Literature uses the unprecise vernacular, it is true; but that is its virtue. For the vernacular, in contrast with any and all technologies, is the idiom of the mind itself, its fundamental humanising tradition. It is the essential historic feat of any civilisation, not so much perhaps to have conceived its guiding ideas--ideas change--as, in conceiving them, to have slowly evolved the articulate elements by which its heritors may conceive their own. Nature cares nothing for them or for what is made of them. They are none of hers. We come by them only through familiar contact with the tradition which has shaped and accumulated them. Here, then, is the great human task--now for the first time in the history of the West abandoned to the mercies of casual experience. Man is a social being in more than his habits and his institutions. His humanity itself hangs on his sociability. Deprive him of his social legacy of articulations and he is once again the sub-human animal. It was the essence of humanism as a discipline that it attempted, not to inculcate a doctrine, but to carry on and on this ultimate humanising process. And in this it served three ends, distinct but interdependent--mind, community, and the tradition on which both mind and community depend. IV From Plato to Irving Babbitt humanists have been occupied with the idea of leadership, since men are social beings, unhappy and self-destructive in mutual hostility, happiest and greatest when co-operating in community in the wisest available ideas. Whose ideas? Plato proposed the leadership of philosophers. But he himself did all that a philosopher can do. He was of the greatest; in one of the high masterpieces of human thought he proposed a scheme for the salvation of Greece--and while he wrote and Athens read, Greek civilisation declined. Something had departed that but an age before had made of Athens the supreme exemplar of what human existence may come to at its best, in zest of life and ardour of co-operation, in brilliance and profundity of thought, something that had created a society more lovely than any other in recorded history, and produced a literature and a full free current of ideas that are still the model and despair of all our aspirations. May this loss have been loss of disciplined community at the basis of all thought? Each man thinks not what he will but what he can with the articulate particles of his consciousness. Only by community here can one mind think the same thoughts as another. In such community minds will hold their common ideas with heightened ardour, as in friendship a common thought rises to new vitality by being shared in utter comprehension. It was not an accident that friendship played so profound a part in Greek life, not an accident that thought and letters so flourished. For expression had met understanding, and understanding had enriched the common premisses of thought. One among them, at all events, made the association.