familiar language of ordinary life, the familiar ideas, would
be intrusions, meriting nothing but frowns or compassionate smiles.

And the same thing is true of most corporate journalism and most
corporate religion. The atmosphere is highly specialised; it is
binding; and those who live in it believe it to be co-extensive with
the whole of life. Let us bind ourselves by Tolstoy; let us agree to
loosen ourselves by Nietzsche; but, in any case let us agree to love
our neighbour on the principle of a close corporation. The main
influences which shape the modern world operate, for the most part,
through intellectual groups; each group can only be appealed to in a
language familiar to it; it can only act on principles (consciously
accepted or presupposed) which are its very special property; you can
never touch it to the quick, in its corporate and active capacity,
without accepting or appearing to accept its collective prejudices.
Its differentia is that which separates it from the unit of common
humanity.

Thus we come to something more difficult to analyse than
specialisation of work--a specialisation of sentiment, habits and
morals, which makes people supremely sapient within a narrow sphere
which they have appropriated, and so limited as to be blind in the
broad field of ethics which lies outside their special ken. And yet it
is through these groups, keen-eyed in one direction, blind in others,
that the intellect, the reforming zeal, the earnestness, the idealism
of the age, have to pass before ideas and vague aspiration can be
transformed into action or effective influence. These groups are the
main-drainage-system of modern life; they are the ordinary channels
through which the business of the world has to pass, and its organised
thought be directed. Take any one of these groups, and consider its
differential character, its mode of apperception, its _ethos_, and you
find it something deformed, twisted, strained in one direction, like a
tree by the sea-shore. But take a few score of them, and imagine their
qualities fused together, and the result would accord with the ideals
of common humanity--ideals vaguely conceived, perhaps, but generous.
It is just because the qualities of these groups, in politics,
religion, social work, and to a lesser extent in literature, are not
and cannot be fused together, but on the contrary, stand apart in
water-tight compartments, so that the whole is like an elaborate
system of checks