cepts or ideas. So far as these precepts are adopted, they are adopted as the record of a process which has been already completed.
Thus, all ideas concerning life come to the individual somehow or other in a personal form. What is true of our individual life forms a habit of mind which we cannot lay aside when we step into a sphere which is beyond our individual experience. We know that truth is ineffective unless it is applied by a person. When we look back upon the past, we do not want to discover a truth or an idea apart from a person, nor can we tolerate a person except as expressing an idea or a truth. This, I take it, is the reason why we are always anxious to discover heroes or great men. The search for such beings is therefore inevitable, for it corresponds to the facts of human nature and expresses a profound truth. But it sometimes raises difficulties and suggests questionings about the nature of human judgment When we find that the reputations, the aims, and the motives of prominent personages in the past are still matters of debate, we begin to doubt the possibility of the existence of any principles on which such judgment can proceed. It is still a question whether Mary Queen of Scots was a profligate intriguer or an injured martyr. The proposal to split the difference meets with little approval; partisanship is almost as heated nowadays as it was in her own times, though the practical reasons, which, it might be thought, can alone create partisans, have long since disappeared. Still, people like to deal with heroines or villains, and abhor more ordinary characters. They like their
