nce, are as different from one another as
they used to be from ministers and doctors. Every new skill we come to
and every new subdivision of skill marks the world off into pigeon-holes
of existence, into huge, hopeless, separate divisions of humanity. We
live in different elements, monsters of the sea wondering at the air,
air-monsters peering curiously down into the sea, sailors on surfaces,
trollers over other people's worlds. We commune with each other with
lines and hooks. Some of us on the rim of the earth spend all our days
quarrelling over bits of the crust of it. Some of us burrow and live in
the ground, and are as workers in mines. The sound of our voices to one
another is as though they were not. They are as the sound of picks
groping in rocks.

The reason that we are not able to produce or even to read a great
literature is that a great book can never be written, in spirit at
least, except to a whole human race. The final question with regard to
every book that comes to a publisher to-day is what mine shall it be
written in, which public shall it burrow for? A book that belongs to a
whole human race, which cannot be classified or damned into smallness,
would only be left by itself on the top of the ground in the sunlight.
The next great book that comes will have to take a long trip, a kind of
drummer's route around life, from mind to mind, and now in one place and
now another be let down through shafts to us. There is no whole human
race. A book with even forty-man power in it goes begging for readers.
The reader with more than one-, two-, or three-man power of reading
scarcely exists. We shall know our great book when it comes by the fact
that crowds of kinds of men will flock to the paragraphs in it, each
kind to its own kind of paragraph. It will hardly be said to reach us,
the book with forty-man power in it, until it has been broken up into
fortieths of itself. When it has been written over again--broken off
into forty books by forty men, none of them on speaking terms with each
other--it shall be recognised in some dim way that it must have been a
great book.

It is the first law of culture, in the highest sense, that it always
begins and ends with the fact that a man is a man. Teaching the fact to
a man that he can be a greater man is the shortest and most practical
way of teaching him other facts. It is only by being a greater man, by
raising his state of being to the _n^th_ power, that he can be ma