doctrine by the weakness and limitation of human individuality.

First, then, man can have neither universal knowledge nor a will that contains a truly universal reference. To recommend him to consider the bearings of his action on the whole human race present and to come is to recommend him not to act. To urge universality of interest is to ask him to lose all interest. To demand universal love is to forbid him to devote himself to anyone.

Wer Grosses will, muss sich zusammenraffen :

In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister.1 Now it is idle to pretend that this is the best condition of things we can imagine. A man like Leonardo absorbed both in science and in art is greater and better than the feeble selves of everyday life with their soon-exhausted interests. A love that was at once all-embracing and as intense as our particular affections would be something better than any love we know. To will and act for a world-wide good clearly conceived would be greater and nobler than the intelligent administration of some trifling business. But though we may regret that our ways are not God's ways we cannot alter the fact. For us it will remain a true paradox that we attain our best when we show most plainly our defects. The energetic will, the living interest, the devoted affection exist in us when the bars are most firmly fixed in their places and our personality confined to its narrow but appropriate sphere. It is so with art. That a man can only express himself creatively in a few of the limitless forms of beauty is a misfortune. But his most beautiful products are

1 The lines of Goethe so happily quoted in Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie, p. 290.

reached when he forgets that it is a misfortune which hampers him, and this or that form of art takes his undivided attention; and again in his own chosen province his achievement will have worth in so far as it is a highly individual and peculiar work. Originality may not be the same thing as eccentricity: still less is it the same as mere sincerity. It is not true that the artist is only the voice of universal humanity. His work is the unique expression of a power precious because it is unique. It is useless to tell artists to resemble ordinary people or other artists: so far as they are artists at all they must stand on their differences. A man who saw things with the vision of Velasquez, Raphael, Corot and Degas, all rolled into a chaotic unity, would see nothing at all. We cannot even dream of an experience that would include all these visions and others as well in a vast harmony of artistic power. Certainly we know of no such experience: it is enough if an artist possessing his own vision may also to some extent enter into others. Just so, man cannot love his fellow-beings with indiscriminate intensity: at most he can add to a devotion for one or two some public spirit, and some less passionate yet genuine regard for larger numbers.

Honesty then forces us to admit that our highest good is realized not only in finite personality, as in any case the highest good must be: but in a definite narrowness, a restricted sphere of interest and influence which is involved not in finitude generally but in our sort of finitude. So far is this true that human nature starts back with a certain alarm from the contemplation of a perfect society such as was sketched above. It is something to know that to the end of things finite personality would be a necessary condition of goodness: that to the

end of things the highest good would consist in the relations of persons to persons. But we return from this heaven to earth not merely to gain greater concreteness in an ethical view, but also because we cannot enjoy that rarefied atmosphere for long. Omniscience, infinite good will, virtual omnipotence, are ornaments too grand for us, and we give them up without a murmur. Almost against our better judgement we find that we like a world in which there are not only a number of persons but a number . of different and dissimilar persons. When we say' it takes all sorts to make a world' it is not without a feeling of pleasure that such a necessity should exist-that there should be business men as well as artists, sportsmen as well as sentimentalists. We should be a little sorry to think that our own favourite author was the favourite of all the world that the English character, however superior it may be, should conquer and bend to its pattern all racial peculiarities: that the town mouse should not make a contrast for better or worse with the country mouse. Even with the minor virtues uniformity is too much for us: it is with real relief that we meet people who lose their trains, and do not know what they have done with their tickets, however annoyed we are if this happens to ourselves. Wherever men exist they form themselves into clubs whose first object and interest seems to be the choosing of costumes, and the performance of rituals, to mark them off from the rest of the world. The instinct of property, in fact, is connected with a broader desire to have some peculiar gift or taste of our own: it is only a very philosophic and therefore very unusual temperament that would not be a little nettled to be told 'there is nothing distinctive about you'. We are not unwilling that these special tasks or gifts should

be exercised in the society of a few others like-minded. Man does not want a solitude: but still less does he want a crowd. Our little society must in some way stand out against the rest of the world, and its necessary privilege is to laugh or rail or wonder at the rest of humanity. Those who speak too glibly of the universal brotherhood of man, those who would make humanity taken collectively as an object of worship, would do well to read again Charles Lamb's Essay on Imperfect Sympathies; or to think what that most loveable of writers might have become if he had found no books biblia-abibla, what Dr. Johnson would have turned into without his aversion for Scotchmen, what would have been made of Shelley if he had liked the field-sports of healthy English squires. Even when the prejudice turns sour, and men are produced like Mr. Wells's botanist living in the middle of concentric circles of hatred, they probably retain a certain secret pleasure that there are so many things in the world to hate. The bearing of these facts on the theory of society I shall examine later. It is enough now to notice that there are these differences of taste and occupation implying real defects, disturbing limitations, which yet we cling to with affection. And the value of imperfection goes deeper still. The existence of pain and evil are indispensable to some of the things we prize most in the world. To exalt courage and endurance above all other excellences is perhaps to make a virtue of necessity. But if there were no pain, no evil in the world, against which the rising courage of humanity might show itself, a chief element of goodness would disappear. Even in contemplation art lives on sorrow as much as joy. What the songs of heaven may be we can scarcely conceive. Occasionally, perhaps more often in music than in other

arts, the mood of sheer happiness, entire exaltation above evil or sorrow, is reached. But even there art does not breathe continually, or long, so pure an atmosphere. The unbroken splendour of the Sanctus in Bach's Mass is not more beautiful than the close of the Crucifixus.

To dwell on these things is needless. It is not at all the object of these remarks to write a Theodicy and prove that all partial evil is universal good. Pain and evil do not always prove the occasion of courage and selfsacrifice, nor does tragic beauty shine through every suffering. But though the world is not all good, it contains some sorts of goodness which do really appear to involve pain and evil. And this is the deeper reason why man is not contented with his own pictures of a perfect world: why, for example, William James was made ill by the thought of the bourgeois paradise in Chautauqua.1

To resume, in the passage from a fictitious perfection to the observed imperfections of this world we find certain elements of value appearing in and depending on these imperfections; and we also find a natural tendency in human thirking to demand the retention of differences that imply defects. Man partly uses his fetters as the condition of a new liberty: partly he clings to them because they are at least his own, not some one else's. When we ask ourselves in this new world of concrete inequalities and perversions what ideal is suggested by personality, we find various suggestions occurring to us that were quite irrelevant on the ideal level we have now

1 'What was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: "Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again"". Talks on Psychology, p. 170.