in seeking abstract truth and nursing the political spirit.  There is a decisive preponderance in one direction or the other, and the equal balance between free and active thinking, and coherent practical energy in a community, seems too hard to sustain.  The vast military and political strength of Germany, for instance, did not exist, and was scarcely anticipated in men’s minds, during the time of her most strenuous passion for abstract truth and deeper learning and new criticism.  In France never was political and national interest so debilitated, so extinct, as it was during the reign of Lewis the Fifteenth:  her intellectual interest was never so vivid, so fruitful, or so widely felt.

Yet it is at least well, and more than that, it is an indispensable condition of social wellbeing, that the divorce between political responsibility and intellectual responsibility, between respect for what is instantly practicable and search after what is only important in thought, should not be too complete and universal.  Even if there were no other objection, the undisputed predominance of the political spirit has a plain tendency to limit the subjects in which the men animated by it can take a real interest.  All matters fall out of sight, or at least fall into a secondary place, which do not bear more or less directly and patently upon the material and structural welfare of the community.  In this way the members of the community miss the most bracing, widening, and elevated of the whole range of influences that create great characters.  First, they lose sincere concern about the larger questions which the human mind has raised up for itself.  Second, they lose a fearless desire to reach the true answers to them, or if no certain answers should prove to be within reach, then at any rate to be satisfied on good grounds that this is so.  Such questions are not immediately discerned by commonplace minds to be of social import.  Consequently they, and all else that is not obviously connected with the machinery of society, give way in the public consideration to what is so connected with it, in a manner that cannot be mistaken.

Again, even minds that are not commonplace are affected for the worse by the same spirit.  They are aware of the existence of the great speculative subjects and of their importance, but the pressure of the political spirit on such men makes them afraid of the conclusions to which free inquiry might bring them.  Accordingly they abstain from inquiry, and dread nothing so much as making up their minds.  They see reasons for thinking that, if they applied themselves seriously to the formation of true opinions in this or that department, they would come to conclusions which, though likely to make their way in the course of some centuries, are wholly unpopular now, and which might ruin the influence of anybody suspected of accepting, or even of so much as leaning towards, them.  Life, they reflect, is short; missionaries do not