Magick Without Tears

482 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS All the same, I am glad you wrote ; it is a text for a little sermon that I have had in mind for a long while on the conditions of progress. Number One is obviously Irregularity, Eccentricity, Disorder, the Revolutionary Spirit, Experiment. I have no patience whatever with Utopia-mongers. Biology simply shouts at us that the happy contented community, everyone with his own (often highly specialized) job, nobody in need , nobody in danger, is necessarily stagnant. Termites and other ants, bees, beavers; these and many another have produced perfect systems . What is the first characteristic? Stupidity. "Where there is no vision, the people shall perish." What is the Fighter Termite to do, after he has been blocked out of his home? None of these communities possess any resource at all against any unforeseen unfavourable change of circumstance. (We look rather like that just now at the end of 1944 e.v.) Nor does anyone of them show any achievement; having got to the end of their biological tether , they stay put, without an aim, an idea, an effort. The leech, an insufferable pest in its belt-it has killed off tiger, rhinoceros, anything with a nostril! -is the curse of our military station at Lebong-or was when I was there . At Darjeeling, a few hundred feet higher, devil a one! They have no one to think : Now how can we flourish up higher? Those old forlorn-hope Miss-Sahibs-how wide are their nostrils! Then - how? Consider for a moment our own Empire. How did that spread all over the planet? It was the imaginative logic, the audacity, the adroit adaptability , of the Adventurer that blasted the road. The sunny Socialist smiles his superior smile, and condescends to instruct us. That was an unfortunate, though perhaps sometimes necessary , stage in the perfection of Society. Something in that. But there are other kinds of Adventure. My imagination can set no limit to the possibilities of Science, or of Art: our own Great Work is evidence of that.