pleasant even for one who is mainly ignorant of the flowers and their families to come on two or three varieties of one flower in the course of a country walk.  As a boy, he is excited by the difference between the pin-headed and the thrum-headed primrose.  As he grows older, he scans the roadside for little peeping things that to a lazy eye seem as like each other as two peas—­the dove’s foot geranium, the round-leaved geranium and the lesser wild geranium.  “As like each other as two peas,” we have said:  but are two peas like each other?  Who knows whether the peas have not the same differences of feature among themselves that Englishmen have?  Half the similarities we notice are only the results of our ignorance and idleness.  The townsman passing a field of sheep finds it difficult to believe that the shepherd can distinguish between one and another of them with as much certainty as if they were his children.  And do not most of us think of foreigners as beings who are all turned out as if on a pattern, like sheep?  The further removed the foreigners are from us in race the more they seem to us to be like each other.  When we speak of negroes, we think of millions of people most of whom look exactly alike.  We feel much the same about Chinamen and even Turks.  Probably to a Chinaman all English children look exactly alike, and it may be that all Europeans seem to him to be as indistinguishable as sticks of barley-sugar.  How many people think of Jews in this way!  I have heard an Englishman expressing his wonder that Jewish parents should be able to pick out their own children in a crowd of Jewish boys and girls.

Thus our first generalisations spring from ignorance rather than from knowledge.  They are true, so long as we know that they are not entirely true.  As soon as we begin to accept them as absolute truths, they become lies.  One of the perils of a great war is that it revives the passionate faith of the common man in generalisations.  He begins to think that all Germans are much the same, or that all Americans are much the same, or that all Conscientious Objectors are much the same.  In each case he imagines a lay figure rather than a human being.  He may hate his lay figure or he may like it; but, if he is in search of truth, he had better throw the thing out of the window and try to think about a human being instead.  I do not wish to deny the importance of generalisations.  It is not possible to think or even to act without them.  The generalisation that is founded on a knowledge of and a delight in the variety of things is the end of all science and poetry.  Keats said that he sought the principle of beauty in all things, and poems are in a sense simply beautiful generalisations.  They subject the unclassified and chaotic facts of life to the order of beauty.  The mystic, meditating on the One and the Many, is also in pursuit of a generalisation—­the perfect generalisation of the universe.  And what is science but the attempt to arrange in a series