Men in communities and assemblages are under laws that do not reach or affect the single individual, just as vast bodies of water respond to attractions and planetary perturbations that do not affect the lesser bodies. Men kindle one another as do firebrands, and beget a collective heat and an enthusiasm that tyrannize over the individual purposes and wills. We say things are in the air, that a spirit is abroad; that is, that influences are at work above the wills and below the consciousness of the people. There are changes or movements in the world and in the communities that seem strictly analogous to drifting; it is as when a ship is carried out of its course by unsuspected currents, or as when arctic explorers, with their faces set northward, are unconsciously carried in the opposite direction by the ice floe beneath them. The spirit of the age, or the time-spirit, is always at work, and takes us with it, whether we know it or not. For instance, the whole religious world is now drifting away from the old theology, and drifting faster than we suspect. Certain zealots have their faces very strongly set against it, but, like Commodore Parry on the ice floe, they are going south faster than their efforts are carrying them north. Indeed, the whole sentiment of the race is moving into a more genial and temperate theological climate, away from purgatorial fires rather than toward them. The political sentiment of a country also drifts. That of our own may be said to have been drifting for some time now in the direction of freer commercial intercourse with other nations. A man’s life may stagnate as literally as water may stagnate, and just as motion and direction are the remedy for one, so purpose and activity are the remedy for the other. Movement is the condition of life, anyway. Set the currents going in the air, in the water, in the body, in the mind, in the community, and a healthier condition will follow. Change, diversity, activity, are the prime conditions of life and health everywhere. Persons with doubts and perplexities about life go to work to ameliorate some of its conditions, and their doubts and perplexities vanish--not because their problems are solved, as they think they are, but because their energies have found an outlet, the currents have been set going. Persons of strong will have few doubts and uncertainties. They do not solve the problems, but they break the spell of their enchantment. Nothing relieves and ventilates the mind like a resolution. A true work of art is analogous to a living organism. “The essential condition of art creations,” says Renan, “is to form a living system every portion of which answers and demands every other.... The intimate laws of life, of the development of organic products, and of the toning down of shades must be considered at every step.” Works such as certain of Victor Hugo’s, which have no organic unity and proportion, are, according to this dictum, monstrosities.