Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/385

 some suffering? And suppose it was a rather important promise? With most of us it would then come to be a matter of weighing the promise, the thing of the past, against this unexpected bad consequence, the thing of the future. And the smaller the overplus of evil consequences the more most of us would vacillate. But neither of the two types of mind we are contrasting would vacillate at all. The legal type of mind would obey the past unhesitatingly, the creative would unhesitatingly sacrifice it to the future. The legal mind would say, "they who break the law at any point break it altogether," while the creative mind would say, "let the dead past bury its dead."

It is convenient to take my illustration from the sphere of promises, but it is in the realm of sexual morality that the two methods are most acutely in conflict.

And I would like to suggest that until you have definitely determined either to obey the real or imaginary imperatives of the past, or to set yourself towards the demands of some ideal of the future, until you have made up your mind to adhere to one or other of these two types of mental action in these matters, you are not even within hope of a sustained consistency in the thought that underlies your acts, that in every issue of principle that comes upon you, you will be entirely at the mercy of the intellectual mood that happens to be ascendent at that particular moment in your mind.

In the sphere of public affairs also these two ways of looking at things work out into equally divergent and incompatible consequences. The legal mind