300 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



in most savage tribes : his mediation is enormously 

 important in the Roman Catholic Church : less so 

 in Protestant Churches : until with the progressive 

 raising of the spiritual and cultural level, it is perhaps 

 possible that he may become an obstacle instead of 

 a help. Mediators there must always be. They 

 are the great ones — prophets and poets, heroes, 

 philosophers, musicians, artists, and all who discover 

 or interpret or display what for the ordinary man is 

 hidden or difficult or rare. They mediate between 

 the utmost attainable by man and man in the lump. 

 As Hegel says of one group of these mediators, the 

 artists, it is the function of their art to deliver to the 

 domain of feeling and delight of vision all that the 

 mind may possess of essential and transcendent Being. 

 But, with the spread of invention and the change of 

 civilization, their mediations are becoming more 

 and more readily accessible to all. I can get, on the 

 whole, more satisfactory mediation from three or 

 four feet of properly filled bookshelf than from a 

 dozen priests. Milton will give me doctrine if I 

 want it, but stupendously : Wordsworth will reveal 

 nature : Shakespeare the hearts of men : Blake 

 can put me into a mystical, Shelley into an intellectual 

 ecstasy, while Keats and a dozen others can open 

 universal doors of beauty. What is more, if I have 

 had the mediation of wise parents and good teachers, 

 or to be so fortunate as to be enthusiastic, I find that 

 in many things I can be my own mediator, in the 



