The
man of genuine ideas is hedged in by taboos; the quack finds an audience
already agape. The reply to the invitation, in the domain of applied
ethics, is the revived and reinforced _Sklavenmoral_ that besets all of
us of English speech--the huggermugger morality of timorous, whining,
unintelligent and unimaginative men--envy turned into law, cowardice
sanctified, stupidity made noble, Puritanism. And in the theoretical
field there is an even more luxuriant crop of bosh. Mountebanks almost
innumerable tell us what we should believe and practice, in politics,
religion, philosophy and the arts. England and the United States,
between them, house more creeds than all the rest of the world together,
and they are more absurd. They rise, they flame, they fall and go out,
but always there are new ones, always the latest is worse than the last.
What modern civilization save this of ours could have produced Christian
Science, or the New Thought, or Billy Sundayism? What other could have
yielded up the mawkish bumptiousness of the Uplift? What other could
accept gravely the astounding imbecilities of English philanthropy and
American law? The native output of fallacy and sentimentality, in fact,
is not enough to satisfy the stupendous craving of the mob unleashed;
there must needs be a constant importation of the aberrant fancies of
other peoples.
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