February 28, 191 8 
Land & Water 
13 
A Prevalent Inconsistency : By L. P. Jacks 
THOSE who study the working of their minds 
in the present crisis — and it is wise to do this 
occasionally — will perhaps join me in confessing 
to a measure of inconsistency. I am not speaking 
of logic, but of temper — of changing moods : as 
when, for example, a man is by turns depressed and exalted. 
There is no reason to be ashamed of such discords, for con- 
sistency of temper can hardly be reckoned a hurhan virtue 
at all. At one extreme it is a prerogative of the gods, at the 
other a limitation of the brutes ; so that if ever we encounter 
a being whose moods are never in conflict we maj' conclude 
that he is either supra-humanly wise or infra-humanly stupid 
— probably the latter. For my part I find human nature 
most lovable and interesting precisely at those points where 
it is hardest to understand, that is, when its moods contradict 
one another. There is really nothing to deplore in these 
conflicts — not even when active in the mind of society at 
large, as they are at the present moment. They are a source 
of energy ; powers that move the world come out of their 
clash. A man or an age whose temper never varied would 
be a nonentity in the world of action. 
There are a good many of these inconsistencies now in 
evidence, all interesting, and all bearing witness to the rich 
complexities of human nature. But the one which seems to 
me most worthy of attention at the moment is that strange 
mingling of the sense of power and the sense of powerlSssness 
which arises in most of us as we view the course of current 
events. On the one hand we feel ourselves to be taking part 
in a series of the greatest actions ever performed by man, and 
the feeling is our sense of power. On the other, we seem at 
times to be in the grip of vast forces over which we have no 
control whatsoever, powerless as atoms in a whirling vortex. 
Our minds oscillate between the two attitudes, mastership 
and helplessness. Some would call this a glaring inconsistency. 
But I doubt if it often glares, though unquestionably it does 
so sometimes. More frequently it lurks, and is to be found 
only by those whom Nature has endowed with a good memory 
for their changing moods — by those, I mean, who when they 
have seen themselves for a moment in the glass of self-know- 
ledge do not " straightway forget what manner of men they 
were." 
There are moments when the sense of power rises to an 
extraordinary height and possesses whole multitudes of men 
at once. When, for example, a new idea, like that of a League 
of Nations, first gets possession of our minds we are like men 
intoxicated. We feel that a magic sword has been placed in 
our hands, and it needs only that we lay about us with vigour 
to bring a whole world of wrong and error tumbling down. 
Many examples might be given of men whom the advent of 
new ideas has thus intoxicated with the sense of p)ower — the 
French revolutionists, the Positivists, the Malthusians, the 
Darwinians, the mid- Victorian Radicals, the scientific 
materialists, the followers of Henry George, the early 
Socialists. The Bolsheviks provide a contemporary example. 
They, too, are out to move mountains. We call them fools 
and madmen ; and so they may be ; but are there no ideas 
of our own to which, at one time or another, we have attri- 
buted an equal measure of wonder-working power ? 
This mood of masterful confidence, which is quite sincere 
while it lasts, is our public attitude ; the side of our minds we 
show to one another. We find it in the speeches of statesmen ; 
in the Proclamations of Emperors and the Notes of Presidents ; 
in the programmes of political parties and schools ; in propa- 
ganda of all kinds ; in the literature of social reconstruction. 
All these breathe the spirit of mastership. 
World Dominion > 
There is an expression lately come into evil prominence 
which curiously reflects these feelings. It is the phrase 
" world-dominion." The idea of world-dominion has many 
forms, and we are unjust to the Prussian militarists in treating 
them as its solitary exponents. We are all addicted to the 
notion that the world can be dominated — indeed we are all 
trying to get it dominated by our own ideas of what is 
good for it. World-dominion has been claimed at various 
times for various things — for religion (or for some partic- 
ular doctrine of religion) ; for pliilosophy (as in Plato) ; 
for the Goddess of Reason, for science, for socialistic 
ideals, for Labour. And always the claim has been made 
by men who, from one cause or another, were intoxiaited 
or— if the word be disliked — exalted by their sense of 
power. Some men are thus exalted always. All men are 
thus exalted sometimes. It is a frame of mind which 
craves publicity and usually issues in a programme of world- 
dominion, either &i this kind or of that. Such programmes 
are plentiful at the present moment, and they have more in 
common with one another than appears at first sight. The 
League of Peace, for example, is obviously a scheme of world- 
dominion, and differs from tlie Prussian militarists only as 
to the methods to be applied. So, too, when war broke out in 
Heaven, as narrated in Milton's Paradise Lost (which, by the 
way, is the best of war books for present reading), the 
belligerents were agreed on the general necessity of world- 
dominion. They differed as to the principle of domination 
and fought to settle the question. 
