And, similarly, the unity between men which is produced by a common absorption in such pursuits does not strike very deep. For a man’s temperament has nothing in the world to do with his scientific conclusions, or at least ought not to have. In the ideal pursuit of knowledge, all of the things that set men at variance count for nothing whatever. Consequently the differences, just because they are ignored, are not overcome, with the result that, as at the beginning of this war, we may find professors of the various nations, who had been linked together, as one might think, closely enough in the pursuit of knowledge, hurling manifestoes at one another across their national frontiers. When we pass to the second of the great departments, a real progress may be noted in just these points. For in the experience of the artist Time is genuinely mastered. We get some illustration of this from the absorption which marks the aesthetic contemplation of a picture or a statue. For the time that we are really held by it, we forget about time altogether. But the case is clearer with regard to those arts which handle temporal processes—music and poetry. For it is the whole point, let us say, of a drama, that it shall follow a certain succession; it is vital to its significance that the scenes shall be in that order and no other. If you have two plays, each in three acts, in one of which the first act is cheerful in tone, and the second is neutral, and the third depressing, while in the other the first act is depressing, the second neutral, and the third cheerful, the total effect of the two plays is not the average of the three acts in each case, which would be neutral for both, but is in the one particularly depressing, and in the other particularly cheering. For the play is grasped as a whole. It makes a single impression, if it is a good play. We know what it means—not indeed because we can state it in other words, for it is the only expression of its own meaning; but it has a definite significance for us. And the name of the play comes to stand for that significance. This is especially noticeable in tragedy, where the Greeks, with their sure instinct, chose a story whose plot is known to the spectator in advance, so that we have throughout the play both the impression of the entire story and the particular impression of each scene as it comes and passes. It is significant that the Greeks did so choose for tragedy stories whose plot was known, while their comedians invented their own plots. And most will agree that we enjoy a great play better when we have read it in advance, or when we have already seen it on the stage before; because then we do reach something that may serve perhaps as the nearest image that we can get for eternity—a grasp of the whole stretch of time, realised in its successiveness and in the meaning which that successiveness gives to it, and having the sense of