@spendius,
Quote:The wonderful age in which we live--this twentieth century with its
X-rays that enable us to see through the skin and flesh of men, and to
study the working of their organs and muscles and nerves--has brought a
new spirit into the world, a spirit of fidelity to fact, and with it a
new and higher ideal of life and of art, which must of necessity change
and transform all the conditions of existence, and in time modify the
almost immutable nature of man. For this new spirit, this love of the
fact and of truth, this passion for reality will do away with the
foolish fears and futile hopes which have fretted the childhood of our
race, and will slowly but surely establish on broad foundations the
Kingdom of Man upon Earth. For that is the meaning and purpose of the
change which is now coming over the world. The faiths and convictions of
twenty centuries are passing away and the forms and institutions of a
hundred generations of men are dissolving before us like the baseless
fabric of a dream. A new morality is already shaping itself in the
spirit; a morality based not on guess-work and on fancies; but on
ascertained laws of moral health; a scientific morality belonging not to
statics, like the morality of the Jews, but to dynamics, and so fitting
the nature of each individual person. Even now conscience with its
prohibitions is fading out of life, evolving into a more profound
consciousness of ourselves and others, with multiplied incitements to
wise giving. The old religious asceticism with its hatred of the body is
dead; the servile acceptance of conditions of life and even of natural
laws is seen to be vicious; it is of the nobility of man to be insatiate
in desire and to rebel against limiting conditions; it is the property
of his intelligence to constrain even the laws of nature to the
attainment of his ideal.
Frank Harris: The Man Shakespeare.
To get some idea of what Mr Harris, the inventor of tabloid journalism, meant by "...it is of the nobility of man to be insatiate
in desire and to rebel against limiting conditions", his autobiography, My Life and Loves, is as good a guide as any apart from one's own sense of these things as a virile young man who gets about a fair bit and who enjoys reading an account, mostly unverified, of a life dedicated to the above tasks and providing ample justification for doing so.
The book penetrated the USA through the cracks and doors left slightly ajar. By the time it was okay to read it everybody who mattered had read it.
Whatever ID looks like it basically represents the "limiting conditions" which, in a proper theological organisation and operation, are not fixed but simply need careful consideration before the aspiring upstart ideas-men beating on the doors are let loose on the great unwashed and prematurely ejaculating like the garden hose when you turn the tap on and before you get to the business end its wapping back and forth in a pattern which science has not got to the bottom of yet and you get a soaking.
(That was a pretty good metaphor even if I say so myself.)
