Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/234

 *tween privilege and the people. Such a view may simplify life for him; it may make easy the peroration to the campaign speech; it may provide a glib and facile answer to any question. But he should have a care lest it make him the slave of its own clichés, as Socialists for instance, when they become purely scientific, explain every human impulse, emotion and deed by simply repeating the formula "Economic determinism."

But it will not do; it will not suffice. This view of life is simple only because it is narrow and confined; in far perspectives there appear curious and perplexing contradictions. And even then, the most exhaustive analysis of life and of human society, however immense and comprehensive, however logical and inevitable its generalizations, must always fall short simply because no human mind and no assembly of human minds can ever wholly envisage the vast and bewildering complexity of human life. Each man views life from that angle where he happens to have been placed by forces he cannot comprehend. All of which no doubt is a mere repetition in feebler terms of what has heretofore been spoken of the inherent vice of the sectarian mind. There are no rigid distinctions of good and bad, of proletarians and capitalists, of privileged and proscribed; there are just people, just folks, as Jones said, with their human weaknesses, follies, and mistakes, their petty ambitions, their miserable jealousies and envies, their triumphs, and glories and boundless dreams, and all tending some whither, they know not where nor how, and all pretty much alike.