which aims at making every citizen a full partaker in the advance of the race.  But it cannot be said that this policy has yet been really tried.  It is the acknowledged ideal to which in all Western countries partial steps have been taken, and the democracy, through their most enlightened leaders, will continue to press for its fulfilment.  As this approaches, the individual may become more and more in his degree the microcosm which philosophers have proclaimed him, and the enlargement of the soul, which we know to be a fact for humanity, will become a fact for every man.  Need we doubt that with the general raising in the level new eminences will appear?  Do not great mountains sometimes rise from the sea and sometimes from the high plateau?  We are now in the very midst of a struggle for settlement and incorporation, which, as it is accomplished, should prepare the way for new excellences of every kind.  What may not be hoped of men if once they learn to live with their fellows?  And they can only so learn by studying them.  This is felt by all contemporary writers from Bergson in philosophy to Graham Wallas in politics.  Poets and novelists, above all, have turned more and more to problems of the inner life.

The novelists who ushered in our age are significant of this, and none more so than George Eliot, whose work, though somewhat out of fashion for the moment, is yet marked by the transition from Victorian complacency to modern unrest and modern hopes.  Full of love and appreciation for the old order in England—­the contentment and humours of the country-side, the difference of classes, the respect for religion—­she was carried by the evolutionary philosophy of her time into thoughts of an eternal and world-wide order, the growth of humanity, the kinship of man with the universe, the social nature of duty.  Her contribution was essentially psychological; she enlarged our knowledge of the soul.  She showed us, not certainly more living types than Scott or Dickens, but more play of motives, more varied interests in life, more mental crises.  The soul, above all the woman’s soul, had widened its horizon between Flora Macdonald and Dorothea Brooke.

Every reader will think of famous novelists who have followed the same broadening path, and their work is often really great as well as famous.  The history of thought has in fact throughout the last century been a commentary on those words of Keats to which many of us have turned of late for comfort and inspiration:  ’The world is not a vale of tears, but a vale of soul-making.’  Tears there are in abundance, as the tears of children.  But sorrow is not the leading note of children, nor should it be of humanity in growth.  Soul-making—­the practice and the theory—­has become more and more clearly and consciously the object of human thought and endeavour.  We need the greater mind to see the links in the overwhelming mass of science, in the mazes of human action and history.  We need it still more to grasp and to preserve the unity of our social life.  Most of all for the healing of the world is the greater soul needed, with a world-consciousness, some knowledge, some sympathy, some hope for all mankind.  Without this, a league of nations would be dead before its birth.