Which method is the best for one who, inspired by tenacious and interconnected convictions, desires to make these prevail is a question which different people will answer in different ways. But let us make one supposition. Let us suppose that a person, such, for instance, as myself, who has dealt with ideas and principles in his opinion fallacious (notably those connected with the current claims of Labor), should have so succeeded in influencing the thoughts and the temper of his contemporaries that the modern strife between employers and employed should be pacified, and arrangements by sober discussion should render all strikes needless. Nobody would deny that a person who had brought about this result had performed what would be, in the strictest sense, an action--an action of the most practical and signally important kind, and it would be no less practical if accomplished by means of literature than it would be if accomplished by the ingenuity of cabinets or select committees. Such being the case, then, the reflection will here suggest itself that literature and action are by many critics of life constantly spoken of as though they were contrasted or antithetic things. It will not be inappropriate here, as a conclusion to these memoirs, to consider how far, or in what sense, this contrast is valid. [4] This work, later in date than the preceding, deals with the religious difficulties arising from the phenomena of multiple personality, a subject which was then being widely discussed in England, on the Continent, and in America. CHAPTER XVIII LITERATURE AND ACTION Literature as Speech Made Permanent--All Written Speech Not Literature--The Essence of Literature for Its Own Sake--Prose as a Fine Art--Some Interesting Aspects of Literature as an End in Itself--Their Comparative Triviality--No Literature Great Which Is Not More Than Literature--Literature as a Vehicle of Religion--Lucretius--_The Reconstruction of Belief_.