I know that where there is life, there is essential beauty. Genuine beauty, which fills the soul, is an indication of life, and genuine ugliness, which blasts the soul, is an indication of morbidity—But prettiness is opposed to beauty.
I know that, first and foremost, we must be sensitive to life and to its movements. If there is power, it must be sensitive power.
I know that we must look after the quality of Life, not the quantity. Hopeless life should be put to sleep, the idiots and the hopeless sick and the true criminal. And the birth-rate should be controlled.
I know we must take up the responsibility for the future, now. A great change is coming, and must come. What we need is some glimmer of a vision of a world that shall be, beyond the change. Otherwise we shall be in for a great débacle.
What is alive, and open, and active, is good. All that makes for inertia, lifelessness, dreariness, is bad. This is the essence of morality.
What we should live for is life and the beauty of aliveness, imagination, awareness, and contact. To be perfectly alive is to be immortal.
I know these things, along with other things. And it is nothing very new to know these things. The only new thing would be to act on them.
And what is the good of saying these things, to men whose whole education consists in the fact that twice two are four· —which, being interpreted, means that twice tuppence is fourpence. All our education, the whole of it, is formed upon this little speck of dust.
