That these are important questions, and that the purposes above-mentioned are in many ways good, is clear. But before we can answer the questions, or decide as to the feasibility of the aims, there are some things to be brought and to be kept in view. And these things were not as a rule brought and kept in view. It was assumed that the standard of adjudication was found in the averagely educated and generally cultured individual among the class of more or less 'advanced thinkers' who asked the questions and set up the aims. That class, already denationalised by function, forming a commonwealth or rather a friendly fraternity throughout the capitals of Europe, had cut itself off from the narrower and the deeper sympathies of the national life. Forming a sort of mean or middle stratum in the social organisation, they tended to ignore or despise equally the depths below them and the heights above. They took themselves as the types of humanity, and what _their_ understandings found acceptable they dubbed rational: all else was a survival from the ages of darkness. They forgot utterly that they were only a part, a class, a member in the social body: and that they could only be and do what they were and did, because what they were not and did not do was otherwise supplied. It takes all sorts of people to make a world: but each class--and the order of literature and intelligence is no exception--tends to set itself up as the corner-stone (if not something more) of the social edifice. What is more: in such a loose aggregate as the intelligent upper-middle class, the individual tends more and more to count as something, detached and by himself, to be an equal and free unit of judgment and choice, to be emancipated from all the bonds which hold in close affinity members of a group whose functions are unlike each other's, and yet decidedly complementary. Such a class, again--though there are of course conspicuous exceptions--is, by the stress of special interests, removed from direct contact with nature and reality, and lives what in the main may be styled an artificial life.