The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who
will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.

	But who will be proved right? It will only be known later.
Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil,
in the hope of history's absolution.

				   * * *

	But how can the present decide what will be judged truth in the
future? We are doing the work of prophets without their gift. We replaced
vision by logical deductions; but although we all started from the same
point of departure, we came to divergent results. Proof disproved proof,
and finally we had to recur to faith - to axiomatic faith in the rightness
of one's own reasoning.  That is the crucial point. We have thrown all
ballast overboard; only one anchor holds us: faith in one's self.  
Geometry is the purest realization of human reason; but Euclid's axioms
cannot be proved. He who does not believe in them sees the whole building
crash.

				   * * *

	We had descended into the depths, into the formless, anonymous
masses, which at all times constituted the substance of history, and we
were the first to discover her laws of motion. We had discovered the laws
of her inertia, of the slow changing of her molecular structure, and of
her sudden eruptions. That was the greatness of our doctrine. The Jacobins
were moralists; we were empirics. We dug into the primeval mud of history
and there we found her laws. We knew more than ever men have known about
mankind; that is why our revolution succeeded.

				   * * *

	We have learnt history more thoroughly than the others. We differ
from all others in our logical consistency. We know that virtue does not
matter to history, and that crimes remain unpunished; but that every error
had its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation.
Therefore we concentrated all our efforts on preventing error and
destroying the very seeds of it. Never in history has so much power over
the future of humanity been concentrated in so few hands as in our case.
Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations.
Therefore we have to punish wrong ideas as others punish crimes:with
death. We were held for madmen because we followed every thought down to
its final consequence and acted accordingly. We were compared to the
Inquisition because like them, we constantly felt in ourselves the whole
weight of responsibility for the superindividual life to come. We
resembled the great inquisitors in that we persecuted the seeds of evil
not only in men's deeds, but in their thoughts. We admitted no private
sphere, not even inside a man's skull. We lived under the compulsion of
working things out to their final conclusions. Our minds were so tensely
charged that the slightest collision caused a mortal short-circuit. thus
we were fated to mutual destruction.

				   * * *
	
	Vladimir Bogrov has fallen out of the swing. A hundred and fify
years ago, the day of the storming of the Bastille,the European swing,
after long inaction, again started to move. It had pushed of from tyranny
with gusto; with an apparently uncheckable impetus, it had swung up
towards the blue sky of freedom. For a hundred years it had risen higher
and higher into the spheres of liberalism and democracy. But, see,
gradually the pace slowed down, the swing neared the summit and
turning-point of its course; then after a second of immobility it started
the movement backwards, with ever-increasing speed. With the same impetus
as on the way up, the swing carried its passengers back from freedom to
tyranny again. He who had gazed upwards instead of clinging on, became
dizzy and fell out.

	Whoever wishes to avoid becoming dizzy must try to find out the
swing's law of motion. We seem to be faced with a pendulum movement in
history, swinging from absolutism to democracy, from democracy back to
absolute dictatorship.

	The amount of individual freedom which a people may conquer and
keep, depends on the degree of its political maturity. The aforementioned
pendulum motion seems to indicate that the political maturing of the
masses does not follow a continuous rising curve, as does the growing up
of an individual, but that it is governed by more complicated laws.

	The maturity of masses lies in the capacity to recognize their own
interests. This, however, presupposes a certain understanding of the
process of production and distribution of goods. A people's capacity to
govern itself democratically is thus proportionate to its degree of
understanding of the structure and functioning of the whole social body.

	Now, every technical improvement creates a new complication to the
economic apparatus, causes the appearance of new factors and combinations,
which the masses can not penetrate for a time. Every jump of technical
progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step
behind, and thus causes a fall in the political maturity thermometer. It
takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a peculiar level
of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of
affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government, as
it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilisation. Hence the
political maturity of the masses can not be measured by an absolute
figure, but only relatively, i.e, in proportion to the stage of
civilisation at that moment.

	When the level of mass-consciousness catches up with the objective
state of affairs, there follows inevitably the conquest of democray,
either peaceably or by force. Until the next jump of technical
civilization - the discovery of the mechanical loom, for example - again
sets back the masses in a state of relative immaturity, and renders
possible or even necessary the establishment of some form of absolute
leadership.

