If we go back to the beginning of things, literature, needless to say, is a development of ordinary speech. It is speech which has been made permanent, partly, indeed, by oral tradition, but mainly by the art of writing. Without speech no human co-operation, other than the rudest, would be possible. Some men at least must speak so as to organize the tasks of others, and the latter must understand speech so as to do what the former bid them. When the Deity determined to confound the builders of Babel, or, in other words, to render co-operative work impossible, he did not cut off their hands, but he virtually took speech away from them, by rendering the language of each unintelligible to all the rest. Moreover, in the case of tasks the nature of which is highly complex, it is necessary not only that the organizers should make use of speech, but also that what they speak should systematically be written down. The writing down, indeed, is often the most important part of the matter, as in the case of an Act of Parliament or of the delicate and elaborate formulÆ on which depends the production of chemicals or of great ships.

If written speech, then, of kinds such as these is literature, literature is obviously not antithetic to action, but is, on the contrary, action in one of its most important forms. To state the case thus, however, is stating no more than half of it. As a matter of fact, laws and chemical formulÆ, however carefully written, are not what is meant by literature in the common sense of the word. Though the writing down of speech may in such cases be a form of action, it does not follow that all such written speech is literature. Let us compare the compositions of a child, whether in prose or verse, with a page out of the Nautical Almanac or a manual of household medicine. The child's compositions may intrinsically have no literary value, but they nevertheless represent genuine attempts at literature. A page from the Nautical Almanac or the manual of household medicine may be, for certain purposes, of the highest value imaginable, but the test of literary beauty would be the last test we should apply to them.

What, then, is the primary difference between written words that are literature and written words that are not? The primary difference relates to the objects at which severally the writers aim or the motive by which they are impelled to write. The child writes solely because literary composition is a pleasure to him, as for the sake of a similar pleasure another child takes to a piano. The astronomer and the doctor write to help men in navigating ships or mothers in dosing babies. Between written language which is not literature and written language which is the initial difference is this: that for the writers written language is, in the first case, something which it is not in the second. In the first case, the writer's concern with language, and the sole interest which written language has for him, are things which have no dependence on the merits of written language as such, except in so far as it is a means of accomplishing ulterior objects, with which otherwise the mere merits of language have nothing at all to do. Sound injunctions to a nurse, provided that their meaning was clear, would have far greater value in a hospital than mistaken injunctions written with a grace or majesty worthy of Plato or Tacitus. In the second case, writing is a feat the successful achievement of which is, for the writer, an object and a pleasure in itself; and how far success is achieved by him depends not alone on the pleasure which he derives from his own performances personally, but also, and we may say mainly, on the quantity of kindred pleasure which his writing communicates to his readers.

These observations become more and more true and pungent in proportion as language becomes a more complex instrument, its progress resembling the evolution of an organ from a shepherd's pipe. As it thus progresses, its delicate possibilities of melody, metaphor, and subtle emphasis increase, and masters of the literary art enchant with ever new surprises multitudes who have no capacity for the literary art themselves. So far, then, as literature is in this sense literature for its own sake, the contrast between literature and action is, with certain exceptions, justified. Exceptions, however, to this rule exist, and these, briefly stated, are as follows. When a writer writes a book—let us say, for example, a novel—the object of which is to give pleasure, his primary object in writing it may be either to please himself or else to make money by ministering to the taste of others. The importance of this distinction has been clearly brought out by Tolstoy, who defines art, and literary art in particular, as a means by which the artist contrives to arouse in others emotions and interests which he has experienced in his own person. Such being the case, then, there are, says Tolstoy, many works which partake of the nature of literature, but which are not examples of true literary art. Such, according to him, are our modern detective novels, or any novels the interests of which depend on the solution of a mystery, the reason being that the writer is acquainted with the mystery at starting, and experiences himself no emotion whatever with regard to it. His sole object is to titillate an emotion in others which he does not himself share, and from which, indeed, he is, by the nature of the case, precluded. This is a criticism which might doubtless be pressed too far; but it is within limits fruitful, and, bearing it here in mind, we may say that literature, if we take it in its pure form and regard it as an end in itself, is language, as used to express the personal emotions or personal convictions of the writer, and is raised by him to such a pitch of beauty, of strength or of delicacy that it is a source of pleasure to large classes of mankind apart from all thoughts of relationship, if any, to ulterior objects.

