ENDS AND MEANS
reform or revolution. The early nineteenth century wit-
nessed a reaction towards meaningful philosophy of a kind
that could, unhappily, be used to justify political reaction.
The men of the new Enlightenment which occurred in the
. middle years of the nineteenth century once again used
meaninglessness as a weapon against the reactionaries.
The Victorian passion for respectability was, however, so
great that, during the period when they were formulated,
neither Positivism nor Darwinism was used as a justification
for sexual indulgence. After the War the philosophy of
meaninglessness came once more triumphantly into fashion.
As in -the days of Lamettrie and his successors the desire to
justify a certain sexual looseness played a part in the popu-
larization of meaninglessness at least as important as that
played by the desire for liberation from an unjust and
inefficient form of social organization. By the end of the
'twenties a reactiqp. had begun to set in—away from the
easy-going philosophy of general meaninglessness towards
the hard, ferocious theologies of nationalistic and revolu-
tionary idolatry. Meaning was reintroduced into the world,
but only in patches. The universe as a whole still remained
meaningless, but certain of its parts, such as the nation, the
state, the class, the party, were endowed with significance
and the highest value. The general acceptance of a doctrine
that denies meaning and value to the world as a whole,
while assigning them in a supreme degree to certain
arbitrarily selected parts of the totality, can have only evil
and disastrous results. 'All that we are (and consequently
all that we do) is the result of what we have thought/
We have thought of ourselves as members of supremely
meaningful and valuable communities—deified nations,
divine classes and what not—existing within a meaning-
less universe. And because we have thought like this,
rearmament is in full swing, economic nationalism becomes
ever more intense, the battle of rival propagandas grows
274