Many readers will remember the well-known passage in Stuart Mill's autobiography, in which he dealt with this subject. It has often been quoted against him, because he went so far as to say that "a person of high intellect should never go into unintellectual society, unless he can enter it as an apostle," a passage not likely to make its author beloved by society of that kind; yet Mill was not a misanthropist, he was only anxious to preserve what there is of high feeling and high principle from deterioration by too much contact with the common world. It was not so much that he despised the common world, as that he knew the infinite preciousness, even to the common people themselves, of the few better and higher minds. He knew how difficult it is for such minds to "retain their higher principles unimpaired," and how at least "with respect to the persons and affairs of their own day they insensibly adopt the modes of feeling and judgment in which they can hope for sympathy from the company they keep." Perhaps I may do well to offer an illustration of this, though from a department of culture that may not have been in Mill's view when he wrote the passage. I myself have known a certain painter (not belonging to the English school) who had a severe and elevated ideal of his art. As his earnings were small he went to live in the country for economy. He then began to associate intimately with people to whom all high aims in painting were unintelligible. Gradually he himself lost his interest in them and his nobler purposes were abandoned. Finally, art itself was abandoned and he became a coffee-house politician. So it is with all rare and exceptional pursuits if once we allow ourselves to take, in all respects, the color of the common world. It is impossible to keep up a foreign language, an art, a science, if we are living away from other followers of our pursuit and cannot endure solitude. It follows from this that there are many situations in which men have to learn that particular kind of independence which consists in bearing isolation patiently for the preservation of their better selves. In a world of common-sense they have to keep a little place apart for a kind of sense that is sound and rational but not common.