They have grown, as you
have grown, only more massively and more slowly. In their non-human
beauty and peace they stir the sub-human depths and the superhuman
possibilities of your own spirit. It is no transcendental logic that
they teach; and they give no sign of any deliberate morality seated in
the world. It is rather the vanity and superficiality of all logic,
the needlessness of argument, the relativity of morals, the strength
of time, the fertility of matter, the variety, the unspeakable
variety, of possible life. Everything is measurable and conditioned,
indefinitely repeated, yet, in repetition, twisted somewhat from its
old form. Everywhere is beauty and nowhere permanence, everywhere an
incipient harmony, nowhere an intention, nor a responsibility, nor a
plan. It is the irresistible suasion of this daily spectacle, it is
the daily discipline of contact with things, so different from the
verbal discipline of the schools, that will, I trust, inspire the
philosophy of your children. A Californian whom I had recently the
pleasure of meeting observed that, if the philosophers had lived among
your mountains their systems would have been different from what they
are. Certainly, I should say, very different from what those systems
are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since
Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly
they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that
man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil,
is the centre and pivot of the universe.
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