ience ready for him, who lived mainly by sentiment,
whose sentimentalities had anticipated his own, and who were only
waiting for some one from whom they might learn to sing them to some
definite intellectual tune. Moreover, unlike _Labor and the Popular
Welfare_, which was equally remote from sentimentalism, _Aristocracy and
Evolution_ did not supply the place of it by providing Conservative
thinkers with arguments suitable for immediate use on the platform.

Here we have the old difficulty which has always beset Conservatives
when face to face with revolutionaries. The revolutionaries, or, rather,
the leading spirits among them--for revolutions are always the work of a
small body of malcontents--require no rousing. They welcome any
arguments, philosophic or otherwise, which may tend to invest them with
the prestige of scientific thinkers; but the Conservatives require to be
roused, and roused in two different ways--first, in respect of the
principles on which their own position rests, and secondly, in respect
of the methods by which those principles can be presented to the
multitude in a manner which shall produce conviction. Looking back on
_Aristocracy and Evolution_, I now think that, if I could have rewritten
it in the light of the above considerations, I should modify, not its
argument, but the manner in which this argument was presented. Much of
its substance I have incorporated in what I have written since; but, as
it stood when I finished it, I felt it so far satisfactory that it
expressed all I had then to say as to the subjects of which it treated,
and my house of political thought was for the time empty, swept, and
garnished. After two years' labor spent on it, though this had been
carried on in very agreeable circumstances--in Highland castles and
shooting lodges, or at the Rodens' house in Ireland--I felt the need of
rest--of forgetting in intercourse with agreeable men and women that
anything like disagreeable men existed, who rendered the labors of
political thought necessary. My mind, however, instead of resting, was
presently driven, or driven back, into activities of other kinds.

CHAPTER XIV

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY AND FICTION

The So-called Anglican Crisis--_Doctrine and Doctrinal
Disruption_--Three Novels: _A Human Document_, _The Heart of
Life_, _The Individualist_--Three Works on the Philosophy of
Religion: _Religion as a Creditable Doctrine_, _The Veil of the
Te