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-the reader a resume of what is valid in Marx when purged of this
mystical element. What do we find here? The assertion that civil–
ized man strives always for order, beauty and health, that "the
current of human endeavor is always running in this direction ... ;
each of the great political movements that surges up across social
barriers brings about a new and broader merging of the rising
aggressive element with the element it assaults and absorbs. The
human spirit is always expanding against predatory animal pres–
sure, to make larger and larger units of human beings, until we
shall have finally realized once and for all that the human race is
itself one and that it must not injure itself."
He may condemn abstract statements about the tendencies of
history or the progressive character of conflicts and the ultimate
victory of the good, as dialectical mysticism and metaphysics; but
we see how incapable he is of really expelling them from his own
thought.
Elsewhere he regards metaphysics as the poetry of abstract
imaginations, but his judgment of this poetry lacks the curiosity
and feeling for the imaginative which distinguish his literary criti–
cism. On the other hand, in attacking metaphysics as illogical, his
own arguments are rather vague; it is enough for him to say that
something is metaphysical in order to dispose of
it
as false or
meaningless. Yet, remarkably enough, he argues that the values of
socialism must be presented emotionally and imaginatively, since
they can never be proved. But when a writer makes value judg–
ments
in
economics or speaks of broad tendencies in history which
are the ground of his proposed ends, or affirms in metaphors his
faith in the victory of his ideals, Wilson criticizes him as a theolo–
gian or a mystic. He himself will say: "Fate delivered Bakunin
into his [Marx's] hands." He assumes, however, that when Marx
and Trotsky speak of History as a judge they are reifying the non–
existent future and betraying their ideal of a scientific knowledge
of man. He wants us to read in a literal sense the images of
writers whom he has already held up to us as poetic minds; and
he will not examine the sense of such expressions in the light of the
reasonableness of their programs and their more concrete state–
ments about the future.
This criticism of expressions of faith in the future is puzzling
when read beside Wilson's frequent characterizations of Marx and
