But it is possible, where feelings are so actively involved, to jump from the frying pan into the fire, exchanging an illusion of nothing but greatness in our heroes for an illusion of nothing but meanness. What the critical methods are showing is that motives are mixed in both the greatly good and the greatly bad, as well as in us who are neither the one nor the other. And the obverse of the discovery of smallness in great men is the clearer and clearer demonstration of greatness in small men. That is, the more objective and merciless our analysis of men is, the more do particular qualities stand out in their own light, and the more sharp become the contrasts. The lesson of the new biography is not, “All men are alike,” but “Look for the particulars.” Until a few years ago, when researches began to be made into the psychology of “transfer of training,” we lacked means for understanding the coexistence of opposite qualities in the same personality. Worldly-wise observers knew that motives are mixed, but how they came to be mixed, how ethical contradictories can endure the presence of each other, and why the good influence of home, school, and church have such equivocal results--all this was a matter of guess-work. Some of this guess-work, taking the form of theology, accounted for our contradictory selves by the theory that God and the devil, or the Divine Spirit and human depravity, are at war in each of us. But this did not explain the complacency with which a man can be good and bad, great and small, at the same time. The easy way for thought was to place each man in some broad category and then either ignore conduct that did not fall into it, or else find excuses or sophistical explanations. A man was either a Christian or a non-Christian _as a whole_, it was assumed. If he was a Christian, his un-Christlike conduct was assigned to a dim region of thought and then often conveniently forgotten; if he was a non-Christian, his Christlike conduct was the part assigned to this limbo and then forgotten. Corresponding to this theology there was a naturalistic interpretation of man that ran to the effect that human nature is essentially low, or at least selfish and tricky, and that our virtues are either refined and far-seeing selfishness, or else a mere cloak of respectability. The dim region of thought in this instance, as in the theological judgment upon non-Christians, was that in which moral purity, strength, or greatness seemed spontaneously to spring from within the man.