Thus pure literature, as legitimately contrasted with action, is a matter of great interest for a large number of people whom nobody would describe as literary or as persons of letters otherwise; and I may, therefore, say something of pure literature as estimated more particularly by myself.

Let me begin with prose, which, merely as a pleasurable art, instinct has urged me, from my earliest days, to cultivate. Of what good prose is I have always had clear notions; and, whether I have been successful in my efforts to achieve it or not, my personal experience of the process may not be without some interest. My own experience is that the composition of good prose—prose that seems good to myself—is a process which requires a very great deal of leisure. True excellence in prose, so I have always felt, involves many subtle qualities which are appreciable by the reader through their final effects alone, which leave no trace of the efforts spent in producing them, but which without such effort could rarely be produced at all.

As examples of these qualities I may mention a melody not too often resonant, which captivates the reader's attention, and is always producing a mood in him conducive to a favorable reception of what the writer is anxious to convey. Next to such melody I should put a logical adaptation of stress, or of emphasis in the construction of sentences, which corresponds in detail to the movements of the reader's mind—a halt in the words occurring where the mind halts, a new rapidity in the words when the mind, satisfied thus far, is prepared to resume its progress. To these qualities, as essential to perfection in prose, I might easily add others; but these are so complex and comprehensive that they practically imply the rest.

With regard, then, to these essentials, the practice which I have had to adopt in my own efforts to produce them has been more or less as follows. The general substance of what I proposed to say I have written out first in the loosest language possible, without any regard to melody, to accuracy, or even to correct grammar. I have then rewritten this matter, with a view, not to any verbal improvement, but merely to the rearrangement of ideas, descriptions, or arguments, so that this may accord with the sequence of questions, expectations, or emotions which are likely, by a natural logic, to arise in the reader's mind—nothing being said too soon, nothing being said too late, and nothing (except for the sake of deliberate emphasis) being said twice over. The different paragraphs would now be like so many stone blocks which had been placed in their proper positions so as to form a polylithic frieze, but each of which still remained to be carved, as though by a sculptor or lapidary, so as to be part of a continuous pattern or a series of connected figures. My next task would be to work at them one by one, till each was sculptured into an image of my own minute intentions. The task of thus carving each and fitting it to its next-door neighbors has always been, merely for its own sake, exceedingly fascinating to myself, but it has generally been long and slow. Most of my own books, when their general substance had been roughly got into order by means of several tentative versions, were, paragraph by paragraph, written again five or six times more, the corrections each time growing more and more minute, and finally the clauses and wording of each individual sentence were transposed, or rebalanced or reworded, whenever such processes should be necessary, in order to capture some nuance of meaning which had previously eluded me as a bird eludes a fowler.

As an example of this process I may mention a single sentence which occurs in my little book on Cyprus. It is a sentence belonging to a description of certain morning scenes—of dewy plains, with peasants moving across them, and here and there a smoke wreath arising from burning weeds. The effect of these scenes in some poignant way was primitive, and I was able at once to reproduce it by saying that the peasants were moving like figures out of the Book of Genesis. I felt, however, that this effect was not produced by the groups of peasants only. I felt that somehow—I could not at first tell how—some part in producing it was played by the smoke wreaths also. At last I managed to capture the suggestion, at first subconscious only, which had so far been eluding me. I finished my original description by adding the following words, "The smoke-wreaths were going up like the smoke of the first sacrifice."

It may be objected that prose built up in this elaborate way loses as much as it gains, because it is bound to lose the charm and the convincing force of spontaneity. This may be so in some cases, but it is not so in all. I have found myself that, so far as my own works are concerned, the passages which are easiest to read are precisely those which it has been most laborious to write. And for this, it seems to me, there is a very intelligible reason. Half of the interests and emotions which make up the substance of life are more or less subconscious, and are, for most men, difficult to identify. One of the functions of pure literature is to make the subconscious reveal itself. It is to make men know what they are, in addition to what spontaneously they feel themselves to be, but feel only, without clear comprehension of it. As soon as a writer, at the cost of whatever labor, manages to make these spontaneities, otherwise subconscious, intelligible, the spontaneity of the processes described by him adds itself at last to his description.

