There may be some excuse for not seeing the reality of a policeman, because a uniform is always a thick veil.  But you—­I mean you, I, any of us—­are oddly dim-sighted also in regard to the civil population.  For instance, we get into the empty motor-bus as it leaves the scene of the street accident, and examine the men and women who gradually fill it.  Probably we vaunt ourselves as being interested in the spectacle of life.  All the persons in the motor-bus have come out of a past and are moving towards a future.  But how often does our imagination put itself to the trouble of realising this?  We may observe with some care, yet owing to a fundamental defect of attitude we are observing not the human individuals, but a peculiar race of beings who pass their whole lives in motor-buses, who exist only in motor-buses and only in the present!  No human phenomenon is adequately seen until the imagination has placed it back into its past and forward into its future.  And this is the final process of observation of the individual.

VII

Seeing life, as I have tried to show, does not begin with seeing the individual.  Neither does it end with seeing the individual.  Particular and unsystematised observation cannot go on for ever, aimless, formless.  Just as individuals are singled out from systems, in the earlier process of observation, so in the later processes individuals will be formed into new groups, which formation will depend upon the personal bent of the observer.  The predominant interests of the observer will ultimately direct his observing activities to their own advantage.  If he is excited by the phenomena of organisation—­as I happen to be—­he will see individuals in new groups that are the result of organisation, and will insist on the variations from type due to that grouping.  If he is convinced—­as numbers of people appear to be—­that society is just now in an extremely critical pass, and that if something mysterious is not forthwith done the structure of it will crumble to atoms—­he will see mankind grouped under the different reforms which, according to him, the human dilemma demands.  And so on!  These tendencies, while they should not be resisted too much, since they give character to observation and redeem it from the frigidity of mechanics, should be resisted to a certain extent.  For, whatever they may be, they favour the growth of sentimentality, the protean and indescribably subtle enemy of common sense.

PART II

WRITING NOVELS

I