So the “new spirit” brings us to one of the most ancient modes of human emotion. I sought to emphasise this in my Introduction as well as in the Conclusion, not altogether successfully for some of my readers, who have been led to credit me with virtues of modernity to which I can make no claim. So far from being “an apostle of modernity,” the “new spirit” that I am concerned with is but a quickening in the pulse of life such as may take place in any age, though my tracings are only of a recent acceleration. The greatest manifestation of the new spirit that I know of took place long since in the zoological history of the race when the immediate ancestor of man began to walk on his hind legs, so developing the skilful hands and restless brain that brought sin into the world. That strange and perilous method of locomotion--which carried other diseases and disabilities in its train, more concrete than sin--marked a revolutionary outburst of new life worth contemplating. Yet even among the later and minor movements of life it is not the most recent that to me personally are the most attractive. The Eiffel Tower does not thrill me like the gray towers of Chartres; I find the streets of Zaragoza more interesting than those of Manchester. And, on the other hand, there are modernities which seem to me old, very old, older than life itself. To say this is no doubt to confess that the personal element has a large place in this study of the “New Spirit.” And it is true that, however honest a piece of mechanism your sphygmograph may be, if it is alive there is a very considerable personal equation which you must make up your mind to reckon with. I believe I am not altogether incapable of slinging facts at the head of the British Goliath (with purely benevolent intentions), but on this occasion I wrote for my own pleasure: let me apologise to Goliath for any annoyance I may so have caused him. I wished to speak for once, so far as might be, in my own voice, glad if here and there a reader cared to follow my impatient track, furnishing from the stores of his own knowledge and intelligence what was lacking in commentaries and _pièces justificatives_. I wished at the outset to take a bird’s-eye view of the world as it presented itself to me personally, only indicating by mere hints those parts of the field in which I was more specially concerned. And I wished also to indicate--perhaps once for all--my own faith in those large facts of nature which are unaffected by personal equation, and which harmonise all our petty individual activities. Nature is bent on her own ends, and with infinite ingenuity uses all our energies to carry out her idea of increasing and multiplying the countless forms of life. Death itself is but an accidental after-thought, a beneficial adaptation--as Weismann would have us express it--only affecting the body, that servant of the immortal germ-cells which has grown so large