A signal example of this fact may be found, not in prose, but in love poems. Most people can fall in love. It takes no trouble to do so, whatever trouble it may bring them. If any human processes are spontaneous, falling in love is one of them. Most lovers feel more than they know until great love poetry explains it to them what they are; but great love poems are great, not because they are composed spontaneously, but because they express spontaneities which are essentially external to themselves. In other words, the achievement of perfection, whether in prose or poetry, is comparable to the task of a piano tuner, who may spend a whole morning in tightening or relaxing the strings, but who knows at once, when he gets them, the minutely precise tones which the laws of music demand.

Whether every reader will agree with me as to these questions or not, they are, at all events, examples of questions purely literary, which are in themselves captivating for large numbers of people, without any reference to ulterior, or what are called practical, objects. To these questions I may add a few others, which have been specially captivating to myself.

One of them is the use of metaphor as an immemorial literary device, especially in the case of poetry. What is the psychology of metaphor? Let us take an instance from Tennyson, who in one of his poems speaks, with very vivid effect, of Mediterranean bays as colored like "the peacock's neck." The color of the bay is at once made present to the reader's mind. But why? A discussion of this question occurs in a dialogue between two of the characters in my novel The Old Order Changes. The poet, urges one of them, might, if describing a peacock, have said with equal effect that the peacock's neck was colored like a Mediterranean bay. How is it that we gain anything by comparing one equally familiar thing to another? The secret of the use of metaphor in the poet's art is, says the speaker, this. When the mind is at rest its surface is alive with vivid images which have settled on it like sea birds on a rock, but the moment any one of these detects an approach on our part, in order that we may examine it carefully, its wings are spread, and in a flash it is gone. When, however, we use a simile in order to describe something which is obviously our main concern (say the color of a Mediterranean bay), the thing which we are anxious to describe acts as a kind of stalking-horse, which enables us to approach and capture the thing which we use as an illustration (say the neck of a peacock) before the peacock so much as suspects our neighborhood. We have it alive before us, with all its feathers glittering, and these throw a new light on objects which our direct touch might have frightened away beyond the confines of our field of vision. The more vivid of the two objects communicates its color to the less vivid.

Two other purely literary questions are discussed in The Veil of the Temple, the first of these being as follows. One of the speakers calls attention to a criticism which is often and justly made with reference to many, and even to the best of novels, that, while the minor characters are drawn with the utmost skill, the heroes (such as most of Scott's) have often no characters at all. The reason, he says, is that, in most cases, the hero is not so much an individual, with characteristics peculiar to himself, as a certain point of view, from which all the other characters and incidents of the story are drawn. Or else, if some of these are, as very often happens, not drawn from the point of view of the hero, they are drawn from the point of view of some other ideal spectator, on whose position, moral or local, the whole perspective of the story, mental or ocular, depends. Let us take, for example, a typical opening scene of a kind proverbially frequent in the novels of G. P. R. James. Such scenes were proverbially described very much as follows: "To the right lay a gray wall, which formed, to all appearance, the boundary of some great sheep tract. To the left was a wood of larches. Between these was a road, showing so few signs of use that it might have been a relic of some almost forgotten world. Proceeding along this road on a late October evening might have been seen three horsemen, of imperfectly distinguishable, yet vaguely sinister, aspect." In the absence of an ideal spectator, who is tacitly identified with the novelist, his hero, or his reader, such a description would mean very little more than nothing. There would be no left or right unless for a supposed spectator standing in a particular place and looking in a particular direction. The aspect of the horsemen could not be sinister or indistinguishable unless there were an assumed man whose eyes were unable to distinguish it.

