Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/152

 to argue that it alone is "real." If there is a logical connection, I miss it. The argument affects me as fantastic: it is as if an arctic explorer, having proved that the cold of the polar regions is almost incredibly painful, should procced to argue that Prince Patrick Island is the only fit place to live, and that London, Paris, and New York are phantasmagorial. My faith is weak: I have never been able to think of New York, or even of Chicago, as a dream-city.

Yet the moment the monoptic naturalists begin to discuss the moral world, they take just that line: they insist that the moral world is so unreal as to be virtually non-existent—at the same time howling at the thorns which it thrusts into them. The assumption of practically all the insurgents against custom, convention, and morality is that every man who takes a customary, conventional, or moral attitude is a hypocrite, and that every man who doesn't abandon such attitudes is a coward and essentially a moral phantom.

The now popular but profoundly erroneous notion underlying their mental processes is this: that no man can express himself hotly and sincerely through any form of action or through any form of words which has ever been employed before. It is an extension of the attack on the verbal cliché to the entire fabric of approved and applauded values which we call civilization. A Hebrew singer smites his harp and sings: "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord." That