release from the narrow life as it closes about us.
One man I know makes an anthology into which he copies to re-read any
passage that stirs and revives in him the sense of broad issues. Others
again seem able to refresh their nobility of outlook in the atmosphere
of an intense personal love.

Some of us seem to forget almost as if it were an essential part of
ourselves. Such a man as myself, irritable, easily fatigued and bored,
versatile, sensuous, curious, and a little greedy for experience, is
perpetually losing touch with his faith, so that indeed I sometimes turn
over these pages that I have written and come upon my declarations and
confessions with a sense of alien surprise.

It may be, I say, that for some of us forgetting is the normal process,
that one has to believe and forget and blunder and learn something and
regret and suffer and so come again to belief much as we have to eat and
grow hungry and eat again. What these others can get in their temples
we, after our own manner, must distil through sleepless and lonely
nights, from unavoidable humiliations, from the smarting of bruised
shins.

3.22. DEMOCRACY AND ARISTOCRACY.

And now having dealt with the general form of a man's duty and with
his duty to himself, let me come to his attitude to his individual
fellow-men.

The broad principles determining that attitude are involved in things
already written in this book. The belief in a collective being gathering
experience and developing will, to which every life is subordinated,
renders the cruder conception of aristocracy, the idea of a select life
going on amidst a majority of trivial and contemptible persons who "do
not exist," untenable. It abolishes contempt. Indeed to believe at all
in a comprehensive purpose in things is to abandon that attitude and
all the habits and acts that imply it. But a belief in universal
significance does not altogether preclude a belief in an aristocratic
method of progress, in the idea of the subordination of a number
of individuals to others who can utilize their lives and help and
contributory achievements in the general purpose. To a certain extent,
indeed, this last conception is almost inevitable. We must needs so
think of ourselves in relation to plants and animals, and I see no
reason why we should not think so of our relations to other men. There
are clearly great differences in the capacity and range of experience of
man and man and in their power of u