le adequately to portray
it in dry didactic language: it is only truly describable in the medium
of art, where actual concrete individuals are shown acting and reacting
on each other--as in the novel or the drama. We are like a company of
chess-men, not sorted out in kinds, pawns together, kings and queens
together, and knights and rooks together, but simply thrown at haphazard
into a box, and jumbled side by side. In the stationary societies, where
all individuals were permeated by the same political, religious, moral,
and social ideas; and where each class had its own hereditary and fixed
traditions of action and manners, this cause of friction and suffering
had of necessity no existence; individual differences and discord might
be occasioned by personal greeds, ambitions, and selfishnesses, but
not by conflicting conceptions of right and wrong, of the desirable and
undesirable, in all branches of human life. (Only those who have been
thrown into contact with a stationary and homogeneous society such
as that of primitive African tribes before coming in contact with
Europeans; or such as the up-country Boers of South Africa were twenty
years ago, can realise adequately how wholly free from moral and social
problems and social friction such a society can be. It is in studying
such societies that the truth is vividly forced on one, that the key to
half, and more than half, of the phenomena in our own social condition,
can be found only in our rapidly changing conditions necessitating
equally rapid change in our conceptions, ideals, and institutions.)

Thirdly, the unrest and suffering peculiar to our age is caused by
conflict going on within the individual himself. So intensely rapid is
the change which is taking place in our environment and knowledge that
in the course of a single life a man may pass through half a dozen
phases of growth. Born and reared in possession of certain ideas and
manners of action, he or she may, before middle life is reached, have
had occasion repeatedly to modify, enlarge, and alter, or completely
throw aside those traditions. Within the individuality itself of such
persons, goes on, in an intensified form, that very struggle, conflict,
and disco-ordination which is going on in society at large between its
different members and sections; and agonising moments must arise, when
the individual, seeing the necessity for adopting new courses of action,
or for accepting new truths, or conforming to