tied 

 and twisted by twenty centuries full of wordy but un 

 successful philosophers&quot; (p. 169), nor can he understand 

 (p. 1 6) why &quot;the world is paying millions of money and 

 bestowing honours and rewards in profusion upon the 

 learned and wise and spiritual leaders who teach it to 

 believe such illogical nonsense &quot; as a man s responsibility 

 for his acts. He prefers instead to argue the whole 

 matter out again for himself, to reiterate the old fallacies, 

 to repeat the old inconsequences, to be stopped at the old 

 deadlocks. 



Mr. Blatchford would possibly be surprised to find 

 how much precedent there is for all his positions, if he 

 had the curiosity and leisure to trace them back to their 

 origins. Even his condemnation of the futility of philo 

 sophy is no new thing, and is mild compared with the 

 things which philosophers have been in the habit of 

 saying of each other. The opinion which the greatest 

 philosophers have entertained of the efforts of their 

 colleagues has usually been a low one. Herakleitos, the 

 great Ephesian, used all his predecessors as illustrations 



