ributes now, and every able brain falls within that informal and
dispersed kingship which gathers together into one purpose the energies
of the race.

Section 10

It is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human existence in
which 'politics,' that is to say a partisan interference with the ruling
sanities of the world, will be the dominant interest among serious men.
We seem to have entered upon an entirely new phase in history in which
contention as distinguished from rivalry, has almost abruptly ceased to
be the usual occupation, and has become at most a subdued and hidden
and discredited thing. Contentious professions cease to be an honourable
employment for men. The peace between nations is also a peace between
individuals. We live in a world that comes of age. Man the warrior, man
the lawyer, and all the bickering aspects of life, pass into obscurity;
the grave dreamers, man the curious learner, and man the creative
artist, come forward to replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a
less ignoble adventure.

There is no natural life of man. He is, and always has been, a sheath
of varied and even incompatible possibilities, a palimpsest of inherited
dispositions. It was the habit of many writers in the early twentieth
century to speak of competition and the narrow, private life of trade
and saving and suspicious isolation as though such things were in some
exceptional way proper to the human constitution, and as though openness
of mind and a preference for achievement over possession were abnormal
and rather unsubstantial qualities. How wrong that was the history
of the decades immediately following the establishment of the world
republic witnesses. Once the world was released from the hardening
insecurities of a needless struggle for life that was collectively
planless and individually absorbing, it became apparent that there was
in the vast mass of people a long, smothered passion to make things. The
world broke out into making, and at first mainly into aesthetic
making. This phase of history, which has been not inaptly termed the
'Efflorescence,' is still, to a large extent, with us. The majority
of our population consists of artists, and the bulk of activity in
the world lies no longer with necessities but with their elaboration,
decoration, and refinement. There has been an evident change in the
quality of this making during recent years. It becomes more purposeful
than it was, losing something