But biology and Africa were merely the fields of human interest in which Oswald’s mind was most active in those days. Such inquiries were only a part of his valiant all-round struggle to reconstruct the life that it had become impossible to carry on as a drama of the noble and picturesque loves and adventures of Oswald Sydenham. His questions led him into philosophy; he tried over religion, which had hitherto in his romantic phase simply furnished suitable church scenery for meetings and repentances. He read many books, listened to preachers, hunted out any teacher who seemed to promise help in the mending of his life, considered this “movement” and that “question.” His resolve to find what “the whole beastly game was about,” was no passing ejaculation. He followed the trend of his time towards a religious scepticism and an entire neglect of current politics. Religion was then at the nadir of formalism; current politics was an outwardly idiotic, inwardly dishonest, party duel between the followers of Gladstone and Disraeli. Social and economic questions he was inclined to leave to the professors. Those were the early days of socialist thought in England, the days before Fabianism, and he did not take to the new teachings very kindly. He was a moderate man in æsthetic matters, William Morris left him tepid, he had no sense of grievance against machinery and aniline dyes, he did not grasp the workers’ demand because it was outside his traditions and experiences. Science seemed to him more and more plainly to be the big regenerative thing in human life, and the mission immediately before men of energy was the spreading of civilization, that is to say of knowledge, apparatus, clear thought, and release from instinct and superstition, about the world.
In those days science was at its maximum of aggressive hopefulness. With the idea of scientific progress there was also bound up in many British minds the idea of a racial mission. The long Napoleonic wars had cut off British thought from the thought of the continent of Europe, and this separation was never completely healed throughout the nineteenth century. In spite of their world-empire the British remained remarkably self-centred and self-satisfied. They were a world-people, and no other people were. They were at once insular and world-wide. During the nineteenth century until its last quarter there was no real challenge to their extra-European ascendancy. A man like Sydenham did not so much come to the conclusion that the subjugation and civilization of the world by science and the Anglican culture was the mission of the British Empire, as find that conclusion ready-made by tradition and circumstances in his mind. He did not even trouble to express it; it seemed to him self-evident. When Kipling wrote of the White Man’s Burden, Briton was understood. Everywhere the British went about the world, working often very disinterestedly and ably, quite unaware of the amazement and exasperation created in French and German and American minds by the discovery of these tranquil assumptions.