were carried out with dispatch at its close.  This was the case with education, with the franchise and with measures affecting the health, the housing, and the industrial conditions of the people.  And there is now a greater and stronger demand among us for a further advance, above all for making every citizen not merely or even primarily a voting unit, but a consciously active, consciously co-operative, member of the community.

Comte, who died in 1857 just before our period, was perhaps the clearest voice in Europe to herald both movements:  the advance to international unity, and social reform within the State.  It was he who, under the title of Western Republic, proclaimed the existence of a real unity of nations, whose business it was to strengthen themselves as a moral force, to act as trustees for the weaker people and lead the world.  It was he who, in the phrase ‘incorporation of the proletariate’, summed up all those social reforms in which we are immersed, which aim at making every citizen a full member of his nation.  Like all ideals it was far easier to conceive and to respect than to foresee or to secure the necessary means to put it into effect.  Perhaps the perfect symmetry of the plan, the over-sanguine hopes of the man who framed it, have even proved some hindrance to its rapid spread.  It has seemed, like Dante’s polity in the De Monarchia, to take its place rather among the utopias than the practical schemes of reform, and when men saw the infinite complexity of the problems and met the living lions in the path, they suffered the comparative depression which we have noticed as a feature of the age.

Here indeed it would appear that we have reached one of the most serious cross-currents in recent European thought.  In science, in philosophy, in politics, and in social economics, though we see the goal at least in outline, we are in some danger of being overwhelmed by the difficulties of the pursuit.  Our vision is somewhat clouded and our steps hampered by the entangling details of the country between.  It is substantially the same problem which faces us both in the philosophical and the practical sphere, and the analogy between the two is instructive.  Spencer’s synthesis, which we instanced as the last encyclopaedic attempt to present all knowledge—­at least all scientific knowledge—­in one system, has been riddled fore and aft by hostile shot, though in the end more of it may be found to have survived than is seen at present above water.  The philosopher who in our generation has acquired the European vogue most comparable to that of Spencer is Bergson.  Now Bergson has dealt some of the shrewdest blows at Spencer’s system, but he does not set out to construct a rival system of his own.  He is most careful to say that he is not doing this, that any such work must be done by later workers, that he is only making suggestions for a new point of view.  It is interesting to note in general terms what that