124 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



naturally been felt first and most deeply at the 

 great centres of the nervous system of civilization 

 represented by the national life of the leading 

 countries. But this significance extends far beyond 

 its relation to the ideals of nationality. Every 

 institution in civilization is in fore-grips with a new 

 kind of knowledge, the control of which will become 

 a matter of life and death to it. It is clearly in 

 evidence that the science of creating and transmit- 

 ting public opinion under the influence of collective 

 emotion is about to become the principal science 

 of civilization to the mastery of which all govern- 

 ments and all powerful interests will in the future 

 address themselves with every resource at their 

 command. 



It represents an enormous advance in knowledge 

 once to grasp firmly in all its far-reaching import 

 the fact that the human faculty in which centres 

 the integration that is taking place in civilization 

 is not the reasoning process of mind but the emotion 

 of the ideal. At no distant time it will be seen that 

 all the principal movements in Western thought 

 since I published Social Evolution represent the 

 ever- widening adjustment to this fact of the old 

 intellectual positions. Whether we watch at our 

 centres of learning writers like Mr, F. C. S. Schiller 

 declaring the reasoned quest after absolute truth to 



