The bulk of his work was to
discover and define that purpose, that purpose which must be the
directing and comprehending form of all the activities of the noble
life. One cannot be noble, he had come to perceive, at large; one
must be noble to an end. To make human life, collectively and in
detail, a thing more comprehensive, more beautiful, more generous
and coherent than it is to-day seemed to him the fundamental
intention of all nobility. He believed more and more firmly that
the impulses to make and help and subserve great purposes are
abundantly present in the world, that they are inhibited by hasty
thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and that the real
ennoblement of human life was not so much a creation as a release.
He lumped the preventive and destructive forces that keep men
dispersed, unhappy, and ignoble under the heading of Prejudice, and
he made this Prejudice his fourth and greatest and most difficult
limitation. In one place he had written it, "Prejudice or
Divisions." That being subdued in oneself and in the world, then in
the measure of its subjugation, the new life of our race, the great
age, the noble age, would begin.
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