o longer did he ask why am I such a fool, but why are we all such
fools? He became Man on the automobile of civilisation, crushing his
thousands daily in his headlong and yet aimless career....

That was a trick of Mr. Britling's mind. It had this tendency to spread
outward from himself to generalised issues. Many minds are like that
nowadays. He was not so completely individualised as people are supposed
to be individualised--in our law, in our stories, in our moral
judgments. He had a vicarious factor. He could slip from concentrated
reproaches to the liveliest remorse for himself as The Automobilist in
General, or for himself as England, or for himself as Man. From remorse
for smashing his guest and his automobile he could pass by what was for
him the most imperceptible of transitions to remorse for every accident
that has ever happened through the error of an automobilist since
automobiles began. All that long succession of blunderers became Mr.
Britling. Or rather Mr. Britling became all that vast succession of
blunderers.

These fluctuating lapses from individuation made Mr. Britling a
perplexity to many who judged only by the old personal standards. At
times he seemed a monster of cantankerous self-righteousness, whom
nobody could please or satisfy, but indeed when he was most pitiless
about the faults of his race or nation he was really reproaching
himself, and when he seemed more egotistical and introspective and
self-centred he was really ransacking himself for a clue to that same
confusion of purposes that waste the hope and strength of humanity. And
now through the busy distresses of the night it would have perplexed a
watching angel to have drawn the line and shown when Mr. Britling, was
grieving for his own loss and humiliation and when he was grieving for
these common human weaknesses of which he had so large a share.

And this double refraction of his mind by which a concentrated and
individualised Britling did but present a larger impersonal Britling
beneath, carried with it a duplication of his conscience and sense of
responsibility. To his personal conscience he was answerable for his
private honour and his debts and the Dower House he had made and so on,
but to his impersonal conscience he was answerable for the whole world.
The world from the latter point of view was his egg. He had a
subconscious delusion that he had laid it. He had a subconscious
suspicion that he had let it cool and that it was