No one can feel any reasonable doubt that we have heard about Christ and Socrates and Buddha and St. Francis a mere chaos of excerpts, a mere book of quotations.  But from those fragmentary epigrams we can deduce greatness as clearly as we can deduce Venus from the torso of Venus or Hercules ex pede Herculem.  If we knew nothing else about the Founder of Christianity, for example, beyond the fact that a religious teacher lived in a remote country, and in the course of his peregrinations and proclamations consistently called Himself “the Son of Man,” we should know by that alone that he was a man of almost immeasurable greatness.  If future ages happened to record nothing else about Socrates except that he owned his title to be the wisest of men because he knew that he knew nothing, they would be able to deduce from that the height and energy of his civilisation, the glory that was Greece.  The credit of such random compilations as that which “E.S.S.” and Mr. George Allen have just effected is quite secure.  It is the pure, pedantic, literal editions, the complete works of this author or that author which are forgotten.  It is such books as this that have revolutionised the destiny of the world.  Great things like Christianity or Platonism have never been founded upon consistent editions; all of them have been founded upon scrap-books.

The position of Maeterlinck in modern life is a thing too obvious to be easily determined in words.  It is, perhaps, best expressed by saying that it is the great glorification of the inside of things at the expense of the outside.  There is one great evil in modern life for which nobody has found even approximately a tolerable description:  I can only invent a word and call it “remotism.”  It is the tendency to think first of things which, as a matter of fact, lie far away from the actual centre of human experience.  Thus people say, “All our knowledge of life begins with the amoeba.”  It is false; our knowledge of life begins with ourselves.  Thus they say that the British Empire is glorious, and at the very word Empire they think at once of Australia and New Zealand, and Canada, and Polar bears, and parrots and kangaroos, and it never occurs to any one of them to think of the Surrey Hills.  The one real struggle in modern life is the struggle between the man like Maeterlinck, who sees the inside as the truth, and the man like Zola, who sees the outside as the truth.  A hundred cases might be given.  We may take, for the sake of argument, the case of what is called falling in love.  The sincere realist, the man who believes in a certain finality in physical science, says, “You may, if you like, describe this thing as a divine and sacred and incredible vision; that is your sentimental theory about it.  But what it is, is an animal and sexual instinct designed for certain natural purposes.”  The man on the other side, the idealist, replies, with quite equal confidence, that this is the very reverse of the truth.  I put it as it has always