incorrigibly sincere, and offended every group by speaking candidly on every subject: after sympathizing with the workers as victims of their employers, he added that the workers would be as domineering if positions were reversed; and after sympathizing with women as victims of men, he did not fail to add that men were the victims of women so far as the women could manage it. He grew old alone.
As he aged he became more gentle in opposition, and more moderate in opinion. He had always laughed at England's ornamental king, but now he expressed the view that it was no more right to deprive the people of their king than it was to deprive a child of its doll.[1] So in religion he felt it absurd and unkind to disturb the traditional faith where it seemed a beneficent and cheering influence.[2] He began to realize that religious beliefs and political movements are built upon needs and impulses beyond the reach of intellectual attack; and he reconciled himself to seeing the world roll on without much heeding the heavy books he hurled in its direction. Looking back over his arduous career, he thought himself foolish for having sought literary fame instead of the simpler pleasures of life.[3] When he died, in 1903, he had come to think that his work had been done in vain.[4]
We know now, of course, that it was not so. The decay of his repute was part of the English-Hegelian reaction against positivism; the revival of liberalism will raise him again to his place as the greatest English philosopher of his century. He gave to philosophy a new contact with things, and brought to it a realism which made German philosophy seem, beside it, weakly pale and timidly abstract. He summed up his age as no man had ever summed up any age since Dante; and he accomplished so masterly a coördination of so vast an area of
