The problem of overcoming these evils is nothing less than the problem of spiritualizing democracy. There are some of our hero-worshipping people who think that that vast result can still be accomplished by harking back to some such programme as the "great man" theory of Carlyle. Another theory of spiritualizing democracy, no less familiar to the student of nineteen-century literature, is what is called "the divine average" doctrine of Walt Whitman. The average man is to be taught the glory of his walk and trade. Round every head there is to be an aureole. "A common wave of thought and joy, lifting mankind again," is to make us forget the old distinction between the individual and the social group. We are all to be the sons of the morning. We must not pause to analyze or to illustrate these two theories. Carlyle's theory seems to me to be outworn, and Whitman's theory is premature. But it is clear that they both admit that the mass of men are as yet incompletely spiritualized, not yet raised to their full stature. Unquestionably, our American life is, in European eyes at least, monotonously uniform. It is touched with self-complacency. It is too intent upon material progress. It confuses bigness with greatness. It is unrestful. It is marked by intellectual impatience. Our authors are eager to write life rather than literature. But they are so eager that they overlook the need of literary discipline. They do not learn to write literature and therefore most of them are incapable of interpreting life. They escape, perhaps, from "the musty grip of the past," but in so doing they refuse to learn the inexorable lessons of the past. Hence the fact that our books lack power, that they are not commensurate with the living forces of the country. The unconscious, moral, and spiritual life of the nation is not back of them, making "eye and hand and heart go to a new tune." If we could have that, we should ask no more, for we believe in the nation. I heard a doctor say, the other day, that a man's chief lesson was to pull his brain down into his spinal cord; that is to say, to make his activities not so much the result of conscious thought and volition, as of unconscious, reflex action; to stop thinking and willing, and simply _do_ what one has to do. May there not be a hint here of the ultimate relation of the individual to the social organism; the relation of our literature to our national character? There is a period, no doubt, when the individual must painfully question himself, test his powers, and acquire the sense of his own place in the world. But there also comes a more mature period when he takes that place unconsciously, does his work almost without thinking about it, as if it were not his work at all. The brain has gone down into the spinal cord; the man is functioning as apart of the organism of society; he has ceased to question, to plan, to decide; it is instinct that does his work for him.