“They do not by any means always fail. In all concerted action there must be a plan. Herzl is certainly a man with a plan.”
“Yes but it’s different; his idea is his plan. It isn’t clever . And now that it is here it seems so simple. Why was it never put forward before?”
“The greatest ideas are always simple; though not in their resultants. This dream however, has always been present with Jews.”
“Of course. The Zionist Movement, coming now, when it is most wanted, is not altogether Herzl. It’s that strange thing, the thing that makes you stare, in history. A sort of shape …”
“It is the collective pressure of life; an unseen movement. But if you feel this what now becomes of your individualism? Eh?” He chuckled his delight … passing so easily and leisurely to personal things.
“Oh the shape doesn’t affect the individual , in himself. There’s something behind all those outside things that goes on independently of them, something much more wonderful.”
“You are wrong. What you call the shape, affects most profoundly every individual in spite of himself.”
“But he must be an individual to be affected at all, and no two people are affected in the same way … after this evening I’m more of an individualist than before. It is relief to know that science is a smaller kind of truth than philosophy. The real difficulty is not between science and religion at all, but between religion and philosophy . Philosophy seems to think science assumes too much to begin with and can never get any further than usefulness.”
“Science can afford to smile at this.”
“And that religion is philosophically unsound, though modern religious controversy is metaphysical.”