The argument here in question will carry us on to certain kindred problems, connected likewise with the novelist's art, which are these: The necessary assumption of the author as ideal spectator being given, a question arises with regard to the range of vision which, in his capacity of spectator, the novelist professes to possess. Many novelists mar the effect of their work—and among these Thackeray is notable—by adopting an attitude which in this respect is constantly vacillating. Sometimes it is one of omniscience, sometimes of blind perplexity. At one time he describes the inmost thoughts of his characters which are suffered or pursued in secret, as though he could see through everything. At another time he will startle the reader with some such question as this: "Who shall dare to say—I certainly cannot—what at that solemn moment the lad's real reflections were?" A partial escape from the sense of unreality which alternations like these produce is to be found in the method which many novelists have adopted—namely, that of dividing the story into so many separate parts, these being told in succession by so many different characters, each recording events as wholly seen from the point of his own unchanged perspective. Such is the method adopted by Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White, for example. The danger of this artifice is that it tends to be too apparent. The most logically complete escape from the difficulties which we are here glancing at is to be found, no doubt, in the method of autobiography in a single and undivided form; unless indeed the assumption of absolute omniscience on the author's part can be used with a rigid consistency which it very rarely exhibits.

Another question of a purely literary kind, reflection on which is to me, at least, pleasurable (though many persons of literary taste may, perhaps, regard it as a bore), is the relation of modern prosody to ancient, and more particularly to Latin. It has always seemed to me that the lengthening and shortening of syllables according to their position, as happens in classical Latin, with regard to the syllables that follow them, must always have corresponded with the stresses or absence of stress which would naturally be made apparent by the voice of an ideal reciter; and to me, as to some other people, the question has proved amusing of how far in English verse Latin prosody could be reproduced. Many attempts have been made at deciding this question by experiments. The most remarkable of these are two which were made by Tennyson. One of them, called "Hendecasyllabics," is little more than a trick played with extreme skill, and in no serious sense does it merit the name of poetry. The other, "An Ode to Milton," is no less charming as a poem than as a conquest over technical difficulties. Let us take the first stanza:

Here the stresses which the meaning of the English verse demands fall exclusively on syllables which would, according to Latin prosody, be long; but there are one or two syllables which in Latin verse would be long (such as "of" in the second line) which invite no stress in the English—which do not, indeed, admit of it—and must for that reason be treated by an English reader as short. Aiming at greater completeness, but otherwise in a manner very much less ambitious, I attempted an experiment of a similar kind myself, consisting of a few hexameters, in which not only do the natural stresses fall, and fall exclusively, on syllables which in Latin would be long, but in which also every syllable would be emphasized by an English reciter with a natural stress corresponding to it. These hexameters were a metrical amplification of an advertisement which figures prominently in the carriages of the Tube Railway, proclaiming the charms of a suburb called Sudbury Town, and remarkable for its surrounding pine woods. The moment I read the words "Sudbury Town" I recognized in them the beginning of a hexameter classically pure; and after many abortive attempts I worked out a sequel—a very short one—as follows:

The moral of such experiments seems to me to be this: that even if ancient prosody, such as that of the Virgilian hexameter, could be naturalized completely in English, the emotional effect of the meter would in the two languages be different, and that Anglo-Latin hexameters would, with very rare exceptions, mean no more than successes in a graceful and very difficult game. It is indeed for that very reason that I mention this question here. It is a question of pure literature or of purely literary form. As such, it has proved fascinating to many highly cultivated persons; yet even by such persons themselves it will not be seriously regarded as much better than trivial. But this is not all. From this consideration we are led on to another. If the problems of Anglo-Classical prosody are trivial even for those who happen to find them entertaining, may not all literature, even the highest, when cultivated for its own sake only, be, from certain points of view, a triviality also?

According to differences of taste and temperament, different persons will answer this question differently. Since I am not entering here on any formal argument, but am merely recording my own individual views, I should, speaking for myself, answer this question in the affirmative. I may, indeed, confess that the mere artist in literature—the person for whom literature, as such, is the main interest in life—is a person for whom secretly I have always felt some contempt, even though, for myself personally, this magical triviality has been one of life's chief seductions.

