The Russians, and not least the lesser Russians, may teach us this thing once more. Among these lesser, Leon Shestov holds an honourable place. He is hardly what we should call a philosopher, hardly again what we would understand by an essayist. The Russians, great and small alike, are hardly ever what we understand by the terms which we victims of tradition apply to them. In a hundred years they have accomplished an evolution which has with us slowly unrolled in a thousand. The very foundations of their achievement are new and laid within the memory of man. Where we have sharply divided art from art, and from science and philosophy, and given to each a name, the Russians have still the sense of a living connection between all the great activities of the human soul. From us this connection is too often concealed by the tyranny of names. We have come to believe, or at least it costs us great pains not to believe, that the name is a particular reality, which to confuse with another name is a crime. Whereas in truth the energies of the human soul are not divided from each other by any such impassable barriers: they flow into each other indistinguishably, modify, control, support, and decide each other. In their large unity they are real; isolated, they seem to be poised uneasily between the real and the unreal, and become deceptive, barren half-truths. Plato, who first discovered the miraculous hierarchy of names, though he was sometimes drunk with the new wine of his discovery, never forgot that the unity of the human soul was the final outcome of its diversity; and those who read aright his most perfect of all books--_The Republic_--know that it is a parable which fore-shadows the complete harmony of all the soul's activities.