point of view is, as we shall have occasion later on to revert to it.  It rests on a new interpretation of the nature and growth of conscious life.  He is in short a semeur d’idees-force rather than an encyclopaedist or a system-maker.  The difference is characteristic of the age and might be traced in the other contemporary schools, the pragmatists, the new realists, and the rest.  The new Descartes is looked for but not announced.  Perhaps when he arrives he will prove to be a whole army and not a single man.  But if an army, it will need a better co-ordination, a more clearly defined common spirit, than is at present apparent in the philosophic hosts.

A similar perplexity in the practical sphere has a similar cause but a graver urgency.  The multiplicity and contrariety of the facts are upon us as we face in practice the ideals which we have accepted from the earlier thinkers, from the century of hope.  In science and philosophy we feel that the cause of unity may with some safety be left to look after itself.  If the new Descartes does not appear in person, we may have confidence that plenty of inferior substitutes will be found, who, if they work together, will keep alive the great task of unifying thought.  For in this region the nature of things assists our efforts and will sooner or later get the work done.  The stars in their courses are fighting for us and for unity.  But in the world of wills the task is tenfold more difficult and the dangers imminent.  The poor and labouring millions, the oppressed and dissatisfied nations, are forcing the door, and though there is fair agreement in theory as to how they should live and work together in peace, yet the realization is by no means automatic, and the difficulties thicken as we come nearer to them.

But even here, perhaps most of all here, it is the first word of wisdom to take stock of the favourable symptoms, to see clearly the forces on which we can rely in our forward march.  And they are not far to seek in all classes and in every Western land.  Read any account of an English community in the early nineteenth century, say George Eliot’s ‘Milby’ in the Scenes of Clerical Life.  How far more humane, more enlightened, and happier is the state of the succeeding community, the Nuneaton or Coventry of the present day!  No question but the novelist would have welcomed as a convincing proof of her ‘meliorist’ doctrine the progress made in her own homeland in the century since her birth.  We know by personal experience the general kindliness and cheerfulness of our fellow citizens, their tolerance, their readiness to hope, their prevalent orderliness and self-restraint.  We are thinking perhaps of a certain tendency to slackness, a dangerous falling-off in the output of work.  If that be so, we need only look at the activities of any playground, or of a class-room in a well-ordered school, to be sure of the future.  The natural man, at least in our temperate climates, and as exhibited in the behaviour of his natural progenitor, the child, is all for vigour and experiment.  It is we, the adult community, the trustees of the child, who are to blame if his maturity fails of the eager questioning and the untiring labours of his unspoilt youth.