BELIEFS
ing of the world was such as to be compatible with, or
actually most completely expressed by, the iniquities I have
mentioned above—iniquities which happened, of course, to
serve the personal or sectarian interests of the philosophers
concerned. In due course there arose philosophers who
denied not only the right of these Christian special pleaders
to justify iniquity by an appeal to the meaning of the world,
but even their right to find any such meaning whatsoever.
In the circumstances, the fact was not surprising. One
unscrupulous distortion of the truth tei*ds to beget other
and opposite distortions. Passions may be satisfied in the
process; but the disinterested love of knowledge suffers
eclipse.
For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries,
the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an
instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was
simultaneously liberation from a certain political and eco-
nomic system and liberation from a certain system of
morality. We objected to the moraEty because it inter-
fered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political
and economic system because it was unjust. The sup-
porters of these systems claimed that in some way they
embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted)
of the worjd. There was one admirably simple method of
confuting these people and at the same time justifying our-
selves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny
that the world had any meaning whatsoever. Similar tactics
had been adopted during the eighteenth century and for the
same reasons. From die popular novelists of the period,
such as Crebillon and Andrea de Nerciat, we learn that the
chief reason for being 'philosophical' was that one might
be free from prejudices—above all, prejudices of a sexual
nature. More serious writers associated political with sexual
prejudice and recommended philosophy (in practice, the
philosophy of meaninglessness) as a preparation for social
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