tion of knowledge, and leaves you in
an inconceivable, unknowable Absolute, so, according to Falder, who
has been in prison, "Nobody wishes you any harm, but they down you all
the same." In precisely the same way as Professor James pleads for a
view of truth which rests on the unfailing vividness of finite
experience, so Mr. Galsworthy pleads for a justice which shall be
applicable, not to an infinite number of imaginary cases, but to the
individual, to the person whom we might chance to know, and meet, and
work with--to the necessitous human being. He pleads for a law which
shall be elastic, not rigid; dealing with men, not cases; for which
mercy shall come to be a part of the idea of justice. That which is
good enough for human beings in their dealings one with another ought
not to be too good for the law. Intercourse with concrete reality is
Professor James' requirement for the truth of an idea; intercourse
with human beings is Mr. Galsworthy's requirement as the basis of
social morality and of law. That does not of course mean that the
legislator must be acquainted with all those for whom he legislates
any more than that we can directly experience the facts of history
which we claim to know. But every rule--in knowledge, in morality, in
law--must be referable to this test of intercourse. Let your judgment
of human beings be such as you would award to those who are
sufficiently human to be among your friends. Let it be directed solely
towards the well-being of the individual so far as that is consistent
with the well-being of society. Again and again Mr. Galsworthy has
shown us how stereotyped views, abstractions of the human mind, settle
down upon classes and individuals and warp their judgments and their
conduct. In _Fraternity_ he showed how the idea of class differences
becomes an obsession in the human mind, obliterating the truer idea of
human community, of those common qualities in character which are not
skin-deep, like class, but fundamental. In _Strife_ he showed how the
idea of the rights of an employer, of the rights of a workman, is an
abstraction hiding from master and workman the human bond which human
intercourse would have revealed. In _Justice_, again, he showed how
that lowest of all existing codes, the legal code, erects a
"temple-like" abstraction of the law to which all individuals, however
different they may be, however various their requirements, are made to
conform.

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