Masters of the World. 
The idea of world-dominion, now prevalent everywhere in 
one or other of its many forms, seems to indicate that in some 
sense we are masters of the world — a view of ourselves which 
implies an enormous sense of power. This, however, is 
only the public aspect of our mentality. In every age, cer- 
tainly in our own, there is a side of human life from which 
reporters are excluded, or rather, from which reporters exclude 
themselves because it fails to provide them with marketable 
copy. It is the existence of this unreported side which 
makes history difficftlt to write, and often untrustworthy when 
written. The sense of powerlessness belongs to it. It 
naturally tends to hide or at least to express itself in whispers 
and undertones. When a man believes that he is captain of 
his soul, or (like the Kaiser) a ruler of other men's destinies, 
he can hardly 'keep his feelin'gs to himself ; but when mis- 
givings assail him and he feels as though the bottom were 
dropping out of the world, he will say as little about it as 
possible, both in the public interest and in his own. I think, 
therefore, that we should be wrong in concluding that the 
sense of powerlessness is non-existent because so little of it 
gets reported in books, in public speeches, in documents of 
one kind or another. The future historian will misre- 
present the men of to-day if he stops at describing 
them as amazingly cocksure. He will misrepresent them by 
telling only half of the truth. They are amazingly cocksure ; 
but woven in with all this self-confidence there is a strain of 
profound misgiving as to the general state of the world. For 
the evidence of this we must look to the unreported side of 
human life — ^the conversations of statesmen after dinner, the 
confessions of intimate friends, the talk of the club and the 
railway carriage; the outcries of imaginative men who lie 
awake at night — things which, 'from the nature of the case, 
are not intended for publication. 
These two strains, the sense of power and the sense of 
powerlessness, unquestionably co-exist, the one public, the 
other private, and each speaking in opposite tones. The one 
talks proudly of science, and persuades us that with science 
at our elbow we can move mountains ; the other reminds us 
that science itself hasgot out of hand and become an implement 
for the self-destruction of mankind. The one points to the 
miracles of effort and organisation which the nation can 
accomplish when, as now, it is inspired by a unitary motive ; 
the other feplies that a unitary motive may play all kinds of 
damnable tricks ; for example, when it takes the form of 
Pan-Germanism and threatens to wreck civilisation. The 
one proclaims that we are partners in mighty actions directed 
by the intelligent purpose of the common mind ; the other 
answers that these mighty actions are forced upon us by 
circumstances over which we have no control ; that the world 
is full of violent, unpredictable, explosive forces; that we 
are in the grip of elemental powers ; that we are like men 
who eat and drink while an earthquake is rocking the house. 
The two views are interwoven in the consciousness of all of 
us ; the one giving rise to public utterance, the other to 
private thought. Here it is that we are not consistent with 
■ ourselves. 
The causes which have given rise to the sense of power are 
well known, the achievements of science being the most 
obvious. The causes of the opposite feeling are less familiar, 
though no less deserving of study. One of them is especially 
worthy of attention at the present moment, because it seems 
likely to issue in important political developments. It pro- 
ceeds from a state of things which one might expect to con- 
tribute to our sense of power, but which oddly enough is 
beginning to have the opposite effect — I mean, the enormous 
mass and volume of the modern State. As an exhibition of 
power, what could be more impressive than a statistical 
account of one of the great empires of the world- — its jiopulation, 
its wealth, the immense volume of its civil and military 
machinery ? Not without reason do they call themselves 
" Great Powers." But the sense of power in the people is 
