It is, perhaps, best expressed by saying
that it is the great glorification of the inside of things at the
expense of the outside. There is one great evil in modern life for which
nobody has found even approximately a tolerable description: I can only
invent a word and call it "remotism." It is the tendency to think first
of things which, as a matter of fact, lie far away from the actual
centre of human experience. Thus people say, "All our knowledge of life
begins with the amoeba." It is false; our knowledge of life begins with
ourselves. Thus they say that the British Empire is glorious, and at the
very word Empire they think at once of Australia and New Zealand, and
Canada, and Polar bears, and parrots and kangaroos, and it never occurs
to any one of them to think of the Surrey Hills. The one real struggle
in modern life is the struggle between the man like Maeterlinck, who
sees the inside as the truth, and the man like Zola, who sees the
outside as the truth. A hundred cases might be given. We may take, for
the sake of argument, the case of what is called falling in love. The
sincere realist, the man who believes in a certain finality in physical
science, says, "You may, if you like, describe this thing as a divine
and sacred and incredible vision; that is your sentimental theory about
it. But what it is, is an animal and sexual instinct designed for
certain natural purposes." The man on the other side, the idealist,
replies, with quite equal confidence, that this is the very reverse of
the truth.
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