are not in your line, pull your hat over your eyes and say they are not. There is no use in attempting to utter right expressions about sunsets if you do not really delight in them. Go about with your minds in a receptive state and ask yourself the meaning of things, and then go back and consult your guidebooks, and find out what they say about them. Then your pleasure will really be increased. If you have a question to ask, and you go to a library to find the answer, it is astonishing how many books that you have never dreamt of turning over before become full of interest, and how much literature you are introduced to if you have a burning curiosity at the bottom of your mind.

I have been attempting very imperfectly to show you the truth of the old adage that we were all taught as boys in a passage in which Cicero praises books: "Pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur”; which may be translated as follows: "Books spend the night with us, they accompany us on our foreign travels, and go with us into the country". I want to show you that the country can go with you even into your books, and that is, on the whole, a more valuable way of looking at the matter.

HEROES.1

ANY attempt to meditate on the records of the past, with a view to using the results for guidance in the present, at once raises questions which are incapable of solution. It is impossible to appraise human activity by any fixed standard or to determine its limitations. On the one hand, we feel that great events or great movements are only intelligible when described in the terms of individual endeavour; on the other hand, there are times when we begin to doubt if their appropriation by individuals can after all be justified. There is no doubt that we can only understand ideas when they are exhibited in their application to actual life. In themselves they are abstract, remote, inoperative. They only show their power as they excite our interest; and they claim that interest only when they are set forth in the actions or aspirations of men like ourselves. Indeed, it is not too much to say that all our mental possessions come to us in the first instance by the process of imitation. The child appropriates its mother's sayings, and adopts unconsciously its mother's attitude towards life. This is the source of its learning long before it pays any attention to its mother's pre

1 An address given to the Social and Political Education League on 4th November, 1898.

cepts or ideas. So far as these precepts are adopted, they are adopted as the record of a process which has been already completed.

Thus, all ideas concerning life come to the individual somehow or other in a personal form. What is true of our individual life forms a habit of mind which we cannot lay aside when we step into a sphere which is beyond our individual experience. We know that truth is ineffective unless it is applied by a person. When we look back upon the past, we do not want to discover a truth or an idea apart from a person, nor can we tolerate a person except as expressing an idea or a truth. This, I take it, is the reason why we are always anxious to discover heroes or great men. The search for such beings is therefore inevitable, for it corresponds to the facts of human nature and expresses a profound truth. But it sometimes raises difficulties and suggests questionings about the nature of human judgment. When we find that the reputations, the aims, and the motives of prominent personages in the past are still matters of debate, we begin to doubt the possibility of the existence of any principles on which such judgment can proceed. It is still a question whether Mary Queen of Scots was a profligate intriguer or an injured martyr. The proposal to split the difference meets with little approval; partisanship is almost as heated nowadays as it was in her own times, though the practical reasons, which, it might be thought, can alone create partisans, have long since disappeared. Still, people like to deal with heroines or villains, and abhor more ordinary characters. They like their

pictures to be painted in vivid colours, and will have no neutral tints. This desire is natural enough, but it is adverse to the formation of a right judgment. Great men are so called either because they expressed great ideas or because they did great actions. The danger in dealing with them is lest we clothe them too entirely with the idea, or associate them too absolutely with the action; indeed, we often make vast assumptions solely for the purpose of giving convenient names to things. There is no doubt about the greatness of an idea; it must be associated with some name, and the man who bears the name becomes accordingly great. There is no question that an important event occurred; some one must have done it; so the immediate agent has all the credit. Then, as soon as a man has been voted a great man, it is necessary that he be maintained in all things at the level of his imputed greatness.

This ordinary and obvious method of procedure is open to two dangers. First, it is possible, on one side, that the truth of the idea or the value of the act should suffer from the frailties of the individual with whom it is associated, and that great historic impulses should be made repugnant to some minds by the temper of their foremost exponent. For instance, there are people who fail to do justice to the intellectual and spiritual value of the Reformation movement in Germany, because of Luther's deficiency in the higher æsthetic perceptions.

Secondly, there is a danger that the real character of the hero should disappear before the persistent attempt to read him into a formula. This is a great

loss, for there is nothing more dangerous, in political speculation or political teaching, than the attempt to transcend the actual facts of human life, or disregard the limitations of human frailty. Nothing is more misleading than a picture of impossible consistency. We cannot take Henry II. as a sagacious law-giver without reflecting that he had an ungovernable temper; and it is well worth remembering that the great Duke of Marlborough, for all his courage in the field, trembled before his wife.

We must not confuse the great results of history with the issues of individual lives. Both of them are written for our learning, but they are written in different books. Do not let us mix the contents of the two volumes.

There are two objects possible to us in studying the records of the past-two distinct sources of instruction, in two different directions. One is to discover the great lines of human progress; to see the course it followed, and to determine the guiding principles which inspired its advance. This is a scientific study of human development, and owes its value to the completeness of our conception of the end of social life. We must recognise that this conception is constantly being modified by the tendencies of current aspirations, which are themselves seriously affected by contemporary political ideas. Thus, sixty years ago, the success of the ideas of the French Revolution constituted them a standard for judging the past, and a starting-point for criticising the future. The events of 1870 affected this standard insensibly, and perhaps undeservedly. It is curious to note the effects of this