Reflection is Destructive

So long as scientists and philosophers remain a caste, even the problem of morality, that is, of behaviour, will remain for them one of cognition and not of activity, a subject for study and not for practical application, something that just happens rather than something that must be done and, furthermore, done not by individuals but collectively. So long as scholars are not prepared to become a Commission for the elaboration of a plan of common action (and without this mankind cannot act according to a single plan as a single being, which is to say, attain adulthood), the contradiction between the reflective and the instinctive cannot be resolved. Failure to accept action as their duty confines the learned class to reflection, while the rest of the human race, uncommitted to any single task, continues to act instinctively and remains the tool of a blind force. Reflection can have only a destructive effect, since it does not restore what is being destroyed. 'To be a conscious agent of the evolution of the universe' means to be the conscious tool of mutual constraint (struggle) and elimination (death). It means subjecting the moral to the physical, whereas even in the present state of disunity and inactive knowledge men still express, one way or another, moral aspirations, though they yield to necessity because of their physical weakness. Only when discord and inaction are recognised as temporary will we be able to imagine the magnitude and meaning of supreme bliss.