342 HUMANISM xvm 



character-building a care that would otherwise have been 

 disproportionate? For, as most of them are thoroughly 

 aware, ordinary people are quite good enough for ordinary 

 purposes. Why, then, should they strive laboriously to 

 change and remould themselves, and fall, perchance, into 

 the exaggerated virtue of Jane Austen Beecher Stowe de 

 Rouse, who was &quot; good beyond all earthly need &quot; ? Is it 

 not much more convenient to stay as one is, and to reply 

 to the ambitions of an unquiet conscience as the General 

 of the Jesuits replied to the Pope who wished to reform 

 them, Sint ut sunt aut non sint, Let them be as they 

 are or not be at all ? Is it not always inconvenient to 

 think of the future, and is not the future life altogether 

 too big a thing to think of? And is not this, and not 

 any logical or scientific difficulties which the thought 

 involves, the real reason why men seek to banish it 

 from their consciousness, why it is hardly ever more 

 than a half belief in most men s minds ? Human inertia, 

 all that keeps us commonplace and sordid, unheroic 

 and unaspiring is, and always has been, dead against 

 it. And that is why moral reformers have always in 

 sisted on it. For their function is to overcome moral 

 inertia. 



It is, however, some consolation to think that the past 

 course of Evolution seemingly sanctions the belief of 

 those who would have us take account of a future which 

 extends into another life. Certainly the expansion of the 

 future, of which our action takes account, is one of the 

 most marked characteristics of a progressive civilization. 

 The animal looks into the future not at all, and the 

 savage but little ; but, as civilization grows, the future 

 consequences of action become more and more important, 

 and are prepared for more and more. When we have 

 dared to forecast the future of the race when our coal 

 supply shall be exhausted ; when we have looked un 

 flinchingly upon that unimaginably distant period when 

 the sun s light shall fail, shall we shrink from rising to 

 the contemplation of a future that extends immeasurably 

 further ? 



