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.