	This process might be compared to the lifting of a ship through a
lock with several chambers. When it first enters a lock chamber, the ship
is on a low level relative to the capacity of the chamber; it is slowly
lifted up until the water-level reaches its highest point. But this
grandeur is illusory, the next lock chamber is higher still, the levelling
process has to start again. The walls of the lock chambers represent the
objective state of control of natural forces, of the technical
civilisation; the water-level in the lock chamber represents the political
maturity of the masses. It would be meaningless to measure the latter as
an absolute height above sea-level; what counts is the relative height of
the level in the lock chamber.
	
	The discovery of the steam engine started a period of rapid
objective progress, and consequently, of equally rapid subjective
political retrogression. The industrial era is still young in history, the
discrepancy is still great between its extremely complicated economic
structure and the masses' understanding of it. Thus it is comprehensible
that the relative political maturity of the nations in the first half of
the twentieth century is less than it was in 200 B.C. or at the end of the
feusal epoch.

	The mistake in the socialist theory was to believe that the level
of mass-consciousness rose constantly and steadily. Hence its helplessness
before the latest swing of the pendulum, the ideological self-mutilation
of the peoples. We believed that the adaptation of the masses' conception
of the world to changed circumstances was a simple process, which one
could measure in years; whereas, according to all historical experience,
it would have been more suitable to measure by centuries. The people of
Europe are still far from having mentally digested the consequences of the
steam engine. The capitalist system will collapse befre the masses have
understood it.

	As to the Fatherland of the Revolution, the masses there are
governed by the same laws of thought as anywhere else. They have reached
the next higher lock chamber, but they are still on the lowest level of
the new basin. The new economic system which has taken the place of the
old is even more incomprehenible to them. The laborious and painful rise
must start anew. It will probably be several generations before people
manage to understand the new state of affairs, which they themselves
created by the Revolution.

	Until then, however, a democratic form of government is
impossible, and the amount of individual freedom which may be accorded is
even less than in other countries. Until then, our leaders are obliged to
govern as though in empty space. Measured by classical liberal standards,
this is not a pleasant spectacle. Yet all the horror, hypocrisy and
degradation which leap to the eye are merely the visible and inevitable
expressions of the law described above. Woe to the fool and the aesthete
who only ask how and not why. But woe also unto the opposition in a period
of relative immaturity of the masses, such as this.

	In periods of maturity it is the duty and the function of the
opposition to appeal to the masses. In periods of mental immaturity, only
demagogues invoke the ``higher judgement of the people''. In such
situations the opposition has two alternatives: to seize the power by a
coup d'etat, without being able to count on the support of the masses; or
in mute despair to throw themselves out of the swing - `` to die in
silence''.

	There is a third chance which is no less consistent and which in
our country has been developed into a system: the denial and suppression
of one's own conviction when there is no prospect of materialising it. As
the only moral criterion we recognise is that of social utility, the
public disavowal of one's own conviction in order to remain in the Party
is more honourablethan the quixotism of carrying on a hopeless struggle.

	Questions of personal pride; prejudices such as exist elsewhere
against certain forms of self-abasement; personal feelings of tiredness,
disgust and shame - are to be cut off root and branch...

				   * * *
	
	Gletkin's personality had gained such power over him that even his
triumphs were turned into defeats. Massive and expressionless, he sat
there, the brutal embodiment of the State which owed its very existence to
the Rubashovs and Ivanovs. Flesh of their flesh, grown independent and
become insensible. Had not Gletkin acknowledged himself to be the
spiritual heir of Ivanov and the old intelligentsia? Rubashov repeated to
himself for the hundredth time that Gletkin and the new Neanderthalers
were merely completing the work of the generation with the numbered heads.
That the same doctrine became so inhuman in their mouths, had, as it were,
merely climatic reasons. When Ivanov had used the same arguments, there
was yet an undertone in his voice left by the past, by the remembrance of
the world which had finished. One can deny one's childhood, but not erase
it.  Ivanov had trailed his past after him to the end; that was what gave
everything he said an undertone of frivolous melancholy; that was why
Gletkin called him a cynic. The Gletkins had nothing to erase; they need
not deny their past, because they had none. They were born without
umbilical cord, without frivolity, without melancholy.

