When a thinker has a world of thought of his own, he generally becomes cold towards other thinkers, and to none more than to him whose star is nearest his own. It is necessary, therefore, that he should read, above all, the philosopher whose thought most closely resembles his, for to him he is most likely to be unjust. We are the most hostile to those who say what we say, but say it in a way we do not like. 105 _The Twice Subtle_ The thinker who has been twice subtle arrives at simplicity. And in doing so he has, at the same time, discovered a new truth. But this other thinker has possessed simplicity from the beginning. Has he also possessed this truth? At any rate, he does not know it. 106 _Mastery of One's Thoughts_ One should know how to keep one's thoughts at a distance. The French can do this, and, therefore, write at once wittily and profoundly of serious things. But the Germans live, perhaps, too near their thoughts, and are possessed by them: hence, their obscurity and heaviness. Wit--lightness of hand--shows that one is master of one's thought, and is not mastered by it. Nevertheless, the thoughts of the Germans may be the mightier. In this matter the complete thinker should be able to become French or German as occasion demands. 107 _Psychologists_ The keenest psychologists are those who are burdened with no social mission and get along with a minimum of theory. Joseph Conrad, for instance, is infinitely more subtle in his analysis of the human mind and heart than is H. G. Wells or John Galsworthy. He has the happy unconcern and detachment of a connoisseur in humanity, of one who experiences the same fine interest in an unusual human situation as the dilettante finds in some recondite trifle. Henry James carried this attitude to a high degree of refinement. He walked among men and women as a botanist might walk among a collection of "specimens," dismissing the ordinary with the assured glance of an expert, and lingering only before the distinctive and the significant. Should we who nurse a mission deplore the spirit in which these disinterested observers enter into their task? By no means. But for them, certain domains of human nature would never have been discovered, and we should have been correspondingly the losers. For we revolutionists must know the human kind before we can alter them. The non-missionary is as necessary as the missionary, and to none more than to the missionary. 108 _Realism_