about. Music, it is true, is something other than, in a sense more
than, either thought or feeling or even poetry, and cannot be reduced to
any of them (nor any of them to it). The universe would be poor indeed
if it could be so. But none the less the truth may be, as Spinoza
thought, that the universe is at once a unity and a unity with many
facets, so that any one facet, while for ever unique, can bring to our
minds all the mysteries of the rest.

In any case, the high confidence that breathes in the music of a hundred
years ago meets us again in the philosophers.

Hegel, born in the same year as Beethoven and Wordsworth (1770), is sure
that nothing can resist the onslaught of man's spirit. 'Stronger than
the gates of Hell are the gates of Thought.' Fichte is convinced that
there waits in man, only to be developed, a power that will unite him
with all other men and at the same time develop his own personality to
the full. In a sense, the deepest, each man _is_ his fellow-men, and
they are he.

How much this conception has affected modern thought can be seen in a
recent and very remarkable book, _The New State_,[73] where the very
basis of democracy is shown to be the faith in this essential unity, a
unity to be worked out, not yet realized, but capable of realization, a
faith stirring all through the modern world, in ways expected and
unexpected, from Syndicalism to the League of Nations.

Later than Hegel and Fichte, the great Positivist conception of life
preached by Comte is instinct with this belief that man united with his
fellows, and only as so united, can attain heights undreamt-of and
unlimited.

The flood-tide of this faith flowed far into the nineteenth century. The
Italian Mazzini, leader of revolt in 1848, was filled with it. Prophet
of the most generous political gospel ever preached, he lived on the
hope that, if freedom were given to the nations and duty set before
them, they would prove worthy of their double mission, and peace would
come to pass between all peoples.

But even Mazzini had his moments of agonizing doubt. And others beside
him, men of lesser intellect as well as greater, were soon to raise, or
had already raised, voices, stern or fretful, of protest and criticism.
It became clear at last that this joyous confidence rested on a very
definite view of life and one that might easily be challenged, the view,
namely, that at bottom the universe meant well to man, that his greatest
aspi