more generous and coherent than it is to-day seemed to him the fundamental intention of all nobility.  He believed more and more firmly that the impulses to make and help and subserve great purposes are abundantly present in the world, that they are inhibited by hasty thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and that the real ennoblement of human life was not so much a creation as a release.  He lumped the preventive and destructive forces that keep men dispersed, unhappy, and ignoble under the heading of Prejudice, and he made this Prejudice his fourth and greatest and most difficult limitation.  In one place he had written it, “Prejudice or Divisions.”  That being subdued in oneself and in the world, then in the measure of its subjugation, the new life of our race, the great age, the noble age, would begin.

So he set himself to examine his own mind and the mind of the world about him for prejudice, for hampering follies, disguised disloyalties and mischievous distrusts, and the great bulk of the papers that White struggled with at Westhaven Street were devoted to various aspects of this search for “Prejudice.”  It seemed to White to be at once the most magnificent and the most preposterous of enterprises.  It was indeed no less than an enquiry into all the preventable sources of human failure and disorder. . . .  And it was all too manifest to White also that the last place in which Benham was capable of detecting a prejudice was at the back of his own head.

Under this Fourth Limitation he put the most remarkable array of influences, race-hatred, national suspicion, the evil side of patriotism, religious and social intolerance, every social consequence of muddle headedness, every dividing force indeed except the purely personal dissensions between man and man.  And he developed a metaphysical interpretation of these troubles.  “No doubt,” he wrote in one place, “much of the evil between different kinds of men is due to uncultivated feeling, to natural bad feeling, but far more is it due to bad thinking.”  At times he seemed on the verge of the persuasion that most human trouble is really due to bad metaphysics.  It was, one must remark, an extraordinary journey he had made; he had started from chivalry and arrived at metaphysics; every knight he held must be a logician, and ultimate bravery is courage of the mind.  One thinks of his coming to this conclusion with knit brows and balancing intentness above whole gulfs of bathos—­very much as he had once walked the Leysin Bisse. . . .

“Men do not know how to think,” he insisted—­getting along the planks; “and they will not realize that they do not know how to think.  Nine-tenths of the wars in the world have arisen out of misconceptions. . . .  Misconception is the sin and dishonour of the mind, and muddled thinking as ignoble as dirty conduct. . . .  Infinitely more disastrous.”