ventions.

Among much that is doubtful in the future of the League, one thing
stands out as a capital certainty. Without losing the very spirit of its
being it can never become a satellite system, revolving round one
dominant Power or even a dominant clique. It was formed to contradict
and destroy an oppressive imperialism: it can only thrive by the free
co-operation of the partners, finding their proper end in a prosperity
shared by all.

Such is a short summary of some of the leading topics treated here,
those perhaps in which public interest has been most keenly aroused. But
nothing has been said in this introduction of Art or Music, and of
Religion only a little by implication. It may be well in conclusion to
attempt a still more summary impression of the main drift of the period
on the spiritual side. We may in such a wider view see some common
tendency in all these activities, some inspiration of religion, some
link with art, some impulse to live strongly and to hope.

The present writer would find this leading thread in the increasing
stress laid by recent European thought on the spiritual, or
psychological, side of every problem, in the growing desire to
understand the character of man's own nature and to develop all the
powers of his soul.

One of the latest authorities[2] on anthropology has told us that 'to
develop soul is progress', and he has followed the clue through the
meagre relics of Palaeolithic and Neolithic man. So does the last
science of the nineteenth century throw light on the dim recesses of the
past. For unquestionably psychology is the characteristic science added
to the hierarchy in our period; it has crowned biology and is exercising
a profound influence on philosophy, literature, and even politics. If
Aristotle was its founder, if it was Descartes who first showed its
profound connexion with philosophy, it is to workers in our own day that
we must look for those methods of accurate observation, comparison, and
the study of causes without which it could not advance farther. And
modern psychology has advanced far enough to see that we must include in
its purview the 'soul' of a minnow as well as of a man. Descartes had
stopped too short, for to him animal life, as distinct from human,
showed only the movements of automata. But now, just as the biologist
conceives man as part of one infinite order of living things, so the
psychologist believes that the facts of his consciousness, the crow