The man of science, the statesman, even the poet, now speaks for a
multitude, and out of a multitudinous consciousness, which had not
gathered to support, to inspire, or to weigh down, an Aristotle, a
Pericles, a Cromwell. This is a dominating fact from which it is well to
take our start. Assuredly the soul of mankind has been collectively
enlarged and enriched. How far the individual can share in this
enlargement is still one of the problems of the future. The West has
committed itself to a general policy of education which aims at making
every citizen a full partaker in the advance of the race. But it cannot
be said that this policy has yet been really tried. It is the
acknowledged ideal to which in all Western countries partial steps have
been taken, and the democracy, through their most enlightened leaders,
will continue to press for its fulfilment. As this approaches, the
individual may become more and more in his degree the microcosm which
philosophers have proclaimed him, and the enlargement of the soul, which
we know to be a fact for humanity, will become a fact for every man.
Need we doubt that with the general raising in the level new eminences
will appear? Do not great mountains sometimes rise from the sea and
sometimes from the high plateau? We are now in the very midst of a
struggle for settlement and incorporation, which, as it is accomplished,
should prepare the way for new excellences of every kind. What may not
be hoped of men if once they learn to live with their fellows? And they
can only so learn by studying them. This is felt by all contemporary
writers from Bergson in philosophy to Graham Wallas in politics. Poets
and novelists, above all, have turned more and more to problems of the
inner life.

The novelists who ushered in our age are significant of this, and none
more so than George Eliot, whose work, though somewhat out of fashion