Perhaps the truth of the matter may be approached as follows. The popular rendering of a great man’s views is singularly liable to run straight into the pit-falls against which he more particularly warned the world. This could be proved true in an extraordinary degree of such men as Plato and Spinoza, and still more astonishingly, perhaps, of the founder of the Christian religion. The reason is obvious. A great man works with the ideas of his age, and regenerates them. But in as far as he regenerates them, he gets beyond the ordinary mind; while in as far as he operates with them, he remains accessible to it. And his own mind has its ordinary side; the regeneration of ideas which he is able to effect is not complete, and the notions of the day not only limit his entire range of achievement--where the strongest runner will get to must depend on where he starts--but float about unassimilated {15} within his living stream of thought. Now all this ordinary side of his mind will partake of the strength and splendour of his whole nature. And thus he will seem to have preached the very superstitions which he combated. For in part he has done so, being himself infected; in part the overwhelming bias of his interpreters has reversed the meaning of his very warnings, by transferring the importance, due to his central thought, to some detail or metaphor which belongs to the lower level of his mind. It is an old story how Spinoza, “the God-intoxicated man,” was held to be an “atheist,” when in truth he was rather an “acosmist”; and in the same way, on a lower plane, the writer who struggled through to the idea that true sovereignty lay in the dominion of a common social good as expressed through law and institutions, is held to have ascribed absolute supremacy to that chance combination of individual voices in a majority, which he expressly pointed out to have, in itself, no authority at all.