396
PARTISAN REVIEW
a
self
wnich he did not possess before-he returns with his plan
of campaign: not to let himself be dominated by things, but to
govern them himself, to impose his will and his design upon them,
to realize his ideas in that outer world, to shape the planet after
the preferences of his innermost being. Far from losing
his
own
self in this return to the world, he on the contrary carries his self
to the
other,
projects it energetically and masterfully upon things,
in other words, he forces the
other- the
world- little by little to
become himself. Man humanizes the world, injects it, impregnates it
with his own ideal substance and is finally entitled to imagine that
one day or another, in the far depths of time, this terrible outer
world will become so saturated with man that our descendants will
be able to travel through it as today we mentally travel through
our own inmost selves-he finally imagines that the world, with–
out ceasing to be the world, will one day be changed into some–
thing like a materialized soul, and, as in Shakespeare's
T empest,
the winds will blow at the bidding of Ariel, the spirit of ide3s.
I do not say that this is certain-such c:,:rtainty is the ex–
clusive possession of the
progressivist,
and I am no progressivist, as
you will see. But I do say that it is possible.
And please do not assume, from what you have just heard,
that I am an
idealist.
Neither a progressivist nor an idealist! On
the contrary, the idea of progress, and idealism-that exquisitely
and nobly proportioned name-progress and idealism are two of
my
betes noires,
because I see in them perhaps the two greatest
sins of the last two centuries, the two greatest forms of irresponsi–
bility. But let us leave this subject, to treat it in due season, and for
the moment quietly continue along our road.
It seems to me that we can now,
if
only vaguely and schematic–
ally, represent to ourselves humanity's course from this point of
view. Let us do so in a brief statement which will at the same time
serve us as a resume and a reminder of all that has preceded.
Man, no less than the animal, finds himself consigned to the
world, to the things about him, to his surroundings. At first his
existence is hardly different from zoological existence; he too lives
governed by his environment, placed among the things of this
world as one of them. Yet no sooner do the beings around him give
