The leading minds of that age are not minds which owed their intellectual superiority to a disproportionate development of certain intellectual tendencies, or to a dwarfed or inferior endowment of those natural affections and personal qualifications which tend to limit men to the sphere of their particular sensuous existence. The mind of this school is the representative mind, and all men recognise it as that, because, in its products, that nature which is in all men, which philosophy had, till then, scorned to recognise, which the abstractionists had missed in their abstractions,--that nature of will, and sense, and passion, and inanity, is brought out in its true historical proportions, not as it exists in books, not as it exists in speech, but as it exists in the actual human life. It is the mind in which this historical principle, this motivity which is not reason, is brought in contact with the opposing and controlling element as it had not been before. In all its earth-born Titanic strength and fulness, it _is_ dragged up from its secret lurking-places, and confronted with its celestial antagonist. In all its self-contradiction and cowering unreason, it is set face to face with its celestial umpire, and subjected to her unrelenting criticism. There are depths in this microcosm which _this_ torch only has entered, silences which this speaker only has broken, cries which he only knows how to articulate. 'The soundest disclosing and expounding of men is by their _natures_ and _ends_,' so the one who is best qualified to give us information on this question tells us,--by their natures _and_ ends; 'the weaker sort by their natures, and the _wisest_ by their ends'; and '_the distance_' of this wisest sort 'from the _ends_ to which they aspire,' is that 'from which one may take measure and scale of the rest of their actions and desires.'