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A League of Nations 635greater high-glowing cusp and apex. Thus in the human mindwhich looks always before and after, its great dream of the idealpast completed itself by a greater dream of the ideal future.These things modern man with his scientific and secularisedmentality finds it difficult to believe in unless he hasfirst theosophised or mysticised himself into a fine freedomfrom the positive scientific intelligence. Science which tracesso confidently the nobly complete and astonishing evolutionof our race in a fairly swift straight line from the ape man tothe dazzlingly unfixable brilliancy of Mr. Lloyd George andthe dyspeptic greatness of Rockefeller, rejects the old traditionsas dreams and poetic figments. But to recompense us for ourloss it has given us instead a more practicable, persistent andimmediate vision of modern progress and the future hope ofa rational and mechanically perfectible society: that is the onereal religion still left, the new Jerusalem of the modern creed ofa positivist sociology. The ideal past has lost its glamour, but asober glamour of the future is brought near to us and takes onto the constructive human reason a closer hue of reality. TheAsiatic mind is indeed still incurably prone to the older type ofimagination which took and still takes so many inspiring forms,second coming of Christ, City of God, the Divine Family, adventof Messiah, Mahdi or Avatar, — but whatever the variety of theform, the essence is the same, a religious or spiritual idealisationof a possible future humanity. The European temperament —and we are all trying to become for the moment, superficiallyat least, white, brown, yellow or black Europeans, — demandssomething more familiarly terrestrial and tangible, a secular,social, political dream of evolving humanity, a perfected democracy,socialism, communism, anarchism. But whichever line wetake and whether it be truth or illusion, the thing behind is thesame and would seem to be a necessity of our human mindand will to action. We cannot do without some kind of futuristidealism. Something we must labour to build individually andcollectively out of ourselves and our life, unless we wouldbe content with the commonness and stumbling routine of ahalf-made and half-animal manhood, — a self-dethronement