additional to desire, and this does apparently introduce a factor virtually new to the biological series. The part that the purposive foresight of the intellect has been allowed to take in human affairs has always been limited by instinctive inhibitions. This limitation has effectually prevented man from defining his situation in the world, and he remains a captive in the house of circumstance, restrained as effectually by the mere painted canvas of habit, convention, and fear as by the solid masonry of essential instinctive needs. Being denied the freedom, which is its indispensable source of vigour, the intellect has necessarily failed to get a clear, comprehensive, and temperate view of man’s status and prospects, and has, of course, shrunk from the yet more exacting task of making itself responsible for his destiny. Nowhere has been and is the domination of the herd more absolute than in the field of speculation concerning man’s general position and fate, and in consequence prodigies of genius have been expended in obscuring the simple truth that there is no responsibility for man’s destiny anywhere at all outside his own responsibility, and that there is no remedy for his ills outside his own efforts. Western civilization has recently lost ten millions of its best lives as a result of the exclusion of the intellect from the general direction of society. So terrific an object lesson has made it plain enough how easy it is for man, all undirected and unwarned as he is, to sink to the irresponsible destructiveness of the monkey.
Such ostensible direction as societies obtain derives its sanction from one or more of three {257} sources—the hereditary, the representative, and the official. No direction can be effective in the way needed for the preservation of society unless it comes from minds broad in outlook, deep in sympathy, sensitive to the new and strange in experience, capable of resisting habit, convention, and the other sterilizing influences of the herd, deeply learned in the human mind and vividly aware of the world. Plainly enough, neither of the classes enumerated above is any more likely to possess these characteristics than any one else. To the representative and official classes there even attaches, at any rate