noble, he had come to perceive, at large; one must be noble to
an end. To make human life, collectively and in detail, a thing more
comprehensive, more beautiful, 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
log