The content and significance of such a feeling are presented in concrete form by such institutions as authors' or writers' clubs. In London and in other capitals so many of these have been established, and continue to flourish, that they obviously perform certain useful and welcome functions; but my own criticism would be that to call them clubs for "authors" or "writers" is a misnomer which fails to particularize the real basis of membership. In the modern world, no doubt, all writers, merely as writers, have certain interests in common. They have, in the first place, to get their works published, and the business of publication is a very complex process, which has necessarily a legal and financial side. Questions are inevitably involved of financial loss or gain, and even writers who are indifferent to profit, and are ready to bear a loss, will desire to be treated fairly. They may be ready to bear a loss, but not a loss which is inequitable, and if any gain should ensue, they will desire an equitable share of it. In connection with such matters, authors' clubs may perform many useful offices for their members. In so far, however, as their functions are limited to offices such as these the proper name for them would be not clubs, but agencies. On the other hand, in the modern world authorship to a great extent is a systematic writing for journals. It has to be performed, in respect both of time and other conditions, in accordance with strict arrangements between the writers themselves and the officials by whom, whether as editors or owners, these journals are managed. For this reason persons who practice journalism—daily journalism in particular—will probably be persons more or less similar in their habits, and clubs for admission to which the main qualification consists in the fact of authorship may provide them with special conveniences which they one and all desire. But for persons whose literary pursuits are carried on in isolation, and who aim at expressing by authorship no thoughts or no sentiments but their own, it seems to me that a club for authors or writers as such represents a conception as wrong as would that of a club for speakers as such or for politicians as such. What bond of union would there be between a Tory and a ferocious Democrat if they neither of them put pen to paper—if they were not authors at all? They would keep, so far as was possible, to different sides of the street. Why, then, should they wish to meet in a club coffee room and lunch at adjacent tables, simply because each, besides holding opinions absolutely odious to the other, should, instead of keeping them to himself, endeavor to disseminate them by writing among as many of his fellow creatures as was possible?

It may be said that two such men might very well wish to do so because, though what each expressed was odious to the other in itself, each was a consummate master of literary art in expressing it, and each admired, and was aware of, the presence of this technical mastery in the other. Now, so far as it goes, this, in numerous cases, may be true. Indeed, such an admission is the very point from which the present argument started. Pure literature, as such, is, no doubt, susceptible of consummate beauties, in their natural admiration of which men who are otherwise the bitterest adversaries may agree. What does this admission cover? It applies, in my own opinion, to minor literature only, though masterpieces of minor literature may be in their own way supreme, as Keats has shown us in such poems as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," but, as applied to literature in its higher and greater forms, the admission fails to be true, because it fails to be adequate. A poem by Keats may be admirable so far as it goes, but really great literature, such as Goethe's "Faust," for example, would possess but a minor value unless there were at the back of it something that is more than literature. In the case of a poem like "Endymion" the poem is greater than the man who writes it. In the case of a poem like "Faust" the man is greater than the poem. Behind the poet stands the man of profound reflection, the man of the world, the philosopher, the passionate or disillusioned lover. He is all of these before he is a literary artist. His writing is only the vehicle by which he communicates what he is in all these capacities to others, and so leaves a practical impression on the thoughts and emotions of the world.

And what is true of verse is more obviously true of prose. Of all prose works which have captured attention by their mere merits as literature, no better example can be given than the great masterpiece of Gibbon. But though Gibbon may be read by many for the sake of his mere literary charm, his place in the world as a great writer depends but in a secondary way on this charm in itself. He lives because this charm was used by him to convey the results of research so penetrating and comprehensive, and guided by a mind so sagacious and powerful, that for the most part these results have stood the test of criticism, however keen and hostile; and in accomplishing this feat Gibbon has rendered a service which is still indispensable to the historical students and historical thinkers of to-day, whereas otherwise his merely literary merits would have been merits displayed in vain or relegated to a literary museum which few men cared to enter.

This conception of pure literature as written language which is mainly appreciated for its own sake, and is for that reason in a relative sense trivial, no doubt widens out again when we come to consider the fact that emotion of some kind is, in the last resort, the one thing which gives value to life. But the fact remains that all the desirable emotions are determined by things which are not in themselves emotions, such as knowledge, intellectual beliefs, and the laws, economic and otherwise, which alone render a civilized society possible; and even the greatest of merely literary charms make great literature only in so far as they endow mankind with fundamental things like these.

