eriment and noting certain
deductions. But while he may offer a prescription for certain
symptoms, he gives us to understand that he is only diagnosing a phase
in human development; that he is seeking an ultimate which he never
hopes to find, and that the deductions he draws to-day may be rejected
to-morrow without a shadow of regret. He would be constant, I think,
only in his inconstancy to any criterion of present conditions as
applicable or likely to be applicable to the future; he sees life as a
dynamic thing in process of change and growth. "All the history of
mankind," he writes, "all the history of life has been and will be the
story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss,
struggling to exist and prevail over and comprehend individual
lives--an effect of insidious attraction, an idea of invincible
appeal." And it is for this reason that he is so eager to battle with,
annoy, disarrange and reconstruct that rule-of-thumb world he
censures so steadily; he is fighting the assumption of a static
condition which he knows to be impossible.

And for a moment in _The New Machiavelli_, and again in his next book,
_Marriage_, he has a passing vision of some greater movement of which
we are but the imperfect instruments. He develops and then drops the
idea of a "hinterland," not only to the individual mind but to the
general consciousness. The "permanent reality," he calls it, "which is
never really immediate, which draws continually upon human experience
and influences human action more and more, but which is itself never
the actual player upon the stage. It is the unseen dramatist who never
takes a call." And in another place he writes in the same connection:
" ... the ideas go on--as though we are all no more than little cells
and corpuscles in some great brain beyond our understanding."

We come again to a hint of that explanation at the end of _Marriage_,
published in 1912. The story, reduced to the barest outline, is that
of the relations of Trafford to his wife. It is not complicated by any
sexual temptations or jealousies, but it gradually evolves the
integral problem of the meaning of life.

Trafford, before his engagement to Marjorie Pope, and for a year or
two after his marriage, was engaged in research work. His speciality
was molecular physics and he was a particularly brilliant
investigator. That research, with all the possibilities that it held
of some immense discovery of the laws that go