is directed against it. The two essays on Liberalism versus Culture and The Irony of Liberalism ought to be digested by all those who still fancy that this creed is of use in the modern world.
"If liberalism had been a primitive system, with no positive institutions behind it, it would have left human genius in the most depressed and forlorn condition. The organized part of life would have been a choice among little servitudes, and the free personal part would have been a blank. Fortunately, liberal ages have been secondary ages, inheriting the movements, the feelings, and the social hierarchy of previous times, when men had lived in compulsory unison, having only one unquestioned religion, one style of art, one political order, one common spring of laughter and tears."
There is more truth in this than most apostles of liberalism are willing to concede. Since the Renaissance, Europe has been like a clock running down; its positive institutions have come to it from the Middle Ages, and the changes effected have all been negative. To this process there must come an end; if the clock is not to stop, it must be wound up again sooner or later. The essay on The Irony of Liberalism shows, by an almost Hegelian dialectic, how freedom breeds opposite propagandas, each stimulating "hatred and wilfulness," and generating a strict tyranny by which the beneficent intentions of liberalism are defeated. The war, even, affords Mr Santayana a certain grim satisfaction as a refutation of the glib hopes of liberals. Addressing the liberal intellectuals on armistice day, he says:
"Ah, my delicate friends, if the soul of a philosopher may venture to address you, let me whisper this counsel in your ears: Reserve a part of your wrath; you have not seen the worst yet. You suppose that this war has been a criminal blunder and an exceptional horror; you imagine that before long reason will prevail, and all these inferior people that govern the world will be swept aside, and your own party will reform everything and remain always in office. You are mistaken. This war has given you your first glimpse of the ancient, fundamental, normal state of the world, your first taste of reality. It should teach you to dismiss all your philosophies of progress or of a governing reason as the babble of dreamers who walk through one world mentally beholding another."
