that philosophy and the fine arts took a wrong turn at the
Renaissance,--at least it is useless to call on them now to turn back.
The world seldom turns back. It absorbs, it re-creates, it brings new
significance into the older thought. All progress, Goethe tells us, is
spiral,--coming out at the place where it was before, but higher up.
No, we cannot wisely blame or praise, but we may patiently study and
understand. That is what I am attempting to do here. The movement
described is no negligible accident of our time. It is world-wide, and
shows progress steadily in a single direction.

In order, however, to prove that such a change in moral estimates has
occurred, it was hardly necessary to survey the course of history. The
evidence lies close around us, and is found in the standards of the
society in which we move. Who are the people most prized? Are they the
most self-conscious? That should be the case if our long argument is
sound. Our preceding chapters would urge us to fill life with
consciousness. In proportion as consciousness droops, human goodness
becomes meagre; as our acts are filled with it, they grow excellent.
These are our theoretic conclusions, but the experience of daily life
does not bear them out. If, for example, I find the person who is
talking to me watches each word he utters, pauses again and again for
correction, choosing the determined word and rejecting the one which
instinctively comes to his lips, I do not trust what he says, or even
listen to it; while he is shaping his exact sentences I attend to
something else. In general, if a man's small actions impress us as
minutely planned, we turn from him. It is not the self-reflecting
persons, cautious of all they do, say, or think, who are popular. It
is rather those instinctively spontaneous creatures characterized by
abandon--men and women who let themselves go, and with all the wealth
of the world in them, allow it to come out of itself--that we take to