From Begin Here: A War-Time Essay (1940) by Dorothy L. Sayers.

In times like the present, when we see the principles we have acknowledged attacked, and their foundations undermined; when doubts about the rationality and purpose of the universe have been sown in our minds; when we are led to see ourselves more and more as the helpless puppets of world-processes which we do not understand; and when we are in addition fatigued and harassed by constant wars and upheavals, we are desperately tempted to try and call a halt to the march of events. “Give us stability!” we cry; “we do not want this perpetual change and disturbance; we want stability.”

But there are two kinds of stability. The spinning top is stable so long as it keeps moving; when it stops, it falls into inertia. Let us face the facts courageously. Unless the democracies keep moving, and unless they can preserve the vital balance of all their principles, they will become inert and useless, and will be swept up and carted away by the next moving thing that comes along. We are like a man riding a bicycle on a tight-rope across the Niagara Falls: we cannot go back, we dare not stop, we must go forward and keep our balance if we are not to fall to destruction.

That being so (and we shall probably feel better if we once accept the situation and resolve to deal with it energetically), it may be helpful to look once again at the various conceptions of man as shown to us by historical development and see whether we cannot form some plan for knitting them up again into that Whole Man who is the full expression of each and every one of us. The new Whole Man will be, or ought to be, an advance upon the original conception of him, because we now know more about the various aspects of him than we did in the Middle Ages. It was doubtless a good thing that we should thus, as it were, take him to pieces and have a look at the works, but the time has now come, I think, for putting the pieces together, with any improvements that our new knowledge may suggest. This is, indeed, a perfectly scientific way of proceeding: from synthesis to analysis, and from analysis to a new synthesis – so we need not feel that there is anything unpractical or mysterious or “idealistic” about it.