'The fundamental instinct of life is to create, to make, to discover, to grow, to progress. Every one in some form or other has experience of this joy of creating; the joy of seeing the growth, the building, the change, the coming. The instinct of those in authority has recognised—without[Pg 93] perhaps knowing it—the love to create, when they devised punishment—the treadmill7, prisons, routine, all thwarting8 that free creative impulse to the point of torture. Or on a minor9 scale the trivial school stupidities and idlenesses of 'lines'; detentions10 without labour or sacrifice or both; or even the cheap and easy physical punishment. Such punishment, if not all inflicted11 punishment, springs out of the distinctive12 protective aim of slavery. Creative life comes slowly.
Life, this beautiful, creative life, comes slowly through the ages, but it comes. Slowly mankind is emerging out of slavery into the beautiful freedom of creative life. Slowly mankind is realising the natural desire, the instinctive13 natural urge, the essential need for life—of each individual to be free. Free—i.e. free to strive, to endeavour, to reach onwards, to create, to make, to beget14. The economic freedom of the individual has been slowly escaping throughout history. It burst into a new vigorous life through the hammering blows of the French Revolution. During the last century or more this principle of freedom has been changing our political relationships and values. This economic escape may be said to have reacted[Pg 94] on science, and the modern developments of evolution have benefited by the spreading change in the temper of mind, and by the influx15 of workers and creative thinkers from the enslaved order.
And this raises a large question which I have in mind this morning. Every one can see to-day the immensity of the problems before the world. It does not need much reflection, or
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CHAPTER VI The War and Sanderson's Propaganda of Reconstruction
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