The Wind and the Trees - Page 2

so the human city rises under the wind of the spirit into toppling
temples or sudden spires. No man has ever seen a revolution.
Mobs pouring through the palaces, blood pouring down the gutters,
the guillotine lifted higher than the throne, a prison
in ruins, a people in arms--these things are not revolution,
but the results of revolution.

You cannot see a wind; you can only see that there is a wind.
So, also, you cannot see a revolution; you can only see that
there is a revolution. And there never has been in the history
of the world a real revolution, brutally active and decisive,
which was not preceded by unrest and new dogma in the reign
of invisible things. All revolutions began by being abstract.
Most revolutions began by being quite pedantically abstract.

The wind is up above the world before a twig on the tree has moved.
So there must always be a battle in the sky before there
is a battle on the earth. Since it is lawful to pray
for the coming of the kingdom, it is lawful also to pray for
the coming of the revolution that shall restore the kingdom.
It is lawful to hope to hear the wind of Heaven in the trees.
It is lawful to pray "Thine anger come on earth as it
is in Heaven."

. . . . .

The great human dogma, then, is that the wind moves the trees.
The great human heresy is that the trees move the wind.
When people begin to say that the material circumstances have
alone created the moral circumstances, then they have prevented
all possibility of serious change. For if my circumstances
have made me wholly stupid, how can I be certain even that I
am right in altering those circumstances?

The man who represents all thought as an accident of environment
is simply smashing and discrediting all his own thoughts--
including that one. To treat the human mind as having an ultimate
authority is necessary to any kind of thinking, even free thinking.
And nothing will ever be reformed in this age or country unless
we realise that the moral fact comes first.

For example, most of us, I suppose, have seen in print and heard
in debating clubs an endless discussion that goes on between Socialists
and total abstainers. The latter say that drink leads to poverty;
the former say that poverty leads to drink. I can only wonder at their
either of them being content with such simple physical explanations.
Surely it is obvious that the thing which among the English proletariat
leads to poverty is the same as the thing which leads to drink;
the absence of strong civic dignity, the absence of an instinct
that resists degradation.

When you have discovered why enormous English estates were not long
ago cut up into small holdings like the land of France, you