ician, and ultimate bravery is courage of the mind. One thinks of his
coming to this conclusion with knit brows and balancing intentness
above whole gulfs of bathos--very much as he had once walked the Leysin
Bisse....

"Men do not know how to think," he insisted--getting along the
planks; "and they will not realize that they do not know how to
think. Nine-tenths of the wars in the world have arisen out of
misconceptions.... Misconception is the sin and dishonour of the mind,
and muddled thinking as ignoble as dirty conduct.... Infinitely more
disastrous."

And again he wrote: "Man, I see, is an over-practical creature, too
eager to get into action. There is our deepest trouble. He takes
conclusions ready-made, or he makes them in a hurry. Life is so short
that he thinks it better to err than wait. He has no patience, no faith
in anything but himself. He thinks he is a being when in reality he is
only a link in a being, and so he is more anxious to be complete than
right. The last devotion of which he is capable is that devotion of
the mind which suffers partial performance, but insists upon exhaustive
thought. He scamps his thought and finishes his performance, and before
he is dead it is already being abandoned and begun all over again by
some one else in the same egotistical haste...."

It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life that these words
should have been written by a man who walked the plank to fresh ideas
with the dizziest difficulty unless he had Prothero to drag him forward,
and who acted time after time with an altogether disastrous hastiness.

2

Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from the
cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at cowardice
and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete Research
Magnificent. You can no more resolve to live a life of honour nowadays
and abstain from social and political scheming on a world-wide scale,
than you can profess religion and refuse to think about God. In the past
it was possible to take all sorts of things for granted and be loyal to
unexamined things. One could be loyal to unexamined things because they
were unchallenged things. But now everything is challenged. By the
time of his second visit to Russia, Benham's ideas of conscious
and deliberate aristocracy reaching out to an idea of universal
responsibility had already grown into the extraordinary fantasy that he
was, as it were