History should aid us to an answer here. The author of “Our Times,” Mark Sullivan, after giving an account of the partisan strife and popular movements of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, suggests that perhaps all this expenditure of energy and intensity of enthusiasm was but part of the passing show and came to nothing, while the so-called leaders who seemed to be creating history were but the puppets of deeper and silent forces. He suggests that the enduring changes are those of science and the arts. I believe we have here one of the important lessons of history. Progress in civilization has been the work almost wholly of scientists, philosophers, artists, engineers, and unique individuals. The rest has been froth and foam, a struggle to liberate mankind from the clutches of its most recent liberators, crowd devouring crowd, mass movements marching to Utopia down blind alleys. Unfortunately there is some truth in the statement that the intelligence of the race has little influence upon mass movements. This is not because scholarship is aloof, however, so much as because the multitude in its enthusiasms does not heed the counsels of wisdom. When I become a zealot for a movement I lose my critical faculties. In exalting my cause I would persuade myself that my existence is of more importance to the world than it really is. No one so devoted and earnest could possibly be in the wrong, and in the righteousness of my cause, I have infallibility. What need have I of the wisdom that comes by taking thought when I have the truth by intuition and intensity of feeling? If it is true that men can only be made to act under the lash of blind faith and enthusiasm, then the estate of man is a sorry one indeed. For most of the things done will end in tragic failure. It is only the conceit of ignorance to believe that the world can be straightened once for all by people who do not know what they are doing. Moreover, to say that ignorance is necessary to the accomplishment of good is to say, that ignorance is desirable and better for man than knowledge. There have been those who held such a view. Obscurantists always hold it. It is the philosophy of pessimism, and it is interesting to note that it is the believer and the devotee, the man of action and not the gentle doubter who finally ends in pessimism.