Throughout these memoirs there has been constant allusion to the relation borne by literary expression to life in the case of the author himself. I have said already that for mere literature as such, and for its practitioners, I have from my youth onward had a certain feeling of contempt, and I now may explain once more what, at least in my own case, such a feeling really means. It means, not that mere literature at its best is not beautiful and delightful, but that it must, in order to be worthy of a serious man's devotion, be a mere part of some whole, the other part of which is incomparably the larger of the two. It means that literature, in order to be great literature, must at the same time be practically a form of action. I have no ambition to impose this opinion on others. I would merely record it as an opinion on which, since the ending of my early days at Oxford, I have myself by instinct acted. Whatever I have written I have written with one or other ulterior object, to which the mere pleasure of literary opposition as such has been altogether subordinate. Of the nature of these objects I have said enough already, but I may once again define them.

One of them relates to religion, to the quality of the lives and the loves of ordinary men and women as affected by it, and also to metaphysics and science, in so far as they leave, or do not leave, the doctrines of religion credible.

The second of these objects relates to the existing conditions of social and industrial life, more especially to those suggested by the loosely used word "Labor," and the frantic fallacies with regard to these by which the ideas of extreme reformers are vitiated, and from which, instead of meeting them, too many Conservatives shrink in ignominious terror.

With regard to religion, philosophy, science, and the widespread ideas underlying what is vaguely described as Socialism, I have endeavored to discredit, or else to modify, the views which, for something like fifty years, leaders who are called "advanced" have been making more and more widely popular. I have resorted for this purpose to the methods of fiction and of formal argument. The implication of all the writings by which I have attempted to do this is that the mischief, religious, social, and political, which "advanced" thought has done may in time, by a rational development of conservative thought, be undone, and the true faiths be revived on which the sanctities, the stabilities, and the civilization of the social order depend.

I have nevertheless always myself recognized, ever since early enthusiasm felt the chill of experience, that such a counter-revolution must be slow, nor have I ever underrated the obstacles which certain false idealisms now at work in the world may oppose to it. On the contrary, I have always felt that no man is fit to encounter an adversary's case successfully unless he can make it for the moment his own, unless he can put it more forcibly than the adversary could put it for himself, and takes account, not only of what the adversary says, but also of the best that he might say, if only he had chanced to think of it.

On this principle I have endeavored myself to act. The process, however, may in some cases be not without the seeming danger that the converter, in thus arming himself for his task, may perform it somewhat too thoroughly, and end by being himself perverted. He must, at all events, go near to experiencing a sense of such perversion dramatically. Of this fact I have myself provided an example in one of my writings, to which I just now alluded, and which herein differs from the rest. Having elsewhere argued in defense of religious faith, as though feeling that, through argument and knowledge, mankind will some day recover it, I wrote the work here in question as a man might write who had himself made a final—even a complacent—surrender to the forces which he had dreamed of dissipating.

This work is a poem called "Lucretius on Life and Death," and was partly suggested by the vogue acquired by Fitzgerald's rendering of the RubÁiyÁt of Omar Khayyam. The doctrine of Omar is, as everybody knows, a doctrine of voluptuous pessimism. There is no life other than this. Let us kiss and drink while it lasts. The doctrine of Lucretius is to a certain extent similar, but is sterner and more intellectual in its form. I accordingly selected from his great scientific poem, which contains in embryo all the substance of the modern doctrine of evolution, those passages which bear on the meaning of man's existence. I arranged these in logical order, and translated or paraphrased them in the meter with which Fitzgerald has familiarized and fascinated the English ear, so that the philosophy of the Persian and the Roman might be reduced to something like a common denominator. Lucretius is so far a pessimist that, under existing conditions, human life is for him no more than a hideous nightmare; but he is so far an optimist that he looks upon all this misery as due to one removable cause, this cause being the prevalence of one mistaken belief, which a true scientific philosophy will altogether eradicate. The belief in question is a belief in a personal God, who is offended by the very nature of man, and who watches with a wrathful eye by the deathbed of each human creature, in order to begin a torture of him which will last for all eternity. Man's true savior, Lucretius argues, is science, which makes this belief ridiculous by showing clearly that all individual things—human beings included—are nothing but atomic aggregations, which, having been formed for a moment, dissolve and disappear for ever. How, then, can any avenging God be anything more than the distempered dream of children? How could such a God torture men when they die, since as soon as they are dead there is nothing left to torture? Let them cast this incubus of irrational fear behind them, and the mere process of life may then be tolerable enough. It may even, in a sober way, be happy. It certainly need not be, as it now is, miserable; and at all events it will be pleasing as a prelude to the luxury of an endless sleep. Of my own rendering of the great Lucretian message, I may here give a few stanzas as specimens:

