He has no
patience, no faith in anything but himself. He thinks he is a being
when in reality he is only a link in a being, and so he is more
anxious to be complete than right. The last devotion of which he is
capable is that devotion of the mind which suffers partial
performance, but insists upon exhaustive thought. He scamps his
thought and finishes his performance, and before he is dead it is
already being abandoned and begun all over again by some one else in
the same egotistical haste. . . ."
It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life that these
words should have been written by a man who walked the plank to
fresh ideas with the dizziest difficulty unless he had Prothero to
drag him forward, and who acted time after time with an altogether
disastrous hastiness.
2
Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from
the cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at
cowardice and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete
Research Magnificent. You can no more resolve to live a life of
honour nowadays and abstain from social and political scheming on a
world-wide scale, than you can profess religion and refuse to think
about God.
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