looked ahead.  This has been said of us on the Continent.  It is not so.  We do not study the art of fishing in troubled waters.  The waiting habit in our transactions, domestic as well as foreign, arises from our inveterate preference for thinking in images rather than in concepts.  We put off decisions until the whole of the facts can be visualized.  This carries with it that we often do not act until it is very late.  Our gifts enable us to move with energy, if not always with precision.  To predict what we will do in a given case is not easy for a foreigner.  It is not easy even for ourselves.  We have few abstract principles, and reliable induction from our past is not easy.  We are often guided by what Mr. Justice Wendell Holmes has called “the intuition more subtle than any particular major premise.”  Nor is help to be derived from any study of our general outlook on life, for that outlook is hard to formulate even to ourselves.

Now all this, our peculiar gift, if kept under control, may well have its practical advantage, but, as the case stands, it is apt to bring in its train a good deal of disadvantage.  In periods when nations are trying to render firm the basis of peace by remolding and giving precision to their aims, so that these can be made common aims, lack of definiteness in national ideals is a sure source of embarrassment.  At a time when democracy is more and more claiming in terms to occupy the whole field it becomes increasingly desirable that the higher purposes of democracy should become clear to the people themselves.  For the practise of a country can never be wholly divorced from its theory of life.  The tendencies of the national will are bound up with the nation’s science, with its literature, with its art, and with its religion.  These tendencies are affected by the capacity of the nation to understand and express its own soul.  Beyond science, literature, art and religion there lies something that may be called the national philosophy, a disposition rather than a definite creed.  This sort of philosophy is different in France from what it is in Germany, and in Germany from what it is in the English-speaking countries.  The philosophy of a people takes shape in the attitude its leaders adopt in their estimation of values and of the order in which they should be placed.  And this turns on the conceptions and ideas which are current in the various departments of mental activity.  It is thus that a philosophy of life has to be given some sort of place in his professions even by the statesman who has to address Parliament and the public.  He is driven to make speeches in which a good many conceptions and ideas have to be brought together.  And it gives rise to a great difference of quality in such utterances if the general outlook of the speaker be a large one.  But this requires that he should know himself and be aware of the conceptions and ideas which dominate his mind, and should have examined their scope before employing them.