436 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
world war in one lifetime and had survived to witness the making and
dropping of an atomic bomb.

If, however, we find this consensus between Valery and Beerbohm
impressive, what are we to make of it when Valery and Gibbon, so far
from speaking with one voice, declaim to us in irreconcilably discordant
accents ? When prophets disagree, are we to give credit to either of their
opposing voices ? The common-sense answer is that prophets talk the
language of feeling, and that neither of the two antithetical attitudes
which a Gibbon and a Valery respectively represent is warranted by the
facts. Gibbon's belief that, in bis generation, the Western World had
extricated itself, once for all, from the flow of History was decisively
refuted, as we have seen, by revolutionary events that Gibbon himself
lived to witness; but Gibbon's signal discomfiture is no evidence that an
opposite appraisal of the Western Civilization's prospects is bound to
prove correct. The symbol which a stricken Twentieth Century sees
glimmering through the darkness ahead is not a skull-and-crossbones; it
is a question-mark; and, though this cautionary signal will rightly give
pause to a wayfarer who has been allowing himself to expect the light
ahead of him to show green, the colour of the light that he is actually
being shown is neither this beckoning green nor a forbidding red, but is
a cryptically neutral yellow. Signs and portents which are good evidence
that the wayfarer is in danger are no evidence at all that he is doomed to
come to grief.

The truth is that Valery's pessimism and Gibbon's optimism are,
both alike, rationalizations of feelings that are irrationally subjective.

The only rational ground for Gibbon's complacent outlook was the
ephemeral experience—out of date within Gibbon's own lifetime—of an
exceptional spell of peace in the course of an exceptionally temperate
passage of Modern Western history; but, if we were to try to account for
Gibbon's complacency by seeing in it a rational inference from experi-
ence, we should hardly have begun to explain it. The deeper explanation
of Gibbon's mood is to be found, not in any process of reasoning, but in
an irrational egocentric illusion; and this most fantastic of all freaks of
Maya is of course no peculiar aberration of one eighteenth-century
Western philosopher's mentality.

The egocentric illusion has always beset every living organism in
which an ego has ever asserted itself. In an earlier context we have made
a survey of the breakdowns which human creatures, institutions, tech-
niques, and ideals have brought upon themselves by the sin of self-
idolization;1 and we have observed2 that there has never been a human
personality, community, or society that has not been tempted to commit
the fatuous impiety of trying to put itself in the place of its Creator by
casting itself for the role of being 'the Chosen People* and *the Heir of
the World'.3 The most damning characteristic of this Original Sin of
Human Nature is its aptness to vary in the degree of its virulence in
inverse ratio to the measure of any rational justification for succumbing
to it. Self-idolization is most flagrantly in evidence, not as a self-

i S*e IV. iv. 261-465. 3 See IV. iv. 245-61.

3 Rtttn. iv. 13.