sing will, for
several generations at least, albeit it will be freely
inter-communicating and like a whispering gallery for things outspoken,
possess no universal ideals, no universal conventions: there will be the
literature of the thought and effort of this sort of people, and the
literature, thought, and effort of that.[32] Life is already most
wonderfully arbitrary and experimental, and for the coming century this
must be its essential social history, a great drifting and unrest of
people, a shifting and regrouping and breaking up again of groups, great
multitudes seeking to find themselves.

The safe life in the old order, where one did this because it was right,
and that because it was the custom, when one shunned this and hated
that, as lead runs into a mould, all that is passing away. And
presently, as the new century opens out, there will become more and more
distinctly emergent many new cultures and settled ways. The grey expanse
of life to-day is grey, not in its essence, but because of the minute
confused mingling and mutual cancelling of many-coloured lives.
Presently these tints and shades will gather together here as a mass of
one colour, and there as a mass of another. And as these colours
intensify and the tradition of the former order fades, as these cultures
become more and more shaped and conscious, as the new literatures grow
in substance and power, as differences develop from speculative matter
of opinion to definite intentions, as contrasts and affinities grow
sharper and clearer, there must follow some very extensive modifications
in the collective public life. But one series of tints, one colour must
needs have a heightening value amidst this iridescent display. While the
forces at work in the wealthy and purely speculative groups of society
make for disintegration, and in many cases for positive elimination, the
forces that bring together the really functional people will tend more
and more to impose upon them certain common characteristics and beliefs,
and the discovery of a group of similar and compatible class interests
upon which they can unite. The practical people, the engineering and
medical and scientific people, will become more and more homogeneous in
their fundamental culture, more and more distinctly aware of a common
"general reason" in things, and of a common difference from the less
functional masses and from any sort of people in the past. They will
have in their positive scienc