o be the medium through which they viewed contemporary
events. Or perhaps the long projecting shadow of some existing
institution may have darkened their vision. The Church of the future,
the Commonwealth of the future, the Society of the future, have
so absorbed their minds, that they are unable to see in their true
proportions the Politics of to-day. They have been intoxicated with
great ideas, such as liberty, or equality, or the greatest happiness of
the greatest number, or the brotherhood of humanity, and they no
longer care to consider how these ideas must be limited in practice or
harmonized with the conditions of human life. They are full of light,
but the light to them has become only a sort of luminous mist or
blindness. Almost every one has known some enthusiastic half-educated
person, who sees everything at false distances, and in erroneous
proportions.

With this disorder of eyesight may be contrasted another--of those who
see not far into the distance, but what is near only; who have been
engaged all their lives in a trade or a profession; who are limited to
a set or sect of their own. Men of this kind have no universal except
their own interests or the interests of their class, no principle but
the opinion of persons like themselves, no knowledge of affairs beyond
what they pick up in the streets or at their club. Suppose them to be
sent into a larger world, to undertake some higher calling, from being
tradesmen to turn generals or politicians, from being schoolmasters to
become philosophers:--or imagine them on a sudden to receive an inward
light which reveals to them for the first time in their lives a higher
idea of God and the existence of a spiritual world, by this sudden
conversion or change is not their daily life likely to be upset; and on
the other hand will not many of their old prejudices and narrownesses
still adhere to them long after they have begun to take a more
comprehensive view of human things? From familiar examples like these we
may learn what Plato meant by the eyesight which is liable to two kinds
of disorders.

Nor have we any difficulty in drawing a parallel between the young
Athenian in the fifth century before Christ who became unsettled by new
ideas, and the student of a modern University who has been the subject
of a similar 'aufklarung.' We too observe that when young men begin to
criticise customary beliefs, or to analyse the constitution of human
nature, they are apt to l