in
and body of a man lives his Self; that you must preserve that brain
entire, aerate it, nourish it lest it die and his whole being die, and
yet you cannot say it is in this cell--or in that. So with an equal
mystery of diffusion the mind of mankind exists. No man, no
organization, no authority, can be more than a part of it. Twice at
least have there been attempts of parts to be the whole; the Catholic
Church and the Chinese Academy have each in varying measure sought to
play the part of a collective mind for all humanity and failed. All
individual achievement, fine books, splendid poems, great discoveries,
new generalizations, lives of thought, are no more than flashes in
this huge moral and intellectual being which grows now self-conscious
and purposeful, just as a child grows out of its early self-ignorance
to an elusive, indefinable, indisputable sense of itself. This
collective mind has to be filled and nourished with the Socialist
purpose, to receive and assimilate our great idea. That is the true
work of Socialism.

Consider the organs and media of the collective mind as one finds them
in England or America now, how hazardous they are and accidental! At
the basis of this strange thought-process is the intelligence of the
common man, once illiterate and accessible only to the crude,
inarticulate influences of talk and rumour, now rapidly becoming
educated, or at any rate educated to the level of a reader and writer,
and responding more and more to literary influences. The great mass of
the population is indeed at the present time like clay which has
hitherto been a mere deadening influence underneath, but which this
educational process, like some drying and heating influence upon that
clay, is rendering resonant, capable of, in a dim answering way,
_ringing_ to the appeals made upon it. Reaching through this mass,
appealing to it in various degrees at various levels and to various
ends, there are a number of systems of organizations of unknown value
and power. Its response, such as it is, robbed by multitudinousness of
any personality or articulation, is a broad emotional impulse.

Above this fundamental mass is the growing moiety which has a
conscious thought-process, of a sort. Its fundamental ideas, its
preconceptions, are begotten of a mixture of social traditions learnt
at home and in school and from the suggestions of contemporary customs
and affairs. But it reads and listens more or less. And scattered