I doubt whether rules can be formulated which will help us much in interpreting the state of the social mind and predicting what success a given proposition will have. The attempts which have been made in this direction, such as those of Tarde in his _Logique sociale_, seem to me mechanical and unilluminating. If we accept the view that the higher intelligence is a complex imaginative synthesis, there is little reason for expecting help from such rules. What is necessary is that the interpreter and prophet shall have the knowledge and vision to reproduce in himself the essential influences of the time, and so, by a dramatic process, carry on the movement in his imagination and foresee the outcome. No formula of psychological selection will be of much use. Life is not subject to such formulas. If an idea is quite incapable of working in the actual situation, if there is no soil in which it can grow, people will take no interest in it, it will not “take hold” anywhere, but come and go as a mere flitting impression, not even achieving definite statement. It is certain that ideas not infrequently occur to men which will later be esteemed as great truths, but are rejected by those to whom they occur because they do not kindle in the actual trend of thought. This was the case with the Darwinian idea of development through the survival of the fittest; several persons who are known, and probably others who are not known, having seen it vaguely long before Darwin, and it came to power only when the situation was ripe. It is particularly true of social and moral ideals, since these are never novel or obscure in themselves, but are old thoughts renewed and illuminated from time to time by successive waves of faith. The Christian conception of a society of brothers with God as a loving father, is probably older than civilization, and can never have been far from men’s desires. The case is much the same with the idea of democracy, with Rousseau’s idea of the nobility of human nature and the depravity of institutions, and with Kant’s moral imperative. Even if an idea impresses an individual here and there it can hardly hold its ground without some kind of group support. Thus Hamerton says of the development of ideas in art: “The taste and knowledge of their contemporaries usually erect impassable barriers around artists. If there is no feeling or desire for a certain order of truth on the part of the public, the artist will have no stimulus to study that order of truth; nay, if he does study and render it, he will incur insult and abuse, and be thereby driven back into the line of subject and treatment which his contemporaries understand.”[77]