k." To
combine the functions of a trader with those of an explorer, a soldier,
and a diplomat is what he really enjoys. So, all over the world, he
opens the ways, and others come in to reap the fruit of his labours.
This is true in things intellectual as in things practical. In science,
too, he is a pioneer. Modern archaeology was founded by English
travellers. Darwin and Wallace and Galton in their youth pursued
adventure as much as knowledge. When the era of routine arrives, when
laboratory work succeeds to field work, the Englishman is apt to retire
and leave the job to the German. The Englishman, one might say, "larks"
into achievement, the German "grinds" into it. The one, accordingly, is
free-living, genial, generous, careless; the other laborious, exact,
routine-ridden. It is hard for an Englishman to be a pedant; it is not
easy for a German to be anything else. For philosophy no man has less
capacity than the Englishman. He does not understand even how such
questions can be put, still less how anyone can pretend to answer them.
The philosopher wants to know whether, how, and why life ought to be
lived before he will consent to live it. The Englishman just lives
ahead, not aware that there is a problem; or convinced that, if there is
one, it will only be solved "by walking." The philosopher proceeds from
the abstract to the concrete. The Englishman starts with the concrete,
and may or, more probably, may not arrive at the abstract. No general
rules are of any use to him except such as he may have elaborated for
himself out of his own experience. That is why he mistrusts education.
For education teaches how to think in general, and that isn't what he
wants or believes in. So, when he gets into affairs, he discards all his
training and starts again at the beginning, learning to think, if he
ever does learn it, over his own particular job. And his own way, he
opines, must be the right way for every one. Hence his contempt and even
indignation for individuals or nations who are moved by "ideas." At this
moment his annoyance with the leaders of "Young China" is provoked
largely by the fact that they are proceeding on general notions of how a
nation should be governed and organised, instead of starting with the
particularities of their own society, and trying to mend it piece by
piece and from hand to mouth. Before they make a Constitution, he
thinks, they ought to make roads; and before they draw up codes, to
extirpate