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STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER

prejudices in general, not of any special prejudice; to have our opinions constructed out of pure, impartial, unbiassed thought, free from all baser alloy of mephitic vapours. The mere self-willed assertion of our own fancies can never lift us to the higher point of view which would reveal our narrowness and ignorance. Hence the vast importance of 'culture': the one thing needful; which, again, in another view, is equivalent to a frank submission of ourselves to the Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist, indeed, is an entity not quite easy to define. But it at least supposes that genuine philosophy and scientific thought is a reality; that there is a real difference between the scholar and the charlatan; that criticism in a wide sense has achieved some permanent and definite results; and that, although many antiquated prejudices still survive and dominate us, especially in England, and constitute the whole mental furniture of the Philistine, they are doomed to decay, and those who hold by them doomed to perish with them. To recognise, therefore, the deep, underlying currents of thought, to get outside of the narrow limits of the popular prejudice, to steep our minds in the best thought of the past, and to be open to the really great thoughts of the