x THE WILL IN DEVELOPMENT 191 



whom the artist seeks imaginatively to realise have 

 fashioned this network. But fashioned as it is by man, it 

 by no means covers the whole of human needs or expresses 

 the full possibilities of human life. It is just the particular 

 compromise of impulse with conditions which the jostling 

 of a myriad of forces happens to have brought about. Not 

 but that wisdom, insight, statesmanship have gone to the 

 making of it. Without these no accommodation were 

 possible at all. But their part has been to make the best 

 adjustment possible with circumstances. They have not 

 yet overcome the conditions or made themselves master of 

 the material in which they work. To put the same point 

 in another way, society, though consisting of conscious and 

 intelligent units, is not thereby constituted a conscious 

 whole. On the contrary, the interaction of the units, each 

 with his own seemingly clear purpose, is ever at work pro- 

 ducing situations which no one plans. Not only so, but 

 the mass of custom from which law and ethics take their 

 start grows out of an indefinite number of acts, in each of 

 which the individual was conscious only of his immediate 

 end, and had no concern with the social institution which he 

 was all the time building up. But such an institution once 

 formed becomes for action and, indeed, for thought itself 

 a habit, a fixed groove, a category by which henceforward 

 experience will be judged, by which thought will be 

 directed and action confined. It is not till the fabric of 

 custom has been formed that ideals of life take their rise, 

 and so they come into existence confronted, so to say, not 

 with an unweighted experience which they might dispas- 

 sionately judge, but with man and society as they have been 

 formed by generations of unconscious growth. Hence at 

 the outset the milieu dominates the ideal itself, even when 

 it is an ideal of revolt. The social fabric, with its strange 

 organic power of adaptability, absorbs the independent 

 thought, sucks it into its tissue, digests it and emerges very 

 slightly modified by that which was going to revolutionise 

 it. The ideal so digested becomes a convention, and in 

 the end little more than a form of words out of which all 

 the blood has been sucked, and it is perhaps serving the best 

 function of which it remains capable when it stimulates the 



