Not but what the
Mollycoddle may act, and act efficiently. But, if so, he acts from
principle, not from the instinct of action. The Red-blood, on the other
hand, acts as the stone falls, and does indiscriminately anything that
comes to hand. It is thus he that carries on the business of the world.
He steps without reflection into the first place offered him and goes to
work like a machine. The ideals and standards of his family, his class,
his city, his country and his age, he swallows as naturally as he
swallows food and drink. He is therefore always "in the swim"; and he is
bound to "arrive," because he has set before himself the attainable. You
will find him everywhere in all the prominent positions. In a military
age he is a soldier, in a commercial age a business man. He hates his
enemies, and he may love his friends; but he does not require friends to
love. A wife and children he does require, for the instinct to propagate
the race is as strong in him as all other instincts. His domestic life,
however, is not always happy; for he can seldom understand his wife.
This is part of his general incapacity to understand any point of view
but his own. He is incapable of an idea and contemptuous of a principle.
He is the Samson, the blind force, dearest to Nature of her children. He
neither looks back nor looks ahead. He lives in present action. And when
he can no longer act, he loses his reason for existence. The Red-blood
is happiest if he dies in the prime of life; otherwise, he may easily
end with suicide. For he has no inner life; and when the outer life
fails, he can only fail with it. The instinct that animated him being
dead, he dies too. Nature, who has blown through him, blows elsewhere.
His stops are dumb; he is dead wood on the shore.

The Mollycoddle, on the other hand, is all inner life. He may indeed
act, as I said, but he acts, so to speak, by accident; just as the
Red-blood may reflect, but reflects by accident. The Mollycoddle in
action is the Crank: it is he who accomplishes reforms; who abolished
slavery, for example, and revolutionised prisons and lunatic asylums.
Still, primarily, the Mollycoddle is a critic, not a man of action. He
challenges all standards and all facts. If an institution is
established, that is a reason why he will not accept it; if an idea is
current, that is a reason why he should repudiate it. He questions
everything, including life and the universe. And for that reason Nature
ha