and enthusiasm he needs. What of the artist who dulls his vision by haggling and reckoning over his pay, or the inventor sinking his fine imagination in calculations over royalties! In figures like these syndicalist metaphysic deals. Thus Sorel dramatizes his "sublime myth" of the general strike. It calls like "unseen music in the night" to the deeper and more unselfish passions of the soul. Its power is that it cannot be proved. Only what is beyond proof moves us greatly. He despises sociology with its goggled pretence of laws and classified data on which reasoned prediction can be based. Far better is a philosophy half articulate with its cavernous depths, its terrors, its silences and its mysteries.[1] "The unspoiled soul of the proletariat" is to be initiated into these veiled places where "tired and sleeping masses of men" may be roused to a sense of their power. Only through disturbing and dramatic figures speaking to the imagination can they be made to look and listen.
Above all, in this awakening is the proletariat to learn that it is to have no mastery but its own. Such salvation as it wins must be solely through its own initiative and direction. When it says, "No God, no master," there are no reservations. Though Sorel makes much of religion as myth, the Syndicalists generally are not timid and discreet like so many Socialists on the subject of instituted religion. They turn against it because of what it asks. Christian virtues, like reverence, humility and obedience, are all
- ↑ Even from a scholar showing much sympathy with Professor Bergson—I have heard the phrase, "He is the Philosopher of the Unutterable."
