it all down as confusion. Now there is not one "great antique
heart," whose beatings we can count, but many impulses, many circles
of thought in which men are moving many objects. Men are not all in
the same state of progress, so cannot be moved in masses as of old.
At one time chivalry urged all men, then the Church, and the
phenomena were few, simple, and broad, or at least they seem so in
history.

Ellesmere. Very true; still I agree somewhat with Dunsford, that
men are not agitated as they used to be by the great speculative
questions. I account for it in this way, that the material world
has opened out before us, and we cannot but look at that, and must
play with it and work at it. I would say, too, that philosophy had
been found out, and there is something in that. Still, I think if
it were not for the interest now attaching to material things, great
intellectual questions, not exactly of the old kind, would arise and
agitate the world.

Milverton. There is one thing in my mind that may confirm your
view. I cannot but think that the enlarged view we have of the
universe must in some measure damp personal ambition. What is it to
be a King, Sheik, Tetrarch, or Emperor, over a bit of a little bit?
Macbeth's speech, "we'd jump the life to come," is a thing a man
with modern lights, however madly ambitious, would hardly utter.

Dunsford. Religious lights, Milverton.

Milverton. Of course not, if he had them; but I meant scientific
lights. Sway over our fellow-creatures, at any rate anything but
mental sway, has shrunk into less proportions.