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from Part 2 - Shaw the dramatist
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
UNDERSHAFT: [startled] A Secularist! Not the least in the world: on the contrary, a confirmed mystic.
(Major Barbara, Collected Plays, vol. III, p. 110)Although very much a participant in the secular fervor of his times, Bernard Shaw, like his creation Andrew Undershaft, was also a confirmed mystic, and gradually this mysticism led him to a long-range solution to human problems, a solution he called the Life Force and a philosophy he called Creative Evolution. Over time, Shaw's plays became less social diatribes and more parables addressing what he saw as the basic human paradox: by the time the human mind begins to achieve its potential, the human body is ready for the dustbin. Creative Evolution, and its concurrent human development, were therefore based on a premise that that which furthered the evolution of the species toward the true development of the intellect was good, and that which hindered it was bad.
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