ceremonious and bewildering circumlocution. It is thus double-natured. The organized public opinion that we see, hear, feel and obey is the costumed officialism of human nature, through ages of custom charged with enforcing upon individuals the demands of the many. The other is that tacit and nearly always unconscious understanding among men and women, which binds them in mysterious cohesion through a belief in or a dread of something that they can not understand, because they can not feel it with their hands, control it with their strength or disturb it with their threats. The myriads of mankind in this secret tribunal are silent because they are ignorant of speech. They are dull of brain and low in nervous organization, so that perception with them is a cerebral agony and even feeling responds only to the shock of actual physical suffering. Organized public opinion, when compared with this unnameable and resistless silent force of human instinct is like a small body of the police in the presence of a vast sullen mob. If the mob is determined and throws capable leaders forward, the police either desert to the mob or disappear. If the mob does not understand itself and produces no leaders the police rule it. It is fair to speak of this tacit common instinct as ignorant, because the world always has been shared between Ignorance and his twin brother, Indolence. Knowledge is the rarest coin that circulates among men. No one can accumulate knowledge unless he possesses the broad catholicity of purpose to labor ceaselessly for truth, to accept it from whatsoever source it comes, in whatsoever guise, with whatsoever message it brings him, and to abide whatsoever results may follow. If he expects an angel and a devil comes, it is still the truth he is seeing, it is still knowledge he is gaining. The genius of knowledge-seeking was glorified in that obscure German chemist who, experimenting upon himself with a new solution into which a fatal wrong ingredient had entered, cried in the agony of death to his assistant: "Note my symptoms carefully and make an autopsy—I am sure it is a new poison we have liberated!" If the vast majority of men shrink from and evade irksome labor with their muscles—even though life and comfort depend upon it—a still vaster majority shirk the disciplined toil and tension of the mind, which, if it have real purpose, makes little of the only rewards that spur men to muscular labor.

The men who have really thought and labored and struggled for the abstract jewel of truth, and to beautify and make happy the world we live in, are, to the masses of indolent, ignorant, selfish human beings that have swarmed through the ages, as parasites upon some huge animal. The mass of humanity, considered as a whole, separated from these restless and stinging parasites, observed through the perspective of history, tradition and science, resembles nothing so much as some monstrous dull-brained and gloomy animal, alternately dozing and raging through the centuries, now as if stupefied in its own bulk or then as if furious with the madness of brute power. In fact, though mankind have achieved the dignity of a history that fills the thoughtful with wonder, yet as a mass they are filled with as much violence, injustice, ruthlessness and selfishness as if it were but yesterday they had emerged from the primitive struggles with wild beasts, the tangled forests, the trackless mountains, and the pitiless elements, and yet stood flushed with savage exultation but dull with physical weariness. In that vast human bulk that sprawls over every continent, the primitive ferocity still exists, veiled perhaps under familiar livery and uniform, but untamed by centuries of training. It is this gloomy mass, saturated with superstitious cowardice, savage with the selfish instinct of greed, or dull with the languor of gorged and exhausted passion, that deliberates not in words or thought, but in some impenetrable