to
urge, the sense of intellectual responsibility. If it were inevitable
that one of these two should always enfeeble or exclude the other, if
the price of the mental alacrity and open-mindedness of the age of
Pericles must always be paid in the political incompetence of the age of
Demosthenes, it would be hard to settle which quality ought to be most
eagerly encouraged by those who have most to do with the spiritual
direction of a community. No doubt the tone of a long-enduring and
imperial society, such as Rome was, must be conservative, drastic,
positive, hostile to the death to every speculative novelty. But then,
after all, the permanence of Roman power was only valuable to mankind
because it ensured the spread of certain civilising ideas. And these
ideas had originated among people so characteristically devoid of the
sovereign faculty of political coherency as were the Greeks and the
Jews. In the Greeks, it is true, we find not only ideas of the highest
speculative fertility, but actual political institutions. Still we
should hardly point to Greek history for the most favourable examples of
their stable working. Practically and as a matter of history, a society
is seldom at the same time successfully energetic both in temporals and
spirituals; seldom prosperous alike in seeking abstract truth and
nursing the political spirit. There is a decisive preponderance in one
direction or the other, and the equal balance between free and active
thinking, and coherent practical energy in a community, seems too hard
to sustain. The vast military and political strength of Germany, for
instance, did not exist, and was scarcely anticipated in men's minds,
during the time of her most strenuous passion for abstract truth and
deeper learning and new criticism. In France never was political and
national interest so debilitated, so extinct, as it was during the reign
of Lewis the Fifteenth: her intellectual interest was never so vivid,
so fruitful, or so widely felt.

Yet it is at least well, and more than that, it is an indispensable
condition of social wellbeing, that the divorce between political
responsibility and intellectual responsibility, between respect for what
is instantly practicable and search after what is only important in
thought, should not be too complete and universal. Even if there were no
other objection, the undisputed predominance of the political spirit has
a plain tendency to limit the subjects in which the m