surface, it is a power in the deeps, an undertow. It goes on in
silence while men think, in studies where they write self-
forgetfully, in laboratories under the urgency of an impersonal
curiosity, in the rare illumination of honest talk, in moments of
emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not in everyday
affairs. Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everyday affair,
are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits,
interests, usage. Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation,
personal feeling, are their substance. No man can abolish his
immediate self and specialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he
simply turns himself into something a little less than the common
man. He may have an immense hinterland, but that does not absolve
him from a frontage. That is the essential error of the specialist
philosopher, the specialist teacher, the specialist publicist. They
repudiate frontage; claim to be pure hinterland. That is what
bothered me about Codger, about those various schoolmasters who had
prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their dream of an
official ruling class. A human being who is a philosopher in the
first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the
first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like
gifts to the pretence--a quack. These are attempts to live deep-
side shallow, inside out. They produce merely a new pettiness. To
understand Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to
join a Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not
even tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for
which it stands. . . .

I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here. It had
taken me some years to realise the true relation of the great
constructive ideas that swayed me not only to political parties, but