It has been necessary to take this brief survey of the influences that are now modifying the face of the civilized world, for it is in this theatre and under these conditions that the three great modern forces that we shall meet with throughout this book are acting. What impresses one is the vast resonance which now accompanies every human achievement, because of the communalization and extension of the methods of intercourse. It has become one of the chief tasks of science to attain unity, unity of standard and measure and nomenclature; this has been the object of numberless conferences. It is to attain this end that the efforts to manufacture a universal language have obtained some support, fruitless as they have hitherto been. It was by a wholesome instinct that men formerly clung to Latin as the universal language of educated Christendom; the humanizing intercourse which by means of a common language broke through the barriers of race, forms one of the most charming features of the early Middle Ages. The equally wholesome instinct of individual development has intervened; but the other again becomes dominant, and the universal language becomes more and more inevitable every day. Around it will centre the chief struggle and the chief triumph of the scientific spirit.
The very splendour and inevitable impetus of these modern movements is producing, here and there among us, a reasonable reaction, a reaction against the hurry and excitement of modern life. And yet, perhaps, less a reaction than their natural outcome and development.
It is by art and religion that men have always sought rest. Art is a world of man’s own making, in which he finds harmonious development, a development that satisfies because framed to the measuring-rod of his most delicate senses. Religion is the anodyne cup--indeed of our own blood--at which we slake our thirst when our hearts are torn by personal misery, or weary and distracted by life’s heat and restless hurry. At times, the great motor instincts of our nature, impelling us by a force that we cannot measure or control, cause us to break up our dainty house of art, or to dash down bravely the cup of healing. But we shall always return to them again; they, too, represent an instinct at the root of our being. In the recognition of this harmony lies the secret of wise living.