No one seems to believe in appreciating—appreciating more than one thing, at least. The practical disappearance in any vital form of the lecture-lyceum, the sermon, the essay, and the poem, the annihilation of the imagination or organ of comprehension, the disappearance of personality, the abolition of the editorial, the temporary decline of religion, of genius, of the artistic temperament, can all be summed up and symbolised in a single trait of modern life, its separated men, interested in separate things. We are getting to be lovers of contentedly separate things, little things in their little places all by themselves. The modern reader is a skimmer, a starer at pictures, like a child, while he reads, never thinking a whole thought, a lover of peeks and paragraphs, as a matter of course. Except in his money-making, or perhaps in the upper levels of science, the typical modern man is all paragraphs, not only in the way he reads, but in the way he lives and thinks. Outside of his specialty he is not interested in anything more than one paragraph’s worth. He is as helpless as a bit of protoplasm before the sight of a great many very different things being honestly put together. Putting things together tires him. He has no imagination, because he has the daily habit of contentedly seeing a great many things which he never puts together. He is neither artistic nor original nor far-sighted nor powerful, because he has a paragraph way of thinking, a scrap-bag of a soul, because he cannot concentrate separate things, cannot put things together. He has no personality because he cannot put himself together.
It is significant that in the days when personalities were common and when very powerful, interesting personalities could be looked up, several to the mile, on almost any road in the land, it was not uncommon to see a business letter-head like this:
General Merchandise,
Dry Goods, Notions, Hats,
Shoes, Groceries, Hardware, Coffins
and Caskets, Livery and
Feed Stable.
Physician and Surgeon.
Justice of the Peace, Licensed to Marry.
If, as it looks just at present, the nation is going to believe in arbitration as the general modern method of adjustment, that is, in the all-siding up of a subject, the next thing it will be obliged to believe in will be some kind of an institution of learning which will produce arbitrators, men who have two or three perfectly good, human sides to their minds, who have been allowed to keep minds with three dimensions. The probabilities are that if the mind of Socrates, or any other great man, could have an X-ray put on it, and could be thrown on a canvas, it would come out as a hexagon, or an almost-circle, with lines very like spokes on the inside bringing all things to a centre.