social union of the whole community. This is the situation discussed in
our seventh and eighth chapters.

In philosophy and literature a similar dividing line appears. In the
'sixties Herbert Spencer was publishing the capital works of his system.
The _Principles of Psychology_ was published in 1872. This 'Synthetic
Philosophy' has proved up to the present the last attempt of its kind,
and with the vast increase of knowledge since Spencer's day it might
well prove the last of all such syntheses carried out by a single mind.
Specialism and criticism have gained the upper hand, and the fresh turn
to harmony, which we shall notice later on, is rather a harmony of
spirit than an encyclopaedic unity such as the great masters of system
from Descartes to Comte and Spencer had attempted before.

In literature also the dates agree. Dickens, most typical of all early
Victorians, died in 1870. George Eliot's last great novel, _Daniel
Deronda_, was published in 1876. Victor Hugo's greatest poem, _La
Légende des Siècles_, the imaginative synthesis of all the ages,
appeared in the 'seventies. There have been many writers since, with
Tolstoi perhaps at their head, in whom the fire of moral enthusiasm has
burnt as keenly, nor have the borders of human sympathy been narrowed.
Yet one cannot fail to note a less pervading and ready confidence in
human nature, a less fervent belief that the good must prevail if good
men will only follow their better leading.

Here then is our period, marked in public affairs by a progress from
one conflict, desperate and tragic, between two of the leading nations
of the West, to another and still more terrible which swept the whole
world into the maelstrom; and marked in thought by a certain dispersion
and depression of mind, a falling in the barometer of temperament and