He did not even care
that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and
amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun.
From the beginning of history, this attitude had been branded
as criminal -- worse than crime -- sacrilege! Society punished it
ferociously and justly, in self-defence. Mr. Adams, the father,
looked on it as moral weakness; it annoyed him; but it did not
annoy him nearly so much as it annoyed his son, who had no need
to learn from Hamlet the fatal effect of the pale cast of thought
on enterprises great or small. He had no notion of letting the
currents of his action be turned awry by this form of conscience.
To him, the current of his time was to be his current, lead where
it might. He put psychology under lock and key; he insisted on
maintaining his absolute standards; on aiming at ultimate Unity.
The mania for handling all the sides of every question, looking
into every window, and opening every door, was, as Bluebeard
judiciously pointed out to his wives, fatal to their practical
usefulness in society. One could not stop to chase doubts as
though they were rabbits. One had no time to paint and putty the
surface of Law, even though it were cracked and rotten. For the
young men whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867
and 1900, Law should be Evolution from lower to higher,
aggregation of the atom in the mass, concentration of
multiplicity in unity, compulsion of anarchy in order; and he
would force himself to follow wherever it led, though he should
sacrifice five thousand millions more in money, and a million
more lives.
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