				   * * *

	With what right do we who are quitting the scene look with such
superiority on the Gletkins? There must have been laughter amidst the apes
when the Neanderthaler first appeared on earth. The highly civilised apes
swung gracefully from bough to bough; the Neanderthaler was uncouth and
bound to the earth. The apes, saturated and playful, lived in
sophisticated playfulness, or caught fleas in philosophical contemplation;  
the Neanderthaler trampled gloomily through the world, banging around with
clubs. The apes looked down on him amusedly from their tree tops and threw
nuts at him. Sometimes horror seized them; they ate fruits and tender
plants with refinement; the Neaderthaler devoured raw meat, he slaughtered
animals and his fellows. He cut down trees which had always stood, moved
rocks from their time-hallowed place, transgressed against every law and
tradition of the jungle. He was uncouth, cruel, without animal dignity-
from the point of view of the highly cultivated apes, a barbaric relapse
of history.  The last surviving chimpanzees still turn up their noses at
the sight of a human being...

				   * * *

	For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on the
earth. The Party had taught one how to do it. The infinite was a
politically suspect quantity, the `I' a suspect quality. The Party did not
recognize its existence. The definition of an individual was: a multitude
of one million divided by one million.

				   * * *

	He was a man who had lost his shadow, released from every bond. He
followed every thought to its last conclusion and acted in accordance with
it to the very end. The hours which remained to him belonged to the silent
partner, whose realm started just where logical thought ended. He had
christened it `the grammatical fiction' with that shamefacedness about the
first person singular which the Party had inculcated in its disciples.

				   * * *


	``I have only one justification before you, Citizen Judges; that I
did not make it easy for myself. Vanity and the last remains of pride
whispered to me: Die in silence, say nothing; or die with a noble gesture,
with a moving swansong on your lips; pour out your heart and challenge
your accusers.  That would have been easier for an old rebel, but I
overcame the temptation. With that my task is ended. I have paid; my
account with history is settled.''

				   * * *

	He listened with a feeling of childlike shame and then knocked
again:

	2-4...

	He listened, and again repeated the same sequence of signs. The
wall remained mute. He had never consciously tapped the word `I'. Probably
never at all. He listened. The knocking died without resonance.

	He continued pacing through his cell. Since the bell of silence
had sunk over him, he was puzzling over certain questions to which he
would have liked to find an answer before it was too late. They were
rather naive questions; they concerned the nature of suffering, or, more
exactly, the difference between suffering that made sense and senseless
suffering. Obviously only such suffering made sense, as was inevitable;
that is, as was rooted in biological fatality. On the other hand, all
suffering with a social origin was accidental, hence pointless and
senseless. The sole object of revolution was the abolition of senseless
suffering. But it had turned out that the removal of this second kind of
suffering was only possible at the price of a temporary enormous increase
in the sum total of the first. So the question now ran: Was such an
operation justified? Obviously it was, if one spoke in the abstract of
`mankind'; but applied to `man' in the singular, to the cipher 2-4, the
real human being of bone and flesh and blood and skin, the principle led
to absurdity. As a boy, he had believed that in working for the Party he
would find an answer to all questions of this sort. The work had lasted
forty years, and right at the start he had forgotten the question for
whose sake he had embarked on it. Now the forty years were over, and he
returned to the boy's original perplexity. The Party had taken all he had
to give and had not supplied him with the answer. And neither did the
silent partner, whose magic name he had tapped on the wall of the empty
cell. He was deaf to direct questions, however urgent and desperate they
might be.

	And yet there were ways of approach to him. Sometimes he would
respond unexpectedly to a tune, or even the memory of a tune, or of the
folded hands of the Pietà, or of certain scenes of his childhood.  As if a
tuning-fork had been struck, there would be answering vibrations, and once
this had started a state would be produced which the mystics called
"ecstacy"  and saints "contemplation"; the greatest and soberest of modern
psychologists had recognized this state as a fact and called it the
"oceanic sense."  And, indeed, one's personality dissolved as a grain of
salt in the sea; but at the same time the infinite sea seemed to be
contained in the grain of salt.  The grain could no longer be localized in
time and space.  It was a state in which thought lost its direction and
started to circle, like the compass needle at the magnetic pole; until
finally it cut loose from its axis and travelled freely in space, like a
bunch of light in the night; and until it seemed that all thoughts and
sensations, even pain and joy itself, were only the spectrum lines of the
same ray of light, disintegrating in the prism of consciousness.

                                   * * *

	The Party denied the free will of the individual - and at the same
time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to
choose between two alternatives - and at the same time it demanded that he
should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish
good and evil - and at the same time spoke pathetically of guilt and
treachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a
wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could
not be stopped or influenced - and the Party demanded that the wheel
should revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There was
somewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out.

				   * * *