How, then, the poet asks, shall the individual man be more enduring than these?

In writing this poem I experienced the full sensation of having become a convert to the Lucretian gospel myself, against which throughout my life it had been my dominant impulse to protest.

There are, doubtless, many others who experience this disconcerting vicissitude—for whom the deductions of science as a moral message are ludicrous, but for whom its homicidal negations prove in the end ineluctable. If this is their permanent, if this is their final condition, they will perhaps deserve commiseration, but they will hardly deserve castigation, for their attitude is one which will bring its own castigation with it. I can only hope that I am entitled to the truly charitable satisfaction of regarding them as a class to which I do not myself belong, and that the literary industry of a life otherwise idle may prove to be a form of action, or rather a reaction, which, alike as to religion and politics, will have not been unserviceable to the world.

To sum the matter up, the Lucretian philosophy of life, appealing as it may to men when in certain moods, is one which, when submitted to what Kant calls the "practical reason," shrivels up into an absurdity, and I have shown at length, in my work The Reconstruction of Belief, that this becomes only the more apparent when we consider the attempts which have been made by modern thinkers to vivify it by an idea of which in Lucretius there is no trace. Put into language less imposing than his own, the gospel of Lucretius virtually comes to this, that men may eat and drink and propagate their kind in comfort if only they will hold fast to the belief that men, when they die, slip into their burrows like rabbits, and will, though they have done with pleasure, be out of the reach of pain—that whatever they may have done or not done, they will all, as individuals, be as though they never had been. The only enlargement of this gospel which modern thought can suggest is rooted in a transference of men's serious interests in life from the life of the individual to the life of the community or the race, and in the thought that, though the individual perishes, the race will continue and progress.

The answer given to this argument in The Reconstruction of Belief is that, even if we suppose such corporate progress to be a reality, it cannot be invested with any practical meaning unless we postulate the individual, and consider his fortunes first. We have here the Asses' Bridge of all philosophy whatsoever, and until the philosopher has crossed it the philosopher can do nothing but bray. The whole external universe, the race of men included, has for no man any perceptible existence except in so far as it is reflected in the thoughts and the sensations of the individual. The conception of the race is nothing, so far as we can know it, beyond what the individual conceives. Let us suppose it, then, to be in some relative sense true that the human race is undergoing some change always for the better in respect of its material or moral conditions, which change will continue so long as the race exists. In that case the course of Humanity will be comparable to an upward road which the race will be always ascending toward heights of welfare at present hardly imaginable. Such will be the course of the race, but the course of the individuals will be something totally different. It will for each be a progress not up such a road, but across it, no matter at what altitude this crossing is made. Humanity will always be nothing more than a procession passing from one turnstile to another, the one leading out of, and the other leading into, a something which always must be, for each individual, a nullity. Apart from the individual, nothing which the human race knows as desirable can exist; and, logically and practically alike, the only efficient connection between the individual and the race must first of all be a connection not with the race as such, and not with external nature, but with something which is beyond both, and is not comprehended in either.

The only conceivable human being who will, apart from religion, ever be able to describe himself as coextensive with the human race will, as Nietzsche puts it in one of his most memorable sentences, be the last man left alive when the rest of the human race is frozen. He, and he only, will be able to say truly: "Homo sum. Humani nihil a me alienum puto."