o keenly alive to social problems, a
great philanthropist. Next to these I would put great thinkers,
moralists, poets--all who inspire. Then I would put the absolutely
effective instruments of great designs--legislators, lawyers, teachers,
priests, doctors, writers--men without originality, but with a firm
conception of civic and human duty. And then I would put all those who,
in a small sphere, exercise a direct, quiet, simple influence--and then
come the large mass of mankind; people who work faithfully, from
instinct and necessity, but without any particular design or desire,
except to live honestly, honourably, and respectably, with no urgent
sense of the duty of serving others, taking life as it comes, practical
individualists, in fact. No higher than these, but certainly no lower,
I should put quiet, contemplative, reflective people, who are
theoretical individualists. They are not very effective people
generally, and they have a certain poetical quality; they cannot
originate, but they can appreciate. I look upon all these
individualists, whether practical or theoretical, as the average mass
of humanity, the common soldiers, so to speak, as distinguished from
the officers. Life is for them a discipline, and their raison d'etre is
that of the learner, as opposed to that of the teacher. To all of them,
experience is the main point; they are all in the school of God; they
are being prepared for something. The object is that they should
apprehend something, and the channel through which it comes matters
little. They do the necessary work of the world; they support
themselves, and they support those who from infirmity, weakness, age,
or youth cannot support themselves. There is room, I think, in the
world for both kinds of individualist, though the contemplative
individualists are in the minority; and perhaps it must be so, because
a certain lassitude is characteristic of them. If they were in the
majority in any nation, one would have a simple, patient, unambitious
race, who would tend to become the subjects of other more vigorous
nations: our Indian empire is a case in point. Probably China is a
similar nation, preserved from conquest by its inaccessibility and its
numerical force. Japan is an instance of the strange process of a
contemplative nation becoming a practical one. The curious thing is
that Christianity, which is essentially a contemplative, unmilitant,
unpatriotic, unambitious force, decidedly oriental in