things, but the being willing to be leveled towards the
infinite? Until humility produces that frame of mind and spirit in the
artist can his audience gain the greatest kind of utility and
inspiration, which might be quite invisible at first? Emerson realizes
the value of "the many,"--that the law of averages has a divine source.
He recognizes the various life-values in reality--not by reason of
their closeness or remoteness, but because he sympathizes with men who
live them, and the majority do. "The private store of reason is not
great--would that there were a public store for man," cries Pascal, but
there is, says Emerson, it is the universal mind, an institution
congenital with the common or over-soul. Pascal is discouraged, for he
lets himself be influenced by surface political and religious history
which shows the struggle of the group, led by an individual, rather
than that of the individual led by himself--a struggle as much
privately caused as privately led. The main-path of all social progress
has been spiritual rather than intellectual in character, but the many
bypaths of individual-materialism, though never obliterating the
highway, have dimmed its outlines and caused travelers to confuse the
colors along the road. A more natural way of freeing the congestion in
the benefits of material progress will make it less difficult for the
majority to recognize the true relation between the important spiritual
and religious values and the less important intellectual and economic
values. As the action of the intellect and universal mind becomes more
and more identical, the clearer will the relation of all values become.
But for physical reasons, the group has had to depend upon the
individual as leaders, and the leaders with few exceptions restrained
the universal mind--they trusted to the "private store," but now,
thanks to the lessons of evolution, which Nature has been teaching men
since and before the days of Socrates, the public store of reason is
gradually taking the place of the once-needed leader. From the Chaldean
tablet to the wireless message this public store has been wonderfully
opened. The results of these lessons, the possibilities they are
offering for ever coordinating the mind of humanity, the culmination of
this age-instruction, are seen today in many ways. Labor Federation,
Suffrage Extension, are two instances that come to mind among the many.
In these manifestations, by reason of tradition, or th